Frankenstein in the Work of Mary Shelley
FRANKENSTEIN BY MARY SHELLEY
The focus of this study is to summarize chapters 16 through 20 in Mary Shelley's and to choose two to three particularly meaningful quotes or quotes that are provocative or significant. work entitled 'Frankenstein'. Chapter 16 opens with the exclamation of "cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live?" (Shelley) This exclamation importantly sweets the scene for the dilemma in this story as Frankenstein is wailing against the unfairness of his expectance and his loneliness and lack of a companion and goes on to relate how he has been chased as a beast and forced to hide from those who intend to harm him. Frankenstein goes on to tell how he was shot in the woods and suffered there for several weeks and relates being approached by a child that was beautiful and relates killing the child and noticing portrait of a woman in a locket on the child and being enraged that he in his monstrous form would never know the love of such a woman. Frankenstein reports going into a barn and finding a young woman sleeping and waking her and telling her that she will assist in creating his companion. However he was denied by the woman to receive assistance and she stated that she could not create another evil as himself even if she was tortured. The woman relates shuddering on thinking about it but Frankenstein tries to reason with her. The woman's future husband travels...
Frankenstein's creation of the monster is rendered as a kind of horrific pregnancy; for example, where a pregnant woman expands with the child she is bearing and usually eats more, Frankenstein wastes away during his work, depriving himself "of rest and health" (Shelley 43). Rather than expressing any kind of paternal (or maternal) love for his creation, Frankenstein recoils, as "breathless horror and disgust filled [his] heart" (Shelley 43).
If you reanimate dead flesh then how do you kill it? Victor, on his death bed, intones to his new friend the Captain of the discovery vessel that ambition in science should be kept in check, even if that means death in anonymity. He first intones that he regrets that he is dying while the beast still lives and then warns the captain to keep his ambition in check. That he
What Victor is saying is that in order to create a living being from the dead, he must haunt the graveyards like a human ghoul and experiment on live animals to "animate" "lifeless clay," being the deceased remains of human beings. From this admission, it is abundantly obvious that Victor, like Prometheus, sees "clay" as the foundation for creation, a substance which is part of the earth itself and
My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. (Shelley, 1961, p. 44) Frankenstein challenges the values of man that are based on fear and thus goes forward to create a beast that even Dante could not have conceived of. (Shelley, 1961, p. 50) He then chases the beast to his own death. The Beast on the other hand exemplifies a helpless child
It is through Shelley's doubling between Frankenstein and the Monster, and herself and Frankenstein and the Monster, that Freud's uncanny and psychological concepts of the id, ego, and superego can be analyzed. Shelley demonstrates how an individual's outward appearance is not necessarily representative of their character and at the same time is able to come to terms with the psychological traumas that plagued her -- from losing her own mother
Good and Evil in Frankenstein Mary Shelley's Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, who bored with his mundane life, decides to attempt to create a new life out of deceased human remains. Dr. Frankenstein's ignorance of the responsibility necessary to take care of the life that he has brought into this world leads him to abandon his creation; this abandonment leads to the Frankenstein's Monster to react violently as he
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