tic behavior (Thornburg 54-55).
Setting and time are also important to the Romantic writer. Mary Shelley set her story in contemporary time, since she wanted to emphasize the advances of then-modern science. But this is not typical of Romantic concepts. She did, however, place her characters in remote Romantic settings, since much of this novel takes place in the remote Alps. As Germany was the center of the Romantic movement, the creature was created in a university in Ingolstadt, Germany, a faraway and unknown place to much of her reading public. Later in the work, when the bride of the monster must be created as well, the site of her creation is on a remote island somewhere off the coast of Scotland. The purpose of creating a story in a remote place was to set a narrative in a place utterly unknown to the general reader, embellishing the fantasy and glamour of the story (Veeder 127).
The Romantic writer was not interested in creating believable characters. And we do not really believe in the existence of the creator or the creature. Also, the various characters in the story seem to float in and out of reality. Additionally, Romantic-era writers are often condemned for accenting the strange, the bizarre, the unusual in their writing and it is out of the Romantic tradition that we find such figures as the creature in Frankenstein, the vampire in Dracula and the like. Romantic writers felt that the ordinary had no place in the realm of art (much like Hollywood screenwriters today). The major purpose of the Romantic writers was to choose subjects which could affect the reader in a manner which he would not meet in day-to-day life. Because of this motivation, the subject matter of many Romantic novels were strange creatures, or otherwise the writers chose to tell scary stories, using bizarre situations and horrors which he (or she) hoped would startle the reader with situations he had never imagined before. The except...