Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

The purpose of this research is to examine Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus with reference to those aspects of the work that appear to inherently derive from the English culture and literary tradition. The plan of the research will be to position Frankenstein in the context of literary history, and then to discuss ways in which the prevailing philosophical literary climate of the period in which the novel was written demonstrates a particularly English interpretation of the cultural universe.

The popular idea of how Frankenstein came to be written derives from Shelley herself, who explains in an introduction to the novel that she, her husband Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron set themselves the literary task of creating ghost stories during a short vacation at a European villa. According to Shelley, the story she conceived was predicated of the notion popular as the 18th became the 19th century that electricity could be a catalyst if not an agent of the life: "In her introduction she recalls the talk about Erasmus Darwin, who had 'preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion'" (Joseph vii). The extraordinary means form the basis for Frankenstein.

At the time the novel was written, England was on the brink of leading the Industrial Revolution in Europe. The experiments of Huntsman (crucible steel manufacture), Newcomen (steam-powered pumps), and Cochrane (coal tar production) th

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her of these sources of authority would do for Shelley, but authority has always to be found somewhere if we are to distinguish the lies that tell truths from just plain lies (Rabkin 43). This is not to say that industrialization and the maturing of scientism were an unmixed blessing, but only that the habit of mind was no longer medieval but as it were modern. This explains the use by Shelley of the colophon The Modern Prometheus, and it does not eliminate the potentiality for literary investigation of the modernist-created moral pause. Fellman (178, 180, et Passim) makes this point when he asserts that Frankenstein was a literary anticipation of the 20th-century preoccupation with and alienation of human beings and technologies. He asserts that technology has led to a culture of repression of positive creative energy in favor of technology that developed a life of its own and that there is a parallel in Frankenstein with Victor's alienation and withdrawal from his family and from the world at large. Curiously, Tillyard deals with the troubling element of moral ambiguity implicit in a culture of scientism when he cites Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, wherein "the poet asks by what means liberty, once lost, can be regain

Category: Literature - M