This document discusses several key aspects of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: 1) It describes the context in which Shelley conceived of and wrote Frankenstein, during a rainy day when she and other Romantic poets told ghost stories to pass the time. 2) It provides a brief summary of the framing device and storytelling structure of Frankenstein, which is told through a series of letters from Captain Walton. 3) It explores some of the scientific ideas that influenced Shelley, particularly galvanism and the question of whether life could be created through electrical stimulation.

1. ENG503:
ROMANTICISM &
BEYOND
LITERARY & CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF ROMANTICISM
The Romantic Gothic (Shelley's Frankenstein)

3. • In Greek mythology, the Titan
Prometheus had a reputation as
being something of a clever
trickster and he famously gave the
human race the gift of fire and the
skill of metalwork, an action for
which he was punished by Zeus,
who ensured everyday that an
eagle ate the liver of the Titan as he
was helplessly chained to a rock.
PROMETHEUS MYTHOLOGY

4. • It was a rainy, gloomy day on Lake Geneva, and a bunch of
Romantic poets were stuck in the house with nothing to do. To
pass the time, Lord Byron suggested that they each write a ghost
story. Nineteen-year-old Mary wracked her brain to think of a good
one. "I busied myself to think of a story, - a story to rival those
which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the
mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror -- one
to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and
quicken the beatings of the heart,“ Shelley wrote. The story came
to her in a dream. It was a vision of a creature brought into the
world by human hands, of life without birth. It would be a story of
all that could go wrong when men try to play God. She awoke and
began to write the world's first modern horror novel -
Frankenstein.
MARY SHELLEY: WRITING
FRANKENSTEIN

5. • In a series of letters, Robert Walton, the captain of a ship
bound for the North Pole, recounts to his sister back in
England the progress of his dangerous mission. Successful
early on, the mission is soon interrupted by seas full of
impassable ice. Trapped, Walton encounters Victor
Frankenstein, who has been traveling by dog-drawn sledge
across the ice and is weakened by the cold. Walton takes him
aboard ship, helps nurse him back to health, and hears the
fantastic tale of the monster that Frankenstein created.
Question: Can you create the frame from which this story is told.
FRAMING FRANKENSTEIN

6. The preface of Frankenstein is almost completely devoted to
further defining the reason by which Shelley chose to gorge
herself in the idea of galvanism, which led her to a radical dream
about the creation of life through electrical movement. In the
preface, she writes, “I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental
vision, – I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling
beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous
phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of
some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an
uneasy, half vital motion.”
THE PREFACE

7. • “Galvanism” can be defined as the effect of the application of
electric current pulses through body tissues that causes
muscle contraction. Late in the 18th century, Scientist Luigi
Galvani, who was experimenting on dissected frogs, mistakenly
touched a brass rod to a steel scalpel making a clear
contraction of muscle in an otherwise dead frog. He believed
that this form of electricity, which he called “animal electricity”,
was a form of energy that was still being held in the animal’s
tissue. Today, it is referred to as Electrophysiology and
scientists are aware that it is not in fact an electrical fluid
streaming from the brain that makes the animal twitch but
instead just the effect of the joining of two metals and their
electrical charges.
IDEAS OF GALVANISM

9. This deals with the idea of “duality” where the positive and negative
electrical forces highlight other contrasts within the novel such as the
monster’s character as good or evil, and the morals of Dr. Frankenstein as
being the creator versus the destroyer.

10. According to the humoural theory passed down from the Greek Hippocratics 2500 years
ago and established until modern times, we harboured all four humours in the blood.
(Note: the humour blood is distinct from the usual blood.)
We were born with a certain temperament that was made up of a mixture of these
humours: the body`s constitution or complexion, orkrasis (in Greek), was constituted by
them. Ideally all of the humours had to be balanced, according to one`s temperament.
When the body was thrown off-balance, it was in a state ofdyskrasia (in Greek), and that
was when one was ill, unhappy or out-of- sorts.
The proportions between the humours were thought to change over a lifetime, but also
over the year, and even the day. No one was born with an equal amount of each one, and
what counted as optimal balance for one person differed from what counted as optimal
balance for someone else.
Still, each humour traditionally had specific characteristics. These are described on the
results page if you take the humoural personality test, but they are summed up below.
https://prezi.com/y9gns_f118s6/the-four-humours/
HUMOURAL THEORY

12. 1818 Frankenstein or the Modern Promethius
1931 Frankenstein / Bride of Frankenstein: The Legacy Collection
THE LEGACY OF FRANKENSTEIN

13. STORIES AND STORYTELLING:
- Plays with ‘story’; reader pieces together stories.
- Multiplicity of tales/half-remembered details with multiple narrators.
- Parallel stories hint future doom (e.g. story of the nun at San Stefano).
- Anti/non-linearity – labyrinthine narratives/tales.
- Self-consciousness: self-conscious references to the process of fictionalisation
and storytelling; reader made aware they are reading a novel.
- Interplay of reality and fantasy.

14. ‘TERROR’ V. ‘HORROR’: RADCLIFFE DEVELOPS
BURKE’S AESTHETIC THEORY; PRIVILEGES ‘TERROR’:
‘Terror’: elevates the mind and enables action; created in novel by
‘obscurity’, which allows the imagination to exaggerate reality. (2, vi,
p. 229)
‘Horror’: freezes human faculties, renders the mind passive and
immobilises the body. Horror created via themes/motifs such as
underground vaults, charnel houses etc.
TERROR AND HORROR ARE SO FAR OPPOSITE, THAT THE FIRST
EXPANDS THE SOUL, AND AWAKENS THE FACULTIES TO A HIGH
DEGREE OF LIFE; THE OTHER CONTRACTS, FREEZES, AND NEARLY
ANNIHILATES THEM.
(Radcliffe (1826) , ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’)