Yousef, Nancy "The Monster in a Dark Room: Frankenstein, Feminism, and Philosophy" MLQ: Modern

Language Quarterly - Volume 63, Number 2, June 2002, pp. 197-226

Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus was one of the most famous gothic tales of all
time and an essential novel of the literary realm . This masterpiece was written by Mary
Shelley in 1818, after a nightmare she had, just before a ghost-story writing contest.

“I busied myself to think of a story…One which would speak to

the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror
one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood,
and quicken the beatings of the heart (From Mary Shelley’s Introduction to the 1831
edition of Frankenstein).

The novel opens up with the letters written by Robert Walton to his sister, telling the story
of his travel during the expedition to the North Pole. One day he hosts a man that he finds
stuck in the ice. This man is Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant and intelligent scientist whose
challenge of nature and mad genius led him to discover the secret of eternal life and
consequently create the most hideous and grotesque monster who turns his life into a real
living hell.
Joseph Addison, an English statesman, poet and writer, visited the Alps and wrote
“The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror”1. He defines the sublime for its
aesthetic greatness and power .His contribution to the budding concept of the sublime was
that there were “three pleasures of the imagination”: “greatness, uncommonness, and beauty.
Addison’s ideas were the sounding board for Edmond Burke’s concept of the sublime in his
work, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful