Frankenstein

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Frankenstein

• "The Modern Prometheus"

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• According to the Greeks, Prometheus stole fire
  from the gods to give to the humans so they could
  improve their lives. As punishment, he was
  chained to a rock, where an eagle each day
  plucked at his liver.
• Similarly, Mary Shelley's arrogant scientist,
  Victor Frankenstein, claimed "benevolent
  intentions, and thirsted for the moment when I
  should put them in practice."
• Frankenstein endures not only because of its
  infamous horrors but for the richness of the
  ideas it asks us to confront--human
  accountability, social alienation, and the nature
  of life itself.

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Frankensteins Mother

• Mary Shelley
• I busied myself to think of a storyOne which
  would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature
  and awaken thrilling horror.

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Mary Shelley

• Mary Shelley was born into a family of the
  British artistic and intellectual elite. Her
  mother was the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Her
  father was William Godwin, a political
  philosopher and novelist.
• While Mary Shelley drew her inspiration from a
  dream, she drew her story's premises about the
  nature of life from the work of some of Europe's
  premier scientists and thinkers
• Heard Samuel Taylor Coleridges Rime of the
  Ancient Mariner recited when she was a child.
• Her sophisticated creature read Plutarch and
  Goethe, spoke eloquently, and suffered much.

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Mary Wollstonecraft

• Although she died approximately a week after her
  daughter was born, Wollstonecrafts writings and
  reputation were important to the young Mary
  Wollstonecraft Godwin

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William Godwin

• Did not formally educate his daughter, Mary, but
  encouraged her to read from his well-stocked
  library
• Hosted intellectual gatherings with conversations
  a young Mary overheard

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You couldnt make this up

• At fifteen, Mary met the poet Percy Shelley, who
  was married at the time. Two years later, she ran
  off with him to France. They were married in
  December 1816, two weeks after Percy Shelley's
  first wife drowned. By then Mary had already
  borne him two children.
• She ultimately gave birth to 4 children in 5
  years, three of whom died as infants.
• The Shelleys traveled throughout Switzerland,
  Germany, and Italy, visiting friends, studying
  languages and art, and writing.
• Percy Shelley died in 1822 in a boating accident.
• Mary returned to England and supported her
  children and her father with her writing.

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It was a dark and stormy night literally

• In the summer of 1816, nineteen-year-old Mary
  Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover, the poet
  Percy Shelley, visited the poet Lord Byron at his
  villa beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland.
• Stormy weather frequently forced them indoors,
  where they and Byron's other guests sometimes
  read from a volume of ghost stories.
• One evening, Byron challenged his guests to each
  write one themselves. Mary's story, inspired by a
  dream, eventually became the novel Frankenstein.

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Percy Shelley

• Many people assumed Frankenstein was written by
  Percy Shelley since Mary did not attach her name
  to the first edition, printed in 1818, and Percy
  wrote the preface.

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Art imitates life or science

• Shelley's story did not arise from just her
  imagination.
• Scientists and physicians of her time, tantalized
  by the elusive boundary between life and death,
  probed it through experiments with lower
  organisms, human anatomical studies, attempts to
  resuscitate drowning victims, and experiments
  using electricity to restore life to the recently
  dead.

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• When Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet, drowned
  in London in 1816, rescuers took her lifeless
  body to a receiving station of the London
  Society.
• There, smelling salts, vigorous shaking,
  electricity, and artificial respiration--as with
  the resuscitation bellows shown here--had been
  used since the 1760s to restore drowning victims
  to life.

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• In March 1815, Mary Shelley dreamed of her dead
  infant daughter held before a fire, rubbed
  vigorously, and restored to life.
• At the time, scientists would not have wholly
  dismissed such a possibility.
• Could the dead be brought back to life? Could
  life arise spontaneously from inorganic matter?
• Physicians of the day treated such questions
  seriously and wrote treatises and articles
  claiming many successes.

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• During the 1790s, Italian physician Luigi Galvani
  demonstrated what we now understand to be the
  electrical basis of nerve impulses when he made
  frog muscles twitch by jolting them with a spark
  from an electrostatic machine.
• When Frankenstein was published, however, the
  word galvanism implied the release, through
  electricity, of mysterious life forces.
• "Perhaps," Mary Shelley recalled of her talks
  with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, "a corpse
  would be reanimated galvanism had given token of
  such things."

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Romanticism

• Approximately 1800-1830s
• Reaction to and rejection of Age of Reason and
  Classicism (logos)
• Focus on the individual, subjective, irrational,
  emotional, and transcendent (pathos)
• Found beauty in the natural world, saying it was
  a place of solace, but dangerous if man attempted
  to exert control over nature

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Romanticism and the Individual

• Romantics were preoccupied by the genius, the
  hero, and the exceptional figure
• Focused on his or her passions and individual
  struggles
• Saw the artist as a supreme individual
  creator whose creative spirit is more important
  than adherence to traditional rules or procedures
• Emphasized imagination and belief in the
  supernatural which led to the creation of

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the Gothic Novel

• Invented almost single-handedly by Horace Walpole
  with The Castle of Otranto (1764)
• Walpole's novel was imitated not only in the
  eighteenth century and not only in the novel
  form, but it has influenced the novel, the short
  story, poetry, and even film-making up to the
  present day.

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Archetypes of Gothic Novel

• Gothic Hero isolated either voluntarily or
  involuntarily
• Villain epitome of evil, either by his (usually
  a man) own fall from grace, or by some implicit
  malevolence
• The Wanderer, as found in many Gothic tales, is
  the epitome of isolation as he wanders the earth
  in perpetual exile, usually a form of divine
  punishment

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Elements of Gothic Novel

• Set in castle/old house/cave
• Atmosphere of mystery and suspense
• Omens, portents, visions
• Overwrought emotion
• Women in distress
• Women threatened by powerful male
• Metonymy of gloom and horror (rain stands for
  sorrow, etc.)
• Vocabulary of the gothic

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Frame Narrative

• The frame-within-frame-within-frame form
  parallels the search in the story for something
  deep, dark, and secret at the heart of the
  narrative.
• The form thus also resembles the psychoanalytic
  process of peeling back layers of repressive
  narratives put in place by the conscious mind to
  reveal the unconscious.

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• First, Robert Walton sets down on paper the
  events of his meetings with a stranger, who turns
  out to be Victor Frankenstein.
• Frankenstein relates his story to Robert Walton.
• Frankensteins creature relates his own tale to
  his creator.
• Leads us to question the reasons behind each of
  the narrations since the teller of each story is
  a character with shortcomings, prejudices, and
  motives.

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