Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

I.  What’s Frankenstein got to do with Darwin?

II. Romanticism

A. Begins as a philosophical movement in Germany: 

1. Reaction against Enlightenment

2. loss of faith in reason

a. Hume:  failure of design argument

b. Kant

B. Then as a literary movement:  Goethe (1749-1832)

1. Goethe established his literary reputation with Sorrows of Werther (1774)

a. a semi-autobiographical, highly sentimental story of unrequited love and suicide 

b. one of the books that Frankenstein's monster reads (167)

2. Sorrows of Werther launched German and thus European romanticism

a. Goethe's romanticism is a reaction to the Enlightenment

1.) Enlightenment is French, classical, rationalistic

2.) Romanticism is German, gothic, emphasizes nature and the passions

b. Sorrows also represents Goethe's Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) period

1.) Sturm und Drang sets out by defying rules and conventions of German poetry, which at that time was pastoral, Anacreontic (praising love and wine)

2.) part I of Goethe's Faust and an unfinished Prometheus also belong to this Sturm und Drang period

3. Faust reflects Goethe's boyhood interest in alchemy, astrology, and occult philosophy:  an interest reflected in his later works

a. an interest we also find in Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein, who reads Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus

b. Goethe's early life has other parallels with Victor Frankenstein's:  the provincial upbringing followed by the loss of innocence at the university

C. protagonist of romantic literature typically at odds with society, both rejecting it and rejected by it

1. like Byron himself

2. and, in the novel, much like Frankenstein and his monster

D. romantic poets also had this vision of themselves as creators

1. a theory expressed by Samuel T. Coleridge, represented in his dreamlike, hallucinatory poems like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan

a. Ancient Mariner -- a poem of magic and mystery, in which the protagonist is punished for killing an albatross that arrives at a ship in the far north as an omen of good luck

b. see allusion on p. 14 to the albatross, and again on 202

2. seeing themselves as creators, of course, the romantics set themselves up against the Creator, and thus make themselves tragic figures

3. in Milton's Paradise Lost, it is Satan that Percy Shelley most admired

a. another one of the books that the monster reads (167)

b. note how the monster always addresses Victor Frankenstein in Biblical language

E. the romantics emulated tragedies like Prometheus, in which the hero sets himself up against the gods

1. part of their rejection of authority

2. lots of versions of this legend, but typically include:

a. making men out of clay

b. stealing fire for man from the gods of Olympus

c. defender of humankind against Zeus, who wants to destroy them

F. Mary Shelley sub-titled her work "The Modern Prometheus"

1. in Frankenstein, monster turns against his creator much as Prometheus turns against his god

2. her interest in Prometheus reflects her link with the romantics

III. Mary Shelley’s (1797-1851) Life

A. Her maiden name was Mary Godwin

1. daughter of William Godwin

2. named after her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft

B. William Godwin

1. novelist and political philosopher concerned with property, democracy

2. believed that human beings are naturally good but have been corrupted by society, like Rousseau

a. representative of Enlightenment ideal that good can be achieved here on Earth

b. but unlike Enlightenment thinkers, thought that it was science, etc. that made us unhappy

3. advocated a kind of utopian communism

C. Mary Wollstonecraft

1. early feminist, concerned with freedom and education of women, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women

2. she and William Godwin were opposed to marriage as a form of slavery

a. however, they made an exception and married for the sake of their soon-to-be-born daughter

b. Mary Wollstonecraft already had a daughter born out of wedlock, Fanny Imlay

3. Mary Wollstonecraft died from childbed fever after giving birth to Mary

D. William Godwin remarried, raising their daughter Mary along with Fanny Imlay and the children of his new wife, incl. Claire Clairmont

E. Mary's Education

1. Mary was educated mostly at home

2. through her father, met many famous writers, incl. Charles Lamb, Samuel T. Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

