The Gothic Novel & Frankenstein

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The Gothic Novel Frankenstein

• Brit Lit II
• Mr. Marcel

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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.

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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 Brontes 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.

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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.

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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.

6
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.

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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
  Percys 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.

8
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 Marys
  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.

9
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 Stokers 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.

10
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.

11
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.

12
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.

13
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.

14
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.

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Gothic Traits in Frankenstein

• Frankenstein is set in continental Europe,
  specifically Switzerland and Germany, where many
  of Shelleys 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.
• Victors 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.

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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.

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Gothic Traits in Frankenstein

• In the Gothic novel, the characters seem to
  bridge the mortal world and the supernatural
  world.
• Frankensteins 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.

18
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 Miltons Paradise Lost, the
  book the 'creature' finds in the cabin, is also
  clearly evident within the novel.

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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.

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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.

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What else is going on in literature, besides
Romanticism and The Gothic Novel?

• Jane Austen, the first great nineteenth-century
  novelist, was, in some sense the last great
  eighteenth-century novelist ironic, comic,
  promoting the values of reason and restraint.
• 1818, a year after Austens death, saw the
  (anonymous) publication of Frankenstein, quite a
  different sort of novel.

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Group Work (Ch.1-11)

1. Describe the Frankenstein family (Chapters 1
   2). What was Victors mom like? How is Victor
   different from Elizabeth? (p. 22)
2. Find several instances of Victors hubris (p.39
   and earlier). Where does this stem from? How
   does it lead to obsession?
3. Describe in detail the creation of the monster.
   How does Victor feel before, during, and after
   the process?
4. How are Mary Shelleys 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?
5. Describe the encounter between Victor his
   monster (Chapter 10, pages 86-89) what is
   discussed? Find all religious imageryanalyze
   its purpose.
6. Describe and analyze the monsters first
   encounters with humans. What is Mary Shelleys
   message here?

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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 Victors mom like? How is Victor
   different from Elizabeth? (p. 22)
3. Find several instances of Victors 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?

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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 Victors mom like? How is Victor
   different from Elizabeth? (p. 22)
3. Find several instances of Victors 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?
5. How are Mary Shelleys 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?
6. Describe the encounter between Victor his
   monster (Chapter 10, pages 86-89) what is
   discussed? Find all religious imageryanalyze
   its purpose.
7. As the monster observes the poor family, why/how
   does he grow to appreciate/love them? Describe
   the family.