Research Essay You will write a thesis-driven literary research .docx

Research Essay
You will write a thesis-driven literary research paper about one
or more of the assigned texts we have read and discussed this
quarter. The paper may be an extension of short essays
The thesis should make an argument about the text(s), and the
supporting discussion should defend this argument by quoting
particular passages and analyzing their meaning. This is NOT a
BOOK REPORT so make sure you avoid merely
SUMMARIZING the text(s). The thesis cannot duplicate an
argument made in the secondary sources, but it can be situated
with reference to one or more arguments. The paper must cite at
least THREE credible outside sources obtained from Bloom’s
Literature database.
The assigned text is a primary source; credible outside sources
are published articles or books referring to the authors, texts,
and/or their time periods or describing a useful theoretical
perspective from which you will analyze the primary text, e.g.
theories from sociology, economics, or psychology.
Criteria for Grade: 1. Name the author(s) and the title(s) of the
work(s) you are discussing;
2. Present a clear thesis about the work(s) that responds to the
question(s);
3. Refer to specific examples in the work(s) in order to support
your thesis;
4. Analyze both the work(s)’s form and content while using
proper terminology;
5. Cite at least THREE outside sources that comment on the
topic of your paper;
6. Correct spelling and grammar.
Format: Typed, double-spaced, ONE inch margins, 12 point font
Times New Roman. Length: Approximately 1000-1200 words.
Faustian theme
From:A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms, Second

Edition.
The generic term for stories of people whose lust for absolute
knowledge drives them to tragic extremes, symbolized by a pact
with the Devil. The legend is based upon the career of Johann
Faust, a 16th-century German scholar who experimented with
alchemy and magic. An account of his life that incorporated
medieval legends of selling souls to the devil, published in
1587, provided the basis for Christopher Marlowe's Tragical
History of Dr. Faustus (1588–92). Marlowe's play is notable for
Faust's celebration of the beauty of Helen of Troy and for its
powerful conclusion in which Faustus is dragged screaming into
Hell.
Dr. Faustus was imitated by German writers of the 17th and
18th centuries, who emphasized the magical tricks of Faustus
and downplayed the tragic aspects of the story. The adaptation
of Gotthold Lessing in 1759 restored the serious tone,
emphasizing Faust's lust for knowledge as his motive.
In Goethe's great drama (Faust, Part One, 1808, Part Two,
1832), Faust's story illustrates the basic unity underlying the
variety and complexity of life. Its happy ending, in which Faust
is saved because of his constant searching and striving, reflects
the Romantic belief in the ultimate goodness of the human soul.
Following Goethe, scores of 19th-century writers attempted
with little success to capture the essence of the figure. The most
notable 20th-century rendering of the theme is Thomas
Mann'sDoktor Faustus (1947), in which the story is recast as a
commentary on the German people's "pact" with Nazism. Some
critics have also seen in Faust the embodiment of the scientist's
arrogance that issued in the atomic age. The American poet Karl
Shapiro, in "The Progress of Faust" (1946), describes Faust's
reemergence "In an American desert at war's end."
Modern comic versions of the story include Stephen Vincent
Benet's The Devil and Daniel Webster (1937) and Douglas
Wallop's The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (1954), later
transformed into the successful Broadway and film

musical Damn Yankees (1957; 1958).
Further Information
J. W. Smeed's Faust in Literature (1975) traces the history of
the figure.
Citation Information
Quinn, Edward. "Faustian theme." A Dictionary of Literary and
Thematic Terms, Second Edition. New York: Facts On File,
Inc., 2006. Bloom's Literature. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 6 Mar.
2016.
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gothic literature
From:A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms, Second
Edition.
A type of fiction that employs mystery, terror or horror,
suspense, and the supernatural for the simple purpose of scaring
the wits out of its readers. The traditional setting, beginning
with Hugh Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), is a
medieval (hence, "gothic") castle, replete with secret passages,
torchlit dungeons, and an occasional bat. The traditional plot, as
in Anne Radcliffe'sThe Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), involves a
beautiful heroine beset by dark shadows, strange noises, and a
candle that keeps blowing out. These early gothic novels aimed
at instilling terror. Later examples of the form, such as Matthew
Lewis's The Monk (1796), moved beyond terror to horror,
invoking demons, ghosts, and other supernatural paraphernalia
in gory and subliminally erotic detail.
The form maintained its popularity from the 1760s to the 1830s.

