Romantic novelist married to the poet P.B. Shelley, she is best known as the author of Frankenstein (1818), one of the most unusual and important novels of the 19th

century, which still speaks to us directly as a myth about contemporary life.

SECTION SUMMARY

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MARY SHELLEY• 1797: she was born Mary Wollstonecraft

Godwin, the only daughter of radical philosopher William Godwin and the famous defender of women’s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft.

Sadly for her, she never really knew her mother who died only eleven days after her birth. Her father was left to care for her and her older half-sister Fanny Imlay.

• 1801: Godwin married again. Mary never got along with her stepmother, who always favoured her own children, but she developed a close relationship with one of her half-siblings, Mary Jane (Claire) Clairmont.

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MARY SHELLEYThe Godwin household was certainly unconventional but intellectually electric and had a high number of distinguished guests during Mary’s childhood, including Romantic poets S. T. Coleridge and W. Wordsworth.

1807-1812: though she didn’t have a formal education she loved reading and made great use of her father’s extensive library. From a young age she enjoyed writing fiction, too.

Her father described her as “singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind.” Her desire for knowledge was great, and her perseverance in everything she undertook almost invincible.

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MARY SHELLEY

1814: Mary began a relationship

with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley

a devoted student of her father.

He was still married when he and the teenaged

Mary fled England accompanied by Claire.

The couple would remain together for the next eight years. They travelled together, wrote together, revised and commented on each other’s work.

1815: they lost their first child, a baby girl who only lived for a few days.

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MARY SHELLEY

1816: the Shelleys were in Switzerland with Claire, Lord Byron and John Polidori. Thatsummer, at Villa Diodati, on Lake Geneva, Frankenstein was born.

Her travel book History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) recounts the continental tour she and Shelley took in 1814 following their elopement and their summer near Geneva in 1816.

Later that year, Mary suffered the loss of her half-sister Fanny who committed suicide. Another suicide, this time by Percy’s wife, occurred a short time later so she and Percy Shelley were able to marry in December.

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MARY SHELLEY

1818: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus debuted as a new novel from an anonymous author and in time proved to be a huge success. The Shelleys then moved to Italy.

1819: their son Percy Florence was born, the only one out of four children to survive.

1822: on 8th July, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm on the Gulf of La Spezia while returning from Leghorn (Livorno) to Lerici in his sailing boat. He was cremated and buried in Rome. 8

MARY SHELLEYMade a widow at 24, Mary returned to London and worked hard to support herself and her son. She pursued a very successful writing career as a novelist, biographer and travel writer. Among her novels The Last Man (1826) is often ranked as her best work: it is an account of the future destruction of the human race by a plague.

She also devoted herself to promoting her husband’s poetry and preserving his place in literary history.

1851: she died of brain cancer in London and was buried at St. Peter’s Church in Bournemouth, with the cremated remains of Shelley’s heart.9

GENESIS of FRANKENSTEIN: MOUNT TAMBORA and…

In April 1815 the most powerful Volcanic eruption in human history took place: in Indonesia Mount Tambora sent clouds of volcanic ash billowing into the upper atmosphere and caused

❑ the sun to be obscured;

❑ levels of rainfall to increase;

❑ temperatures to drop.

The summer of the following year was thus dismal and damp, with low temperatures and torrential rain, causing disastrous crop failures throughout North America, Europe and Asia.

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… “the year without a summer”. People living on the other side of the world found it sinister

and eerie to need to light candles at midday as darkness descended… and the discovery by scientists of large dark spots on the sun in the same year added to the growing sense of unease and impending doom.

“The year without a summer”, as 1816 became known, provided the perfect backdrop to the telling of bleak, macabre and doom-laden Gothic tales.

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AT THE VILLA DIODATI That summer Mary travelled with

Percy and Claire through France to meet up with Lord Byron: he had taken lease of the Villa Diodati, on the shores of Lake Geneva, while the Shelleys settled in a smaller house nearby.

They spent many evenings up at the villawith Byron and John Polidori, Byron’sphysician, who had trained in medicine in Edinburgh, and had dissected bodies supplied by grave-robbers.

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GHOST STORIES and… The candlelit interior of the Villa Diodati became

the home to discussions about galvanism and the principles of animation, with Polidori’s medical knowledge acting as a balance for Byron and Percy Shelley’s more speculative imaginings.

When Byron suggested the idea of writing ghost stories, the interest in galvanism, anatomy and the spark of life, together with the thunder storms outside, all took root in Mary’s imagination: late one night she had the nightmare that gave rise to the central idea of Frankenstein…

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…the WINNER!Mary Shelley remembered later:

“... I busied myself to think of a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. ... I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir... By some extraordinary means it beganto move with voluntary motion.”

It was this idea that became her novel Frankenstein.15

THE PLOT

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus tells thestory of a gifted scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who succeeds in giving life to a being of his own creation.

His plan is to create a new life from an assemblage of body-parts, a perfect specimen, capable of defeating death, but he is so involved in his own researches that he loses touch with reality.

