Frankenstein Mary Shelley

Frankenstein: Mary Shelley
Subject: English
Lesson: Frankenstein: Mary Shelley
Course Developer: Hina Nandrajog
College/ Department: Vivekananda College, University of

Delhi
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Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi
Introduction
Mary Shelley
(30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley
Mary Shelley is one of the most interesting literary figures of her time. Born on 30 August
1797, she was a novelist, dramatist, essayist and biographer. However, her fame rests
largely on her novel, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, first published
anonymously in 1818. The novel was reprinted in 1823; a revised edition was published in
1832. Frankenstein has enjoyed an unassailable hold on public imagination ever since its
first publication. It is the tale of a scientist, Victor Frankenstein, with an idée fixee of playing
God by creating an artificial man in a laboratory. Victor’s ambition makes him completely
oblivious to the possible repercussions of creating synthetic life, and he abandons the
creature he breathes life into when confronted by its hideousness. The novel lends itself to a
great deal of analysis due to its complex tapestry of ideas, and it catapulted Mary Shelley to
instant fame when her authorship was revealed in 1823. Succeeding generations have found
a wealth of meanings in the novel right from the time of its first publication in the
nineteenth century, and critical interest and inquiry into the text has been unabated ever
since. From being regarded as a Gothic text, or belonging to the genre of Science Fiction, or
a treatise on education or on family life, or the moral and ethical choices made by a human
being and shouldering responsibility for such choices – all these imbue the text with a
density and richness that contribute to the abiding appeal of the novel.
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Biographical Note
Mary Shelley
http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/shel.jpg
Mary Shelley was the daughter of two literary and political luminaries. Her mother was
Mary Wollstonecraft, a feminist thinker and activist, and the author of A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman (1792). Her father, William Godwin, was an influential, radical political
thinker and writer.
“… singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of

knowledge is great and her perseverance in everything she undertakes, almost
invincible.”
William Godwin in 1811 (Abinger MSS).
Mary Shelley’s childhood was not a happy one. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died soon
after giving birth to Mary Shelley in 1797. Her father, William Godwin, married their
neighbour, Mary Jane Clairmont, soon after his first wife’s death. He hoped to provide a
mother’s care to the infant Mary and her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, who was Mary
Wollstonecraft’s daughter from a previous relationship. But the stepmother did not give the
young girls the warmth and affection they craved. [As we shall see, this lack of maternal
affection was to shape Mary Shelley’s views about parenting].
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The Polygon (at left) in Somers Town, London, between Camden Town and St Pancras,
where Mary Godwin was born and spent her earliest years
Although Mary Shelley received formal schooling, yet the primary mode of her education
was largely unconventional. Her father supervised her education and she was tutored
rigorously in various subjects, including French and Latin. Her rich and eclectic education
further evolved through an interaction with her father’s contemporaries. She was exposed
to liberal political thought and the varied ideas and discussions of the times, in addition to
possessing the formidable feminist legacy of her mother. She was a voracious reader and,
with her father’s encouragement, often wrote stories as a child. She herself acknowledged
the contribution of the literary legacy of both her parents to her writing and declares in the
Introduction to the revised edition of Frankenstein in 1831:
”It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary
celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing. As a child I scribbled;
and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to ‘write
stories.”
This intellectual heritage and rich education shaped her literary career, as we shall see later.
Her romantic relationship with the famous romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, can also be
understood in this context. Her interaction with great poets and thinkers only increased as a
result of her relationship with Shelley by being a part of ‘The Shelley Circle’. Remarkably,
however, she moves far beyond the ideas and the ideology of both her parents and her
husband. [In fact, Frankenstein has been read as Mary Shelley’s challenge to her husband
and their circle at Villa Diodati where Frankenstein had its genesis, about the dangers of the
unchecked egotism of the artist.]
Click: The_Shelley_Circle.doc
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of William Godwin’s political followers, and Mary and Shelley
met in 1812 and fell in love with each other, even though Shelley was a married man. Mary
saw Percy Bysshe Shelley as an embodiment of her parents' liberal and reformist ideas of
the 1790s. On 26 June 1814, Mary declared her love for Percy at Mary Wollstonecraft’s
graveside in the cemetery of St. Pancras Old Church (shown in the picture below) where
Mary often went.
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St. Pancras Old Church in 1815. On 26 June 1814, Mary declared her love for Percy at Mary
Wollstonecraft's graveside in the cemetery of St Pancras Old Church
In 1814, along with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, Mary eloped to France with Shelley and
they travelled through Europe. Mary was pregnant when they returned to England. Over the
next two years, she and Percy Bysshe faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their
prematurely- born daughter. This only reinforced in her mind the close connection with birth
and death, harking back to her own feelings of loss at her mother’s death.
Claire Clairmont
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claire_Clairmont
A son, William Shelley, was born to the couple in January 1816. After the suicide of
Shelley’s wife, Harriet, Mary and Shelley married in late 1816. (Mary’s half-sister, Fanny
Imlay, too, had committed suicide.) A daughter, Clara Everina Shelley, was born in 1817
but died in Venice soon after the couple left for Italy. In 1819, their son, William Shelley
died in Rome.
Such profound personal tragedies: the death of her mother, the suicide of her half-sister,
and then the deaths of three children was to leave a lasting impression on Mary’s
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personality and her writing. For some time Mary was in a state of deep depression that
isolated her from Percy Bysshe Shelley, who wrote in his notebook:
My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone?
Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one—
But thou art fled, gone down a dreary road
That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode.
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee
Do thou return for mine. (Quoted in Seymour, 233)
Her fourth and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley was born in November 1819.
1822 was a difficult year when Mary almost died in a miscarriage. Later in the same year,
Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia. Mary returned to England after burying
Shelley in Rome. In 1836, her father, William Godwin passed away. Mary Shelley’s health
began to deteriorate, though she made two continental tours in 1840 and 1842 with Percy
Florence and his friends. She died in London in 1851 at the age of 53. In accordance with
Mary Shelley's wishes, Percy Florence and his wife, Jane, had the coffins of Mary Shelley's
parents exhumed and buried with her in Bournemouth.
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http://www.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/t
humb/b/bc/Mary_Shelleys_Family_Tree.jpg/386px-
Mary_Shelleys_Family_Tree.jpg&imgrefurl=http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Mary_Shelley
s_Family_Tree.jpg&usg=__BEkpYmkrTjfCqTuP0z13aSTOZ-
Q=&h=599&w=386&sz=56&hl=en&start=0&sig2=MaQirV3NtAVgxPECfkTY8w&zoom=1&tbni
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d=KY7Cl835KpoNeM:&tbnh=148&tbnw=94&ei=ipyNTeXaDs-
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tree%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26biw%3D1345%26bih%3D566%26tbm%3Disch&um=1&
itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=233&vpy=39&dur=280&hovh=280&hovw=180&tx=97&ty=154&oei=i
pyNTeXaDs-PcdiqjPcJ&page=1&ndsp=22&ved=1t:429,r:1,s:0
Literary Output
Frankenstein alone is iconic enough a text to place Mary Shelley in the list of great writers,
but her other works have only enhanced her stature as a writer. She published her first
work, Mounseer Nongtongpaw, in 1808. They were comic verses written for Godwin's
Juvenile Library when she was ten and a half. However, the poem is attributed to another
writer in the most recent authoritative collection of her works. She was author also of six
other novels: Matilda (1819), Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), Perkin Warbeck
(1830), Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). She wrote for various magazines and journals
(including the Westminster Review and the London Magazine). She wrote two works of
travel- writing: History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817) and Rambles in Germany and Italy
(1844).
Matilda (1819), Dramas, Reviews, Prefaces and Notes: This volume contains Mary Shelley's
only completed novella, Matilda; two mythological dramas, Proserpine and Midas; a
selection of essays and reviews 1823–32; and the prefaces and notes to her editions of
Shelley's poetry and prose. Matilda is a tale of incestuous love between father and
daughter. It was composed in late 1819 and remained a manuscript throughout her lifetime.
In this edition Matilda is newly transcribed from the manuscript, and the rough draft,
entitled `The Fields of Fancy' is printed in full. The verse dramas Proserpine and Midas,
transcribed from the manuscript’s fair copies, present an adaptation of episodes from Ovid,
probably designed for a young audience, and includes lyrics by Shelley. Mary Shelley's
prefaces and notes to her editions of Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839), and
Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, By Percy Bysshe Shelley (1840)
show her pioneering contribution to Shelley scholarship.
Valperga (1823): Originally called Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, Valperga is an intelligent

study in sexual politics. It also contains some of Mary Shelley's most beautiful and
impassioned writing. It was praised on publication for its convincing recreation of the period
(Mary Shelley emulated Scott and foreshadowed George Eliot in the proficiency of her
research and the portraits of its two female protagonists, though the heretic, Beatrice,
shocked the Blackwood's reviewer). Yet, according to Mary Shelley, `it never had fair play'
and (except for a facsimile) has never been republished. This edition appends a transcript of
seventeen pages of surviving manuscript, and the annotations make use of the editor's
study of Mary Shelley's research notes.
The Last Man (1826): The Last Man follows Frankenstein as one of the earliest examples of
science fiction in English. It also presents characters who can be seen, in some of their
aspects, to resemble certain members of the Shelley circle. The narrative begins in the late
21st century in an England, which has become a republic, focusing at first on the conflicting
worlds of the domestic and political. But as the plague takes hold and spreads relentlessly,
the novel's view expands to encompass Europe and the world scene. Dark, even existential
in its mood, The Last Man shows the demise of the human race highlighted against its
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greatest achievement as the ever decreasing band of survivors make their way across the
Alps to the warm cities of the South.
The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, A Romance (1830): Mary Shelley's fourth novel, opens on
22nd August 1485, the day Richard III died in battle at Bosworth Field. Centered on the
figure of the pretender who claimed to be the younger of the two princes smothered in the
Tower at the order of their famous uncle, this historical romance follows the course of
Warbeck's eventful career, as he struggles to assert his right to England's throne. By
entertaining her `belief that Perkin was, in reality, the lost Duke of York', Mary Shelley
mounts a challenge to dramatists, chroniclers, and historians dismissive of her claims. In
her hands, the story becomes an instrument not only for questioning the standard accounts
of Warbeck's life but also for examining the issue that preoccupied her contemporaries as
England entered the Age of Reform. This edition includes the corrections and marginal
notations made by Mary Shelley in the `Abinger' copy of the first edition.
Lodore (1835): Lodore sees Mary Shelley abandon Gothic fiction and historical romance in
order to focus on human relationships, in recognisable contemporary settings. The novel
takes its title from the Byronic hero, but much of the narrative and psychological interest
derives from the development of his estranged wife and their daughter, the destruction of
the family unit and the slow progress towards regeneration. The action moves from England
to Wales, America and Continental Europe, in a series of locations that allow for contrast not
only in physical description, but also in manners, political institutions, moral values and
national characteristics. If Lodore's central theme is love in all its forms, the novel's
structure enables Mary Shelley to introduce a wide variety of topical issues - from education
to slavery to allusions and concerns. This is a work rooted in the Romantic period, but one,
which also anticipates the novels of the Victorian age.
Falkner (1837): Mary Shelley's final novel tells of the bond of fidelity between John Falkner,
the passionate and self-divided hero, and his adopted daughter, who discovers his dissolute
past but remains loyal. Mary Shelley's portrayal of Falkner's adventures in Europe is
indebted to episodes in the lives of her friends, Lord Byron and Edward John Trelawney, but
her investigation of extreme psychological states is modeled on the introspective fictions of
her father, William Godwin.
Travel Writing, Index of Places and Names: This volume contains Mary Shelley's portion of
the volume History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), written with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
based on their elopement to the Continent in 1814; and her recollections of travelling with
her son and his friends in search of improved health, Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844).
This edition of Rambles in Germany and Italy provides much of its historical information
from the Handbooks for Travellers series begun by London publisher John Murray in the
1830s, allowing the reader to understand Mary Shelley's journeys and observations within
the context of the travel conditions unique to the mid-nineteenth century. Previous editions
of History of a Six Weeks' Tour have placed this work within the context of P B Shelley's life
and correspondence, but this is the first edition to stress Mary Shelley's authorship and its
relation to her creative development. An appendix de-attributes the satirical 'Mounseer
Nongtongpaw' (1808), though the verses are still evidence of her childhood involvement
with William Godwin's Juvenile Library.
http://www.pickeringchatto.com/major_works/the_novels_and_selected_works_of_mary_s
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helley
Intellectual and Literary Legacy

