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| Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (1818) Analysis Major Themes Summary |
The Grand Transition – From Romanticism to Realism in 19th Century Literature
As the 18th century began to turn over a new leaf into the 19th century, literature did a complete volte-face and turned its back upon its then existing norms.
From the immensely romantic and stylized literature of the past century—which embraced the improbable, the illusionary, the supernatural, and the heroic—literature of this new era, i.e., the 19th century, turned to realism in a big way.
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The umbrella of realism covered under its shade realisms of different ilk: social realism, socialist realism, kitchen sink realism, and natural realism, to name but a few. Realistic literature in principle abjured and shunned all subject matter that was unreal, fanciful, or detached from observable human experience.
In other words, it accepted, adopted, and garnered only those things to its bosom that were the matter of everyday life. Furthermore, it also dealt with that which pertained to the lives of common people—their struggles, their labor, their domestic routines, their moral dilemmas, and their socioeconomic constraints. Everything and anything that was perceivable with the help of the five senses became the new cause célèbre for literature and was welcomed with open arms by the “new age authors.”
The Victorian Era – A Prolific Breeding Ground for Literary Stalwarts
The Victorian era—which was what this era was known as, spanning roughly from 1837 to 1901 during Queen Victoria’s reign—produced rather prolifically authors whose names have been etched forever in posterity.
Mary Shelley (though her major work predates Victoria’s ascension, she is often grouped with the Romantic-Victorian bridge), Charles Dickens, Jane Austen (whose major works appeared in the late Georgian/Regency period but heavily influenced Victorian sensibilities), Walt Whitman, Charlotte Brontë, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) are but a very few of the stalwarts whose names will always shine like beacons in the literary sky.
They are all known for amassing and producing fabulous works of fiction, nonfiction, biographies, and autobiographies, which are not only eternal in their appeal but also pathbreaking in their content.
For which lover of literature could possibly not have delved deep and emerged satiated and replenished in their souls from books like Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Walden, Leaves of Grass, Nature, and the anthology of Little Women? All the authors of this time wrote works that dealt with the extant realities of their times.
It could be anything from issues relating to women, children, nature, the daily wage earners, the street walkers, the industrial working class, colonial subjects, and even the lowliest of the low. Their writing served as both a mirror and a critique of Victorian society—its hypocrisies, its reform movements, its class stratification, and its emerging modernity.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley –
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in Somers Town, London, England, into a household of educators, philosophers, and radical thinkers in 1797 on the 30th of August.
Unfortunately, when she was but a babe in arms, her mother—the famed feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—passed away leaving the baby to be brought up by her father, William Godwin (a political philosopher and novelist), and her elder half-sister, Fanny Imlay. When the time came for her education, help came in the guise of a private tutor, as well as her father’s extensive library, which exposed her to Enlightenment thought, revolutionary politics, and Gothic literature.
On her father’s remarriage to Mary Jane Clairmont, Mary’s feathers were continually ruffled by her stepmother, and as both of them were consistently at loggerheads, it was deemed fit that Mary be sent to reside with William Baxter, who was a known radical and a close friend of her father as well, in Scotland.
These formative years in Scotland nurtured her imagination and love for wild, untamed landscapes—an influence that would later permeate the alpine and arctic settings of Frankenstein.
By the time she was fifteen, Mary had chrysalised into a bold young lady with a ravenous thirst for knowledge, well-versed in philosophy, mythology, and contemporary science. She embarked upon a torrid relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a much-married poet and aristocrat who admired her father’s works.
Naturally, this caused them to be ostracized by society; they were perpetually on the run from creditors, scandals, and family estrangements. But their fortunes too took a turn for the better, and there came a time when Mary and Percy did get married (after the suicide of Percy’s first wife, Harriet Westbrook) and parent a son, William, as well as lose several other children to illness—a series of losses that profoundly colored Mary’s view of life, death, and creation.
