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For Friday: Shelley, Frankenstein, Letters I-III & Chapters 1-4 (pp.49-88)

Self-Portrait by Goya...or is it Victor Frankenstein???

NOTE: Try to read as much of the first FOUR chapters of Frankenstein for Friday's class. There's SO MUCH to discuss here, so we can't possibly be through it all. The questions below are a kind of 'wish list' of what I hope to discuss, and where you might focus your reading as you wade through the opening chapters. If you've never read the novel, relax and enjoy the ride. If you have, try to read it in light of the Romantic poems we've read in class, and consider how the novel changes when we read it in the shadow of The Rime, Tintern Abbey, and The Eve of St. Agnes. 

Answer TWO of the following: 

Q1: Most first-time readers of Frankenstein are surprised to find that the novel begins with a frame narrative: that of Walton, the arctic explorer, who is writing home to his sister, Mrs. Saville. How does this contrast with the frame narrative we encountered in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”? Also, why is a narrator like Walton a horror-story (or Gothic story) convention even in films today? 

Q2: According to the story of his early education that Victor gives to Walton, what set him on the path of creating new life? How did he go from an earnest, naive young man to a “modern Prometheus” who would “pour a torrent of light into our dark world”? In other words, what went ‘wrong’ in his life, considering he had a good family, wealth, and the support of his parents?

Q3: Immediately after he creates his “monster,” Victor ends up falling asleep and has a nightmare of Elizabeth, where as soon as he kisses her, “her lips...became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms" (84). How do you read this strange dream in relation to the events of the story? Does it remind you of anything we’ve read before?

Q4: Why do you think Shelley quotes the fateful lines from “The Rime” that go, “Like one who, on a lonely road” in Chapter 4, after Victor creates and first sees the monster? Remember that this passage from “The Rime” occurs after the spell has been broken, but the Mariner still feels he is being haunted. Did Shelley simply like the mood or feel of the lines, or might there be a deeper significance?

Q5: Mary Shelley was a student of the Romantics, and knew Coleridge and Wordsworth personally, and of course married (or ran away with) Percy Shelley (who wrote “Ozymandias”). Even in the first four chapters, how do we know this is a ‘Romantic’ novel? Where is she borrowing, plagiarizing, or simply being influenced by the poems she grew up with? Hint: from Chapter 3, “my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature…”

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