During that time it was imitated throughout Europe, influencing
and being influenced by the age of Romanticism. Satirized by
Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey (1818), the form eventually
fell out of favor, only to resurface in the 20th century as
the horror fiction and horror film. One particularly memorable
example of the form, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), is
also regarded as an early progenitor of science fiction.
Further Information
Brendan Hennessy's The Gothic Novel (1978) offers a useful
survey of the genre; Manuel Aguirre's The Enclosed
Space (1990) places it in the context of all horror literature.
Quinn, Edward. "gothic literature." A Dictionary of Literary and
Thematic Terms, Second Edition. New York: Facts On File,
Inc., 2006. Bloom's Literature. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 6 Mar.
2016.
5&iPin=Gfflithem0359&SingleRecord=True>.
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Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Born: 1797 Died: 1851
British novelist
From:Encyclopedia of Literary Romanticism.
Born in Somers Town, London, on August 30, 1797, Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley was the only child of Mary
Wollstonecraft, the educational theorist and pioneer for

women's rights, and William Godwin, the anarchist philosopher
and bookseller. Wollstonecraft died 11 days after giving birth to
Mary. She was brought up with her mother's other daughter,
Fanny, whose father was the American adventurer Gilbert
Imlay. When Mary was three years old, Godwin married his
next-door neighbor, Mary Jane Clairmont, who introduced her
two illegitimate children into the household: Mary Jane, who
became known as Claire, and Charles. Mary acquired another
half sibling when Godwin's second wife gave birth to William.
With her sister Fanny she attended a "Dame School", the
popular name given to a certain type of infant school run—often
haphazardly—by an elderly lady, and then, for seven months in
1811, Miss Caroline Petman's school at Ramsgate, where the
daughters of Dissenters were educated. While at home, Mary
had access to her father's library and tutelage, benefiting from
the historical books he wrote for children. Visiting tutors gave
her lessons in art and French, in which she became fluent. Other
languages she acquired included Latin, Greek, Italian, and some
Spanish.
In June 1812 Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was sent to Dundee
for her health and stayed at the home of William Baxter, who
had supported her father during his opposition to the Treason
Trials of 1794. The house at Broughty Ferry overlooked the
romantic scene of a 15th-century castle. In the 1831
introduction to her most acclaimed novel, Frankenstein, she
wrote that trees and mountains were where her imaginative
works were fostered. Mary stayed with the Baxters, who became
a second family, for 16 months. One of the daughters, Christina,
made a return visit with Mary to the Godwins in London. The
day after their arrival on November 11, 1812, they are believed
to have met the young Romantic poet and aristocrat Percy
Bysshe Shelley, who was accompanied by his wife, Harriet
Westbrook, and her older sister. Mary resumed her sojourn in
Scotland until March 1814 when, on returning to the Godwin
household, she found that Shelley had established himself as a
firm favorite with her sisters. He was also a disciple of the

writings of their father, to whom he gave financial assistance, a
circumstance later fictionalized in hershort story "The
Parvenue" (1836). The poet also revered Wollstonecraft (her
mother, also a poet), whose works he and Mary are reputed to
have read aloud at her graveside as their romance blossomed.
William Godwin disapproved of their union as Shelley was still
married and his wife was expecting their second child.
On July 28, 1814, the lovers eloped to France, taking with them
Mary's half sister Claire. Mary later published a version of her
journal account of their travels as the jointly authored History
of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland,
Germany and Holland (1817), which was also a travelogue of
the inner Romantic journey. The impoverished trio wandered
around Europe, which had been ravaged by the Napoleonic
Wars, returning to England in September. On February 22,
1815, Mary gave birth to a premature daughter, who survived
for just 11 days. In her journal she recorded a dream of the baby
coming back to life. This ties in with the theme of reanimation,
which characterized some of her fiction, most
notably Frankenstein.
Between September 1814 and July 1815, the couple stayed in a
series of lodging houses before settling at Bishopsgate on the
edge of Windsor Great Park, which furnished in part the setting
of Mary's third novel, TheLast Man (1826). While living there,
she gave birth to their son, William, in January 1816. The
following May they departed for Geneva with Claire Clairmont
to rendezvous with Lord Byron, who was spending the summer
in Switzerland. Their destination had been determined by the
fact that Claire was pregnant with Byron's child and hoped, at
the very least, for his paternal support. The convergence of
Byron, his physician John Polidori, and Shelley's party would
lead to a cross-fertilization of literary production culminating in
the publication ofFrankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus (1818).
As Mary Shelley explained in her introduction to the revised
edition of Frankenstein in 1831, her inspiration for the novel