The result is a hideous creature, a monstrous being whonevertheless has human feelings.

The creature reacts to Victor’s and mankind’s rejection with hurt, sorrow and fury, seeking its revenge through murder and terror…

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STRUCTURE

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Frankenstein is an epistolary novel in which the story is told from several different points of view:

❖ the story is introduced through a series of letters written by Robert Walton, a young explorer on an expedition voyage to the North Pole, to his sister, Margaret Walton Saville;

❖ it continues with Victor Frankenstein’s narration to Walton about his life history and how he comes to be

alone so near to the North Pole;

❖ it includes the creature’s narration to Frankenstein of what kind of life he hasbeen obliged to lead.

A GOTHIC NOVEL… The novel presents a number of conventional Gothic

elements such as

❑the setting, i.e. a “sublime” natural world dominated by a frightening, bleak, snowy landscape, lonely and haunting;

❑the atmosphere, pervaded by mystery and horror as well as desolation and terror;

❑ the events, i.e.

➢ the creation of a “monster”;

➢ a shocking number of deaths;

➢ a tragic love story with the heroineending up brutally murdered.

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… and MUCH MORE!

Notwithstanding this, it can be considered the first true work of science-fiction because it gave a scientific form to the supernatural formula.

The author made her protagonist a practising “scientist” (a term which would actually be coined only in 1834), and gave him an interest in galvanic electricity and vivisection, two of the advanced technologies of the early 1800s!

It also introduced a powerful new motif, the double, since Frankenstein is complementary on the one hand to his creature, on the other to Walton.

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THEMES 1. The pursuit of forbidden knowledge is at the heart of the

novel, the subtitle of which is the Modern Prometheus.

In Greek mythology Prometheus was a Titan who created man from clay and then stole fire from the gods to give to mortals. He was punished by Zeus for this act of rebellion and became the symbol of human striving, in particular the quest for scientific knowledge, and the risk of overreaching.

Both Frankenstein and Walton can be seen as overreachers: they attempt to defy Nature as Coleridge’s Ancient Marinerhad done, with disastrous consequences… 22

THEMES2. Prejudice is another key aspect in the novel: eight (2,43 mt) feet

tall and hideously ugly, the monster is rejected by society because of his grotesque appearance which blinds people to his initially gentle, kind nature.

3. Family is presented as central to human life, so much so that most of the book’s horror and suffering is caused by characters losing their connection to their families, or not having a family in the first place.

4. Nature is extremely powerful: Victoroften refreshes his mind and soul when he seeks solitude in nature but when he ignores all of the warnings he must pay the ultimate price for violating its laws. 23

VICTIM or PERPETRATOR? At the beginning of the book it all seems quite clear:

Frankenstein is the victim

the creature is the perpetrator

...but part of what makes M. Shelley’s novel such an impressive accomplishment is her ability to

portray the creature as multi-faceted and complex.24

A CHANGE …

It is true that Frankenstein is

❑ trying to achieve something great and morally good, driven by an admirable thirst for knowledge;

❑ not fully aware of the consequences of his actions;

buthe is also

❑ obsessed with scientific achievement and glory, consumed by a “hubris” that will inevitably lead to his own downfall;

❑ a man who lacks humanness, governed by instinctive impulses, refusing to take responsibility for his creation.

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… of PERSPECTIVE. Conversely, it is true that the creature is

❑ frightening and grotesque, enormous in size, supernaturallystrong and dangerous;

❑ responsible for many violent actions and heinous murders;

buthe is also

❑ capable of kindness, intellectuallycurious, eager to learn, sensitive to beauty and nature;

❑ abandoned from the start by his «father», persistentlyrejected, left without a family or a companion.

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So… VICTIM or PERPETRATOR? Frankenstein’s arrogant scientific endeavour and his desire

to attain the godlike power of creating new life transgressing all boundaries without concern is the real cause of the ensuing disaster. Thus we end up seeing:

the creature as the victim

Frankenstein as the perpetrator

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LEGACY Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein feels absolutely contemporary:

why? It addresses the most fundamental human questions…

“It’s the idea of asking your maker what your purpose is. Why are we here, what can we do?” (Patricia MacCormack, professor of continental philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University);

“Death is an absolute. So the idea that you can reanimate fleshis both shocking and enthralling.” (Sorcha Ni Fhlainn, senior lecturer in film studies at Manchester Metropolitan University).

Moreover it questions the right of science to ignore the social and ethical consequences of its actions:

“The question it asks, «How far is too far?», is at the very heart of modernity”. (Fiona Sampson, In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein, 2018).

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CURIOSITIES Frankenstein has been adapted for film repeatedly: since

the first silent version in 1910 there have been about 150 further versions on different media!

Frankenstein’s monster likewise has remained a potent

metaphor: at the turn of the 21st century opponents

of genetically engineered food

coined the term Frankenfood

to express their concern over

the unknown effects of the

human manipulation of

foodstuffs.30