People and Places in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein:
or, The Modern Prometheus
Christine Walker, English
Faculty Mentor: Debra Best
“In modern European novels,
what happens depends a lot of
where it happens”
Franco Moretti
The physical presence, natural boundaries and manmade turmoil of these locations reflect and affect
the characters while a critical plot points occurs.
The Polar Ice
Begins and ends the narration of Victor by Walton
The Summit of Montanvert
The creature relates his life story to Victor
The Alsace Region
The center of the novel and the center of the frame
Boundary Violations
The Polar Ice
Claimed by Russia and England
Comparison to Napoleon and the war of 1812
The Summit of Montanvert
A divine space between Man and God
The Alsace Region
Disputed politically by Germany and France
The Polar Ice
“our situation was somewhat
dangerous, especially as we were
compassed round by a very thick
fog…the mist cleared away…and we
beheld, stretched out in every
direction, vast and irregular plains of
ice, which seemed to have no
end….we heard the ground sea; and
before night the ice broke and freed
our ship” (Shelly 58)
Caspar David Friedrich, oil painting,
“Wrack im Eismeer,” 1798,
showing eighteenth-century vessel
caught in ice.
Montanvert
“It was augmented and rendered
sublime by the mighty Alps, whose
white and shining pyramids and
domes towered above all, as
belonging to another earth, the
habitations of another race of
beings….Mont Blanc, the supreme
magnificent Mont Blanc, raised itself
from the surrounding aiguilles, and its
tremendous dome overlooked the
valley”
Shelley (114-115)
The Sublime
defined as the intertwining of opposites such as awe and terror that transcends the human
condition is illustrated in the mountain setting of Montanvert, and in Mont Blanc
The Alsace Region
A Multinational Influence
“The DeLacey’s take on the character of
closed political communities, because,
among other things, they undertake the
political activity- perhaps the
fundamental activity that politics perform
- of making decisions about the allocation
of memberships an the rights and
protections that go with it” .
(Bently 8)
The DeLacey’s are French, and Saphie is an
Arab Christian from Turkey. German can be
assigned to the creature since he was
assembled in Ingolstadt.
Work Cited
Bently, Colene. “Family, Humanity, Polity: Theorizing The Basis And Boundaries of Political
Community in Frankenstein.” Criticism: A Quarterly For Literature and the Arts 47.3 (2005):
325-351 MLA International Bibliography. Web. 17 Oct. 2014
Eckhardt, C. C. “The Alsace-Lorraine Question” The Scientific Monthly 6.5 (1918): 431-443.
JSTOR. Web. 17 Oct. 2014
Ketterer, David. “Embodied Settings in Frankenstein.” Science Fiction Studies 32.3 (2005):
548. JSTOR. Web. 17 Oct. 2014
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Frankenstein’s’ Fallen Angel” Critical Inquiry 10.3 1(984): 543-554.
JSTOR. Web 17 Oct. 2014
Randel, Fred V. “The Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” “ ELH
70 (2003):465-491. JSTOR. Web. 17 Oct. 2014
Randel, Fred V. “Feminism, and the Intertextuality of Mountains” Studies in Romanticism 23.4
(1984): 515-532 JSTOR. Web 17 Oct. 2014
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Kathleen Dorothy Scherf, and David Lorne Macdonald.
Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2012. Print.