had been the idea for members of the group to tell each other
ghost stories of their own invention. According to Mary's
anonymous account as given to Thomas Moore in his Life of
Lord Byron (1835) the great poet had suggested that they should
all contribute to a book, which his fame would help sell. This
entertainment took place in 1816 at Villa Diodati at the side of
Lake Leman in Geneva, Switzerland, during that "wet and
uncongenial summer" (Shelley 1980, 7) as Mary wrote in the
1831 Preface to Frankenstein. These adverse weather conditions
had come about due to the activity of Mount Tambora on the
island of Sumbawa, south of Borneo, which proved to be the
most violent volcanic eruption in recorded history. This had
resulted in the coldest summer on record, which ironically
precipitated the forging of Frankensteinfrom the heart of a
volcano.
The night of the ghost-story writing proposed by Byron might
have been June 13, when the group had been driven indoors by
an electrical storm. Lightning has been associated in the popular
imagination, mainly through film adaptations, with the genesis
of Shelley's monstrous birth myth. In her 1831 introduction, she
indicates how a conversation about galvanism had helped spark
her creativity. Byron's guests diverted themselves by reading
some German ghost stories translated into French,
entitled Fantasmagoriana, ou Recueil d'Histoires d'Apparitions
de Spectres, Revenans, Fantômes, etc.; traduit de l'allemand,
par un Amateur (1812), which, according to the preface of the
1818 edition "excited in us a playful desire of imitation"
(Shelley, 1980, 14). Two of these, "The Death-Bride", about a
spectral lover, and "The Family Portraits", in which a portrait
comes to life, influenced Mary's creation along with her
"waking dream", which probably took place on June 16. Her tale
of a creature created out of the parts of cadavers, which would
seek vengeance upon its creator, would emerge as one of the
most powerful and enduring myths to explode out of the gothic
tradition.
On returning to England, Mary lodged at 5 Abbey Churchyard

in Bath, where she continued her plan of transforming her tale
into a novel. While writing in October, she learned of the
suicide of her half sister Fanny, who had died after taking
laudanum at the Mackworth Arms in Swansea. The following
December, there was more sad news. Percy Shelley's wife
Harriet, whom he had left (though no official separation had
taken place), had taken her own life by drowning in Hyde Park's
artificial lake known as the Serpentine. The exact date of her
death is disputed, but it freed him to marry Mary at St.
Mildred's Church in London on December 30, 1816. In January
1817 Claire gave birth to Byron's daughter, Alba, known later
as Allegra, and during the following September, Mary's second
daughter, Clara Everina Shelley, was born.
By this time the Shelleys had been living at Albion House,
Marlow, in Buckinghamshire for five months, and it was here
that Frankenstein reached completion. The novel was published
anonymously in three volumes on January 1, 1818. The author
was assumed by some to be a disciple of William Godwin, to
whom it was dedicated. Walter Scott alighted on Percy Shelley
as the obvious candidate; in fact, Shelley had only actually
written the preface, though he had helped edit the novel. Mary's
name appeared on the title page of the second edition, issued in
1823, the year after Percy's death. The person responsible for
this publication was Godwin, who also made minor alterations
from the first edition. In August that year, the story was
dramatized by Richard Brinsley Peake as Presumption: or, The
Fate of Frankenstein, which Mary Shelley saw performed at the
Lyceum and the English Opera House in London. It proved
highly successful, and a new version was staged in Paris.
In March 1818, the Shelleys set sail from Dover for the
Continent, prompted by concerns for Percy's health and fears
that after the Lord Chancellor gave custody of his children by
Harriet to her family, the law would take away his children by
Mary. The tragic loss of their children, however, came about in
other ways. In September 1818 their two-year-old daughter,
Clara, died from dysentery in Venice, and their three-year-old

