Mary Shelley

The daughter of an active feminist, Mary Woolstonecraft Shelley eloped with the famous poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at the age of 15, and after was continually and profoundly influenced by his words and writings. Her novel Frankenstein is named among the best written and most meaningful of the gothic works, and is one of the few still popularly read today. A precursor to the Romantic trend in art and intellect, gothic novels rejected of the precepts of order, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. The gothic tradition grew out of disillusionment with the Enlightenment and 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism. Romanticism as a whole emphasized the individual, the irrational, the imaginative, the spontaneous, the emotional, and the transcendental. Shelley herself defines "gothic" as a story "which would speak to the mysterious fears of our Nature, and would awaken thrilling horror--one to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart." By infusing moral and social concerns into the gothic style, Shelley achieves more than a simple horror story, however. The universal societal and psychoanalytical questions raised in Frankenstein secure its place in world literature and promise decades of similarly fashioned gothic writings.

As stated above, the gothic genre developed as a harsh reaction to the predominant Neoclassic ideals of the time; the emphasis shifted from the whole to the solitary, and from society to nature. The "Graveyard Poets," one of whom is Thomas Gray, are attributed with having ushered in the new philosophy and are often termed "Pre-Romantics." Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" has all the elements of the gothic: graves, overtones of death, a rural setting, and a desire for return to a more simplistic, natural time. Simultaneously, Jean-Jacques Rousseau preached a similar creed which presented society as evil, and called for a "natural state of man." Shelley was schooled in both writers, and took their words to heart. In 1776 and 1789 Revolutions swept America and France, indicating that the Neoclassic ideals were not as stable as was previously thought. News of these revolutions infected the English with fears about similar occurrences in their own country, and much of this trepidation is manifested through devices such as the senseless mob violence in Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley took fragments of histories and a legend surrounding the castle Frankenstein (which she may or may not have visited) she had heard and developed them into her novel. The castle was once inhabited by a doctor Conrad Dipple, an alchemist who claimed to have the elixir of life, and was known for graverobbing and signing his name "Frankenstiena." She came across this information while vacationing with her husband and Lord Byron in Geneva in the summer of 1816. Mary writes in notes for an edition of her late husband's poetry that they read that summer the New Testament, Paradise Lost, Spenser's Faery Queene, Montaigne's Essays, and Aeschylus' Prometheus, among numerous others (The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley 575). One evening the three, along with Dr. John Polidori and Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, were trapped in Byron's castle as a storm raged outside. For a change from reading Coleridge's vampiric poem "Christabel," Byron suggested a ghost story competition. Out of this competition came Polidori's "The Vampyre," Byron's "Manfred," and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the idea for which came to her in a nightmare.

The setting under which the story was devised was perfect for the story itself; Frankenstein takes place in the Swiss Alps and in Ingolstadt, where Victor Frankenstein is schooled and creates his monster. The novel swims in gloom and decadent expanses of castle and lecture hall, and all the confrontation scenes between Victor and his creation take place in harsh natural settings such as the cliffs and the ice floes. This reinforces Shelley's belief in both the destructive and beautiful properties inherent in nature, and heightens the conflict between the two characters.

The setting, in turn, helps create the mood which permeates the novel. The tone is melancholy, and has an almost destructive sense about it. Due to the instability of the entire society, and Victor in particular, the mood shifts much like the emotions of a manic-depressive would; Victor seems wholly disconsolate yet notices flashes of beauty, such as in the spring during which he recovered with Clerval's assistance. The tone also reveals the social prejudices of the time during the scenes in which the monster is attacked though he has done nothing to provoke such action. This mob mentality is used to illustrate the dangers of a society thinking as a whole; one mistake, and all is lost. The attacks are depicted violently and seem almost mechanical as one shout of fear and misunderstanding leads to an uncontrollable mass of angry bodies without any real reason for their ire. The truly frightening aspect of the mob scenes is the fact that no one questions the purpose behind the attack, but simply follows.

The story makes use of a frame, a structure typical of the genre. The events are retold from a first-person narrative to a secondary audience who is unfamiliar with the happenings. This allows justification of expository information and also allows the audience (now the narrator) to voice thematic and moral assumptions derived from the content of the tale. Frankenstein begins as a seaman's journal, but, upon the beginning of Victor's experience, drops almost entirely the presence of Robert Walton (the seaman) and presents the tale through the Doctor's eyes. Walton is necessary for practical reasons as well: since Frankenstein dies, there must be someone to relate his life, and it would be unfeasible for the story to be told through a personal journal for the simple fact that Frankenstein had more important things to do than keep a diary.

Shelley drew from two Classical sources, Ovid's Metamorphosis and John Milton's Paradise Lost, for the creation of Frankenstein. From Metamorphosis came the Prometheus legend, which appears in the subtitle "The Modern Prometheus." One of the Titans in Greek mythology, Prometheus returned fire from Mount Olympus to the humans after it had been taken from them by Zeus, and so was imprisoned on a peak where an eagle each day ate his liver, which grew again each morning. The Prometheus legend applies to Frankenstein in the instance of Victor, who obtains forbidden knowledge (that which humans should not have,