FRANKENSTEIN

A modern Prometheus

Who was Prometheus according to the Greek myths?

FRANKENSTEIN

Everything you need to know about it

Frankenstein, the novel

This is the story of "Frankenstein"

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley, the author of the novel

It's alive!

A spark of life

Science: good or bad?

What is the role of science depicted in the novel?

Frankestein: a gothic novel or science-fiction?

MOUNT TAMBORA

Can a volcanic eruption be the origin of a literary masterpiece?

Who Was Mary Shelley? Writer Mary Shelley published her most famous novel, Frankenstein, in 1818. Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on August 30, 1797, in London, England. She was the daughter of philosopher and political writer William Godwin and famed feminist Mary Wollstonecraft — the author of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Sadly for Shelley, she never really knew her mother who died shortly after her birth. The Godwin household had a number of distinguished guests during Shelley's childhood, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. While she didn't have a formal education, she did make great use of her father's extensive library. Shelley could often be found reading, sometimes by her mother's grave. She also liked to daydream, escaping from her often challenging home life into her imagination. In 1814, Mary began a relationship with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Percy Shelley was a devoted student of her father, but he soon focused his attentions on Mary. He was still married to his first wife when he and the teenaged Mary fled England together that same year. Writing 'Frankenstein' and Other WorksMary and Percy traveled about Europe for a time. They struggled financially and faced the loss of their first child in 1815. Mary delivered a baby girl who only lived for a few days. The following summer, the Shelleys were in Switzerland with Jane Clairmont, Lord Byron and John Polidori. The group entertained themselves one rainy day by reading a book of ghost stories. Lord Byron suggested that they all should try their hand at writing their own horror story. It was at this time that Mary Shelley began work on what would become her most famous novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Mary and Percy Shelley were finally able to wed in December 1816. She published a travelogue of their escape to Europe, History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), while continuing to work on her soon-to-famous monster tale. In 1818, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus debuted as a new novel from an anonymous author. Many thought that Percy Bysshe Shelley had written it since he penned its introduction. The book proved to be a huge success. That same year, the Shelleys moved to Italy. Their union was riddled with adultery and heartache, including the death of two more of their children. Born in 1819, their son, Percy Florence, was the only child to live to adulthood. Mary's life was rocked by another tragedy in 1822 when her husband drowned. He had been out sailing with a friend in the Gulf of Spezia. Later YearsMade a widow at age 24, Shelley worked hard to support herself and her son. She wrote several more novels, including Valperga and the science fiction tale The Last Man (1826). She also devoted herself to promoting her husband's poetry and preserving his place in literary history. For several years, Shelley faced some opposition from her late husband's father who had always disapproved his son's bohemian lifestyle. Shelley died of brain cancer on February 1, 1851, at age 53, in London, England. She was buried at St. Peter's Church in Bournemouth, laid to rest with the cremated remains of her late husband's heart.

The role of science in Shelley’s Frankenstein Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein examines the pursuit of knowledge within the context of the industrial age, shining a spotlight on the ethical, moral, and religious implications of science. The tragic example of Victor Frankenstein serves to generally highlight the danger of man’s unbridled thirst for knowledge, a science without morality; however, a deeper consideration of the novel’s text reveals a subtle contradiction to such an interpretation. While Shelley exemplifies a disastrous effect of unmitigated desire to possess the secrets of the earth, she employs a subtext filled with contradictory language, which implies that such curiosity is innate to mankind and virtually inextricable from the human condition. The creation of Frankenstein's monster is presented as an unsurpassed feat of scientific discovery, yet one that brings only sorrow, terror, and devastation to his maker. In a sense, the creation of the monster is a punishment inflicted upon Frankenstein for his unbridled pursuit of knowledge. This reflects themes presented in Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, in which Faustus is condemned to hell for his overreaching ambition. These ambitions of Faustus and Frankenstein appear to be beyond the range of information available to mortal, and are in fact infringing upon knowledge meant only for the Divine. In the case of Frankenstein, he has usurped the power of God by creating life without the union of male and female. Shelley wrote Frankenstein during an age where scientific advances were exploding rapidly. The discovery of such concepts as electricity had the power to effectively shake the foundations of previously established constructs and truths about the natural world. What is interesting to note, however, is that these issues, considered very "modern" in Shelley's day, continue to resound within our present age. Our society currently wrestles with such issues as artificial intelligence, cloning, DNA, genetics, neuroscience, and stem cells, which ultimately leads to controversy regarding the roles, uses, and limitations of science. The book exists not as a static representation of a period in history, but as continued fodder for timeless questions on the role of science in human progress, technology, and evolution.