son, William, died of malaria, otherwise known as "Roman
fever", in Rome in June 1819. Their fourth and only surviving
child, Percy Florence Shelley, was born on November 12, 1819,
in Florence. It was here that Mary Shelley started research work
on a historical novel set in the 14th century, eventually
called Valperga, or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio
Castracani (1823), the idea for which she had conceived in
Marlow in 1817. It concerns the clash between tyranny and
republicanism. Castruccio is a despotic warlord who is modeled
on the actual feudal lord of Lucca. He is in love with
Euthanasia, who rules the fortress of Valperga in a peaceful and
conciliatory way according to the principles of reason and
sensibility.
In January 1820 the Shelleys moved to Pisa. That year Mary
Shelley wrote the mythological verse drama Midas and the
children's story Maurice, or, The Fisher's Cot, before settling,
probably in the autumn, to the composition of Valperga, a task
that occupied most of 1821. In April 1822, the first of more
terrible losses for that year struck with the death of Clare's
daughter Allegra. The news arrived while the Shelleys were at
Casa Magni at San Terenzo, their summer residence. In June
Mary narrowly escaped dying after a miscarriage, and in July
Percy was drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from
Livorno to Lerici.
The death of her husband, followed by that of their friend Byron
in 1824, prompted Mary Shelley to declare herself to be "the
last relic of a beloved race" and to identify with the eponymous
hero Lionel Verney of her apocalyptic novel The Last
Man (1826). Verney is the last survivor of a plague that has
wiped out the human race. This pessimistic vision was seen as
unfeminine, and the book was blasted by one critic as an
"elaborate piece of gloomy folly"; The book was even banned in
Austria. Shelley was so disheartened by the criticism that she
returned to the historical romance and wrote The Fortunes of
Perkin Warbeck, set at the end of the 15th century. Warbeck had
been a pretender to the English throne during the reign of Henry

VII, and Shelley believed him to be the lost duke of York, long
believed to have been murdered in the tower, reputedly on the
orders of Richard III. The novel was eventually published in
1830 as an antimonarchical historical romance.
Financial distress also forced Shelley to start writing stories and
essays for periodicals in 1823. For example, she published one
story and two essays in The Liberal in 1823, and a year later
there appeared, in London Magazine, "On Ghosts";
"Recollections of Italy"; and "The Bride of Italy", which was
based on Percy's infatuation with Teresa (Emilia) Viviani. Mary
also started submitting material to annuals and gift books, and
between 1823 and 1839 she wrote more than 20 stories for gift
books or periodicals; 16 of these stories were published
in Keepsake. Examples include: "The Evil Eye" (1829), which
evokes Albanian superstition, and "The Dream" (1831), set
during the reign of Henry IV of France. She also published two
well-known tales dealing with the supernatural:
"Transformation" (1830), based on Byron's drama TheDeformed
Transformed (1824), which Mary Shelley had copied for him;
and "The Mortal Immortal" (1833). She wrote most of the
essays for the five volumes of the Rev. Dionysius
Lardner's Cabinet of Biography: Lives of the most Eminent
Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal (1835–
37) and Lives of the most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men
of France (1838–39).
For the third edition of Frankenstein, published in 1831, Shelley
wrote a longer introduction and made extensive revisions. In
this version, the portrayal of the hero, Victor Frankenstein, who
is believed to be based partly on her late husband, was made
more sympathetic. Victor is a Romantic scientist who isolates
himself while carrying out nefarious experiments with the parts
of dead bodies. His creation of a monstrous being, which he
rejects, has been seen as an allegory of the child-parent
relationship, drawing on the creation of Adam as derived from
John Milton'sParadise Lost. As suggested by the novel's
subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, Victor Frankenstein is an