Frankenstein needs to be read in the context of Mary Shelley’s life and personal experiences
and background, and in order to do so, it is imperative to understand the times and ideas
that formulated her intellectual heritage. Born at the cusp of the eighteenth and the
nineteenth century, she inherited the intellectual and literary fabric of both eras, imbibed
their values in her formative years and evolved a critical understanding of her times that is
reflected in her works.
The Enlightenment, the major cultural movement of the eighteenth century, heralded new
ideas and new approaches to old social and political institutions. It believed in the autonomy
of reason that would enable man to understand the principles that govern nature, man and
society. Reason and empirical analysis was privileged over traditional belief and authority.
The material world was observed and classified, and this was believed to lead to an
understanding not only of the universe, but of man and society as well. The belief that the
entire universe was governed by supernatural forces gave way to the conviction that natural
forces governed us. Science was freed from the stranglehold of religion, and religion was, in
turn, humanized. This not only placed man at the centre of the universe instead of God, but
placed the onus of his life and redemption in his own hands. This led to a belief in the
possibility of progress and perfectibility for the human race. John Locke (1632-1704) in his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) maintained that all knowledge originated
from sense perception. According to him, at birth, the human mind was a tabula rasa, a
blank tablet, but as the infant began to experience the external world, things began to be
registered on the tablet. Thus, he believed, environment determines behaviour and
character. Even evil was not a part of the divine plan, but a result of an imperfect
environment which could be changed.
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John Locke (1632-1704)
http://images.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.malaspina.com/jpg/locke.jpg&imgref
url=http://www.malaspina.com/site/person_767.asp&usg=__kIIzh6xrkHs-pQ-
kYfkKJwcr5Z4=&h=566&w=485&sz=42&hl=en&start=2&um=1&tbnid=YPpuDxWNjiKUWM:&
tbnh=134&tbnw=115&prev=/images%3Fq%3DLocke%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3
DG
Below you can see Experiment on a bird in the Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby. This
picture was painted in 1768, and is a good example of the art of the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:History_of_science/Previous_pictures
In the picture we see a family group gathered round a table to see a demonstration of a
vacuum pump. The pump is extracting air from the class 'bubble' which contains a cockatoo.
As the air is pumped out of the bubble the cockatoo will die. The demonstrator stands just
to the left of centre, explaining the device to his audience. Around him we see various
members of the household. To the left of the picture is a pair of young lovers. Next to them
are two brothers of the family, the elder acting as time- keeper for the experiment, and the
other, a young boy, leaning round him to see what is happening. On the other side of the
table, the father of the family comforts, and explains the experiment to, his two young
daughters, who are horrified and upset. An old man sits and gazes into the candle on the
table. In the background, a boy shutters the windows and watches proceedings over his
shoulder.
There are a number of features of this picture, which relate to or offer comment on the
thinking and ideals of the Enlightenment:
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Science enlightens - almost literally. Wright's use of light is not only typical of him, it is also
symbolic - the light in the picture shines out onto the people in the room from the table,
where the scientific experiment is located. We can just make out a candle, distorted and
obscured, but the light seems to radiate from the scientific apparatus itself, illuminating the
people who are otherwise in heavy shadow. Perhaps it is significant that the servant-boy is
shutting out the natural light of the moon.
Knowledge increases power and control. The fact that the family is gathered for an
evening's entertainment watching a scientific experiment reflects the Enlightenment
preoccupation with increasing the sum of human knowledge. It was thought that by
understanding the natural world and ourselves we could come closer to controlling them.
Here, the demonstrator's knowledge gives him the power of life and death - he can kill, or
reprieve, the bird in the air pump.
Knowledge is not class-bound. In an age where the educated middle classes stirred the
lower classes against the powerful aristocracy, knowledge, understanding and education
were political weapons. Their reach was greater than ever before, in this painting extending
to the servant-boy in the background who is fortunate enough to be present, and the
female children of the family (however much their intrinsic squeamishness and emotional
nature may prevent them from understanding the import of the sight).
People are still people. Wright could not have foreseen the terrible demonstration of human
nature seen in the post-Revolutionary Terror in France. His picture does show, however,
that the lessons it taught were not entirely unknown beforehand (people did not function in
an emotional vacuum, living as automata powered by reason alone): the young man and
woman on the left of the picture are utterly absorbed in each other - to them the emotional
world is more significant than the scientific.
[This analysis of the painting to illustrate the basic tenets of the times is available at:
http://www.heckgrammar.co.uk/index.php?p=10728 ]
Another influential thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), accepted the

Enlightenment values partially. He agreed with Locke that society had its origins in a state
of nature, but he regarded this state as a paradise, where evils had arisen due to disputes
over property rights that, in turn, produced social and political inequality. Therefore, to
ensure general security, a civil society was established in which individuals surrendered
their rights to the community. Each member of a society abided by a social contract and
agreed to submit to the will of the majority. Thus all members achieved democratic
equality. Unlike Locke, who had argued only for a portion of sovereign power to be
surrendered to the state, with the rest retained by the people themselves, Rousseau
contended that sovereignty was indivisible, and it was completely vested in civil society.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Jean-
Jacques_Rousseau_(painted_portrait).jpg/180px-Jean-
Jacques_Rousseau_(painted_portrait).jpg
Politics cannot remain immune from ideology and the idea of social justice had developed
out of the Enlightenment ethic. The ideas of social justice--equality, freedom and power for
the proletariat--found political resonance first in the American Civil War (1861-1865) and
later the French Revolution (1789-1799). Several liberal and radical thinkers, William
Godwin among them, embraced these ideas enthusiastically in England. In Inquiry
Concerning Political Justice (1793), Godwin prophesized an inevitable but peaceful evolution
towards equitable distribution of property among members of a society. For William Godwin,
Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft and other radicals, evil inhered in social institutions
that maintained arbitrary inequality, oppression and want. With the possible exception of
William Blake, Mary Shelley's mother (Mary Wollstonecraft) was the most influential of the
Enlightenment radicals. Her work on women's liberation, A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792) won her lasting fame.
However, the Reign of Terror, unleashed in France in the wake of the French Revolution,
showed that reason and ideas of brotherhood and equality did not end tyranny or inequality
or the abuse of power. It was a disquieting demonstration of the imperfectability of human
beings. Moreover, the revolutionary period of 1780 to 1830 which provided food for thought
for the novel was also the period of the first Industrial Revolution that transformed the
landscape of England from agrarian to industrial and led to considerable political and social
upheaval.
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To view power point projects on the industrial revolution,

http://worldhistory.pppst.com/industrialrevolution.html
There were divergences in opinions about whether the new developments would prove to be
a boon or a bane. Deeper researches in branches of science promised greater control over
natural resources. The exciting prospect of generation of wealth made human beings
careless of the cost – both in material and spiritual terms. The hold of the aristocracy,
already loosened by the weakening of the feudal structure, now yielded power to a newly
emerging middle-class. The ruling classes, however, attempted to cling to their privileges
through a series of strict laws, seeking to subdue the rising tide of protest against
inequitable distribution of wealth. Demobilization of the army after Napoleon’s defeat in
1815 led to large scale unemployment, or poorly paid jobs. This was a period of widespread
agitation by the Luddites in 1811, who perceived the new spinning mills as a threat to their
cotton weaving economy. The Luddites were a social movement of British textile artisans in
the 19th Century who protested, often by destroying mechanized looms, against the
changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt threatened their way of life
and livelihood. It took its name from Ned Ludd. There were many riots like the Spa Fields
Riot in 1816, and the government responded by crushing such protests violently, like the
Peterloo Massacre in 1819 in which nearly a thousand workers were killed in Manchester.
Luddites destroying machinery
http://images.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://21stcenturysocialism.com/files/thumbnail
s/luddites.jpg&imgrefurl=http://21stcenturysocialism.com/article/what_the_victorians_did_f
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3DN
For Conservatives like Edmund Burke, evil resided in those philosophers and rebels who
wanted to strip away the protection of social hierarchies and institutions. In Reflections on
the Revolution in France (1790), Burke questioned the French Revolution and saw it as a
crime against the social order, as tradition and custom had been accorded no respect or
say. Such counter-revolutionary sentiment saw Godwin and his writings as a nascent
monster that had to be stamped out, lest England went the way of revolutionary France.
Monster imagery was frequently evoked to depict Godwin and Wollstonecraft as the
begetters of anarchy and destruction.
Edmund Burke
http://images.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://goldenstate.files.wordpress.com/2008/05
/rudd-edmund-
burke.jpg&imgrefurl=http://goldenstate.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/elections-baseball-
and-
burke/&usg=__YOTXiH4rT3zrfsYhHXIueaalZFE=&h=542&w=357&sz=19&hl=en&start=1&u
m=1&tbnid=bPjpy6qhBJkqCM:&tbnh=132&tbnw=87&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dedmund%2B
burke%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG
The period in which Frankenstein was written is historically the Romantic Period.
Romanticism was a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in
the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the
Industrial Revolution In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of
the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature, and
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was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major
impact on historiography, education and natural history.
The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience,

placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—
especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its
picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom
to something noble, made of spontaneity a desirable character (as in the musical
impromptu), and argued for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by
nature in the form of language and customary usage.
According to the Wikipedia, Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal
models to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be
authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban
sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and
distant in modes more authentic than Rococo chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the
imagination to envision and to escape.
The modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted,
perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than
the mores of contemporary society.
Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which
prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of
the French Revolution laid the background from which both Romanticism and the Counter-
Enlightenment emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence
on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second
half of the 19th century, "Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism.
Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and
artists, whose pioneering examples would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual
imagination as a critical authority, which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in
art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a zeitgeist, in the
representation of its ideas.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism)
Heritage of Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s Reading

As noted above, Mary Shelley was a voracious reader. She had been closely associated with
the philosophical and intellectual debates of the times through the discussions of her
parents and their contemporaries. In addition to this, she read with great interest the
developments in science and technology, particularly the fascination with theories regarding
the revival of the dead. The journals that she kept give us some idea of the books she was
familiar with. Among others, she read William Godwin’s Enquiry concerning Political Justice
and its Influence on Modern Morals and Manners (1793) and Things as They Are; or The
Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of
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Woman (1792) and Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), an unfinished novel published
posthumously, The Physiognomical System by Dr. Gall and Dr. Spurzheim (1815); Samuel
Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), The Sorcerer by Veit Weber (1795), translated by R. Huish; The
Monk, by Matthew Gregory Lewis (1796); Constantin Volney’s The Ruins, or a Survey of the
Revolutions of Empires (1791); Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667); The Sorrows of Young Werter
(1774), by Goethe; Plutarch's Lives (late 1st century); and, Emile (1762), by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau.
Mary Shelley’s reading exposed her to the Enlightenment ethic as well as the Romantic
ideal. Her acquaintance with the ideas propounded about man and nature by thinkers like
John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are evident from her work, as is her parents’ legacy
– the radicalism of Godwin and the feminism of Wollstonecraft. Mary Shelley recognized the
liberating force of radicalism, and equally, the impact of the brutal face of the French
Revolution, and the subsequent conservatism, which meshed together in those difficult
times. Mary Shelley employs standard anti-Jacobin motifs as grave robbing, reviving the
dead, and monsters that destroy their own creators.
Frankenstein might well be a descendent of the anti-Godwinian novel of the 1790s in which
Victor is a latter-day Godwin. U.C. Knoepftmacher has suggested her dedication to William
Godwin was secretly invidious as it criticizes Godwin’s philosophical ideas – especially his
schemes for regenerating the human race. Godwin expressed the idea of rational individuals
improving society whereas Mary Shelley shows the individual’s lack of control and the
ensuing juggernaut of evil consequences. She subverts the position by making the monster
speak like a philosopher while Victor rants in impotent rage. Victor’s attempts to regenerate
human life echo both Godwin and the conservative critique of Godwin’s ideas. In An Enquiry
Concerning the Principles of Political Justice (1793), Godwin had exulted in the coming of a
new human race – one produced by social engineering, not sexual intercourse. His
utopianism is parodied through Victor’s self-centred creation of a new Adam of “gigantic
stature”. The monster displays the features of the Burkean monster – grotesque and evil.
However, Mary Shelley goes beyond and subverts both the radical and conservative
traditions. Mary Wollstonecraft had admitted to the Burkean thesis that rebels are monsters
but she had seen them as social products – products of oppression and misrule. Mary
Shelley, too, chose to depict socially created monsters who offer a powerful verbal critique
of injustice and oppression, and a defense for rebellion through a creature who is physically
monstrous yet intrinsically humane, and who is subsequently warped because of his social
alienation, isolation, unbelonging.
Not only did Mary Shelley dispute both the radical and conservative traditions, she
challenged the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Shelley as well. She participated
in the major concerns of Romanticism, while simultaneously making a profound criticism of
its fundamental beliefs, particularly the dangers of the unbounded and uncontrolled artistic
ego. Frankenstein questions the unhindered pursuit of knowledge and rationality at a time
when human aspiration and achievement was considered limitless; and is a demonstration
of the dreadful implications of such boundless human imagination and enterprise. The
prioritization of imagination over reason that glorified the individual ego and the desire for
self-expression is questioned through Walton, Frankenstein and the monster – the Romantic
egotists who desire to construct and control the world. Frankenstein, the ‘master scientist’
shuts out all other contact; and this is fatal as it leads to an inorganic and unbalanced view
of nature. His attempt to circumvent and reverse Nature’s immutable laws of life and death,
17
through the artificial life he creates, becomes the most extreme manifestation of such a
solipsistic view.
Birth of the text – Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus
Mary Shelley began work on Frankenstein in Switzerland in mid-June of 1816 while she was
on a European sojourn with a party of friends. She later described that summer in
Switzerland as the moment "when I first stepped out from childhood into life". They stayed
at Villa Diodati, Lord Byron’s home on Lake Leman near Geneva. The party comprised
Mary’s lover/husband, Percy Shelley, her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron, and his
physician and friend, Dr. John William Polidori.
The Villa Diodati
http://www.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.nlm.nih.gov/frankenstein/images/diod
ati.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.nlm.nih.gov/frankenstein/stormy.html&usg=__q3iHumBGoNb
tr6mbCr3ax-
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iodati%2Bgranger%2Bcollection%26um%3D1%
26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26biw%3D1362%26bih%3D566%26tbm%3Disch&um=
1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=128&vpy=83&dur=2683&hovh=186&hovw=271&tx=130&ty=133&
oei=rqCNTdvyA8GrcfTbtPwJ&page=1&ndsp=19&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0
The weather did not permit outdoor activities. "It proved a wet, ungenial summer", Mary
Shelley remembered in 1831, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house."
The visitors whiled away their time in the Villa in Geneva telling one another Gothic German
ghost tales such as Fantasmagoriana: Collection of the Histories of Apparitions, Spectres,
Ghosts (Jean Baptiste Eyries, 1812). The term appears to have derived from a magic
lantern experiment in 1802 presented by a Frenchman M. Philipstal. Variants of the term
have been used to describe apparitions of phantoms, such as by Jean Baptiste Eyries in
Fantasmagoriana or Collection of the Histories of Apparitions, Spectres, Ghosts, etc. (1812).
This is the work from which Lord Byron read aloud to Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire
Clairmont, and J. W. Polidori on the night of June 16, 1816. Click:
http://www.jahsonic.com/Fantasmagoriana.html"
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http://www.jahsonic.com/Fantasmagoriana.html
The group also discussed a variety of topical issues. The conversation often turned to
exciting research and development in science in the eighteenth century by scientists like
Erasmus Darwin, a natural philosopher, and physicists like Luigi Galvini and Giovanna Aldini.
Their research into animation of dead matter and the feasibility of returning a corpse or
assembled body parts to life was a particularly fascinating subject for discussion.
Lord Byron proposed an interesting solution to alleviate the boredom of being cooped up
indoors. He suggested that each member of the party write a ghost story. Most of the
guests began enthusiastically but soon gave it up. (Apart from Mary Shelley’s story, the
only other extant story is Polidori’s The Vampyre: A Tale.) Thus, Mary Shelley’s novel
evolved out of Lord Byron’s playful challenge, and owes a substantial part of its content to
the discussions and readings the group engaged in there. She could not immediately think
of a story and spent a lot of time looking for inspiration. Shortly afterwards, she conceived
the idea for Frankenstein in a waking dream. She describes the revelation in her final
revision of Frankenstein in 1831:
My imagination unbidden, possessed and guided me. I saw with shut eyes, but acute mental
vision, – the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.
I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some
powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must
it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the
stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he
would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror stricken…. He (the artist) sleeps but is
awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his
curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.
Castle Frankenstein that Mary Shelley visited during a tour where, apparently, research was
carried on to construct a human being.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_Castle
Mary Shelley began writing a short story; with Percy Bysshe Shelley's encouragement, she
expanded this tale into her first novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. She
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completed the draft of Frankenstein in 1817. She recorded, "It was on a dreary night of
November that I beheld my man completed."
A page from the original manuscript of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
The manuscript contains many hand-written corrections by Percy Shelley. Academics say it
provides unique evidence for the debate on how much he influenced the story.
http://sites.google.com/site/myhideousprogenywebsite/related-assignments/mary-shelley-
s-frankenstein-manuscript
Frankenstein was published anonymously in January 1818 by a rather obscure publisher of

