Dear Year 9
This half term we are going to read the Gothic novel Frankenstein. It’s a really great story
but I accept that you will not find it easy reading. Many of you will struggle with the amount
of reading and the language (there are a lot of tricky words and some very long -winded 19th
Century sentence structures). I start my letter off with this because I want to be clear
that it’s OK to struggle with a difficult text. Learning isn’t meant to be easy so if you are
struggling, that’s a good sign. I don’t expect you to ‘get it’ straight away and I certainly won’t
be offended if some of you don’t enjoy reading it. But bear with it and you might find that,
actually, you start to enjoy it. My expectation of you is that you stay positive, stay focused
and stick with it.
You might remember hearing in the news recently about an argument between the fashion
designers ‘Dolce and Gabbana’ and the singer Elton John. Basically, the fashion designers said
that any baby born by IVF or in any other way that involved medical intervention was
‘synthetic’. This caused huge offense to many parents including Elton John, a homosexual man
who has two children via surrogacy with his husband. He said it was offensive and
homophobic to call his children ‘synthetic’. What do you think? Are babies that are created
‘in a test tube’ any less real than babies who are conceived naturally? Might Dolce and
Gabbana call wounded war veterans who have artificial or robotic limbs ‘synthetic’ because
they are no longer 100% natural? You might remember politicians and scientists arguing
about the legalisation of stem cell research last year. Would Dolce and Gabbana, if they were
suffering from life threatening bowel cancer, accept a ‘synthetic’ bowel created from stem
cells in a laboratory if it saved their life?
You might think these issues are only relevant to our modern scientific age. They are not. In
Frankenstein, an enthusiastic young scientist called Dr. Frankenstein researches something
called ‘galvanism’. Galvanism meant bringing a dead animal or person back to life with
electricity. People actually experimented on this with frogs in the 1900s but it didn’t get
much further than that. This is where the story of Frankenstein gets weird: after he
discovered how to bring a human back to life by giving it an electric shock, Dr. Frankenstein
goes around digging up bodies from graves and stitches them all together into a new person
that he calls ‘Adam’ (it’s a reference to God creating Adam, the first man). It’s basically a
horror story, because everything goes badly for Dr. Frankenstein from the moment his
monster comes alive. The main themes are: ‘what is it that makes us human?’ and ‘should
humans be allowed to play the role of God and tamper with nature?’
Mary Shelley came up with the idea for Frankenstein whilst having a holiday in a mansion at
Lake Geneva in Switzerland with her friends. The weather was terrible and to keep
themselves entertained, they took turns to tell scary stories. Shelley used her knowledge
about galvanism and the stormy, spooky setting of the holiday house in Switzerland as
inspiration for her story. Everyone loved it so when she got home she wrote it up into a much
longer and more detailed story, had it published and became famous.
The novel is written using a clever framing technique. The first part starts with someone
called Captain Walton writing letters home to his sister. He is an explorer in the Arctic and
he’s just explains how tedious and horrible it is. Things start to get more interesting when he
sees a huge, man-like shape across the ice: Adam the monster. The next day, he meets a
weary traveller who he takes under his wing. After a few days, the traveller (who turns out
to be Dr. Frankenstein) tells Walton his story. It turns out he is out in the Arctic chasing his
creation, Adam, who has run amok. It’s quite a grim situation to be in This is where the
narrative perspective changes and we jump back in time to hear the story of how Dr.
Frankenstein created Adam from the very beginning. The art of writing a story using letters
is called ‘epistolary’ form and some of who have read The Faultin Our Stars might recognise
the format.
We won’t be reading all Frankenstein in class. Instead, I am loaning you each a copy of the
novel and giving you all a pen, a pack of post it notes and a zip lock bag. You need to keep
everything inside the zip lock and bring it to every English lesson. I will be setting targets
for reading up to certain pages which I expect you to meet. Reading and meeting these page
targets will be your homework for this half term. It’s quite likely that you will not
understand exactly what’s going on whilst reading and that you will find the language
difficult. This doesn’t matter. I want you to persist. Use a dictionary for vocabulary, use the
Sparknotes provided on Show My Homework and, at a minimum, just make sure you
understand the gist of what you read. You should make notes of your ideas, responses and
questions about what you read on the post it notes and stick them into your copy of the
novel. I will help you understand the story and other aspects such as language and theme in
our lessons. I will also be collecting in your novels and post its, inside the zip lock bags,
during the half term and I will be giving you feedback on your post it note taking.
You should show this letter to your parents so that they understand what your homework will
be this term. They might like to read Frankenstein at the same time so that they can discuss
the novel and help you with your reading.
I know you will all learn a lot – about Mary Shelly, about Frankenstein, language and about
yourselves as English students - from reading a Classic novel in this way and I hope you enjoy
the activity as well! Good luck!
Mrs Brown.