Frankenstein

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)

• Daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, a writer and pioneering feminist, and William Godwin, an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. • When she was 18, she eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. • After her husband died in a shipwreck in 1822, Mary Shelley fell into poverty. She continued to write fiction to support herself. Frankenstein (1818) was her first and by far her most successful work of fiction. Fig.

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Story behind the story:Mary Shelley spent a summer near Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and other friends. In the evenings, they told each other compelling ghost stories. Mary, in a letter some years later, recorded that she was the last one to come up with a ghost story. One night she had a dream in which she envisioned "the pale student of unhallowed arts" kneeling beside his creation—the monster. She began writing the story that became Frankenstein the next morning.

Setting: Switzerland, France, England, Scotland, and the North Pole in the 18th century

Title

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Allusion:

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The entire book is rife with allusions to other works→ critics have noted that Shelley created a living book out of pieces of other books, just as Frankenstein created his monster.(1)

“A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, embowelled and embalmed, but that once had flesh, and motion, and a boundless variety of determinations and actions. I am glad that I can, even upon these terms, converse with the dead, with the wise and the good of revolving centuries.”

― William Godwin, Fleetwood

• Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) overtly referred to on the title page (Adam’s challenge to God) and throughout the novel• Biblical references → the monster’s request for a mate echoes Adam’s loneliness before Eve was created• Rousseau (a native of Geneva, as was Victor Frankenstein) → ideas re: education for citizenship; his introspective Reveries of a Solitary Walker → pre-Romanticism• Creation myths

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Motifs

• bifurcation (nature itself, the creature, Frankenstein)• happy domestic life (Frankenstein’s youth and the De Lacey family) / exclusion and rejection

Themes• Is humanity mostly good, or mostly evil?• Political injustice (and the psychology of an individual being unjustly charged)• Feminism→ Mary Shelley drew on her mother Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas re: interdependence of the private/feminine sphere and public/masculine sphere. Notice that Victor’s downfall truly begins when he has completely separated himself from the domestic/feminine sphere in his single-minded pursuit.• Gender is a social construct→the monster is both feminized and masculinized and swings between extremes of these two→identifies with both Adam and Eve as portrayed in Paradise Lost, esp. Eve’s awakening. Ugliness and horror rather than narcissism at awakening, however.

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Themes• Do we possess free will (the capacity for meaningful moral choice) or are we driven by our natures and experiences?• Solitude (necessity of and danger of), being “alone in the midst of humankind”• The failure of human sympathy → Shelley’s focus on the epistemology of sympathy raises questions about identity, disgust, and our ability to learn from and share fellow feeling with others.• Distortion: the creature’s physical state; Victor Frankenstein’s single-minded focus; our perception of others’ motives; what else?

Form: Epistolary Novel

The book itself is made up of letters, or epistles.

Form: Tragedy

• How is Frankenstein saturated with the tradition of tragedy?

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Fig. 6Fig. 7

Romanticism• Nature reflects inner state; nature is graceful and uplifting and yet merciless and deadly.• A sense of the sublime: the feeling of transcendence; the weight of the world lifts in the face of beauty

Gothic Literature• so called because the earliest works in the genre were set in castles and were a type of imitation medievalism (2)

• Terrifying experiences• The macabre • Mysterious, supernatural elements

PlotThe beauty of this plot lies in the dynamic between the surprising and the inevitable.Plot arc: the education of the monster: three novels found in a satchelGoethe: domestic ways of beingPlutarch: political insightsMilton: cosmic ideasobservation of the De Lacy family, realization of rejection and abandonment

Characterization

•To what extent is the monster a “noble savage”? (Romanticism/Rousseau)• juxtaposition→ monster is counterpart of Victor→ ties in to theme “was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, and yet so vicious and base?”

Diction and Syntax

• Diction is lyrical, melodious, nostalgic, picturesque, sentimental, ornate, and also passionate, bitter, and strident.

• Shelley’s use of varying sentence structures for her different narrators serves to create the “nested story” sense.

If you loved Frankenstein,• Interactive fiction http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/frankenstein_remixed_salpart/• woodcut illustrations: Lynd Ward• scholarly article on “The Spectacle of Masculinity” http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/462596?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104155842011• BBC documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf4w8heMmKA• Marshall, David. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Print.

Sourceshttp://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/frankenstein_remixed_salpart/

1) preface and introduction, Frankenstein, second edition

2) https://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_2/welcome.htm

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau_(painted_portrait).jpg

Marshall, David. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Print.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau_(painted_portrait).jpg

Fig. 1 http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DlKdVR17k4I/SpgSLP-BZcI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/uw5tHHz-J2A/s1600-h/Mary+Shelley.jpg

Fig. 2 http://zsr.wfu.edu/special/files/frankenstein-009.jpg

Fig. 3 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau_(painted_portrait).jpg

Fig. 4 http://uploads8.wikiart.org/images/lynd-ward/not-detected-272492.jpgFig. 5 http://www.brianruckley.com/uploaded_images/ward_frankenstein_110-742862.gifFig. 6 http://alancook.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/five.jpgFig. 7 http://alancook.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/three.jpg