The Gothic Novel &
Frankenstein
Brit Lit II
Mr. Marcel
The Gothic Novel
• Frankenstein is by no means the first
Gothic novel. Instead, this novel is a
compilation of Romantic and Gothic
elements combined into a singular work
with an unforgettable story.
• The Gothic novel is unique because by the
time Shelley wrote Frankenstein, several
novels had appeared using Gothic themes,
but the genre had only been around since
1754.
The Gothic Novel
• The first Gothic horror novel was The Castle of Otranto by
Horace Walpole, published in 1754.
• The Castle of Otranto - The basic plot created many other
gothic staples, including a threatening mystery and an
ancestral curse, as well as countless trappings such as
hidden passages and oft-fainting heroines.
• Perhaps the last type of novel in this mode was Emily
Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, published in 1847. In between
1754 and 1847, several other novels appeared using the
Gothic horror story as a central story telling device, The
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1794) by Ann
Radcliffe, The Monk (1796) by Matthew G. Lewis, and
Melmouth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin.
The Gothic Novel
• The Gothic novel: set in some exotic
place like Italy and involving a heroine (or,
less often, hero) in a struggle with the
mysteriously evil and seemingly
supernatural.
• A landscape of vast dark forest with
vegetation that bordered on excessive,
concealed ruins with horrific rooms,
monasteries and a forlorn character who
excels at the melancholy.
The Gothic Novel
• It is the predecessor to modern horror and,
above all, has led to the common definition of
"gothic" as being connected to the dark and
horrific.
• Prominent features of gothic novels included
terror, mystery, the supernatural, ghosts,
haunted buildings, castles, trapdoors, doom,
death, decay, madness, hereditary curses, and
so on.
Mary Shelley
• Mary Shelley was twenty when
Frankenstein was published, twenty-four
when her husband drowned; although she
wrote a good many other things, her fame
clearly rests on her archetypal tale of the
monster and his creator.
Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
• Mary Shelley was born in London, the second daughter of
famed feminist, educator and writer Mary Wollstonecraft and
the equally famous liberal philosopher, anarchic & atheistic
journalist, William Godwin. Her mother died eleven days after
her birth.
• Mary received an excellent education unusual for girls at the
time. She met Percy Bysshe Shelley, a political radical and
free-thinker like her father, when Percy and his first wife Harriet
visited Godwin. Percy, unhappy in his marriage, began to visit
Mary more frequently (and alone).
• They eloped to France (Mary is 16). This was Percy’s second
elopement. Upon their return several weeks later, the young
couple were dismayed to find that Godwin, whose views on
free love apparently did not apply to his daughter, refused to
see them.
Mary Shelley
• Percy exulted that Mary was "one who can feel
poetry and understand philosophy.“ They did
have their differences.
• During May of 1816, the couple traveled to Lake
Geneva to summer near the famous and
scandalous poet Lord Byron, whose recent affair
with Mary’s stepsister Claire had left her both
pregnant and somewhat obsessed with him.
• In terms of English literature, it was to be a
productive summer. Percy began work on "Hymn
To Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Blanc." Mary
will write Frankenstein here.
Mary Shelley
• Forced to stay indoors on one particular evening, the
group of young writers and intellectuals decided to have a
ghost-story writing contest. Another guest, Dr. John
Polidori, came up with The Vampyre, later to become a
strong influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
• Other guests wove tales of equal horror, but Mary found
herself unable to invent one.
• That night, however, she had a “waking dream” where
she saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling
beside the thing he had put together." Then she set
herself to put the story on paper. In time it would be
published as Frankenstein.
Mary Shelley
• Returning to England in 1816, Mary and Percy were
stunned by two family suicides in quick succession.
• In November, Mary's older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, left
the Godwin home and took her own life at a distant inn.
• Only weeks later, Percy's first wife drowned herself in
London's Hyde Park. Discarded and pregnant, she had
not welcomed Percy's invitation to join Mary and himself
in their new household.
• On December 30, 1816, shortly after Harriet's death,
Percy and Mary were married, now with Godwin's
blessing. Their attempts to gain custody of Percy's two
children by Harriet failed, but their writing careers enjoyed
more success when, in the spring of 1817, Mary finished
Frankenstein.
Mary Shelley
• Over the following years, Mary's household grew
to include her own children by Percy. Shelley
moved his family from place to place, first in
England and then in Italy.
• Mary suffered the death of her infant daughter
Clara outside Venice, after which her young son
Will died too, in Rome, as Percy moved the
household yet again.
• By now Mary had resigned herself to her
husband's self-centered restlessness and his
romantic enthusiasms for other women. The birth
of her only surviving child, Percy Florence
Shelley, consoled her somewhat for her losses.
Mary Shelley
• Eventually the group settled in Lerici in
Italy, but it was an ill-fated choice. It was
here that Claire learned of her daughter's
death at the Italian convent to which Byron
had sent her, and that Mary almost died of
a miscarriage.
• And it was from here that Percy sailed up
the coast to plan the founding of a journal
with a group of friends. Caught in a storm
on his return, he drowned at sea on July 8,
1822.
Mary Shelley
• Mary was tireless in promoting her late husband's
work, including editing and annotating
unpublished material. Despite their troubled later
life together, she revered her late husband's
memory and helped build his reputation as one of
the major poets of the English Romantic period.
• But she also found occasions to write a few more
novels. Critics say these works do not begin to
approach the power and fame of Frankenstein.