‘shilling shockers’ after being turned down by at least two other publishers. It was dedicated
to William Godwin and had an introduction by Percy Shelley. Reviewers and readers
assumed that Percy Shelley was the author since the book was published with his preface
and dedicated to his political hero, William Godwin. The novel was even thought to have
been written by William Godwin himself, probably because of the social themes that it dealt
with such as education, family life, the moral and ethical choices of an individual, the uses
and misuse of science etc.
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Title Page of Frankenstein
Reproduction of the title page:
FRANKENSTEIN;
OR,
THE MODERN PROMETHEUS.
----<>----
21
IN THREE VOLUMES
----<>----
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?----
Paradise Lost
__________
VOL. I.
___________________
Lenton:
PRINTED FOR
LACKINGTON, HUGHES, HARDING, MAYOR, & JONES,
PINSBURY SQUARE.
22
_______
1818
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: The Novel

Frankenstein in the title is the name of a scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who is like a modern
Prometheus and has overreaching ambition. In Greek mythology, Prometheus was a Titan
who stole fire from Olympus and gave it to humans, for which Zeus chained him to a rock
where an eagle tore at his liver till Hercules freed him. Fired with the possibilities of
science, Frankenstein experiments with the creation of life in a laboratory.
This laboratory was constructed at the University of Ingolstadt in 1778
http://www.google.co.in/imgres?q=University+of+Ingolstadt&um=1&hl=en&sa=N&tbo=d&
biw=910&bih=423&tbm=isch&tbnid=9qBlr5R--Gj-
GM:&imgrefurl=http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/V1notes/univers.html&docid=vxKLtY9ogWs7
pM&imgurl=http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Gifs/steep3.gif&w=350&h=493&ei=b9XrUPmrD
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=1t:429,r:5,s:0,i:103
With single-minded devotion--that entails even the sacrifice of familial ties--Victor

Frankenstein constructs a creature. The creature is larger than life because, impatient in his
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obsession to create life, he does not wish to spend extra time bothering with the minute
details of the project. But once he infuses breath into the lifeless mass, he is aghast at the
grotesque being that he has created, so much so that he instantly forfeits all responsibility
for it.
An image of the Creature
http://images.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.geocities.com/stitchfaceuk/teenage
creation.jpg&imgrefurl=http://shelleyliterature.tripod.com/id15.html&usg=__7D4Nw_NQjn4
fJFIZzfYKUD9vcrI=&h=352&w=279&sz=40&hl=en&start=5&um=1&tbnid=Vn-
6Q5kxedYN2M:&tbnh=120&tbnw=95&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dvictor%2Bfrankenstein%26u
m%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%
3DG
The Creature (who remains nameless) seeks love and an education; the former is denied to
him and he is forced to acquire the latter himself. As the consciousness of his loneliness
grows in him, he is consumed by hatred for his creator, Victor, for having abandoned him;
and his desire for revenge leads him to kill all those who are dear to his creator, culminating
in the murder of Victor’s bride, Elizabeth. Subsequently the Creature escapes, with Victor in
pursuit.
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Inside cover art from the 1831 edition of Frankenstein.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Frankenstein.1831.inside-cover.jpg
Mary Shelley’s Authorial Anxiety

Initially it was not easy for women to gain respectability as writers, and women writers
often published anonymously or under a pseudonym. Mary Shelley’s authorship also took
over a decade to be revealed. Initially, Sir Walter Scott wrote a favourable review of
Frankenstein, but when authorship was attributed to Mary Shelley in the second edition of
the novel in 1823 upon the occasion of the billing of Richard Brinsley Peake’s play,
Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein, critics were less enthusiastic about the novel. It
was probably difficult for nineteenth century readers to accept a woman as the author of
such a gruesome plot.
The British Critic stated … "the author is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of
that which is the prevailing (sic) fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the
gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the
novel without further comment" (April 1818).
However, the ‘stamp’ of approval for women writers was finally won, as is demonstrated by
the issuing of the following stamps!
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Stamps commemorating some famous women writers
12p: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

131/2p: George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss
15p: Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights
171/2p: Mrs. Gaskell's North and South
http://faculty.citadel.edu/hutchisson/Images/stampvicwom002.jpg
http://images.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://faculty.citadel.edu/hutchisson/Images/sta
mpvicwom002.jpg&imgrefurl=http://faculty.citadel.edu/hutchisson/Pages/Stamps%2520Re
vised.htm&usg=__BPt0DCqDEyshZ2vk1qftEQn5pPs=&h=626&w=230&sz=249&hl=en&start
=7&um=1&tbnid=DcF7Ag3k57edkM:&tbnh=136&tbnw=50&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dwomen
%2Bauthors%2Bin%2BVictorian%2Btimes%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG
Mary Shelley admitted to her authorship in 1831 and wrote an introduction to the third and
revised 1831 edition of the book. She claimed that she had made no substantive changes to
the story, although that has been debated.
Even though Mary Shelley does finally acknowledge her “hideous progeny”, critics have
pointed to the ambivalence in this. Mary Shelley adopted various strategies to underplay her
authorial voice. Her dedication of the inspiration for the story to a dream is just such an
instance. Mary Shelley distances herself from her novel, almost denying the story as a
conscious act of creation. In Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (1988), Anne
Mellor ascribes even the revisions to the manuscript by Percy Shelley to authorial insecurity.
26
In fact, her anxiety about her role as a mother (and her guilty perception that she was the
cause of her own mother’s death), coincide with the ‘waking dream’, which was the genesis
of Frankenstein, her public creation. Her sense of inadequacy as a writer made her reluctant
to promote her own authorial persona and "this shame contributed to the generation of her
fictional images of abnormality, perversion, and destruction" (Mellor).
Frame Narrative
Apart from keeping her identity as the author a secret and professing to have conjured up
the novel in a “waking dream”, the very structure of her narrative serves to underplay the
role of the author. Mary Poovey in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as
Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen (1985) has
suggested that the use of multiple narratives permits Mary Shelley to split her artistic
persona: she can both express and efface herself. In Frankenstein, it is an explorer, Walton,
who narrates the story of his encounter with Victor Frankenstein, who, in turn, relates the
details of his ruinous experiment, and within that, is embedded the story of the Creature,
told by Frankenstein. All these narrators are male, wandering, deviant creatures and mirror
each other. Though Walton is still bound by his affection for his sister, Frankenstein had
forfeited all his relations, and the Creature is unable to form any relationships due to his
hideousness.
http://www.heckgrammar.co.uk/index.php?p=10725
The various characters act as a foil to each other. Walton’s narrative presents Frankenstein
as he was before his ambition overpowers his goodness. Frankenstein’s narrative mirrors
Walton’s own aspirations and serves as a warning against his similarly destructive path. The
Creature reveals the innate good within Frankenstein, as well as his own humanity. Henry
Clerval’s temperament is also a foil to measure Frankenstein in the former’s thirst for
knowledge, but not at the cost of his humanity. Through these multiple perspectives, our
emotional response to the characters becomes more nuanced. An important point to keep in
mind is that despite the apparent veracity bestowed on the story by the different narratives,
it is actually only Walton’s version that we have.
By softening direct commentary, the frame narratives create the illusion of an authorless
text. It is left for the reader to connect and combine the interwoven stories into a unified
27
narrative in the absence of the omniscient narrator. This co-opts the reader into the
narrative, and as Katherine Newey says, “… reading Frankenstein involves us in a quest for
knowledge, a search for the truth about the ultimate meaning of the story itself, which
parallels those quests for knowledge of Walton, Frankenstein and the Monster” (Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, 1993, p. 3-4). It also helps “Shelley to achieve her purposes: to
horrify and to generate thought on a number of social, moral, religious and political issues.
The empowerment of the reader, giving the freedom to choose what to accept and find
sympathetic, carries with it the responsibility to develop a personal view on these issues.”
(http://www.heckgrammar.co.uk/index.php?p=10725"http://www.heckgrammar.co.uk/inde
x.php?p=10725
Gothic Element
Another strategy that Mary Shelley employed to disown authorial responsibility was the use
of the Gothic style.
The Gothic may be defined as a style of fiction characterized by the use of desolate or
remote settings and macabre, mysterious or violent incidents, or at a deeper level, by
exploration of social values, prescriptions and proscriptions, concern with good and evil, and
questions regarding the boundaries between what is human, monstrous, natural, unnatural,
supernatural and divine.
Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1765) is regarded as the first Gothic novel. Texts such
as this and Matthew Lewis' The Monk (1796) presented ghoulish supernatural or violent
incidents. The events usually happened in distant time and setting, and fear and terror were
the emotions evoked.
In her introduction to the 1831 edition to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley declared her desire to
"curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart." However, the conventional Gothic
elements are missing in this 'ghost story'.
According to Hannah North, although Gothic novels were written mainly to evoke terror in
their readers, they also served to show the dark side of human nature. Novels such as
Frankenstein draw on science instead of superstition, on what is frighteningly possible and
familiar rather than entirely absurd and alien. They make a link between the world of text
and the world of the reader.
Gothic writers, like Shelley, were interested in the breakdown of boundaries, in the
exploration of what is forbidden, in desires that should neither be spoken of or acted upon.
If we read Frankenstein as a Gothic novel, we can suggest that what Victor does and what
he creates are unnatural. He goes too far, breaks the laws of nature, crosses forbidden
boundaries, and what he unleashes, within himself and in society, is disruption and
destruction.
28
The suggestions of incest in Victor's love for Elizabeth, along with the focus on a creative act
that goes beyond both the functions of God and women, and a creation that blurs the
boundaries between life and death, not to mention the possibility of the Creature being
Victor's double which acted out his forbidden desires, mean that Frankenstein fitted in with
more modern conceptions of the Gothic.
The main protagonist of a Gothic novel is usually a solitary character who has an
egocentrical nature. This is seen many times in Frankenstein, often represented by the
landscape: the bleak, glacial fields of the Alps and the mists of the Arctic serve to indicate
the isolation of the two protagonists. The solitary character can apply to both Victor and his
Creature as they both lived their lives in social isolation.
Frankenstein does not fit in the norm where Gothic novels are concerned; it certainly gives
us an insight into the dark side of human psyche and exposes the society at that time and
how Shelley reacted to it.
By Hannah North
("http://www.heckgrammar.co.uk/index.php?p=10724"http://www.heckgrammar.co.uk/ind
ex.php?p=10724)
To read about some stereotypical elements of the Gothic, click Elements of the Gothic.docx
Anne Mellor notes that Mary Shelley uses the Gothic to “censor her own speech in
Frankenstein”. The Gothic lens becomes a tool to imagine the unimaginable or invoke the
unconscious; it distorts the pictures but projects a reality that cannot be apprehended in
any other way. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the Gothic was seen as
a limited but genuine substitute for the sciences of history and of psychology, a way of
gaining access to, and understanding of, areas where knowledge had not quite penetrated.
(Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the
Present Day. 1980.)
The Gothic mode has been seen as a reaction against the humanistic, rationalist literature of
The Age of Reason. With an appreciation of the power of the unconscious, Mary Shelley
counters a mechanistic view of the world and human nature. The Gothic suggests the power
of the human will to dream what it desires, and the power of the human intellect to realize
these dreams. Frankenstein began as a dream, a window to the unconscious. As for the
Romantics, dreams in Frankenstein are important ways to self-knowledge, but Shelley also
shows that egotism ought to be tempered and the imaginative life must be lived with
responsibility towards others. The Creature is a living example of what a mindlessly
mechanistic world augurs. He is a result of Frankenstein’s overweening egotism. However,
Frankenstein’s tale does bring Walton to a realization of his hubris. Mary Shelley’s use of
dreams is, therefore, ambivalent; she leaves the reader to judge. In Frankenstein serious
philosophical issues are placed against an incomprehensible, subterraneously grotesque
world. It has been suggested that this tension between Gothic and Romantic literary modes
echoes the philosophical tension that existed between herself and her husband, the
Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley.
29
Moreover, placing Frankenstein’s scientific experiments within the literary conventions of the
Gothic mode serves to emphasize the dangers of Frankenstein’s desire to alter irrevocably
the cycles of life and death. It invokes the images of darkness and repression and uses the
grammar of the occult. Initially Frankenstein’s father ensures that there is no supernatural
element in his education. But that changes as he describes his activities using familiar
Gothic tropes--secrecy, darkness, subterranean spaces and forbidden activities.
Subtitle
The subtitle that Mary Shelley has chosen for her novel, "the Modern Prometheus", is also
a kind of intervention by her into this debate of human will and culpability. The title, subtitle
and the epigraph from John Milton’s Paradise Lost and the dedication to William Godwin, in
fact, qualify and comment on each other and serve as a very powerful entry point into the
text and its various issues.
Prometheus Bound. 6th century B.C. Vatican city museum
(http://www.theoi.com/image/img_prometheus.jpg
Combining the Greek and Roman myth, the myth of Prometheus becomes a double-edged
tale of creation and destruction: Prometheus the fire-stealer, and Prometheus the giver of
life. As mentioned, according to the Greek myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods for
the benefit of mankind--to make tools and warm hearts. As a punishment, he was chained
to a rock where an eagle plucked at his liver every day. In the tale told by Ovid in
Metamorphoses, Prometheus fashioned man out of clay and breathed life into him.
Prometheus, a rebel, and a heroic and tragic figure, is central to the Romantic imagination
(sympathy for him is shadowed later in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s four-act play, Prometheus
Unbound, published in 1820). “Prometheus represents the twin roles of the poet as creator
and rebel, whose creative art both transgressed the social order, and brought enlightenment
and liberation to his people” (Katherine Newey, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 1993, p. 15).
Mary Shelley's ambitious scientist, Victor Frankenstein, similarly claimed "benevolent
intentions, and thirsted for the moment when I should put them in practice."
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However, in Mary Shelley’s novel, the subtitle is provocative, as the text of the novel does
not fully bear out the Romantic sympathy for Prometheus, or the modern Prometheus,
Victor Frankenstein. The novel shows rather the perils of overvaulting ambition and the
horrible fate that awaits the over-reacher. At the end of Frankenstein, “the heroic
Prometheus becomes the pathetic Victor Frankenstein, goaded by his creature into the
infertile wastes of the Arctic” (Newey).
Mary Shelley’s ‘Modern Prometheus’ is a man whose actions are compromised by his
egotism and lack of self-knowledge. Harriet Hustis says that the significance of the
Prometheus myth is “reconfigured” by Mary Shelley “in order to foreground the issue of
responsible creativity.” According to hustis, Mary Shelley’s novel explores “the ethics of a
male creator’s relationship to his progeny by questioning the extent to which he incurs an
obligation for the well-being and happiness of that creation by virtue of the creative act
itself.” (Harriet Hustis, ‘Responsible Creativity and the “Modernity” of Mary Shelley’s
Prometheus’, 2003).
Prometheus Bound, 1611-1612. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) Photographic reproduction

