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Frankenstein Notes
Introduction
● Playing up the anxiety around gendered issues and sciences
● Engaging in contemporary issues but also critiquing that
● Victor is an unreliable narrator, we can trust his facts but not his interpretations
Elizabeth
● First introduction to her: “she became my playfellow and eventually my friend”
● Striking and uncomfortable way of looking at this character
● She’s got a range of characteristics that are worth noting, she is a stereotypical
feminine character.
● She is described as- emotional, docile, good-tempered, a sort of domesticated
animal, pet, fragility
○ “She was docile and good-tempered, yet gay and playful as a summer insect.”
○ “No one could better enjoy liberty, yet no one could submit with more grace
than she did to constraint and caprice”
■ He doesn’t completely separate her from rationality, yet she is willing
to be controlled in irrational ways
○ “... her hazel eyes, although as lively as a bird’s, possessed an attractive
softness”
■ Victor finds feminine features as attractive
○ “While I admired her understanding and fancy, I loved to tend on her, as I
should on a favourite animal…”
○ “I delighted investigating the facts relative to the actual word; she busied
herself in following the aerial creations of the poets. The world to me was a
secret, which I desired to discover; to her, it was a vacancy…”
■ Victor believes that he is interested in the real world whereas she is
interested in the vacancy, she is airy
○ He’s devaluing all form of femininity through Elizabeth
○ Victor considers women as an accessory
○ Even in praising her, he’s undercutting aspects of her character
● How does Elizabeth become a part of the family?
○ Victor and Elizabeth were first cousins- incestuous and creepy
○ Shelley later changed Elizabeth’s backstory in a later revision
○ Elizabeth is chosen for Victor by his mother, the mother becomes a
controlling figure here
■ Wrap Victor up in the domestic world
■ Victor is overdetermining the restraints of the domestic world
● Victor is grounded in the feminine world, Elizabeth and women are associated very
strongly with the domestic space
● Female sexuality is often called into question
● Victor wants to cut women out of the reproduction cycle
● Elizabeth reinforces that the domestic space is not for men and that Victor will
forget the domestic world once he leaves
● Elizabeth is reminding Victor that she is not just a vacancy, she has fairly political
views through a letter written to him
● Elizabeth talks about Justine the same way Victor talks about her
Henry
● “Henry Clerval was the son of a merchant of Geneva. He was a boy of singular talent
and fancy. He loved enterprise, hardship, and even danger for its own sake. He was
deeply read in books of chivalry and romance. He composed heroic songs and began
to write many a tale of enchantment and knightly adventure.” (32)
● Presented in a better light than Elizabeth, even though he too lives in a world of
fantasy
● Associated with poets and fantasy, like Elizabeth, but Victor consider Henry to be
ideal
○ For Elizabeth: poetry is a vacancy
○ For Henry: poetry is a study
● The friend is a social bond- there is a gap and a gendered way of looking at
friendship
● Henry represents a halfway house (between a public house that Victor moves into
and also the tight domestic sphere of Elizabeth)
Justine
● “Do you remember on what occasion Justine Moritz entered our family? Probably
you do not; I will relate her history, therefore, in a few words. Madame Moritz, her
mother, was a widow with four children, of whom Justine was the third. This girl
had always been the favourite of her father, but through a strange perversity, her
mother could not en- dure her, and after the death of M. Moritz, treated her very ill.
My aunt observed this, and when Justine was twelve years of age, prevailed on her
mother to allow her to live at our house.” (68)
● Epistolary narrative
● A minor character who exists to be a victim
● She is driven out of the domestic world
Victor
● Victor is much more interest in science and natural philosophy
● The idea of finding the secrets of the world was part of cultural learning
● Science was usually a public spectacle during the time that this novel was published.
