This communication with the outside world includes sections in the novel that clearly show she feels blame and guilt at her depression and how it has made her treat her "beautiful" poet, Woodville. She writes, "But now also I began to reap the fruits of my perfect solitude. I had become unfit for any intercourse, even with Woodville the most gentle and sympathizing creature that existed. I had become captious and unreasonable: my temper was utterly spoilt" (Shelley 76). In fact, she believed her own depression and temperament helped drive Shelley to indulge in extra-marital affairs, and because of this, she became even more depressed and morose. She shows this in Mathilda, in a way to assuage her grief and guilt at placing even more of a strain on her marriage.
It is also interesting to note that Mary formats the novel in the form of a journal or letters to a trusted friend. In another parallel, Mary often wrote detailed letters to friends and family, and several of her journals were published after her death. The novel takes on an even more realistic and autobiographical note because of how Mary fashioned it and it is difficult not to see her own torment in the words. She writes, "I am, I thought, a tragedy; a character that he comes to see act: now and then he gives me my cue that I may make a speech more to his purpose: perhaps he is already planning a poem in which I am to figure" (Shelley 78). She is clearly in pain as she writes, and the novel is cathartic in that it allows her to write vividly about her own feelings, while attributing them to an extremely sad and sympathetic character. It is Mary's way of dealing with the grief in her life, and it perpetuates how lonely and despondent she really felt.
In addition, it is clear the poet in the story is certainly Shelley. She writes of him, "I have said that he was a poet: when he was three and twenty years of age he first published a poem, and it was hailed by the whole nation with enthusiasm and delight" (Shelley 68). This shows the esteem she had for her...
Romantic Era The years in which the Romantic Era had its great impact -- roughly 1789 through 1832 -- were years in which there were "intense political, social, and cultural upheavals," according to Professor Shannon Heath at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (Heath, 2009). The beginning of the Romantic Era actually is traced to the French Revolution, and though that tumultuous event was not in England, William Wordsworth and
Wollstonecraft calls for equality among men, rather than inequality based on money, privilege and being wellborn. Again the duality of power and oppression is spoken of with zeal as Wollstonecraft goes on to pick apart all of the institutions that so many hold dear by virtue of false assumptions and tradition. There is really no conflict that has been more detailed and railed against than the duality of power and
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
Promethean myth holds a very strong hold upon the literature of the romantic era, a collected era of the rekindling of the ideas and ideals of classical antiquity. Though within each evolving age there is the incorporation of propriety and modernity into the stories and ideal of the old. Though not alone, in their fascination with creation and even the promethean myth, as the forbearers of the Romantics had a
Freud and Frankenstein Although psychoanalysis is not a popular method of therapy anymore (although there are still some practitioners), Freud's ideas are still very influential in Western society. He stands as one of the intellectual giants who helped to shape the modern world. A major contribution that he made was his belief that conscious awareness is not all there is, that there exists another deeper layer of consciousness, which he named
Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift, and "Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus" by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly. Specifically, it will discuss family ties -- Gulliver's neglect of his family compared to Victor's neglect of his. During the Enlightenment, many issues of life and society were considered important to the very necessity and enjoyment of life. Both authors create characters that are far from normal and neglect their families in chaotic and
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