of an oil painting (The Granger Collection, New York).
http://www.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.nlm.nih.gov/frankenstein/images/prom
etheus.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.nlm.nih.gov/frankenstein/preface.html&usg=__cVKQF2R
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&ved=1t:429,r:2,s:0
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Epigraph
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus also carries an epigraph on the title page from
John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667).
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me? __
The Expulsion from Eden
http://images.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.wahcenter.net/news/2006/mpl/Milto
n6.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.wahcenter.net/news/2006/mpl/&h=375&w=500&sz=46&hl=
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John Milton
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om/2008/06/john-
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http://sophiawellbelovedpoetry.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/john-milton.jpg
Milton’s Paradise Lost concealed some unexpectedly revolutionary implications for the
Romantics. Mary Shelley’s perception of Milton was conditioned by her parents’ and Percy
Bysshe Shelley’s viewpoint. The sympathy that Satan evokes in Milton is similar to the
empathy the monster elicits in Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s criticism of the Creator who
abandons his creation is patent. As Burton Hatlen says, “In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley does
what Milton, in the eyes of the Romantics, wanted but did not dare to do: she puts the
patriarchal creator on trial and she finds him guilty” (Burton Hatlen, “Milton, Mary Shelley
and Patriarchy”, 1983).
So, if the subtitle is an interrogative comment on the ‘creator’, the epigraph echoes the
thoughts of the ‘creation’. The juxtaposition of the subtitle with the epigraph leads the
reader to interrogate the relationship between the creator and the created, between father
and son. In Frankenstein, the intelligent and sensitive Creature Victor creates is profoundly
moved when he reads a copy of Milton's Paradise Lost. He compares his situation to that of
Adam. Unlike the first man who had "come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature,"
Frankenstein's Creature is hideous in appearance, but he sees a similarity in their condition,
33
which is "wretched, helpless, and alone". His anguish at a lack of ancestry, the reason for
his being, and the pain at abandonment by his own maker, resonates with ethical questions
and debates of the times about the relationship of God and man.
Click the following site for an article on sympathy for Satan in Romantic thought:
http://images.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/i
mages/romantic/rom1_s.jpg&imgrefurl=http://bustill.blogspot.com/2008/06/satanic-and-
byronic-hero-
overview.html&h=207&w=157&sz=7&hl=en&start=166&um=1&usg=__GXzp3WMcg-6H-
Ya6kZq4EY1Ybic=&tbnid=leTFaxeVlSDTOM:&tbnh=105&tbnw=80&prev=/images%3Fq%3D
satan%2Bmilton%26start%3D162%26ndsp%3D18%26um%
3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN (viewed earlier, and redirected to:
http://bustill.blogspot.com/2008/06/satanic-and-byronic-hero-overview.html
Feminist criticism has focussed on Mary Shelley’s problematizing the masculine lens that
regards the natural world as feminine territory to be conquered. The relationship between
the sexes is seen as a combative one: the (male) scientist must storm the (female)
stronghold of nature and subdue her by asserting knowledge. These are metaphors for the
patriarchal invasion of nature, and are equated with rape. The equation of exploitation of
nature with passive femininity points towards the ecological degeneration and imbalance as
a consequence of the Enlightenment ethic. Anne Mellor says, "[T]he scientist who analyzes,
manipulates, and attempts to control nature unconsciously engages in a form of
oppressive sexual politics. Construing nature as the female Other, he attempts to make
nature serve his own ends, to gratify his own desires for power, wealth, and reputation"
(Anne Mellor, 1988). The novel is also a critique of the discovery, conquest and exploitation
of new geographical frontiers by a patriarchal imperialism, as depicted in Walton’s quest. As
Michelle Levy observes, “Mary Shelley, by reflecting darkly on contemporary maritime
exploration and scientific experimentation, lodged a powerful complaint against the twin
dangers of imperialism and science” (Michelle Levy, “Discovery and Domestic Affections in
Coleridge and Shelley”, Studies in English Literature, 2004).
On the theological level, the doctrine that a (male) God single-handedly generated the
universe reflects and reinforces the belief that the generative power is uniquely male. God
generates His own Son in a single act of the will, and in turn the Son shapes Adam out of
the dust with his own hands. Satan generates Sin out of his own head and on earth Adam
himself gives birth to Eve. In all these instances of male birth, the creature is in some
degree ‘lesser’ than his creator. So the ‘male mother’ in some sense ‘owns’ the creature to
which he gives birth. The patriarchal cosmos is a perfectly hierarchical world, descending by
stages from God, the ‘author’ of all creation. (Hatlen, 1983).
34
A Gothic architectural nuance about masculine versus feminine. It’s also called the Adam
and Eve church
http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/4492274
Issues in the Novel

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as Science Fiction
Frankenstein is a layered text that explores ideas and emotions at multiple levels. It has
been discussed not only as a sensationalist Gothic novel, but is also a serious examination
of emerging scientific developments and philosophical ideas. It is a psychological study of
the self and its subjectivity, and its relation to the world around it; it is about an individual
family and its wider concentricity; and exposes how individual human life is rendered
vulnerable to vested interests.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is regarded as among the first examples of the genre now
known as Science Fiction, the features of which demand that the text must be:
35
i) grounded in valid scientific research;
ii) predict what might be possible in the future given new scientific discoveries; and,
iii) offer a humanistic critique of either specific technological inventions or the very nature of
scientific thinking (Anne Mellor, 1988).
The study of the scientific elements of Frankenstein is probably the most popular aspect of
the novel. The National Library of Medicine has a site dedicated to the examination of
Frankenstein’s scientific features.
Frankenstein examines the moral and ethical debates around scientific research, especially
about how far it is right to tinker with nature and how it would impact the social and moral
aspects of civilization.
Science fiction?
Tribute to Science?
Indictment of Science?
The age of Enlightenment was an age of rapid scientific discovery and invention. From the
natural world to the workings of the human body, all had been empirically observed and
analyzed to formulate theories that could be tested and validated. Human anatomy
especially fascinated researchers, and a huge, unofficial/ industry had cropped up to dig up
graves and sell corpses to medical researchers for dissection. In addition to this, public
dissections were carried out to satiate the curiosity of the public about human anatomy.
36
Grave robbing
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/my-ancestor-was-a-grave-robber-and-
other-skeletons-in-the-closet-1655361.html
Public dissection
37
http://quigleyscabinet.blogspot.com/2008/10/public-dissection.html
Dissection was an event open to the public in the 19th century and the corpse came from
the gallows, the criminal having been sentenced to be “hanged and publicly dissected.” It
was punishment and it was entertainment. It has been part of the education of doctors, who
got front row seats at the anatomy theatre back then. Today's dissections have only a
medical (or medico-legal) audience, but anatomist "Gunther von Hagens has challenged the
notion of whether doctors should have a privileged view.
http://quigleyscabinet.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.html
38
William Corder (1803-1828) was convicted and executed for England's infamous Murder in
the Red Barn. The judge passed the following sentence: Nothing remains now for me to do
but to pass upon you the awful sentence of the law, and that sentence is - That you be
taken back to the prison from whence you came, and that you be taken from thence, on
Monday next, to a place of Execution, and that you there be hanged by the Neck until you
are Dead ; and that your body shall afterwards be dissected and anatomized ; and may the
Lord God Almighty, of his infinite goodness, have mercy on your soul!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barn_Murder
39
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jeremy_Bentham_Auto-Icon.jpg
The most notable person I have found to have been publicly dissected was the Utilitarian
philosopher Jeremy Bentham--and it was at his own request. He directed that his body be
anatomized and his skeleton be used to prepare an "auto-icon." His wishes were carried out
after his death in 1832 by padding, clothing, and posing the skeleton (pictured). The head is
made of wax; Bentham's own head was displayed between his feet, but is now stored
elsewhere. The auto-icon has been on display at University College London since 1850.
The following is an example of an anatomy theatre.
40
http://quigleyscabinet.blogspot.in/2008_10_01_archive.html
The earliest anatomy theatre was built at the University of Padua, Italy, in 1594 and is still
preserved.
In the novel Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein "dabbled among the unhallowed

damps of the grave" and frequented dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses to
make his creature. In Mary Shelley's day, as in our own, the healthy human form
delighted and intrigued artists, physicians, and anatomists. But corpses, decaying
tissue, and body parts stirred almost universal disgust. Alive or dead, whole or in
41
pieces, human bodies arouse strong emotion and account for part of
Frankenstein's enduring hold on us.
De Monstro Nato Lutetiae Anno Domini, 1605
National Library of Medicine Collection
As this early book illustration suggests, nature's own "monsters" – sharp deviations from
normal human development – fascinated anatomists of Mary Shelley's day and before.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/frankenstein/bodyparts.html
It is certainly remarkable that such a young woman with no formal education could be
familiar with sufficient scientific and philosophical knowledge to conceive such a plot. This is
partially explained by her voracious appetite to read a diverse collection of books. She was
certainly aware of the researches being made in the scientific field. In the 1831 edition, she
incorporated the idea of galvanism, i.e. the use of electricity to stimulate nerve impulses.
This idea had sounded extremely exciting and promising initially to induce and sustain life.
However, the entire process of creating life had not yet been demystified.
42
Luigi Galvani - Italian physician
(1737-1798)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Galvani
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Luigi_Galvani,_oil-painting.jpg
Luigi Galvani (1737-1798) proposed that electricity flows through nerves. Galvani showed
that stimulation of a frog's nerve
causes contraction of the muscle to which it is attached (1791).
43
Galvani's Experiment http://www.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.clas.ufl.