○ Versus. But Victor describes his scientific descriptions as secret, hidden and
private
● Science was also of interest to men and women during this time period
○ Versus. Victor sees science as something associated with the male world and
related strictly to masculinity
● Science experiments in public spheres were very modern and progressive, a thing of
the future
○ Versus. Victor considers science as a thing of medieval time and the past
Pursuit of Science
● “It was with these feelings… to the charms of nature”. (54-55)
○ This is an obsession, not a cool, researched experiment
○ Emotive, not a lot of scientific details
○ Describes it as filthy and profane, the language is about dirt and impiety
■ Even he knows that he’s not doing anything good
○ Language of religion is used, rather than science
○ Body-snatching, stealing from dissection labs
○ Talking about vivisection through torturing animals
○ Creating a new life at the cost of torturing already living beings- not a good
way of becoming a God
○ Science as an isolated and imprisoned space
○ Watched over by the moon, working at night- living with a cloak
○ Insensible to nature, nature no longer has power over Victor
■ Geneva, Elizabeth, women= serene, natural beauty
■ Victor’s cut himself off from nature
January 27th
Class Issues
● Creature is related to labour and working class
○ The creature willingly makes a servant of himself for the family
● The monster learns about family with aristocratic background, that’s more
appealing to him than the other peasants
Allusions
● Shelley uses a lot of literary intertext
○ 2 central points: Paradise Lost, and Tintern Abbey
○ Throughout= R of the Mariner
Paradise Lost Allusions
● Creature talks about importance about absorbing the ideals of a moral man
● Absorbs from Paradise Lost: the story of creation and being turned away by your
maker
○ Negative parody of Adam, unlike Adam, the Monster is already fallen
○ Associated with Eve
■ Monster becomes convinced of his monstrosity when he looks into the
pond
● Creature doesn’t think he’s able to be anything other than a
monster
● Creature is also similar to Satan
■ However, in Paradise Lost, Eve sees herself as beautiful
● Morality of creation, the responsibility of the creator to his/her creation
Tintern Abbey
● In TA the narrator says that Dorothy is like his younger self, Clerval is compared to
Dorothy
● The Wordsworthian return to nature is not possible in this story
Sappy Story
● Interlude of former French Aristocrats, a young woman from Turkey shows up to
learn French
○ This allows Creature to speak and read
● This exotic fascination
Travel/ Landscape
● Victor goes travelling at the beginning of volume 3, as he goes to England w/ Clerval
(after the death of little Will.)
● V is still miserable in this beautiful landscape, whereas the Creature (even briefly) is
able to find comfort in the natural landscape around him
○ Creature is associated with the natural world
● C takes about the landscape about the Rime is more relatable to human nature
rather than the peaks and values
○ Glacier+Mountains is out of step with mankind, this is where the Creature
sneaks
● C seeks something greater in the natural world, V is able to find beauty in the
landscape with the help of a feminine figure (Clerval)
○ The creature is hypermasculine and so Victor can’t find any humanity left
within the monster
● Victor travels to England (V is originally from Geneva)
○ Germany is associated with doing bad, monster-making stuff (dark, dreary
lab)
○ And England is presented as an enlightened world of science, London is
associated with a positive version of science
■ Victor goes here to make contact with positive sciences (he doesn’t
remain here- says a lot about his character)
● Moving, travel, investigating= Victor= masculine
● Domestic space, still, Elizabeth doesn’t travel with Victor= feminine
● Travel to Orkney (Very Northern part of Scotland)
○ This is an isolated space, not very popular travel destination
○ V goes here to create monster #2
○ “... This i hired… mountainous yet ever changing scene… “
○ A landscape that suggests something about Victor’s mental state in his time
○ Movement into empty, barren, bleak landscape as a form of punishment even
though he claims to be guiltless
● Landscapes are associated with the mental capacity of the characters
● Victor associates the Monster with a barren landscape, but he also aligns himself
with the creature by moving into a landscape laid with isolation
January 30th
Exploration- Background
● Drawing about the assumption of the world outside of Europe as magical and
uninhabited
○ Idea of the rest of the world as a blank space
○ Exploration as means of glory
● An Obsession with the Polar North
○ The Arctic becomes a place to project their fantasies
○ A wild space of adventure and fantasy
○ Scientific travels being made for science
○ England’s desperate effort to find the North-West Passage, people were able
to get to the Arctic when the snow melted
■ Development of a national identity
○ Panoramas were created to indulge the contemporary audiences
● Association of the Arctic as mystery, romance and the gothic
○ John Keats, April 1819 letter to his brother and sister-in-law from The Letters
of John Keats also was interested in the panoramas as a spectacle rather than
just a scientific
○ Trapped in a world that isn’t human
● Shelley places the Arctic as a place of exploration, scientific discovery about also
anti-human
● Emphasize the fear of the Arctic and turning it into the gothic
● Situated this novel in cultural phenomenon of the Arctic
● Desire to reach this gothic horror, violence and power of nature
● From Barker’s programme- on the walruses
○ He even described walruses as monstrous and ugly
● It’s not really a monstrous thing but they turn it into a grotesque thing
● Scientific discovery and a defamiliarized landscape
● Arctic becomes a place that both interests and threatens Britishness (specifically
British masculinity)
● Establishing British power in Frankenstein
● Adriana Craciun, “Writing the Disaster: Franklin and Frankenstein,”
○ The novel is shaped by Arctic discourse but also shapes Arctic discourse
○ Franklin expedition
○ Franklin writes about his expedition and draws on the same tropes as Shelley
does, suggests the north is a place to proving and testing masculinity