Frankenstein revision Themes and Genre and Context PDF

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Revision topics on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1. Frankenstein and science 

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The novel takes a scientist as its central character, and explores the unforeseen consequences for him and for others of his scientific activities – his ardent desire for the acquisition of knowledge (page 46). Mary Shelley emphasises the dangers of scientific research when the scientist does not think through the possible consequences of his work. She also examines what happens when an experiment takes a different direction from the one he expected, and the scientist does not take responsibility for it (Marilyn Butler points out that Frankenstein abandons his Creature when it “goes wrong” rather than trying to understand and remedy the problem: “[The Creature] tracks his own maturation, from a solitary to a social animal. It is he, not Frankenstein, who follows through Frankenstein’s technological achievement in a scientific spirit.” (Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the 1818 text). Frankenstein, by contrast, becomes unscientific, highly emotional and irrational. There are many references in the novel to the history of science, and to what the study of science involves. Frankenstein is first interested in the medieval scientists who wanted to explain everything, and this fills his mind with what he later calls “chimaeras [fantasies] of boundless grandeur” (page 48). There is an emphasis on scientific knowledge as a source of reputation and power, with Frankenstein’s desire for the glory (page 42) that would be the result of banishing disease and so becoming a benefactor of the human race. It has often been pointed out that his “fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature” (page 41) uses a revealingly sexual metaphor, as if his scientific researches were an assault (compare the phrase “entering the citadel of nature” further down the page). In the same passage his reference to “picking up shells beside the great ocean of truth” links him to the ardent explorer, Robert Walton. Science (Natural Philosophy) is also explored in the novel in terms of research that was being done in Mary Shelley’s own time (and in the previous generation): electricity and galvanism (page 43), chemistry, astronomy, physics and physiology (page 49). Like Galvani, Priestley, Humphry Davy, Erasmus Darwin and many others, Frankenstein is engaged in a great enterprise to “unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation”(page 49). The contemporary “vitalist controversy” about the nature and origins of the life-force is a major influence on the novel. Mary Shelley is thoughtfully realistic about some aspects of science – for example, Frankenstein’s account of the “continual food for discovery and wonder” in a scientific pursuit, and his invention of the chemical instruments necessary for his own work to progress (pages 51-52). Later he takes these instruments with him as he goes to create the “mate”.

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The description of Frankenstein’s emotional state as he first discovers “the cause of generation and life” (page 53) and then drives himself to create “an animal as wonderful and complex as man” (page 54) emphasises the power of the scientist, but also the potential danger and presumption of his activities, imitating God but unable to control the process and the consequences of his creation. Key ideas are the pride of wanting to be blessed as a creator by his new species; the repulsiveness and cruelty of his activities (“… as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay”); the isolation that his work imposes on him (note the important description of his “workshop of filthy creation”, a “cell, at the top of the house, separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase”, page 55); his separation from his family; and his neglect of the natural beauty of the seasons, “so deeply was I engrossed in my occupation” (pages 56-57). All of these ideas feed into the novel’s exploration of the morality of science, and especially of the legitimate limits on its interference with the workings of nature.

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Frankenstein is perhaps the first important English novel to take a scientist as its central character, and it shows Mary Shelley responding to the widespread public fascination with a rapidly expanding area of study. The reference to Frankenstein in the sub-title as “The Modern Prometheus” stresses the potentially immense power of science. Mary Shelley’s novel is a tribute to this power, but also a warning of its dangers, and a sense of these dangers was already abroad in discussions of scientific matters in her day. Mary Shelley had discussed current scientific ideas with William Godwin, P. B. Shelley (who conducted experiments while he was a student at Oxford) and other men interested in or dedicated to science. As above, many areas of contemporary scientific enquiry are mentioned in the novel (galvanism, research into the nature and origins of life, even theories of evolution in the work of Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the Victorian evolutionist Charles Darwin).

