The Most Monstrous Being In Mary Shelley's Novel, Frankenstein

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The Most Monstrous Being In Mary Shelley's Novel, Frankenstein

Introduction

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Mary Shelly was born in 1797 and died in 1851; she was the second wife

of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the famous English poet. Her novel

"Frankenstein" was written when she was only 19 years of age and she

wrote it as a response to a challenge that Lord Byron set her.

Frankenstein is considered by some to be a modern Prometheus, an

ancient Greek myth about the creation of man.

Section 1

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Frankenstein wanted to be able to create life and defeat death:

Frankenstein -"I might in the process of time…renew life where death

had apparently devoted the body to corruption."

Frankenstein dreams of a world where death is not an object and he

hopes that one day death would only mean having to be brought back to

life. At this point Frankenstein does not seem at all monstrous.

Although in the beginning Frankenstein's intentions are good but, the

way he goes about realising his dream is not:

Frankenstein - "I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave."

Mary Shelly uses the word "dabbled" to describe the way Frankenstein

looks for body parts in graves. These could have been from people who

had families or other loved ones, but Frankenstein treats them as

pieces of meat, materials for his experiment, and this makes the

reader disgusted at Frankenstein. This is the first sign that

Frankenstein is immoral. Despite this, might be forgiven as his

judgement is affected by his desire to create rather than destroy

life. Although this could shock a modern reader, it does not compare

to the reaction of a Victorian audie...

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...ross two points when she

wrote the novel. The first and more obvious is that when she was

writing Frankenstein, there were radical scientific developments going

on at the time. Scientists were starting to think that they could

bring dead organisms back to life. Mary Shelly thought this was wrong

as more people were starting to believe in science rather than go. I

think Mary Shelly's tale of woe is a warning to people. This is what

can happen when you rebel against god. The second point is that like

her mother, Mary is a feminist. When the novel was written, men would

have made all the vital decisions at the time; Mary didn't agree with

this. In Frankenstein it is men (Frankenstein and the monster) who

make all the vital decisions and consequently it is, bar

Frankenstein's friend Clerval, all women and children who die.

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