edu/ipsa/2003/ginn/image009.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/2003/
ginn.html&usg=__ychGlpCL7Tla_s_LMVu_HDH3uuA=&h=179&w=248&sz=28&hl
=en&start=0&sig2=wdmB7j7bBugxKv7Dn10Igg&zoom=1&tbnid=ZP0s93_nC6E9
TM:&tbnh=127&tbnw=169&ei=UOONTcaPIMa3cKj-pf8J&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dg
alvani%2527s%2Bexperiment%2BNational%2BLib
rary%2Bof%2BMedicine%2BCollection%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG%2
6biw%3D1345%26bih%3D566%26tbm%3Disch&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=152&vpy=97
&dur=49218&hovh=143&hovw=198&tx=102&ty=123&oei=UOONTcaPIMa3cKj-
pf8J&page=1&ndsp=24&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0
Giovanni Aldini (Galvani’s nephew)
Italian physicist
(1762-1834)
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Aldini
His scientific work was chiefly concerned with the medical applications of galvanism. He
conducted experiments for preserving human life and material objects from destruction by
fire. He also tried to demonstrate the revival of an executed criminal George Forster at
Newgate in London.
44
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Aldini
The Newgate Calendar summarizes the events:
On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began
to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually
opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and
the legs and thighs were set in motion. Mr Pass, the beadle of the Surgeons’ Company, who
was officially present during this experiment, was so alarmed that he died of fright soon
after his return home.
An illustration of Aldini’s experiments with executed corpses. His notes of George Foster
record that “the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the
left eye actually opened … The action even of those muscles furthest distant from the points
of contact with the arc was so much increased as almost to give an appearance of re-
animation … vitality might, perhaps, have been restored, if many circumstances had not
rendered it impossible.” (cited in Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters)
Aldini’s act was yet another public showcase of strange new technologies, this time sparking
the imaginations of the Brits. Within the decade, Scottish experimenters were performing
45
similar feats, and the College of Surgeons had, after further attempts similar to Aldini’s,
revived the heart of another convicted murdered, John Bellingham. It was the first recorded
heart shock revival in modern medical history.† (Even today’s scientists turn to electricity to
instantiate life’s precursors in trying to solve the riddle of abiogenesis.)
But even more than that was the effect these results had on popular culture, where Mary
Shelley, well aware of Aldini’s work (as well as that of Erasmus Darwin, a proponent of
evolution well before the concept of “natural selection” was framed by his more famous
grandson), used the idea of reanimation — such as was attempted on her husband’s first
wife after she drowned — to inspire her signature characters, Victor Frankenstein and his
“monster.”
http://www.executedtoday.com/tag/giovanni-aldini/
Interestingly, an attempt was made to shock Percy Shelley’s first wife, Harriet Shelley back
to life following her suicide by drowning. Obviously there was not enough information about
how to animate life for Mary Shelley to describe it in her novel; nor is that knowledge
available even in the 21 st century. Nevertheless, Frankenstein tantalizes the readers enough
and continues to resonate to this day. The fascination with cloning/ genetic engineering and
the debates surrounding the ethics of such artificial human engineering. It forewarns about
the perils of science without conscience.
A persistent question about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been whether it is a celebration
or censure of science? In an article “Technology and its dangerous effects on nature and
human life” as perceived in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and William Gibson’s Neuromancer”
by Orlin Damyanov, the author says that Shelley's novel is “our first and still one of our best
cautionary tales about scientific research.”
(http://www.geocities.com/paris/5972/gibson.html)
http://www.gouverner.net/go/articles/frankenstein_neuromancer.shtml
Orlin Damyanov feels that though the two novels are set in different contexts, “Shelley's
work could be viewed as the apprehension of the new-born fear in regard to technical
invention and Gibson's work as the divination of the consequences of technological
development and sophistication. In both cases the essence of human nature has barely
changed. It is what lies behind the destructive human strife for more, more at any price that
has led to the despondent conclusions of both works.” It is a powerful indictment of the
amoral use of knowledge and technology.
46
(http://www.geocities.com/paris/5972/gibson.html)
http://www.gouverner.net/go/articles/frankenstein_neuromancer.shtml
Orlin Damyanov feels that this aspiration is similar to capitalism: the purpose in both is to
exploit nature's resources for commercial profit as well as political control. One of the most
significant effects of the Enlightenment was to perceive nature as dead, value neutral, and
therefore available for exploitation by humans. For Frankenstein, there are no religious or
ethical questions involved in gathering human and animal organs, bones, and flesh to create
what he later on calls a monster, nor are those violations seen as anything but part of the
trade. The new technology dehumanizes one; and this continues to be a concern even in the
computer age in the twenty-first century.
Victor Frankenstein is only taking the process of scientific research to its logical end: to
create a living creature that would equate him with God.
1935 Article: "Can Science Raise the Dead?"
In the 1930s, American chemist Robert E. Cornish killed a dog with nitrogen gas, then
revived it. Emboldened by this success, he vainly sought access to men executed in the
chamber. These efforts to revive the dead got widespread press coverage during the 1930s.
http://wonderfulstoriesonline.blogspot.com/2007/10/celluloid-monster.html
An important trope of anxiety for Mary Shelley is the incapacity to realize or control the
creation, and as a repercussion, the capacity of the created to destroy the creator. The
Gothic tale of monstrous evil thus rebounds on the creator of the evil rather than the
embodiment of it and becomes a haunting lesson for the narcissistic greed of scientists to
achieve fame and immortality at the cost of ultimate human good.
The ethics of science continue to be debated. Does a scientist have the right to
play God?
However, far from being just a sensational shocker in the Gothic genre or science fiction,
Frankensteinis a complex novel with a wide array of ideas: from parental accountability to
social alienation to ethical responsibility. Not only scientific research, but the philosophical
debates that raged in those times, reverberate through the text.
47
Mary Shelley’s concern with the family

Mary Shelley’s novel offers a feminine alternative to the masculine power politics that
destroys not just the female but the male characters as well. Michelle Levy says that Mary
Shelley saw the domestic affections as the primary tool for restraining the excesses of all
forms of domination (Levy, 2004). Both Walton and Frankenstein have embarked on a
scientific enterprise, however, while Frankenstein encloses himself in a lab, Walton remains
with his men, especially his pilot who is depicted as a very nurturing and self-sacrificing
figure. Mary Shelley argues that cooperation and sympathy, especially by the women of the
family were the only ways to reform a civil society. For her the role of the family, and the
woman’s role within the family, was pivotal in the development of a happy civil society. Men
would then be free to express their better side: their ‘compassion, sympathy and
generosity’. Her chief concern, the 1818 Preface states, has been ‘… the exhibition of the
amiableness of domestic affection, and the excellence of human virtue.’ Mary
Wollstonecraft’s ideas about the education of women which would enable them to
participate meaningfully in civil society are depicted in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley in
Safie’s acquisition of an education and her depiction as an intelligent and independent
woman.
It is undeniable that Mary Shelley attaches value to the family as a means of education
and socialization in the preparation of human individuals for their lives beyond the realm of
the private. However, the modern reader is faced with ambivalence as the families in
Frankenstein are fragmented and dysfunctional. Mary Shelley’s picture of the Frankenstein
family with its gender distinctions echoes Mary Wollstonecraft’s argument in A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman against the distortion of relationships in the conventional bourgeois
family of the late 18th century. Mary Wollstonecraft believed that women, as an oppressed
group, were made ‘objects of pity’ by the conditions of their oppression. “Speak to them
[women] the language of truth and soberness, and away with the lullaby strains of
condescending endearment! Let them be taught to respect themselves as rational
creatures.” (A Vindication, Chapter 5, Section II).
Victor’s family is benevolent and affectionate but the marriage of Alphonse Frankenstein and
Caroline Beaufort lacks physical passion. It is based not on physical love, but centred on
gratitude and affection. Caroline Frankenstein’s maternal self-sacrifice is carried to an
extreme and ends in her own unnecessary death in nursing Elizabeth, and Alphonse
Frankenstein remains an aloof presence in the family. His dismissive remarks about
Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), the German magician, occult writer, theologian, astrologer
and alchemist, leads Victor into a defiant study of Agrippa’s works--a manifestation of the
Oedipal conflict, a fight for supremacy between father and maturing son. But as expected in
a family characterized by lack of physical passion, the struggle is not over the body of
mother, but over a body of learning. This transference of Victor’s energy from his
developing sexuality to his developing intellect foreshadows the disaster that is to follow. At
the important points of emotional and physical development, Victor withdraws into his
solitary, self-indulgent interests instead of engaging with others and facing and resolving
the conflict.
The family home of the Frankensteins is outside the gates of Geneva, a mark of the
obsessively private nature of the household that avoids any contact with the wider world.
For Mary Shelley, this outer world was important. The cloying love depicted in the
48
household chafes Victor unconsciously, and he constantly seeks to stay away. Once he
succeeds, he is loath to return. As was her mother, the author is especially critical of the
stereotypical gender roles of the ‘separate spheres’: the active public man and passive
private woman in the typical bourgeois family. The Frankenstein family, with a powerful
father and a submissive, self-sacrificing mother, produces individuals who carry extreme
and distorted views of their vocations because of their inflexible perceptions of appropriate
gender roles.
male and female
http://reiki.whatitallbelike.com/wp-includes/images/2008/06/gender-reiki.jpg
This polarization of the supposed attributes of femininity and masculinity traps both
Elizabeth Lavenza and Victor Frankenstein. Their unconsummated, asexual, virtually
incestuous marriage is typical of the sterility of the relationships of the novel, and this is
parallel to Frankenstein’s attempt to create human life without the sexual and nurturing
involvement of any woman. Victor creates the Creature not out of love but purely out of a
need to demonstrate his mastery over the processes of nature. Mary Shelley forces us to
recognize that all these male births, insofar as they issue from motives other than love, are
in varying degrees unnatural – that the true monster is not the Creature but the creator
(Hatlen, 1983).
49
Unnatural Birth
Anne Mellor sees this opposition of the natural and unnatural modes of production and
reproduction as a profound concern in the novel. Frankenstein’s arrogance in creating life
without a partner, and the inescapable erasure of the feminine and the maternal of the
project is untenable. Through the erasure of the feminine principle in the creation process
and the dangerous consequences thereof Mary Shelley emphasises the crucial importance of
the feminine.
A painting by Alice Neel
http://jordanhoffman.com/wp-content/uploads/neel420.jpg
The horror of Frankenstein’s unnatural usurpation of the prerogatives of woman is

compounded by the systematic elimination from the novel of all women who might
potentially assert the claims of the generative and nurturing female. Frankenstein’s mother
dies just before he leaves for the university. Justine, who is the mother-substitute, is
hanged for the murder of William, and Elizabeth is killed almost immediately after her
marriage to Victor. Mary Shelley’s fable demanded the exclusion from the novel of all female
50
figures of fertile potency. The presence/absence of the female monster that Victor first
agrees, and then refuses, to create is also significant. The creation of Eve, on a similar
request by Adam to the Maker had initiated the countermovement towards freedom and
equality from hierarchy and obedience. So, inspite of the Fall and the expulsion from Eden,
Paradise Lost can end in a vision of fruition and hope. However, no comparable trajectory
occurs in Frankenstein (Hatlen, 1983).
Several images of nurturing parent/child relationships are scattered throughout

Frankenstein. The alternative to patriarchy is not matriarchy: the substitution of the
powerful, controlling male for the powerful, controlling female. The family ought to include
both a father and a mother. The mother brings to the family a concern for the child not as
a possession, as object, but rather as an emergent, autonomous self. (Victor’s friend,
Clerval, also enacts the nurturing role of the mother when Victor is ill). As Mary
Wollstonecraft insisted, the key to a fruitful relationship between two human beings
(whether these individuals are male or female is irrelevant) is a mutual respect for the
independence, the selfhood and the ‘subjecthood’ of the other (Burton Hatlen, 1983).
Father and child
http://thelessonsinlove.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/father-child-low-res.jpg
In fact, as mentioned earlier, the novel tests both the ethics of Enlightenment and the ideals
of Romanticism and attempts a more holistic amalgam that would facilitate an ‘ethic of care’
to ensure both individual and collective happiness in society. Mary Shelley offers an
integrated vision in which an individual family is the centrifugal impetus for a collective
family: society as a whole. An irresponsible political authority would be a natural corollary of
irresponsible parenting; so it is imperative that the bricks to build a new society be based
on equitable gender relations.
51
Equally, irresponsible parenting is also a metaphor for social divisions which engender
oppression and callousness. The aristocracy as well as the new elite that had risen during
the Industrial Revolution had given birth to a new working class. Yet this new ‘child’ was left
uncared for, thus becoming, in the text, the rebellious Creature questioning the ‘parent’.
Biographical element
It is generally agreed that Mary Shelley’s conception of the plot of Frankenstein has to do
with biographical catharsis. The novel echoes the pain of an ‘orphaned’ Mary who
intellectualizes the issue of the abandoned monster with the contemporary discussions on
the influence of good and bad parenting on human society. Her own lack of a mother/
motherly figure and casual parenting by her father led to a deep sense of loss and a vacuum
that she vocalizes through her text.
Vigee Lebrun, self-portrait with Julie (1789)
http://www.womensstudiesgroup.org.uk/2008workshop.htm
http://www.womensstudiesgroup.org.uk/2008workshop.htm
Sherry Ginn analyzes Mary Shelley’s life in relation to Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial
development in “Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Science, Science Fiction, or Autobiography?”
Ginn argues that the essential elements of Frankenstein’s story, taken from Mary’s own life,
52
are a white gravestone, a motherless child, a beloved father who turns his back on the
child, a university student conducting wild experiments and Mary Shelley’s dreams of
rekindling the life of her dead child.
Mary Shelley lost her own mother soon after her birth and is known to have spent a great
deal of time at her mother’s grave in her childhood and adolescence. Her father, William
Godwin, remarried, and Mary’s strained relationship with her stepmother left a deep
insecurity in her. She resented the transfer of her father’s affections to the new wife so
much that she was packed off to Scotland to stay with a family she hardly knew. The
sensitive and insecure child read that as rejection. Later, after Mary eloped with Percy
Bysshe Shelley, Godwin refused to have anything to do with her. Mary Shelley herself
experienced the pain of losing several of her children and even dreamt of the rekindling of
life in her dead daughter. She records in her Journal (19th March, 1815): “Dream that my
little baby came to life again – that it had only been cold and that we rubbed it by the fire
and it lived – I awake and find no baby – I think about the little thing all day” (qtd. in
Newey, 21).
Mary Shelley’s own experience of pregnancy, birth and child-rearing before and during the
writing of Frankenstein probably made her particularly sensitive to the emotional trauma of
human reproduction and made her pose questions about parental responsibility. She felt
herself a failure as a mother and was surrounded by inadequate and irresponsible fathers--
not just Godwin but Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was busy conducting wild experiments at the
University and being expelled from the University for writing a paper in praise of atheism.
Frankenstein is ‘distinctly a woman’s myth-making on the subject of birth’ because of its

concentration of horror in the traumatic reactions to the aftermath of birth – the taboo
emotions of ‘fear and guilt, depression and anxiety’ which a woman might feel after the
birth of her child’ (Ellen Moers, 1976).
Frida Kahlo
53
‘The Broken Column’ (self-portrait) 1944
http://www.theartwolf.com/self-portraits/kahlo-self-portrait.htm
http://www.theartwolf.com/self-portraits/kahlo-self-portrait.htm
The De Lacey Family

