Massive Revision
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In her novel, Mary Shelley is silent on just how
Victor Frankenstein breathes life into his
creation, saying only that success crowned "days
and nights of incredible labor and fatigue;"
Frankenstein offers no monster-making recipes.
But Shelley's story did not arise from the void.
Scientists and physicians of her time, tantalized
by the elusive boundary between life and death,
probed it through experiments with lower
organisms, human anatomical studies, attempts
to resuscitate drowning victims, and
experiments using electricity to restore life to
the recently dead.
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Subtitle: The Modern Prometheus
Prometheus was one of the Titans
Prometheus = ‘forethought’
As a reward for being the only Titan to not rebel
against him, Zeus assigned Prometheus the task
of forming man
Prometheus became fond of his creation: he
stole the secret of fire from Zeus and deprived
humans of their knowledge of the future, giving
them hope instead
Prometheus is often seen as a benefactor of
human kind
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In response to his betrayal, Zeus chained
Prometheus to a rock where a vulture (or an
eagle) pecked out his liver (or heart), which
regenerated itself each night so that the
punishment was eternal
Early in the 18th century, Prometheus had
become an accepted image of the creative artist
Shelley created a radical shift by transferring the
metaphor of Prometheus as artist to
Prometheus as scientist. By creating her
‘modern Prometheus’ as a scientist, Shelley is
suggesting science is creative
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Paradise Lost is Milton’s account of ‘Genesis’
Frankenstein – attempting to take on the role of God;
defies God in a similar way to Satan; punished for his
defiance in a similar way to Satan
Where is Eve? – the monster wants Frankenstein
(God) to create Eve but he refuses
The monster’s narrative parallels the story of Eve
The description of Victor and Elizabeth’s childhood is
like the innocence of the Garden of Eden
The monster’s awakening is a parody of it – beautiful
but harsh is the world that he finds.
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The three concentric layers of the text are
presented in three volumes: The text has
been described as a ‘Chinese Box’
 Captain Robert Walton’s letters home to his sister
bookend the story
 The narrative related by Victor Frankenstein
 The monster’s story
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Walton’s story of his voyage to the Pole is a
buffer for the reader confronting the more
marvellous story of Frankenstein
Parallel situation between Walton and
Frankenstein – each has a solitary nature,
feels largely self-educated, is obsessed with
their ‘quest’ and ‘suffers’ from hubris
Frankenstein’s narrative warns Walton of the
price payable for egocentric obsessions
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This communicates a number of views and
values
 Plays with the idea that man is essentially good –
the creature is like Satan, the fallen angel
 His passionate responses to nature are typically
Romantic
 Isolation and loneliness are no good (much like
when Frankenstein isolates himself with his
science)
 Literature has much to teach us about the world
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This occurs when the story is told from a
number of different perspectives – who all
view the same events differently.
We have three narrators – but also letters and
so on from other characters
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Victor seeks knowledge for his own reasons
Does not consider the ramifications (Very
Romantic view of the age)
Walton also does this
Victor focused on Alchemy before going to
university and learning about new science
Rime of the Ancient Mariner links in to this, as
it suggests the violation/disrespect of nature
is a sin.
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Romantics favoured a ‘natural’ education
through reading, rather than a formal one,
with adventures providing self-growth.
(Critique?)
 Walton self educated “my education was
neglected, yet I was passionately fond of
reading.”