Is Frankenstein a Gothic masterpiece?Frankenstein (1818) is Mary Shelley’s Gothic masterpiece about a young and ambitious student, Victor Frankenstein, who creates a colossal and hideous monster by re-animating a corpse. Why is Frankenstein regarded as a Gothic novel discuss?Gothic novels focus on the mysterious and supernatural. In Frankenstein, Shelley uses rather mysterious circumstances to have Victor Frankenstein create the monster: the cloudy circumstances under which Victor gathers body parts for his experiments and the use of little known modern technologies for unnatural purposes. Does Frankenstein fulfill the criteria for a Gothic novel?Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein implements many elements of the gothic genre in order to enhance her horror story. The two elements that animate this genre within the text the most are isolation of characters and the dark, gloomy settings where they are isolated. What elements of Gothic literature are in Frankenstein?Gothic Elements in Frankenstein Gothic elements include dark settings, suffering of a heroine, and supernatural. occurences. Victor Frankenstein, a man who is fond of. natural sciences, seeks knowledge htat. In the beginning of the story, Shelly. begins her novel in a series of letters with. Is Frankenstein a Gothic novel or science fiction?Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein falls under two different genres of literature: Gothic novel and science fiction. As a Gothic novel, Frankenstein embodies many of the setting and plot elements associated with the genre. For example, the book takes place in dark and ominous spaces in a distant and unfamiliar land.

Prometheus, in Greek religion, one of the Titans, the supreme trickster, and a god of fire. His intellectual side was emphasized by the apparent meaning of his name, Forethinker. In common belief he developed into a master craftsman, and in this connection he was associated with fire and the creation of mortals. The Greek poet Hesiod related two principal legends concerning Prometheus. The first is that Zeus, the chief god, who had been tricked by Prometheus into accepting the bones and fat of sacrifice instead of the meat, hid fire from mortals. Prometheus, however, stole it and returned it to Earth once again. As the price of fire, and as punishment for humankind in general, Zeus created the woman Pandora and sent her down to Epimetheus (Hindsight), who, though warned by Prometheus, married her. Pandora took the great lid off the jar she carried, and evils, hard work, and disease flew out to plague humanity. Hope alone remained within. Hesiod relates in his other tale that, as vengeance on Prometheus, Zeus had him nailed to a mountain in the Caucasus and sent an eagle to eat his immortal liver, which constantly replenished itself; Prometheus was depicted in Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, who made him not only the bringer of fire and civilization to mortals but also their preserver, giving them all the arts and sciences as well as the means of survival.

Deconstructing the Speech of VictorJust one paragraph after the revelation of Victor’s discovery, one that appears to defy the natural order concerning life and death, Victor delivers a warning regarding the thirst for knowledge that he himself has fallen victim to. “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge…” Yet this statement is fraught with contradiction. Victor first commands his listener to “learn” from him and then paradoxically warns of the danger of knowledge. Knowledge is inextricably linked with the learning; by nature one leads to the other. Victor could have easily inserted a similar phrase such as “listen to me.” Because he has not, the clause “how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge” directly contradicts the command, implying that the listener ought not to heed his advice.

In repose for thousands of years, the volcano began rumbling in early April of 1815. Soldiers hundreds of miles away on Java, thinking they heard cannon fire, went looking for a battle. Then, on April 10, came the volcano’s terrible finale: three columns of fire shot from the mountain, and a plume of smoke and gas reached 25 miles into the atmosphere. Fire-generated winds uprooted trees. Pyroclastic flows, or incandescent ash, poured down the slopes at more than 100 miles an hour, destroying everything in their paths and boiling and hissing into the sea 25 miles away. Huge floating rafts of pumice trapped ships at harbor. Throughout the region, ash rained down for weeks. Houses hundreds of miles from the mountain collapsed under the debris. Sources of fresh water, always scarce, became contaminated. Crops and forests died. All told, it was the deadliest eruption in history, killing an estimated 90,000 people on Sumbawa and neighboring Lombok, most of them by starvation. The major eruptions ended in mid-July, but Tambora’s ejecta would have profound, enduring effects. Great quantities of sulfurous gas from the volcano mixed with water vapor in the air. Propelled by stratospheric winds, a haze of sulfuric acid aerosol, ash and dust circled the earth and blocked sunlight. In China and Tibet, unseasonably cold weather killed trees, rice, and even water buffalo. Floods ruined surviving crops. In the northeastern United States, the weather in mid-May of 1816 turned “backward,” as locals put it, with summer frost striking New England and as far south as Virginia. Failing crops and rising prices in 1815 and 1816 threatened American farmers. Odd as it may seem, the settling of the American heartland was apparently shaped by the eruption of a volcano 10,000 miles away. Thousands left New England for what they hoped would be a more hospitable climate west of the Ohio River. Partly as a result of such migration, Indiana became a state in 1816 and Illinois in 1818. In Europe and Great Britain, far more than the usual amount of rain fell in the summer of 1816. It rained nonstop in Ireland for eight weeks. The potato crop failed. Famine ensued. The widespread failure of corn and wheat crops in Europe and Great Britain led to what historian John D. Post has called “the last great subsistence crisis in the western world.” After hunger came disease. Typhus broke out in Ireland late in 1816, killing thousands, and over the next couple of years spread through the British Isles. Researchers today are careful not to blame every misery of those years on the Tambora eruption, because by 1815 a cooling trend was already under way. Also, there’s little evidence that the eruption affected climate in the Southern Hemisphere. In much of the Northern Hemisphere, though, there prevailed “rather sudden and often extreme changes in surface weather after the eruption of Tambora, lasting from one to three years,” according to a 1992 collection of scientific studies titled The Year Without a Summer?: World Climate in 1816. (Smithsonian Magazine)