However, despite the potentially damaging families depicted in the novel, Mary Shelley’s
desire for a secure family was paramount in her life. This is demonstrated through the
depiction of the De Lacey family that comes closest to an ideal in Frankenstein, a family
supportive of individual members, nurturing them, and encouraging the diligent pursuit of
knowledge and wisdom within the safety of the familial structure. The De Lacey family
provides a glimpse of an ideal environment for the development of the highest moral virtues
of consideration and sacrifice. The behaviour of the De Laceys is not stifled by social
convention or the stereotying of gender roles. Their story is an essential part of the
Creature’s story and forms the core narrative of the text. He learns about everything--even
his own deprivation--through them.
‘The Happy Family’ by Ferdinand Georg Waldmuller
http://www.vanillajoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/the-happy-family-1.jpg
http://www.vanillajoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/the-happy-family-1.jpg
54
Poor Parenting
Both the Creature and his creator are examples of bad parenting. Victor Frankenstein
himself is an over-indulged child, provided with an abundance of warmth and love but not
sufficient guidance. His parents fail to equip him with the necessary social skills to lead a
fruitful and productive life.
For a well-rounded personality, it is imperative that love be leavened with discipline and
guidance. Victor is the adored son, but no effort is made either to direct or regulate his self-
will. He himself blames his father for not having guided his education closely enough
(although one needs to be cautious about accepting everything that Victor says, since by his
own admission, his father had warned him against reading Agrippa and introduced him to
modern science).
Victor’s father is not the ideal father. Ostensibly he adores and pampers his son, but
provides no emotional nurture. This damages Victor’s emotional growth, which in turn, is
responsible for the mutilation of the Creature’s psyche. Victor matures into an adult who is
not conditioned to consider anyone’s desires but his own, nor is he prepared to accept
responsibility for unpleasant duties. When confronted by the wide chasm between his vision
of the Creature and the reality that he creates, Victor’s immediate reaction is to flee. Upon
his return, his only emotion at finding his creation gone is relief. No thoughts of the
Creature’s vulnerability and helplessness cross his mind.
Frankenstein confronted with his Creature
55
http://michaelmay.us/08blog/0311_wrightson_frankenstein.gif
http://michaelmay.us/08blog/0311_wrightson_frankenstein.gif
Studies into the emotional development of children, for example by Erik Erikson (1902-
1994) and Jean Piaget (1896–1980), confirm the stages of psychological development
corresponding to physical development in a child. According to them, conflicts of a prior
stage must be resolved before successful assimilation into the next stage. Failure to do so
results in maladjustment later in life. Victor is an over-indulged child who has never had to
make adjustments with others. This cripples his future capacity for adjustment. Victor is
not shown as having atoned for any transgressions that could have provided him a model
for accepting the consequences of his actions. His intellectual growth is not commensurate
with his emotional development. (Tapia Martinez-Russ, ‘Who Created the First Monster?’)
Jessica M. Natale points out in ‘Victor Frankenstein: An Absent Parent/The Creature: The
Abandoned Child’ that “Victor is not doomed to failure from his initial desire to overstep the
natural bounds of human knowledge ... it is his poor parenting ... [his] failing to follow
through. She also feels that Victor creates a "monster" through his absence of nurturing and
love for his progeny.... Frankenstein did not take into account that he would be responsible
for the goal of his studies. His narrow-minded gaze could only concern itself with the means
rather than the ends of his ambition.”
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Statue of father and child at Versailles
http://kerrinquall.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/10/20/dsc04181_colour_altere
d_cropped_int.jpg
Victor does not even bestow an identity or a name on the Creature. Even this parental
responsibility is left unfulfilled by him – and this is symptomatic of his fear and his
disowning of his creation. Instead of accepting the credit (or blame) for the creation, he
instead vents his anger onto the Creature for being born. “Like the egocentric child
Victor is raised to be, he bears no culpability, and it never occurs to him that he
owes any debt to the Creature for having created him in the first place. He is
incapable of drawing from the same "inexhaustible stores of affection from a very
mine of love," that his own parents bestowed upon him, because what he learned
from their parenting style is what is due him and not what is due others.”
57
Source:
Victor’s horror at his creature is due to the Creature’s physical repulsiveness. Victor is too
conscious of the ugliness of the form to take a scientist’s pride in his creation. Denise
Gigante, ‘Toward a Notion of Critical Self-Creation: Slavoj Zizek and the "Vortex of
Madness": New Literary History, 29.1 (1998) says that the monster’s ugliness is not just the
lack of beauty, but an excess on the other side. Moreover, it denotes an alignment with evil
as opposed to the conjunction of good and beautiful. This hideous Creature is, for Victor, a
symbol of his failure. He condemns the Creature to antisocial or psychopathic behaviour, in
line with a large number of bad parents who feel that if they did not actively abuse their
children they caused no harm. Mary Shelley’s aim, however, is to demonstrate that neglect
is equally culpable.
The philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau’s abandonment of his five children by Therese le
Vasseur to the Parisian Foundling Hospital had affected Mary Shelley deeply. She is horrified
that he should have sent his children “to the receptacle where few survive; and those who
do go through life are brutified by their situation, or depressed by the burden, ever
weighing at the heart, that they have not inherited the commonest right of humanity, a
parent’s care…” (quoted in James O’ Rourke, 1989).
Illustration of ‘the Emile’
Whatever the justifications of more or less bona fide by which Jean-Jacques Rousseau
explained the abandonment of her five children. “By delivering my children to public
education fault of being able to raise them myself (...), I believed to make an act of citizen
and father, and I looked at myself as a member of the republic of Plato (...) the regrets of
my heart taught me that I had been mistaken”.
http://www.memo.fr/en/article.aspx?ID=JJR_IDE_007
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That this is an issue that is relevant even today is demonstrated through the following site
that plays a two-minute clip of a film made on abandoned and neglected children living in
an institution in Bulgaria. Click to view: Bulgaria's abandoned children.docx
Role of Education
The profound critique of parental irresponsibility in Frankenstein questions Enlightenment
theories of education, human nature and sociability. Frankenstein displays Mary Shelley’s
penetrating and critical interpretation of masculine constructions of knowledge and
personhood. The narrative of the Creature’s development and education is drawn from her
ideas formed by her understanding of Godwin, Locke and Rousseau.
The first experience of the Creature is an experience of rejection; and this sets the pattern
for the rest of his life. At birth, he reaches out to Frankenstein as to a parent but the latter
runs away in fright. He is filled with grief and weeps like an abandoned child. He is
frightened by his own voice. He, however, learns things basic to his survival, and beyond--
to read and speak and think--but faces constant rejection as every human being who comes
in contact with him recoils in horror.
The Creature’s education, through his sensory perceptions and observations of the De
Lacey’s activities, exemplifies the English empirical and rationalist tradition of philosophy
and psychology deriving from John Locke, which comes to Mary Shelley through her
mother’s feminist writing and her father’s major work, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.
In the Creature’s education, in his knowledge through experience of himself and the world
around him, Mary Shelley puts into practice these views of the formation of the human
character. Locke maintains that the human character is initially a tabula rasa--a blank page-
-and through sensations, thought develops. Godwin further develops this idea and says that
given suitable conditions and experiences from birth, human character is perfectible.
Although philosophical texts like Locke’s Concerning Human Understanding (1689) and
Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755) do serve as the sources for the
creature’s narrative, the tale of the creature’s Bildung is designed to expose the
implausibility of their accounts of development.
"Bildung" is a process of spiritual formation; it also refers to the inner shape human beings
can attain when developing their aptitudes in touch with and through the agency of the
spiritual contents found in their environment. "Bildung" not only implies the dimension of
teaching but also that of learning not only knowledge and skills, but also values, ethos,
59
personality, authenticity and humanity.
http://www.eaea.org/index.php?k=15098
The philosophical assumptions in that age about the development of the mind of a human
being are tested and exposed through the self-education of the monster. Mary Shelley bears
out William Godwin’s view that human character is entirely the product of its early
experiences and demonstrates the effect of nurture (or lack of it) in the development of the
Creature’s character. According to Locke, the mind first awakens to a multitude of sensory
impressions like light and pain. A similar development is marked in the creature in
Frankenstein, to which Mary Shelley adds one more dimension not found in Locke, the
feeling of isolation. This is not an authentication of Rousseau’s hypothesis of a solitary state
being natural for man, however, because for Mary Shelley, nothing could be more unnatural
than Rousseau’s ‘natural’ man. But for Rousseau and Mary Shelley, development and
evolution are not possible in the wilderness. Hunger forces the Creature in Frankenstein to
come into contact with human beings and this movement from the forest to the De Lacey
cottage is a shift from nature to culture.
Being someone with both intellectual and emotional faculties, the Creature struggles to
carve a place in society for himself. The hovel becomes a kind of ‘empiricist crib’ for him to
acquaint himself with the outside world. He is introduced to the world of human interaction
and occupies a position corresponding to Locke’s mind-in-formation, and yet he advances
much further. The Creature is brought to a realization of a lack of antecedents; lack of
friends and relations, indeed, a lack of any human connection whatsoever. He struggles to
understand what he is, but can find nothing comparable to himself. His vicarious pleasure in
watching the warmth of the De Lacey family makes him yearn for a similar affection, an
affection that is denied to him.
But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother
had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a
blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been
as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me. . . .
What was I?
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A HAPPY FAMILY by Giovanni Battista Torriglia
Italian artist (1858-1937)
http://artmight.com/Artists/Giovanni-Battista-Torriglia-1858-1937/Torriglia-Giovanni-
Battista-A-Happy-Family-302p.html
Abraham Maslow (1908 – 1970), Professor of Psychology, listed the 'Hierarchy of Needs' in
human development in a paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” in 1943:
Physiological: The need for food, drink, shelter, warmth and relief from pain
Safety and security: The need to feel safe and secure,
Social and affiliation: The need for friendship and interaction with others
Esteem: The need for self esteem and the esteem for others
An interpretation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, represented as a pyramid with the more

basic needs at the bottom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
In Frankenstein, once the Creature learns to survive, he yearns for higher things. Lacking
any human interaction, he sinks lower and lower in his own self-esteem; and with every
rejection his alienation from society is more complete. He cries in anguish:
I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all

mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces, and triumph; remember that
61
and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? You would not call it
murder, if you could precipitate me into one of those ice-rifts, and destroy my
frame, the work of your own hands. Shall I respect man when he condemns me?
Let him live with me in an interchange of kindness; and, instead of injury I would
bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance.
Madness, or A Man Bound with Chains
Artist unknown. Photographic reproduction from an illustration from Sir Charles Bell (1774-
1842). Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting, 1806. National Library of Medicine
Collection.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/frankenstein/poor.html
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/frankenstein/poor.html
The books that the Creature finds in the forest are important from the point of view of their
formulations. He learns about the world that he finds himself in from Plutarch's Lives (late
1st century), Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werter (1774) and Milton's Paradise Lost
(1667).
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Plutarch Goethe
http://images.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.gentleworld.org/images/philosopher
s/Plutarch.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.gentleworld.org/philosophers.html&usg=__5QR6Wfh4
8k1tlo2Q7c8R-QKkHLs=&h=400&w=298&sz=26&hl=en&start=5&um=1&tbnid=LzM-k-
M9mRxqgM:&tbnh=124&tbnw=92&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dplutarch%26um%3D1%26hl%3
Den%26sa%3DG
http://www.gentleworld.org/images/philosophers/Plutarch.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Goethe_raabe_1814.jpg
Each of his readings teaches the Creature something about life. Plutarch’s Lives teaches him
the value of wealth and social standing in the material world. Goethe's work tells him of
suicide as an option for a desperately unhappy person. He feels an affinity with the Miltonic
Adam, and is introduced to the idea of God and the moral categories of good and evil.
Through intellectual associations and elevating reading, “the monster develops the
sympathies and moral and political understanding of a late 18 thcentury enlightened human
being” (Newey, 37). Empirical reasoning also informs the Creature’s arguments about his
place in the world, as he tries to persuade Frankenstein to create a female companion for
him. He echoes Mary Shelley’s constant concern about a happy family being a prerequisite
for a happy society. He uses the same terms of reference to talk about his moral
development in terms of the relationship between private domestic affections and broader
social relations that recur in Frankenstein’s story. “The character after whom the novel is
named and is presumed to be the ‘hero’ of the story, appears to be both pusillanimous and
pitiless, while the nameless horror wins our sympathy through his passionate reasoning. In
what is the most horrifying inversion of the novel, through her creation of an eloquent and
rational Monster, Mary Shelley suggests that it is Victor Frankenstein, the bourgeois man of
‘good family’, who is in fact monstrous” (Newey, 42-43).
63
Repeated failures and constant rebuffs have a terrible impact on the Creature’s character
and emotional growth. He pleads for and demands a companion to share his life with, and
when even that is denied to him, rage and rebellion swell his bosom that bring death and
ruin in their wake. Mary Shelley’s Creature is seen as the most oppressed and piteous
character imaginable-- heroic in his ability to speak eloquently about his plight, but
irredeemably monstrous in his destruction of William, Clerval and Elizabeth.
Victor and his Creature: Alter ego?