• The Last Man, a pioneering science fiction novel
of the human apocalypse in the distant future, is,
however, sometimes considered her best work.
Mary Shelley
• In her journal, she writes about "the
stresses of a life spent trying to measure up
to the example, yet to escape the obloquy,
of her parents and husband."
• Mary Shelley died of brain cancer on
February 1, 1851 in London.
Gothic Traits in Frankenstein
• Frankenstein is set in continental Europe,
specifically Switzerland and Germany, where
many of Shelley’s readers had not been.
Further, the incorporation of the chase scenes
through the Arctic regions takes us even further
from England into regions unexplored by most
readers.
• Victor’s laboratory is the perfect place to create
a new type of human being. Laboratories and
scientific experiments were not known to the
average reader, thus this was an added element
of mystery and gloom.
Gothic Traits in Frankenstein
• The thought of raising the dead would
have made the average reader wince in
disbelief and terror. Imagining Victor
wandering the streets of Ingolstadt after
dark on a search for body parts adds to
the sense of revulsion purposefully
designed to evoke from the reader a
feeling of dread for the characters involved
in the story.
Gothic Traits in Frankenstein
• In the Gothic novel, the characters seem
to bridge the mortal world and the
supernatural world.
• Frankenstein’s monster seems to have
some sort of communication between
himself and his creator, because the
monster appears wherever Victor goes.
• The monster also moves with amazing
superhuman speed with Victor matching
him in the chase towards the North Pole.
Mary Shelley
• Shelley had incorporated a number of
different sources into her work, not the
least of which was the Promethean myth
from Ovid.
• The influence of John Milton’s Paradise
Lost, the book the 'creature' finds in the
cabin, is also clearly evident within the
novel.
“The Modern Prometheus"
• The novel's subtitle
• Prometheus, in some versions of Greek mythology, was the Titan
who created mankind, and Victor's work by creating man by new
means obviously reflects that creative work. More widely known
is that Prometheus was the bringer of fire who took fire from the
gods and gave it to man. Zeus then punished Prometheus by
fixing him to a rock where each day a predatory bird came to
devour his liver.
• Prometheus was also a myth told in Latin but was a very different
story. In this version Prometheus makes man from clay and
water, again a very relevant theme to Frankenstein as Victor
rebels against the laws of nature and as a result is punished by
his creation.
“The Modern Prometheus"
• Prometheus' relation to the novel can be interpreted in a
number of ways.
• For Romance era artists in general, Prometheus' gift to man
compared with the two great utopian promises of the 18th
century: the Industrial Revolution and the French
Revolution, containing both great promise and potentially
unknown horrors.
• Byron was particularly attached to the play Prometheus
Bound by Aeschylus, and Percy Shelley would soon write
Prometheus Unbound.
What else is going on in literature, besides
Romanticism and The Gothic Novel?
• Jane Austen, the first great nineteenthcentury novelist, was, in some sense the
last great eighteenth-century novelist: ironic,
comic, promoting the values of reason and
restraint.
• 1818, a year after Austen’s death, saw the
(anonymous) publication of Frankenstein,
quite a different sort of novel.
Group Work (Ch.1-11)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Describe the Frankenstein family (Chapters 1 & 2). What
was Victor’s mom like? How is Victor different from
Elizabeth? (p. 22)
Find several instances of Victor’s hubris (p.39 and earlier).
Where does this stem from? How does it lead to
obsession?
Describe in detail the creation of the monster. How does
Victor feel before, during, and after the process?
How are Mary Shelley’s descriptions of Nature
quintessentially Romantic? Find at least 4 instances. In the
beginning of Chapter 10, how is Victor feeling? Why does
Shelley include the poem?
Describe the encounter between Victor & his monster
(Chapter 10, pages 86-89); what is discussed? Find all
religious imagery…analyze its purpose.
Describe and analyze the monster’s first encounters with
humans. What is Mary Shelley’s message here?
Group Work
1. Who is Robert Walton? What does his crew think of
him? What is his purpose in the story? Describe his
feelings toward Victor. Why does Mary Shelley use the
narrative structure of the letter-writing?
2. Describe the Frankenstein family (Chapters 1 & 2).
What was Victor’s mom like? How is Victor different
from Elizabeth? (p. 22)
3. Find several instances of Victor’s hubris (p.39 and
earlier). Where does this stem from? How does it lead
to obsession?
4. Describe in detail the creation of the monster. How
does Victor feel before, during, and after the process?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Who is Robert Walton? What does his crew think of him? What is
his purpose in the story? Describe his feelings toward Victor.
Why does Mary Shelley use the narrative structure of the letterwriting?
Describe the Frankenstein family (Chapters 1 & 2). What was
Victor’s mom like? How is Victor different from Elizabeth? (p. 22)
Find several instances of Victor’s hubris (p.39 and earlier). Where
does this stem from? How does it lead to obsession?
Describe in detail the creation of the monster. How does Victor
feel before, during, and after the process?
How are Mary Shelley’s descriptions of Nature quintessentially
Romantic? Find at least 4 instances. In the beginning of Chapter
10, how is Victor feeling? Why does Shelley include the poem?
Describe the encounter between Victor & his monster (Chapter 10,
pages 86-89); what is discussed? Find all religious
imagery…analyze its purpose.
As the monster observes the poor family, why/how does he grow
to appreciate/love them? Describe the family.