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2. Family relationships in Frankenstein Marriage: 

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The marriage of Alphonse and Caroline Frankenstein (described in detail in Volume I, Chapter I) expresses a love that arises from intelligent and sensitive understanding of each other’s characters, strengthened by esteem and gratitude. To this extent the relationship is idealised. Note that in some respects Alphonse Frankenstein takes the place of Caroline’s father. Their relationship enables them to take in the “outcasts” Elizabeth and Justine and give them a stable upbringing, despite the irony that both of these young women are eventually destroyed by their associations with the Frankensteins. Significantly, Frankenstein’s mother dies at the same time as he leaves home for university: he loses an important element in his stable family background. Frankenstein’s doomed marriage to Elizabeth. The relationship begins when they are children, when “Harmony was the soul of our companionship …” (page 38), and is literally killed by Elizabeth’s murder, the direct consequence of Frankenstein’s ambition and self-centredness. Yet the relationship has been threatened ever since he left for the university, and there are moments of pathos in her letters to him (Volume I Chapter VI, and especially Volume III, Chapter V, where she suspects that Frankenstein loves someone else – ironic, because he is in another intense and inescapable relationship, that with the Creature). Elizabeth’s death is clearly the climax of Frankenstein’s career of thoughtless destruction and self-destruction. The aborted relationship between the Creature and his “mate”. This makes a disturbing parallel to Frankenstein’s relationship with Elizabeth, whose death is revenge for Frankenstein’s destroying the “mate”. The creature’s threat to “be with you on your wedding night” has suggested to some readers that the monster partly represents a destructive sexual aspect of Frankenstein himself. The description of Elizabeth’s murder is in some ways a horrible parody of a description of a wedding night, with its reference to her “bridal bier” (page 199) and the narrative pattern of climax and exhaustion. The marriage of Safie’s parents: an example of how women can maintain “independence of spirit” even in a religious and social system that denies them opportunities to develop “powers of intellect” (pages 126-127). Note that the unnamed mother passes on her attitudes to her daughter through teaching – a small but significant contrast to the dangerous education that Frankenstein receives at the powerful and socially acknowledged university of Ingolstadt. There is a brief reference in Elizabeth’s first letter (Volume I, Chapter VI) to “little darling William” having “one or two little wives” as a childhood game about adult relationships. This emphasises by contrast the complexity of grown-up relationships in the novel. It suggests a skilfully-concealed dramatic irony on Mary

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Shelley’s part when one remembers that both William and Elizabeth die before they can enjoy a fulfilled adult relationship. Parent/child relationships 

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Frankenstein and his parents: is this relationship an ideal one, or flawed? Are his parents to any extent responsible for his mistakes? Important quotation: “I was their plaything and their idol” (page 35), said in the context of a discussion of how parents have a duty to bring up their children to be happy, balanced members of society – children “whose future lot it was in their hands to direct to happiness or misery, according as they fulfilled their duties to me.” The implication is that Frankenstein is a spoilt child. Note too that Frankenstein’s father fails to warn his son in detail about the dangers of becoming absorbed in the “sad trash” of Cornelius Agrippa: Frankenstein believes that he might have been saved from the “fatal impulse that led to [his] ruin” (pages 40-41) if his father had intervened more effectively. Elizabeth and the Frankensteins: the account of her being adopted (pages 36-37) shows that she was loved by her original foster parents and was “a blessing to them”, but they give her up to the Frankensteins because Providence seems to be offering her a far better chance in life by affording her “such powerful protection.” There is a typically Gothic irony here: Elizabeth is in fact doomed from the moment she joins the family. This chapter ends with Frankenstein’s ominous words: “… till death she was to be mine only.” Frankenstein’s teachers at Ingolstadt: are they also parent-figures? If so, there is a lack at Ingolstadt of the feminine influence that Mary Shelley obviously thinks is essential to a satisfactory upbringing. Like Robert Walton, Frankenstein is in danger when he loses direct contact with this influence (remember that, as above, his mother’s death coincides with his departure for university). Walton’s father: his “dying injunction” was to forbid Walton to embark on a seafaring life, but the library of his uncle Thomas arouses his ambition and he disobeys his father. Mary Shelley is perhaps implying that children (boys?) cannot be prevented from making their own mistakes. This would support the idea that she represents Frankenstein’s story as a tragedy rather than as a simple moral tale, warning against ardour and curiosity. The de Lacey family is characterised by idealised parent/child relationships, in which the children and father act with self-sacrificing benevolence towards each other (Volume II, Chapters III and IV). There are parallels with the Frankenstein family, but are there also any contrasts? Note that the Creature becomes in effect another member of this family through his benevolent activities, but is eventually rejected by them, just as he has already been by Frankenstein. For Mary Shelley there is an obligation on the wider human family not to reject the apparent outsider who actually belongs at its heart.