3. exposed to radical ideas of her parents and the romantic poets

a. reflected in Mary Shelley's novel:  Frankenstein's monster is good until he is corrupted by society

b. also, the idea of free love

F. at 17, runs off with Percy Bysshe Shelley, who abandoned his first wife

1. defending their actions according to the principles of free love

2. father at first disowned her

3. Shelley encouraged her to write

III. Occasion of Frankenstein

A. in 1816, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont, were neighbors of Lord Byron and John William Polidori near Lake Geneva in Switzerland

B. June was rainy, and they stayed indoors in the evenings reading aloud ghost stories from a collection titled Tales of the Dead

C. one night Byron suggested they have a contest among themselves to write ghost stories

1. Polidori's story was about a human vampire, a story that later served as the basis for Bram Stoker's Dracula

2. Mary was having trouble thinking up a story until one night, when they had been talking about things like the principle of life and whether it could be discovered or transferred

a. they had discussed Erasmus Darwin's experiments with spontaneous generation (vermicelli) -- alluded to in Percy Shelley's preface (xxxiii)

b. speculated whether one could bring a corpse to life with galvanism (electricity)

c. this discussion led to nightmares, the basis of her story

D. Frankenstein, is both like and unlike the gothic novels they had been reading

1. monster is not a creature of the mind or an hallucination:  material being created by science

2. created in an attic not in a dungeon:  perversion of intellect, not of passions (63)

3. origin of our mad scientist stories

IV. Shelley's Frankenstein

A. Frankenstein is typically read as a romantic reaction against dehumanizing science

1. a bit of an over-simplification

2. it's certainly an attack on what's dehumanizing, but Shelley's target is much larger

B. As Wendy Steiner says in the introduction, it's a "treatise on the ethics of aesthetic creativity"

1. to understand this, we have to know something about ideas of aesthetics in Shelley's period

2. as Steiner explains, it's a reaction to the aesthetics of the sublime of Burke, Kant

a. these writers contrasted the sublime with the beautiful in the following way:

1.) the beautiful is small, smooth, polished, delicate, light, causing pleasure, usually of a sexual nature, as in the pleasure of seeing a beautiful woman

2.) the sublime is huge, rough, rugged, solid, massive, powerful, dark, gloomy, dangerous, causing pain, as illustrated in the novel in the experience of mountains and polar ice

b. the experience of the sublime was supposed to be the higher aesthetic experience

1.) as the sublime is connected with more powerful emotions

2.) we experience pleasure or delight at being removed to a safe distance from that which is sublime

C. Mary Wollstonecraft had earlier attacked Burke on his account of the beautiful and the sublime

1. not only sexist, relegating women to an inferior position

2. but dehumanizes men, as well

D. Frankenstein can be read as an attack on an aesthetics that emphasizes the sublime over the beautiful as dehumanizing us

1. Frankenstein's monster is sublime

2. Mary Shelley seems to favor the "merely" beautiful over the sublime

3. see p. xviii, where Wendy Steiner quotes a passage in which Victor learns to comes to appreciate the natural beauty of the Rhine river, over the sublimity of the Alps

V.  Literary Form of Frankenstein

A. a version of the frame device

1. that is, telling a story within the framework of another story

2. e.g., The Arabian Nights, in which the frame story is that of Scheherazade, who tells the stories of Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and the 40 thieves, etc.

3. it's associated with Asian literature, but also has antecedents in English literature at least as far back as Canterbury Tales

4. it's a device that allows the author and/or narrator to remove themselves from responsibility for the events that transpire

B. this book contains multiple layers of frame story

1. opens with letters by Walton to his sister

a. the outermost frame

b. describes to her his meeting with Victor Frankenstein, which introduces his story

2. the next frame within a frame is Victor Frankenstein's story about his creating life

3. Frankenstein in turn repeats what the monster has told him about his life,

4. the monster in turn repeats a tale he overheard from the cottagers near whom he was living

C. The first three frames encourage us to compare the narrators

1. Walton, like Frankenstein -- and his monster -- are seekers of knowledge

2. all three are excessively introspective

D. the innermost story is about the De Laceys and Safie, who are characterized as good

1. we get the sense of peeling away layers of corruption to get down to the inner core of goodness

2. reflecting the theme that people are by nature good