example of the Romantic overreacher, who transgresses
boundaries between the human and the divine. The creature is
motivated initially by the more ordinary desire for a family and
eventually finds the idealized De Laceys, but they too reject
him. In retaliation, he targets Victor's family members,
including his youngest brother, William, and fiancée, Elizabeth,
before disappearing into the Arctic wastes, ostensibly to destroy
himself. Like her mother, Mary Shelley emphasized the
importance of the domestic affections, and in Frankenstein she
demonstrates how the neglect of family relations can trigger
tragedy.
The search for, and return to, origins was the Romantics' Holy
Grail, which Shelley pursued through the search for parentage.
In her mythological drama Proserpine (composed 1820,
published 1832), a mother searches for her daughter, who has
been snatched by the god of the underworld. The heroine is
described as a "child of light", a phrase that Percy Shelley had
first used inallusion to his wife and her maternal heritage. Like
Mary Shelley herself, several of her other heroines are
motherless. In her second novel, Mathilda, composed in 1819,
the heroine, whose mother dies shortly after giving her birth,
forms a close bond with her father. She is troubled when he
distances himself from her. The reason, as he eventually
divulges, is because he has been harboring an unlawful and
monstrous love for his daughter. Mary Shelley sent the
manuscript to her father, who was so disgusted with the content
that he refused either to publish it or return it to her despite
repeated requests. It was not published until 1959.
In Shelley's sixth novel, Lodore (1835), the Byronic Lord
Lodore abducts his daughter, Ethel, and takes her to the
American wilderness to live in isolation. After he dies in a duel,
Ethel is befriended by the intellectual and independent Fanny
Derham (thought to be based on Shelley's friend Fanny Wright,
an advocate for women's rights) and is eventually reconciled
with her mother. Shelley reworked the father-daughter
relationship for her short story "The Mourner" (1829), about a

supposed parricide, and in her final novel, Falkner (1837). Here,
Rupert Falkner forsakes his beloved Alithea for a life in India.
When he returns he discovers that she has married another man,
believing Falkner to be dead. She drowns trying to escape him.
He adopts an orphaned girl, Elizabeth Raby, who falls in love
with Alithea's son, Gerard Neville. Falkner tries to sever the
relationship. He is convicted of the murder of Alithea but is
finally freed and then forgiven by Gerard. Family values,
particularly familial duty, was important to Mary Shelley both
in and outside of fiction. In 1837 she started work on writing
her father's life and editing his papers, a task she never
completed, and in 1839 and 1840 she produced multivolumed
editions of her husband's poetry, which included previously
unpublished poems and her own valuable biographical and
contextual notes. In 1840 she published Essays, Letters from
Abroad, Translations and Fragments by Percy Bysshe Shelley (2
vols).
Readers can find in Mary Shelley's work the Romantic themes
of the wanderer, incest, suicide, nature, and the sublime. Her
writings grapple with the challenge of creating a society that
endorses the values of collaboration, equality, education, and
harmony with the natural world. Her final full-length work was
her two-volume Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842,
and 1843 (1844), which was based on letters written during two
journeys that she had taken with her son, who inherited the
Shelley baronetcy upon his paternal grandfather's death in 1844,
becoming Sir Percy.
Toward the end of her life, Mary Shelley went to live with her
son and his wife, Jane, at her husband's boyhood home, Field
Place in Sussex. Here she planned to write Shelley's biography,
until illness intervened. For about two years the family lived at
Field Place and at a house in Chester Square in London while
Sir Percy was purchasing a new house near Bournemouth. When
Mary Shelley knew that she was dying, she asked to be buried
with her parents at St. Pancras. According to the literary
historian Emily Sunstein, Shelley turned down Edward

Trelawny's offer that she take his burial plot next to that of
Percy Shelley in Rome, on the basis that it was too costly. She
died on February 1, 1851, of meningioma (a type of brain
tumor) at Chester Square. The bodies of her parents were
exhumed and reburied on either side of their daughter in
Bournemouth near Boscombe Manor, the home of her son.
Further Information
Blumberg, Jane. Mary Shelley's Early Novels. Houndmills,
Eng.: Macmillan, 1993.
Eberle-Sinatra, Michael, ed. Mary Shelley's Fictions: From
Frankenstein to Falkner. Houndmills, Eng.: Macmillan Press,
2000.
Fisch, Audrey, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor, eds. The
Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993.
Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her
Monsters. London: Routledge, 1988.
Morrison, Lucy, and Staci L. Stone. The Mary Shelley
Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003.
Seymour, Miranda. Mary Shelley. London: John Murray, 2000.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. The Journals of Mary Shelley,
1814–1844. 2 vols. Edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diana
Scott-Kilvert. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
———. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. 3 vols.
Edited by Betty T. Bennett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1980–88.
———. Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories. 2nd ed.
Edited by Charles E. Robinson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
———. The Mary Shelley Reader. Edited by Betty T. Bennett
and Charles E. Robinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1990.
———. Mary Shelley's Literary Lives and Other Writings. 4
vols. Edited by Nora Crook et al. London: Pickering & Chatto,
2002.

———. Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot. Edited by Claire Tomalin.
London: Penguin, Viking, 1998.
———. The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley. 8
vols. Edited by Nora Crook et al. London: Pickering and Chatto,
1996.
———. The Original Frankenstein. Edited by Charles E.
Robinson. Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2008.
———. Frankenstein. Edited by M. K. Joseph. Oxford: Oxford
Sunstein, Emily W. Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality.
Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1989.
I would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Nora
Crook.
Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. "Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft." In
Maunder, Andrew, ed Encyclopedia of Literary Romanticism.
New York: Infobase Publishing, 2010. Bloom's Literature. Facts
On File, Inc. Web. 6 Mar. 2016.
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Running head: MARY SHELLEY: FRANKENSTEIN 1
MARY SHELLEY: FRANKENSTEIN 4

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
There are a number of authors that have used supernatural
beings in their books to pass across their message. Mary Shelley
is among the elite authors that have incorporated this style of
writing in their works. She is most famous for her book
Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. Frankenstein is a
story about a young scientist called Victor Frankenstein who
created a creature from his lab through an experiment that some
people have deemed was one that went wrong (Thornburg,
2007). This grotesque creature ends up being his master’s
tormentor as he kills his loved ones as a revenge for Victor not
creating for him a companion that he could live with. The
supernatural element made the story more interesting to readers
that followed the novel from chapter one to the end.
In Frankenstein the role of the supernatural creature is to show
the evil that is in society. The monster shows the elements of
jealousy and hatred as it endeavors to destroy the happiness of
its creator – Victor. The author wanted to depict the evils that
are in society that can prove great harm to human beings if they
are not monitored. Another role that the supernatural creature
serves in the story is that just like any other person there is the
need for having a companion to help a person get through life.
Thus, in a way the creature is used by the author to show the
importance of having a partner in life. Without Frankenstein’s
monster there are elements of the story that would not have had

as much clarity as what it had (Shelley & Gibson, 2000). Use of
supernatural creatures is therefore a parody that helps readers to
better understand the gist of any author’s written material.
The message that the Romantics were trying to convey by
infusing their works of art with supernatural elements like
monsters and ghosts is that they mostly acted as the villains in
their stories. Frankenstein was substantial in Mary Shelley’s
story. It is through him that the evils in society such as jealousy
and murder are advanced. Since the monster felt betrayed by his
master he felt it was necessary to inflict pain on him through
murdering his loved ones. The monster needed to show that he
required the attention of his master. It did so in crude ways such
as killing his brother. It felt betrayed due to the fact that the
Victor had created him but was now afraid of him. This are
elements that could not have been advanced if the monster was
not in the story.
Another role that the monster plays is the importance of being
accepted in society. The fact that the monster had physical
deformities show how human beings look at themselves. A
person that has a physical deformity is deemed in society as
disabled and not have the ability to thrive or grow. This is why
most disabled people are not empowered to stand for themselves
and rise above how the society looks at them or classifies them
as people. It is unfortunate that there are people who do not
grow because of the labels that the society has put on them.
This was especially prevalent in the day and age of Mary
Shelley.
Companionship is another key element that is prevalent in The
Modern Prometheus. The monster retaliates as it feels that it is
lonely. The love and companionship it expected from its master
is not given. Instead its master shuns it away and makes it feel
unwelcomed. It runs away and keeps away from the town
(Shelley & Gibson, 2000). The monster plays a role of showing
the importance of having a partner to help go through life
together. After killing Victor’s brother the monster begs for
forgiveness and pleads with Victor to make him a companion

that they can go through life together. It strengthens the
thoughts that the writer had to show how significant it was for
her to have a companion that they can share life’s challenges
together. Frankenstein is a story that helped Mary Shelley pour
her heart out to the public. It was a tool that she used to
communicate how she viewed life.
References
Shelley, M. W., & Gibson, D. (2000). Frankenstein. Madrid,
España: Edimat Libros.
Thornburg, M. K. P. (2007). The monster in the mirror: Gender
and the sentimental/gothic myth in Frankenstein. Ann Arbor,
Mich: UMI Research Press.

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