Interestingly, the creator, Victor Frankenstein, is often confused with the Creature that is
left nameless in the text. It is known that Mary Shelley herself appreciated the theatre
adaptation of the novel in which the Dramatis Personae recorded the Creature merely as
“__”. Thus the line between the creator of the monster and the monstrous creation is
blurred and the two shade into each other.
By introducing the Creature’s narrative into Frankenstein’s story, Mary Shelley inserts the
created being’s consciousness into the narrative of the creator. The Creature finds the voice
that Frankenstein has hitherto denied and suppressed. It is through this medium of
language that an ambivalent relationship is created between Frankenstein and his creation.
“His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him.”
Doppelganger – the evil twin
http://strangeworldofmystery.blogspot.in/2008/03/doppelganger-evil-twin.html
64
Doppelganger: A ghostly double of a living person, especially one that haunts its
fleshly counterpart.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Doppelganger
Ostensibly, the creature blames Victor's abandonment for the transformation in his
temperament from a trusting, loving infant into a hateful, evil demon. He vows to kill the
rest of Victor's family unless Victor fulfils his craving for a mate. Implicit in this is the
creature’s avowal to cease his killing if his wish is fulfilled. But Victor balks at fulfilling this
desire as it would force Frankenstein to confront what he wishes to deny – the Monster
would be his repressed truth. This destruction of ‘Eve’, the female creature, has been read
variously as Frankenstein’s fear of sexuality as well as of independent womanhood. The
Monster, in turn, now will seek vengeance, not by striking directly at his creator,
Frankenstein, but by displacing his anger on his friend, Clerval and his bride, Elizabeth.
Frankenstein and his Creature
http://images.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.guildburys.com/Frankenstein%2520
-
%2520Victor%2520and%2520Creature.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.guildburys.com/edinbur
gh_festival.htm&usg=__3nlCybvnZkZSNjEM8_63meXm0Pw=&h=876&w=1334&sz=539&hl
=en&start=3&um=1&tbnid=gx5RY8JuE28CfM:&tbnh=99&tbnw=150&prev=/images%3Fq%
3Dvictor%2Bfrankenstein%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%
3DG
This identification of the self in the other is evident from the displacement of the Oedipal
conflict. The creature kills Victor's youngest brother, William, who says that his father is M.
Frankenstein. He is captivated by the portrait of the parents hanging around William’s neck.
He plants it on Justine Moritz, the mother-substitute (who is forever denied to him), thus
condemning her to death.
When Frankenstein flees from his creation, he dreams of Elizabeth, who dies even as he
kisses her and the corpse is transformed into his mother’s body: at the moment of giving
65
life, he dreams of himself as the bringer of death. His confusion between the living and dead
women, and his own role within the dream as the cause of death, is symptomatic of his guilt
at creating the monstrous Creature. He sees himself as the grotesque and dangerous
opposite of the romantic hero who animates the princess with a kiss. The connection of a
kiss with death in his dream is highly ironic in its revelation of his anxiety about sexuality.
His creation is an avoidance of human heterosexual relations and their role in procreation,
as he replaces them with parthenogenesis, or asexual reproduction. The convergence of
Eros (the life principle) and Thanatos (the death principle) on his wedding night suggests an
apparent fear of erotic union. The relationship between Victor and Elizabeth is almost
incestuous; she has been more of a sister to him, and later, a mother-substitute. The bridal
embrace would exacerbate the Oedipal situation and it is avoided, ultimately, through the
enraged creature’s vengefulness, when Elizabeth’s death is enacted.
An extremely well known painting ‘The Nightmare’ by Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), a Swiss-
born British Romantic painter, is thought to have been the inspiration behind the death
scene of Elizabeth in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The murder of Elizabeth in the wedding
chamber is a horrifying fulfillment of the monster’s revenge for not being granted a
companion; it is also symbolic of Victor Frankenstein’s repressed sexuality.
The Nightmare by Henri Fuseli [1781-82]
The famous painting (or one version of it; Fuseli painted several) that inspired the
description of Elizabeth's dead body flung across her bridal bed just after her
murder by the creature (in Chapter 23 of Frankenstein). This painting is also
known as "The Incubus"—an incubus being a male demon or spirit that visits
sleeping females in the night, usually for sexual purposes. As if this weren't
enough, Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had a relationship (not quite
a sexual affair, apparently, to Wollstonecraft's disappointment) with Henri Fuseli,
a fact which Mary Shelley knew. [Detroit Institute of Arts]
(http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/mshelley.html)
Two photographs of The Nightmare (1781)
66
http://www.litgothic.com/Images/fuseli_nightmare.jpg
Henry Fuseli: The Nightmare, oil on canvas, 755×65 mm, 1790 (Frankfurt am
Main, Goethemuseum); Photo credit: Snark/Art Resource, NY Grove Art Online.
67
http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/img/grove/art/F014985
(viewed earlier) (also viewed at
http://www.xtimeline.com/evt/view.aspx?id=269744
For more information on The Nightmare, go to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightmare
The Creature perfectly illustrates the Unheimliche, a monstrous potentiality, so close to us,
that we have repressed its possibility, and assigned an un as the mark of censorship on
what is indeed too heimisch for comfort. In his essay on the Unheimliche, Freud speculates
on the special capacity of literature to evoke and to control the feeling of the uncanny
(Brooks, 1979).
Mladen Dolar points out to a specific dimension of the uncanny that emerges with
modernity. In premodern society, the dimensions of the uncanny was largely covered (and
veiled) by the area of the sacred and untouchable. It had a religious and socially sanctioned
place in the symbolic from which the structure of power, sovereignty and a hierarchy of
values emanated. With the triumph of the Enlightenment, this privileged and excluded place
was no more; and this gave rise to the dimension of the Other. The other defines the self.
Lacan’s theory of the mirror-phase aims at a similar premise – it is only by virtue of one’s
mirror reflection that one can become endowed with an ego and establish oneself as an “I”.
The trouble with this double is that though one’s identity comes from the image, the image
also brings to the fore the hidden desires of Id, while retaining the mantle of the Superego
that prevents the fulfillment of all desires.
The subject is confronted with his double, the very image of himself, and this crumbles the
subject’s accustomed and brittle reality, shatters the foundation of his world, and produces
a terrible anxiety. Recognizing oneself in the mirror leads to a split: I cannot recognize
myself and at the same time be one with myself. The mirror double immediately introduces
the dimension of castration – the doubling itself already, even in its minimal form, implies
castration: One needs to protect the image to protect oneself. But once one has recognized
the image as oneself, a split occurs and dooms one. So the doubling entails the loss of that
uniqueness that one could enjoy in one’s self-being, but only at the price of being neither an
ego nor a subject.
Usually it is only the subject who can see his own double, doppelganger, as it takes care to
appear only in private, for the subject alone. The double produces two seemingly
contradictory effects: he arranges things so that they turn out badly for the subject, he
turns up at the most inappropriate moments, and dooms the subject to failure; moreover,
he realizes the subject’s hidden or repressed desires so that he commits acts that the
subject would never dare to do or that his conscience wouldn’t allow him to do. He typically
springs up at the moment when one is about to touch, or to kiss, the girl of one’s dreams:
when the subject comes close to the realization of his wishes, when he is on the brink of
attaining full enjoyment, the completion of the sexual relation. But while the double appears
68
to be the one who spoils and obstructs, what is significant is the choice of the object. The
girl is perceived as the obstacle to one’s privileged relation to oneself; she is the obstacle to
narcissism, so one has to get rid of her (the double takes care of that) in order to join one’s
real partner, one’s double. He retains that lost primordial object for which no woman can be
a substitute. But it is, of course, lethal. The subject can only attain it by his death.
Image from a puppetry adaptation of the novel
http://images.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.umbc.edu/newsevents/arts/hi-
res/theatre/frankenstein/frankenstein03-
s.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.umbc.edu/NewsEvents/releases///archives/art/index.html&usg
=__ZZAr852XwyfNAmdLopzVT8zYyLc=&h=360&w=246&sz=13&hl=en&start=13&um=1&tb
nid=ey-
zbZDAl9LOUM:&tbnh=121&tbnw=83&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dvictor%2Bfrankenstein%2Bin
%2Bthe%2Blaboratory%26um
%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DGhttp://www.umbc.edu/newsevents/arts/hi-
res/theatre/frankenstein/frankenstein03-s.jpg
In the end, the relationship gets so unbearable that the subject, in a final showdown, kills
his double, unaware that his only substance and his very being were concentrated in his
double. So in killing him, he kills himself. In Frankenstein, Victor finally resolves upon killing
the Creature, his evil double, though he realizes that it would mean his own death as well.
“In destroying the daemonic side of himself, he will also destroy the whole of self” (Peter
Brooks, ‘“Godlike Science/ Unhallowed Arts”: Language, Nature, and Monstrosity’, 1979).
69
The source of the uncanny is the reappearance of a part that was necessarily lost with the
emergence of the subject--the intersection between the “psychic” and the “real,” the interior
and the exterior, the “word” and the “object,” the symbol and the symbolized--the point
where the real immediately coincides with the symbolic to be put into the service of the
imaginary. So what is uncanny is again the recuperation of the loss: the lost part destroys
reality instead of completing it. The real can never be dealt with directly, that it emerges
only in an oblique perspective, and that the attempt to grasp it directly makes it vanish.
Mirror image
http://images.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://graphics.cs.yale.edu/hongzhi/images/zrt/
perfect%2520mirror%2520and%2520global%2520diffuse%2520illumination%
2520shader,%25203x3x4%2520samples%2520per%2520pixel,%25204%2520sh
adow%2520rays,%25201%2520mirror%2520ball.png&imgrefurl=http://graphics.cs.
yale.edu/hongzhi/zrt.html&usg=__5RArbdategypEBg_9hLbMkXsjPo=&h=512&w=512&sz=3
60&hl=en&start=7&um=1&tbnid=M_SZB8OdZAQMaM:&tbnh=131&tbnw=131&prev=/image
s%3Fq%3Dmirror%2Bimage%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG
Frankensteinis the best example of the uncanny. At first sight, it seems to be the direct
opposite of the theme of the double: the creature created by Frankenstein is a monster
without a name, and his basic problem in the novel is precisely that he cannot find his
double. His narcissism is thwarted from the outset and the main part of the plot actually
springs from his demand for a partner, somebody like him, a wife, so that he could start a
line. He is unique, and as such he cannot even have a name--he cannot be represented by a
signifier (an absence often filled by father’s name).
He is counter to nature, a monstrous creature, but a mirror of what he is excluded from,

nature and culture alike. Through his tragedy, culture only gets back its own message: his
monstrosity is the monstrosity of culture. The noble savage, the self-educated man, turns
bad only because the culture turns him down. By not accepting him, society shows its
inability to integrate him. The creature only wants a social contract with the rest of
70
humanity, but being refused that, he wants to vindicate himself by destroying the contract
that excludes him.
Frankenstein brings to humanity, like Prometheus, the spark of life, but also much more:
here is a promise to provide it with its origin, to heal the wound of castration, to make it
whole again. But filling the lack is catastrophic. The Enlightenment ethic that had
demystified the universe has overreached and, thus, doomed itself. In religious terms,
Frankenstein, who interferes with God’s business, has to be punished for his presumption
and the rebellion of the Enlightenment itself, which has gone too far. The political dimension
is of the French Revolution as monstrous; producing enthusiasm and horror. The Creature
can stand for everything that our culture has to repress: the proletariat, sexuality, other
cultures, other races, alternative ways of living, heterogeneity, the Other.
Abiding Cultural Icon

Ever since the first publication of the novel in 1818, its popularity and its hold on public
imagination have only deepened. Over a hundred motion pictures have been produced to
date and countless stories have been written using the theme. The use of the term
‘Frankenstein’ is popular in common parlance, even though it may not necessarily indicate
an acquaintance with the text. It has been appropriated countless times as a symbol of all
man-made evils. The numerous stage and film adaptations that have been made have
blurred boundaries between the popular and classical text.
Click: Title_Pages.doc
In 1823 Mary Shelley heard from her father of an English Opera House production of a play
entitled Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein. Though the play was inspired by her
novel, it took considerable liberty with the text. And playwrights, filmmakers, and political
cartoonists have done so ever since. The moral and ethical questions posed in Mary
Shelley's novel have often been elided over or distorted or misunderstood in popular public
imagination, but it is undeniably a powerful symbol in popular culture.
71
T.P. Cooke as the monster
The Monster in Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, 1823
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/frankenstein/escaping.html
Subsequently, Frankenstein also proved irresistible to the film-makers. The first cinematic
version of Frankenstein was a silent film produced by Edison Films in 1910.
72
The Edison Kinetogram, March 10, 1910
U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site
Scientific debates in the early twentieth century that centred around the breaching of the
boundaries between life and death thrilled the popular imagination: revival of the dead, use
of artificial organs, genetic mutation through eugenics (the science of improving human
population by controlled breeding), etc.; and the Universal Film Studio responded to this
theme when in 1930, Universal bought film rights to Peggy Webling's Frankenstein: An
Adventure in the Macabre, which had premiered in London three years earlier. This bore
fruit in James Whale’s 1931 film version of the novel that became an instant classic in the
genre of the horror movie.
73
Frankenstein Movie Poster, 1931
http://www.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.pygmalion.ws/images/frankenstein.jp
g&imgrefurl=http://the-black-glove.blogspot.com/2009/10/black-gloves-1st-annual-
halloween-
top.html&usg=__A_MoGfEg7Y96eIJtrdrtNcegqTY=&h=354&w=225&sz=35&hl=en&start=26
&sig2=RMs5hakk3euS14IqdLYeew&zoom=1&tbnid=xmFkoStyA-
iLWM:&tbnh=170&tbnw=107&ei=jr3CTM_-
LYj0vQOOn7nECA&prev=/images%3Fq%3DFrankenstein%2BMovie%2BPoster,%2B1931%2
6um%3D1
%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26biw%3D1076%26bih%3D490%26tbs%3Disch:10%
2C376&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=605&vpy=80&dur=1030&hovh=282&hovw=179&tx=8
9&ty=200&oei=gb3CTPeHM4aCvgP6-
LiZCA&esq=2&page=2&ndsp=11&ved=1t:429,r:3,s:26&biw=1076&bih=490
http://www.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.pygmalion.ws/images/frankenstein.jpg
&imgrefurl=http://the-black-glove.blogspot.com/2009/10/black-gloves-1st-annual-
halloween-
top.html&usg=__A_MoGfEg7Y96eIJtrdrtNcegqTY=&h=354&w=225&sz=35&hl=en&start=26
&sig2=RMs5hakk3euS14IqdLYeew&zoom=1&tbnid=xmFkoStyA-
iLWM:&tbnh=170&tbnw=107&ei=jr3CTM_-
LYj0vQOOn7nECA&prev=/images%3Fq%3DFrankenstein%2BMovie%2BPoster,%2B1931%2
6um%3D1
%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26biw%3D1076%26bih%3D490%26tbs%3Disch:10%
2C376&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=605&vpy=80&dur=1030&hovh=282&hovw=179&tx=8
9&ty=200&oei=gb3CTPeHM4aCvgP6-
LiZCA&esq=2&page=2&ndsp=11&ved=1t:429,r:3,s:26&biw=1076&bih=490
74
Photo of "Henry" Frankenstein in the Laboratory with Fritz and the Creature,
From Frankenstein, James Whale, Director, 1931
http://www.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/2003/ginn/image013
.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/2003/ginn.html&h=229&w=310&sz=27&tbnid
=IJrJTiRmbbuhCM:&tbnh=86&tbnw=117&prev=/images%3Fq%3DPhoto%2Bof%2B%2522
Henry%2522%2BFrankenstein%2Bin%2Bthe%2BLaboratory%2Bwith%
2BFritz%2Band%2Bthe%2BCreature,&zoom=1&q=Photo+of+%22Henry%22+Frankenstein
+in+the+Laboratory+with+Fritz+and+th
e+Creature,&hl=en&usg=__duSukwGzEXKrFIkGSFl5XvbNO9I=&sa=X&ei=G77CTJK3EozuvQ
PplK2YCA&sqi=2&ved=0CB4Q9QEwAA
An obscure English actor, William Henry Pratt, who went by the stage name of Boris Karloff,
played the monster and became an instant star.
Boris Karloff Being Transformed into the Monster by make up artist Jack Pierce
http://confessionsofamichaelstipe.tumblr.com/post/26892404034/littlechiefpaleface-
makeup-artist-jack-pierce
75
Pierce's three months of research into anatomy and surgery convinced him that a
surgeon determined to transplant a brain would cut the top of the skull straight
across, hinge it, pop in the new brain, then clamp it shut. Hence, the Creature's
flat, squared-off head.
The Creature
http://images.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f228/jerryr
amone138/Frankenstein_jpg.jpg&imgrefurl=http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm%3Ffusea
ction%3Duser.viewprofile%26friendID%3D35207689&usg=__iYmFivkPbr9M29IX4vW4a1D9t
kM=&h=447&w=355&sz=27&hl=en&start=10&um=1&tbnid=z8h_WVsHZ1SNwM:&tbnh=12
7&tbnw=101&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfrankenstein%2Bstitches%26imgtype%3Dface%26as
_st%
3Dy%26ndsp%3D20%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN
76
Boris Karloff as the Monster in Frankenstein
http://www.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.doctormacro.com/Images/Karloff,%25
20Boris/Annex/Annex%2520-
%2520Karloff,%2520Boris%2520(Frankenstein)_01.jpg&imgrefurl=http://janicegablebash
man.com/%3Fp%3D349&usg=__F9DqK9aA7X2Oy-
pbIpCrkVmOqJQ=&h=2112&w=1623&sz=1003&hl=en&start=0&sig2=jiofj_GaP0a3LkDKKk7
dzw&zoom=1&tbnid=OScCH7xQ_0h5IM:&tbnh=119&tbnw=98&ei=377CTKjJM4e0vwO54ZCf
CA&prev=/images%3Fq%3DBoris%2BKarloff%2Bas%2Bthe%2BMonster%2Bin%2BFran
kenstein%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26biw%3D1076%26bih%3D490
%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=343&vpy=37&dur=1404&hovh=256&hovw
=197&tx=128&ty=152&oei=377CTKjJM4e0vwO54ZCfCA&esq=1&page=1&ndsp=21&ved=1t
:429,r:2,s:0
A hilarious spoof of the genre of science fiction was a film made by Mel Brooks in 1974
called Young Frankenstein.
77
Poster of the film
http://www.varley.net/Pages/top_25_movies.htm
http://www.varley.net/Pages/images/Favorite%20Movies/Young%20Frankenstein.jpg
The novel has been adapted to suit young readers in the form of comic book and easy
reader.
78
Classics Illustrated Frankenstein, December 1945
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/frankenstein/magazinecovers.html
During the 1940s and 1950s, Classics Illustrated was considered the thinking adolescent's
comic; some parents who wouldn't let their children read comics would nonetheless let them
read these. Note here the arctic scene, which appeared in Mary Shelley's original
story but rarely in the work of her successors.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/frankenstein/magazinecovers.html
Illustrated marvel comic book
79
http://www.amazon.com/Wollstonecraft-Shelleys-Frankenstein-Marvel-
Illustrated/dp/0939766752
Frankenstein, in fact, came to be depicted as a symbol of any creation gone awry.
The Irish Frankenstein, 1843
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
Nineteenth-century English cartoons frequently invoked the image of the Frankenstein