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Safie and her father: he is a tyrannical parent who uses his daughter’s relationship with Felix, then refuses her the freedom she deserves. Throughout he is exploitative and selfish. Justine and her mother. Madame Moritz is a cruel parent who rejects her daughter and only receives her back when she has been terrified into remorse by the deaths of her other children, which she interprets as a punishment. She is a clear example of Mary Shelley’s interest in the variety of ways in which parents can mishandle their relationships with their children. Frankenstein and his Creature (remember that “Creature” means the being that he has created). This is a monstrous version of the parent-child relationship, but the point of the novel is that it need not have been so if Frankenstein had accepted his “son”. Rejection leads to misery: “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.” (page 103). This point is at the heart of the novel’s meaning. Note that Shelley compares this relationship to that between God and mankind, and that Frankenstein accepts at the end of Volume II, Chapter II, that he has failed in his duty towards his Creature. This episode also confirms the point about society’s responsibilities towards its children.

Sibling relationships 

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The novel opens with Walton’s relationship with his sister, and we are able to observe and judge how one sibling treats the other (see the separate notes on Letters I-IV). Mary Shelley establishes a pattern that is repeated in the relationship between Frankenstein and Elizabeth, with the woman staying at home in a state of uneasiness while the man goes off on his dangerous “voyage of discovery to the land of knowledge” (page 61 – words actually used of Clerval when his father finally allows him to go to university). Frankenstein and Elizabeth: she is his “more than sister – the beautiful and adored companion of all my occupations and my pleasures.” (Volume I, Chapter II). Some readers have seen an incest-theme here, emphasised in the original version of the novel by the fact that there Elizabeth is Frankenstein’s cousin. More straightforward is the irony that Frankenstein, at the age of five, regards her as “mine – mine to protect, love, and cherish” (page 37): he will eventually create the monster that destroys her on their wedding night, and his self-centred attitude prevents him from seeing that she, not he, is in danger. Frankenstein and his brothers. Ernest plays no part in the story, but William is obviously important as the first victim of Frankenstein’s terrible miscalculations. The idealised description of him in Volume I, Chapter VI prepares for the sense of waste and brutality when he is killed (chapter VII). Henry Clerval is a kind of adoptive brother too, and loving “hardship, enterprise and even danger for its own sake” (page 39) he is another version of the ardent and aspiring male in the novel. In his case there is an emphasis on a love of “chivalry and romance”, and Frankenstein later describes him (Volume III, Chapter II, page 163) as “the image of my former self” – the man he could have been if he had not embarked on his dangerous intellectual

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journey. At the same point we learn that Clerval has decided to go to India to assist European colonisation and trade. Whatever Mary Shelley thought of this, it is clearly a contrast to the fantastic voyages, literal and metaphorical, that Frankenstein undergoes.