 The creature learns from the DeLacey’s
 Typical Romantic reading list
 No- one to guide him in his learning
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Shelley loses her mother early
Elizabeth’s mother died early during
childbirth
Victor does not care for the creature he
‘parented’
Victor is the real monster – he neglects his
own ‘child’
Critiques the cult of the individual, of
solitariness and introversion of the time
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The Gothic novel (mid 18th – mid 19th) – distinctive for
its fascination with the horrible, the repellent, the
grotesque and the supernatural, in combination with
many of the characteristics of the Romantic novel
Gothic: emphasis on emotion
 Gothic art and architecture was intended to have
a magical or preternatural effect on the viewer
 The Gothic building was the perfect setting for a
story intended to terrify or otherwise overwhelm
the reader
 Dangerous natural settings were employed (the
sublime)
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Characterised by a chronic sense of
apprehension and the premonition of
impending but unidentified disaster
The Gothic world is the fallen world, the
vision of fallen man, living in fear and
alienation, haunted by images of his mythic
expulsion, by its repercussions and by an
awareness of his unavoidable wretchedness
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Action tends to take place at night or in a
claustrophobic, sunless environment
Some motifs of typical Gothic fiction
include: images of death; revenge; family
curse; the Doppelganger; demonic
possession; masking/shape changing;
madness
Coleridge, Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley
were all steeped in this tradition
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Psychologically, the Gothic novel is
generally understood to serve a
fundamental human need:
 Can be called ‘the strange human
need for feeling afraid’
 The need to retain links to the past
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Frankenstein centred around:
 Thirst for knowledge
 A scientific over-reacher
 Forbidden knowledge and the mysteries of life
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The emphasis in Frankenstein is on psychological
terror
The scientific experiment can be seen as proving that
the masculinist arts of civilisation can only reanimate
the dead and deaden the living. It is the feminine and
naturing aspect of reproduction that would have
saved the creature from his lonely life.
Preference for grandeur, the picturesque, the
sublime, passion and extraordinary beauty as
opposed to finish and proportion (i.e. rugged
landscape).
 The creature is moved by the power of the
natural world, and Frankenstein escapes to
nature to think. Walton seeks to subjugate it.
 The natural world reflects the danger and
trauma of the emotional worlds of the
characters.
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Explored the emotional directness of personal
experience:
 Extremes of rapture, nostalgia (for childhood or
the past), horror, melancholy or sentimentality
 Cultivation of the exotic, the bizarre or the
macabre
 Interest in the irrational realms of dream and
delirium
Frankenstein as a Romantic novel
 The growth of the individual mind is
enabled through knowledge of, and
closeness to, nature and not from man
 A moral fable on the self-destructive
consequences of idealism and solitary
obsession in a quest for passionately
knowing
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Self-consciousness in the Romantic period is only a
state which must be passed through so that it may be
transcended
 Frankenstein’s creature moves through the layers of self-
awareness to develop into the ‘modern man’
 However, while he finds his own self, he does not develop into
the next ‘stage’ – he stays ego-centric and unable to truly
understand what is beyond himself, his own passions and his
own need for vengeance
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Are we to recognise that knowledge needs to be
dispensed simultaneously with moral instruction?
(perhaps this is the feminine again?)
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Shelley’s protagonist is so completely engrossed in his
own ego that he must create a being to reassure
himself of his own existence:
 Frankenstein’s consciousness alienates him from life, causing
him to become a solitary figure
 He creates another being, who stands as a double
(doppelganger) or subconscious element of himself
 This grotesque usurpation of women’s bodies essentially
deepens his own crisis of self-consciousness, for, in embodying
his alter-ego he cannot now go beyond it and return to a state
of former innocence
There is the sense of the Doppelganger in
Frankenstein’s creature
 Frankenstein’s monster is a magnified image of
the self of the creator, indicative of Victor’s
profound narcissism
 This monster represents a larger than life superego of his creator (remember its size)
 Frankenstein concedes that the monster he
created is in essence a part of his spirit, his
mirror: “my own vampire, my own spirit let loose
from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was
dear to me”
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Frankenstein becomes the epitome of egotism and selfconsciousness:
 To Walton, Frankenstein confessed that his “eyes [became] insensible to the
charms of nature. And the same feelings … caused me also to forget those
friends who were so many miles absent”
 The wounded deer Frankenstein comes across in the Alpine valley he sees as
‘a type of me’
 Frankenstein was so self-obsessed that he cannot consider the possibility that
it may be Elizabeth who dies at the hand of the monster on their wedding
night
 When he does consider the scenario of his own death he is self-gratifyingly
morbid: “yet when I thought of my beloved Elizabeth – of her tears and
endless sorrow, when she would find her lover so barbarously snatched from
her – tears, the first I had shed for months, streamed from my eyes”
Victor as the id, who acts out his sexual and
aggressive natures by seeking to become God.
 The creature then, represents the ego which
must work with the demands of the real world
and come to terms with societal rejection.
 Walton becomes the superego or the conscience
that relates the acceptable and unacceptable
behaviour.
 These three characters represent the struggle of
man and his conscience with the good and the
bad, the learned and the ignorant.
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