monster for any ‘Other’. Here, their target was the Irish.
80
I’m what you might call a ‘people-person’
http://www.cartoonstock.com/newscartoons/cartoonists/cgo/lowres/cgon235l.jpg
Glossary
Tabula rasa: blank tablet
Conservatives: people resisting change and desirous of preserving tradition
Anarchy: absence of government; state of society where there is no law and order
Radicalism: the holding or following of principles advocating drastic political, economic or

social reform
Juggernaut: something, such as a belief or institution that elicits blind and destructive
devotion or to which people are ruthlessly sacrificed
Utopianism: idealist or visionary belief in the perfectibility of human society
Solipsistic: from solipsism (Philosophy); the theory that the self is the only thing that can
be known or verified
Topical: currently of interest; contemporary
Phantasm: something apparently seen but having no physical reality
Odious: arousing strong dislike
Dreary: dismal; bleak
Pseudonym: false name
Progeny: child or descendant
Persona: literally mask; a voice or character representing the author in a literary work
Ruinous: destructive
Deviant: differing from the norm
Galvanism: direct-current electricity, especially when produced chemically
Engender: to bring into existence
Catharsis: literally purgation; a purifying or figurative cleansing of the emotions
81
Deprivation: loss
Doppelganger: a ghostly double of a living person, especially one that haunts its fleshly
counterpart
Parthenogenesis: development of an egg without fertilization; occurs in many insects
Eros: love; sexual desire
Thanatos: death as a personification or as a philosophical concept; death instinct
Eugenics: the study of the hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled
selective breeding
Map of Interesting Sites:
To view pictures of the film:

"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021884/"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021884/
"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109836/"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109836/
To see a trailer of the film:
"http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=tTNN5h8CG_Y"
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=tTNN5h8CG_Y
To view a silent movie:
"http://www.archive.org/details/FrankensteinfullMovie"
http://www.archive.org/details/FrankensteinfullMovie
To view some snippets of the film, etc.
"http://www.theatre.ubc.ca/season/frankweb/"
http://www.theatre.ubc.ca/season/frankweb/
"http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=vrguPghlZ6U"
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=vrguPghlZ6U
to view the stages of make up:
"http://static.squidoo.com/resize/squidoo_images/-
1/lens1464624_lg_sn7655.jpg"http://static.squidoo.com/resize/squidoo_images/-
1/lens1464624_lg_sn7655.jpg
82
To listen to audio books:
"http://www.squidoo.com/Frankenstein-audio-books"
http://www.squidoo.com/Frankenstein-audio-books
83
Bibliography
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=&SUCCESS=&%250=3149855"Mary Shelley's Perkin Warbeck 1991.
Reese, Diana. HYPERLINK

=&SUCCESS=&%250=3114970"A Troubled Legacy : Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the
Inheritance of Human Rights. 2006.
Renfroe, Alicia. "http://prometheus.cc.emory.edu/panels/2D/A.Renfroe.html""Defining

Romanticism: The Implications of Nature Personified as Female in Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre"
91
Richard, Jessica.
=&SUCCESS=&%250=3078415""A Paradise of My Own Creation" : Frankenstein and the
Improbable Romance of Polar Exploration 2003.
Richardson, Alan.
=&SUCCESS=&%250=3061352"British Romanticism and the science of the mind 2001.
Rose, Ellen Cronan. ‘Custody Battles: Reproducing Knowledge about Frankenstein’.

Copyright © 1995 by New Literary History, The University of Virginia. All rights reserved.
New Literary History 26.4 (1995) 809-832.
Rowe, Stephanie.
=&SUCCESS=&%250=3136957""Listen to me" : Frankenstein as an appeal to mercy and
justice, on behalf of the persecuted animals 2006.
Schuetz, Julie K. "http://prometheus.cc.emory.edu/panels/4A/J.Schuetz.html""Mary Shelly's

The Last Man: Monstrous Worlds, Domestic Communities, and Masculine Romantic Ideology"
Seymour, Miranda.
=&SUCCESS=&%250=3042656"Mary Shelley 2000.
Simons, Judy.
=&SUCCESS=&%250=3361373"Diaries and journals of literary women from Fanny Burney
to Virginia Woolf 1990.
St. Clair, William.

=&SUCCESS=&%250=3147869"The Godwins and the Shelleys : the biography of a family
1989.
Todd, Janet M.
=&SUCCESS=&%250=3178869"Be good sweet maid : an anthology of 'Women & literature'
1981.
Tuite, Clara. ‘Frankenstein's Monster and Malthus' "Jaundiced Eye": Population, Body
Politics, and the Monstrous Sublime. Copyright Â© 1998 The Johns Hopkins University
Press. All rights reserved. Eighteenth-Century Life 22.1 (1998) 141-155 Access provided by
University of Delhi.
92
Varenne, Caroline.
=&SUCCESS=&%250=3085478"Une anomalie culturelle : Mary Shelley et le statut de
l'auteure [Mary Shelly and the woman writer's status] 2004.
Ward, Maryanne C. ‘A Painting of the Unspeakable: Henry Fuseli's "The Nightmare" and the
Creation of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"’. The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language
Association, Vol. 33, No. 1. (Winter, 2000), pp. 20-31.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0742-
5562%28200024%2933%3A1%3C20%3AAPOTUH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U
Wardle, R. M.
=&SUCCESS=&%250=3205132"Mary Wollstonecraft : a critical biography 1951.
Yousef, Nancy. ‘The Monster in a Dark Room: Frankenstein,
Feminism, and Philosophy’.
Zimmerman, Lee. ‘Frankenstein, Invisibility, and Nameless Dread’. 135. American Imago,
Vol. 60, No. 2, 135–158. © 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.
These essays can be retrieved from the following websites:
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley"
"http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/mshelley.html"
http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/mshelley.html
"http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl/wwwopac.exe?DATABASE=catalo&LANGUAGE=0&SRT0=D1&SE
Q0=descending&NP=8997"http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl/wwwopac.exe?DATABASE=catalo&LA
NGUAGE=0&SRT0=D1&SEQ0=descending&NP=8997
There are also several other sites:
"http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-
66623107.html"http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-66623107.html
For some bibliographical references.

"http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/chronologies/mschronology/mws.html"Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley Chronology and Resource Site
Includes a chronology, some contemporary reviews of various MWS works, and a brief
select bibliography.
"http://www.empsfm.org/exhibitions/index.asp?articleID=953"Brief biographical note
93
[Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame]
"http://home-1.worldonline.nl/~hamberg/" \t "_blank"My Hideous Progeny
Includes a biography, discussion and e-text of Frankenstein, a brief overview of Gothic

fiction, and more. [Cynthia Hamberg]
This site also includes a page devoted to the literary works mentioned in Frankenstein,
though it does not provide links to those (e)texts, many of which are available online. Two
works not listed on Ms. Hamberg's page are books the Creature finds and reads: Constantin
Francois de Volney's "ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext98/ruins10.txt"Ruins
of Empire, available as a Project Gutenberg etext (614K), and Plutarch's
"ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext96/plivs10.txt"Lives of the Noble Grecians
and Romans, also at Project Gutenberg.
"http://www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/gothic/shelley.html"The Shelleys and their

Circle: A Gothic Family
Part of the "http://www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/gothic/index.html"Sublime Anxiety

exhibit at the University of Virginia.
"http://www.kimwoodbridge.com/maryshel/maryshel.shtml"
\t "_blank"Mary Shelley page
No longer being updated, and with many dead links, this once-excellent site has lost much
of its value. [Kim Woodbridge]
"http://www.heureka.clara.net/art/shelley.htm"Brief biographical note[Keith Parkins]
"http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/mshelley.htm"Biographical note[The Authors Calendar]
"http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/wives/writers/shelley.html"
Brief biographical note
Part of the PBS website for the 2002 production of

"http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/gaskell.html"Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters.
"http://www.dickinson.edu/~nicholsa/Romnat/mwshelley.htm"Biographical note
Discusses MWS as a writer of "natural history" in the Romantic period. [Ashton Nichols,
Dickinson College]
"http://www.bartleby.com/65/sh/ShelleyM.html"Brief biographical note
[Columbia Encyclopedia, Bartleby]
"http://omni.sytes.net/~monica/mshelley.htm"Brief biographical note[Gothic Labyrinth]
"http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/mshelley_bio_note.html"Brief biographical note
[John W. Cousins, A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, 1910]
94
"http://www.underthesun.cc/Classics/Shelley/"Timeline
Includes links. [Classic Authors.net]
"http://victorian.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/concordance/wollstonecraft/"
Wollstonecraft Hyper-Concordance
Part of the ‘The Victorian Literary Studies Archive’, this concordance allows you to search
the etext of Frankenstein — and no, I don't know why Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's famous
novel is listed under her mother's name.
"http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/person.asp?search=ss&sText=mary+shelley&LinkID=
mp04087"Mary Shelley portrait(s)
[National Portrait Gallery, London]
"http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/frankenstein/index.html"http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibi
tion/frankenstein/index.html
******
95

Frankenstein Mary Shelley

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Frankenstein Mary Shelley

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Frankenstein: Mary Shelley

Lesson: Frankenstein: Mary Shelley

Course Developer: Hina Nandrajog

College/ Department: Vivekananda College, University of

(30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851)

“… singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of

William Godwin in 1811 (Abinger MSS).

My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,

And left me in this dreary world alone?

Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one—

But thou art fled, gone down a dreary road

That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode.

For thine own sake I cannot follow thee

Do thou return for mine. (Quoted in Seymour, 233)

Valperga (1823): Originally called Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, Valperga is an intelligent

Intellectual and Literary Legacy

John Locke (1632-1704)

Another influential thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), accepted the

To view power point projects on the industrial revolution,

Luddites destroying machinery

The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience,

Heritage of Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s Reading

Birth of the text – Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus

The Villa Diodati

A page from the original manuscript of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Frankenstein was published anonymously in January 1818 by a rather obscure publisher of

Title Page of Frankenstein

Reproduction of the title page:

THE MODERN PROMETHEUS.

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me man? Did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me?----

LACKINGTON, HUGHES, HARDING, MAYOR, & JONES,

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: The Novel

This laboratory was constructed at the University of Ingolstadt in 1778

With single-minded devotion--that entails even the sacrifice of familial ties--Victor

An image of the Creature

Inside cover art from the 1831 edition of Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley’s Authorial Anxiety

Stamps commemorating some famous women writers

12p: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

Prometheus Bound. 6th century B.C. Vatican city museum

Prometheus Bound, 1611-1612. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) Photographic reproduction

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me man? Did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me? __

The Expulsion from Eden

Issues in the Novel

i) grounded in valid scientific research;

The following is an example of an anatomy theatre.

In the novel Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein "dabbled among the unhallowed

De Monstro Nato Lutetiae Anno Domini, 1605

National Library of Medicine Collection

Luigi Galvani - Italian physician

Galvani's Experiment http://www.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.clas.ufl.

Giovanni Aldini (Galvani’s nephew)

The Newgate Calendar summarizes the events:

1935 Article: "Can Science Raise the Dead?"

Mary Shelley’s concern with the family

male and female

A painting by Alice Neel

The horror of Frankenstein’s unnatural usurpation of the prerogatives of woman is

Several images of nurturing parent/child relationships are scattered throughout

Father and child