Points for context 

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Mary Shelley was very interested in the structure and dynamics of the family, probably because of her own family circumstances. Her mother’s death eight days after Mary’s birth, and apparent tensions between Mary and her step-mother, may explain the recurrent figure of the absent or inadequate mother. Anxieties in the novel concerning Frankenstein’s relationship with his Creature, the “child” who destroys his parent, are possibly linked to this as well. Mary and her two step-sisters were educated by their father, William Godwin, and she naturally shows an interest in the effect of parents on their children’s development. In the Romantic period issues of parenting and nurturing were very much under discussion in novels and poems as well as in books on education. The novel had also become a sophisticated medium for exploring love and marriage, sexual and emotional relationships, and the family was under scrutiny by radical novelists as a potentially tyrannical institution, reproducing and backing up the tyranny of society.

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3. The representation of women in Frankenstein An important question is: are women always represented in this novel as passive and powerless, or is the picture more complex? What strengths and resources do they show? 

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Robert Walton’s sister: note that the whole novel is represented as a man’s narrative addressed to a woman. Walton repeatedly says that he is in search of a sympathetic friend with whom he can share his ambitions, successes and disappointments, yet he already has such a friend in his sister, if he could only recognise this. Arguably, Walton’s weaknesses are represented as specifically masculine ones. There are points at which the reader is prompted to think that Walton must be causing pain to his sister, without knowing or taking the trouble to consider whether he is doing so (see the separate notes on Letters I to IV). Compare Frankenstein’s relationship with Elizabeth. Frankenstein’s mother: note that like Elizabeth and Justine, she is rescued from a state of unhappiness, which may make her seem like a passive character. On the other hand, after her marriage she herself becomes the rescuer (with the support of her husband). Her courage on her deathbed, and her announcement that it is her wish for Frankenstein to marry Elizabeth, and that Elizabeth must now look after the younger children, indicate resolution and decisiveness as well as insight into Frankenstein’s character. Note too that her death is the result of her courageous decision to nurse Elizabeth herself. Elizabeth: Mary Shelley “softened” her character when she altered the novel for the edition of 1831. It is important to consider what strengths Elizabeth still has to balance the extended and sentimental comparison to an angel in Volume I, Chapter I. Why can she nevertheless not save Frankenstein, and why is she herself destroyed? Her courageous attempt to save Justine’s life by speaking up for her in court, and her honest letter to Frankenstein in Volume III, Chapter V, can be set against the impression given at the climax of the novel that she is a powerless victim of the Creature’s revenge on Frankenstein (important: the attack on Elizabeth is essentially the Creature’s attack on Frankenstein through her, as if she were a pawn in a male power-struggle). Justine: the “classic” female victim of injustice, and the pattern is emphasised by the fact that the judges are all men and that she is unjustly condemned for a horrifyingly “unfeminine” (conventional view) attack on the child. Justine is like Elizabeth and Caroline Frankenstein in showing courage in the face of suffering: her self-possession is contrasted with Frankenstein’s hidden emotional turmoil and cowardice. The priest who manipulates her into making a false confession to save her soul also contrasts unfavourably with Justine, yet she still submits, and dies resigned to her fate. Safie: she is represented as both a victim and a “winner” in the battle of life. Threatened by her father’s ingratitude to the de Laceys and his plans for her to return to Turkey and the harem, she imitates her resolute Christian mother (who “spurned 7

bondage”) and escapes to join Felix – this is described as “the plan of conduct that it would become her to pursue in this emergency.” (page 129). Remember that she is helped in this plan by a girl attendant (whom she nurses affectionately when she falls ill and dies), and by “the woman of the house” who takes care that Safie can cover the last twenty leagues of her journey in safety. The “good hands” that she falls into are the hands of women.

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As a prominent woman author, Mary Shelley could be expected to be interested in women’s position in the family and in society, and in love-relationships seen from the woman’s point of view. She analyses/criticises the way women are treated in a male-dominated society, showing some of the ways in which they can preserve their integrity. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was the best known and most influential feminist writer of the 1790’s. Mary Shelley was determined to find out as much as she could abo...