Frankenstein

"The Modern Prometheus"

• 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.

Frankenstein’s Mother

• Mary Shelley• I busied myself to

think of a story…One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror.

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 Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” recited when she was a child.

• Her sophisticated creature read Plutarch and Goethe, spoke eloquently, and suffered much.

Mary Wollstonecraft

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

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

You couldn’t 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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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."

Romanticism

• Approximately 1800-1830’s

• 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

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…

…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.

Archetypes of Gothic Novel

• Gothic Hero: isolated either voluntarily or involuntarily

• Villain: epitome of evil, either by his Villain: epitome of evil, either by his (usually a man) own fall from grace, or by (usually a man) own fall from grace, or by some implicit malevolencesome implicit malevolence

• The Wanderer, as found in many Gothic The Wanderer, as found in many Gothic tales, is the epitome of isolation as he tales, is the epitome of isolation as he wanders the earth in perpetual exile, wanders the earth in perpetual exile, usually a form of divine punishmentusually a form of divine punishment

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

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.

• 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.

• Frankenstein’s 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.

Robert Walton’s Letters

Victor’s Story

Creature’s Story

Frame Narrative in Frankenstein

Margaret Saville (Robert’s sister) is the recipient of the letters