The author in her penned quite a few memorable novels, of which Valperga (1823, a historical novel about medieval Italy), Mathilda (a posthumously published novella dealing with father-daughter incest and suicide), The Last Man (1826, one of the first apocalyptic science fiction novels), Lodore (1835), Falkner (1837), and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830, a historical romance about a pretender to the English throne) are notable for more than one reason and were very popular in their time.
Despite being overshadowed by Frankenstein, these works deserve renewed critical attention for their treatment of gender, power, and historical determinism.
The Story of Frankenstein (The Modern Prometheus) – Unparalleled Detail and Analysis
The Extraordinary Conception of a Masterpiece
The novel Frankenstein was conceived rather incongruously by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in a waking nightmare or a dream—what she later described as a “waking dream” in her 1831 introduction.
It just so happened that once, when the family was holidaying at Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816 (later called “the year without a summer” due to the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora), an inordinately wet and cold summer kept them confined indoors most of the time.
Recoursing to reading and recounting German ghost stories—from the collection Fantasmagoriana—on these dismal days proved to be their best bet and indeed a boon for this little group that consisted of the Shelleys, their son William, John Polidori (Lord Byron’s personal physician), Claire Clairmont (Mary’s stepsister and Byron’s former lover), and Lord Byron himself.
One such afternoon, Lord Byron proposed that each of them pen a story that dealt with either the supernatural or ghostly shenanigans at the very least. Even so, it was days before Mary could come up with even a germ of a story, much to her mortification. She was anxious to “think of a story” that would “speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror.”
One evening, the gathered group and Mary were exploring ideas for Mary’s story. She had a Eureka moment and began to explore an electrifyingly new idea that she had come across. Galvanisation—a thrilling new concept which had lately been explored by scientific students such as Luigi Galvani and his nephew Giovanni Aldini—allowed for the passage of electrical currents through the body of a dead frog (or a human corpse) to get it twitching, suggesting the reanimation of lifeless matter. That night as she slept, this very thought concretised as a dream: she saw “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. ” She saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretch out and come to life.
Upon waking, terrified yet exhilarated, she resolved to write the story that would eventually become Frankenstein. However, when it was first published anonymously in 1818, Mary was rather reticent about giving her name to the book, which was not just scientifically rather unorthodox but also religiously almost blasphemous, as it appeared to usurp the divine prerogative of creating life.
Plot Structure:
The story begins as a series of correspondences from Robert Walton, an Arctic explorer, to his sister, Mrs. Margaret Saville. Robert is at sea in the higher reaches of Russia, where the view—vast sheets of ice, endless polar nights—hearkens him no end. Robert had not always been a sailor; he became one to overcome the ennui that stifled him. It saddened him, but the reasons for his sadness were beyond him—quite like Antonio’s in the famed Shakespearian drama The Merchant of Venice:
“In sooth, I know not why I am so sad: / It wearies me; you say it wearies you; / But how I caught it, found it, or came by it / What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born, / I am to learn; / And such a want-wit sadness makes of me / That I have much ado to know myself” (The Oxford Shakespeare / Act 1, Sc.1).
The life of a sea farer, buffeted by adventure and danger, was very agreeable to him except for the fact that he yearned to meet a kindred soul—someone who would understand him, share his ambitions, and reciprocate his thoughts and innermost feelings. He voiced his angst to his sister: “...my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend, I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a gentle yet capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own…” (Frankenstein, 1818 edition, p.6).
His prayers of meeting the kind of person he is searching for are answered when Victor Frankenstein is delivered almost onto his doorstep one morning by the kind hand of providence. “…all the sailors busy on one side of the vessel, apparently talking to someone in the sea. It was, in fact, a sledge…but there was a human being within it…A European…his limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering” (Frankenstein p.12).
Within a few days, though good nourishment helped him recover, Victor tended to remain morose and glum. With the passage of time, however, his natural reticence started wearing down, and taking Robert into his confidence, he regaled the story of his extraordinary life.
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