LITERATURA INGLESA II.

1
Restauración y Siglo XVIII

Unit 4. Pre-Romantic Poetry and Frankenstein

Part 2
Feedbak on PECs
Feedback on first PEC
● General information. Avoid it or at least, include it in adjectival form?
● Intersperse analysis about the two characters (essay 1) with general features of the book (analysis of society,
satirical component)?
● Do I need to mention the author, title and date?
● The difficulty of writing an introduction.
● Relevant arguments vs not so relevant. Human, non-human characters, focus on those aspects that you
study about first.
● Unbalanced PECs, one essay much longer than the other.
● The second PEC, make the topic explicit.
● Can the topic of your PEC be made explicit from reading the essay only?
● Did you get the result you expected?
Task we set before the break

Discuss the main differences between

Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock
and Thomas Gray’s Elegy in a Country
Churchyard.
Revolutionary idealism

Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, thought and wrote about a new way in
which society could be formulated from within, political institutions could
change and the people could reimagine a new form of rational society in
which men and women could be equal beings. Many institutions would also
no longer be necessary.
This nonviolent revolutionary idealism that she inherited from both her
parents had a huge impact on young Mary.
Some more on Frankenstein. Think about the following

1. The power of science

2. Responsibility
3. Isolation
4. Gender politics in the novel
5. Natural scenery
6. Implausibility
7. The role of Walton
8. Twinning
9. Guilt, remorse and regret
The Power of Science
Vivid imagination was needed to develop the novel. The power of imagination
giving way to human passions beyond what we would think of.
The current scientific and philosophical ideas around electricity served as the
backdrop of the novel:
Vitalism: there is a “vital spark” in living organisms.
Galvanism: animal electricity
A waking dream of Shelley’s made her think about what would be like to
reanimate something that is dead. She then imagines this and a scientist's
reaction at seeing how he succeeded. She was terrified by this idea.
Responsibility
Victor
● Running away when the creature comes to life
● Justine’s death
● Does the novel provide a clear moral (common criticism at the time it was
published). Should it?
● “fangs of remorse”
● Debilitating sense of remorse
● Scientific responsibility. You can’t undo what you have discovered. Therefore
you have to apply it responsibly.
● The creature also feels remorse.
Isolation

❏ Profound meditation on isolation.

❏ Isolation of Victor because of this secret he can’t share.
❏ Isolation of the creature. An Adam without an Eve. A creature of a
different species.
❏ Romantic notion of solitude. Wonderful descriptions of the scenery. Being
alone is also fulfilling in the novel. Different kind exclusion and outcast
status.
“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mold me man? Did I solicit thee
from darkness to promote me?” said Adam in Paradise Lost (Milton 10.743-
745).

➢ the creator and the created

➢ the fall of Lucifer
➢ Mythic recapitulation in secular terms of the story of fall
➢ Adams feels remorse
➢ A Godless framework
➢ heroic impossible dangerous expropriation of knowledge
Gender politics of the novel

Why a man creating a person, not a woman?

Patriarchal exchange of a woman between men: creation of a future monster;

she’d be passed from Victor to the creature.

Gender polarization:

man - ego, power, colonization, ambition

woman - nurturing, appreciation of the family, surrounding

Tabula rasa
The creature is a tabula rasa. He wants to be looked after, wants to be good. These are feminine
values. He is entrapped by the picture of domesticity, companionship and kindness when he
watches The Delaneys. Idealized vision of domesticity. The creature doesn’t kill animals to eat, a
vegetarian.
Society makes him devil.
The creature is full of remorse.
She is playing with the ideas of masculine behaviour vs. feminine behaviour
I was benevolent and good. Misery made me a fiend. The noble savage: society and civilization
corrupts human beings. Man is born free.
It contrasts with the evil picture of the monster’s fingers imprint in their victims’ necks. There is
ambivalence.
Natural scenery

The mountain, hostile or welcoming environment?

The bleak sky is kinder than the human beings. For the creature this
environment, nature is escape. The human in always threatening.
Implausibility in the novel

From the construction of the creature to how the creature learns. Suspension of
disbelief.

Victor refuses to explain his secret of how he constructed the creature on the
premises that if the secrets is out, other people will try. The creature doesn’t want
to leave behind any evidence of how he was put together either.

Did the contemporary readers find the science plausible? The scientific dimension
of the novel was not what shocked readers at the time. It came up when it was
adapted for the stage a bit later on.
Robert Walton
What’s his role?
Through him readers have some way of understanding how Victor has become to
be the way he is.
He agrees to return on his expedition. Is this the way the novel teachers readers
about this unbridled ambition?
Framing device of the letter. To his sister, Her initial matches Mary Shelley’s. Mary
writes herself in. It’s nine months between the first and last letter from Walton to
his sister. Mary is writing into the novel her own period of gestation when she was
in Wollstonecraft's womb?
Twinning

Walton looking for a best friend.

Frankenstein finds his best friend in Henry Clerval

The creature as Victor’s doppelganger (Freudian), pursuing his egotistic

ambitions.

More?
Topics that require you to compare works

Remorse/Guilt/Regret in Frankenstein and Moll Flanders

Moll admits her repentance

Moll is driven by action. Does Victor do something about the consequences of his
actions?

... Keep the brainstorming going

Based on “Frankenstein”, In Our Time. BBC Radio 4.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00051n6