Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN

The purpose of this paper is to discuss Mary Shelley's work, Frankenstein. The paper will study the text of the work, examine the problems of authorship, and search for the origins of the book. In addition, this paper will trace the influences that led to the writing of the book: occultism, philosophy, science and morality.

Very few writers exist outside of the currents in which they live, and Mary Shelley is no exception. She was a product of the Romantic Era and she moved among the greatest talents of that particular time. But most closely associated with the writing of Mary Shelley is Edgar Allan Poe. His use of the gothic and the bizarre might be said to be a direct descendant of the Frankenstein creation. In any case, since Mary Shelley was so familiar with all of the great minds and talents of the Romantic movement, it is natural that her work would reflect the Romantic trends. It would seem best to study Frankenstein in terms of the major conventions and devices of the Romantic Era.

For Romantic writers, emotions were the cornerstone of art. In Shelley's novel, the creature sensed things before he thought about them. In chapters 11-16, we learn that the creature, on the day he was created, was "born" with emotions and feelings. And it was only with great trial that it was able to learn such things as reading and writing. Therefore, we can conclude that the Romantic writer felt that the subject of art was emotions and the art of highest value was that wh

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hat of her contemporaries, who believed that man could become a perfect being, perfected by himself (Spark 44). The origins of the novel are now clear to modern scholars, and came to Mary Shelley as a result of her elopement on the European continent. There actually was a family of Frankensteins living in Europe (German, to be precise) and that family had a thousand year history. The family of Frankenstein can be traced back to Arbogast von Frankenstein (the name Arbogast is still current in the family), a victorious jouster in a tournament of the Knights of Cologne in 948 AD. The first recorded history of the family begins with the construction of the castle which bears the Frankenstein name, originally built on a small scale in the middle of the thirteenth century, around 1250. The territory was acquired by the Lutzelbachs of Odenwald (the ancestors of the Frankensteins), through their marriage with the Weisterstadt family, who owned some of the villages surrounding the castle. The implication here is that Mary Shelley had borrowed the name of her novel from places she had seen during her voyage down the Rhine with Shelley in 1814. And, given the evidence, it is probably true (Mellor 129). Occultism plays a major role

Category: Literature - M