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Symbolism intro essay
The effect of symbolism
The effect of symbolism
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The gothic novel is previously associated with being a ‘rebellion against constraining neoclassical aesthetic ideals of order and unity, in order to recover a suppressed primitive and barbaric imaginative freedom.’ (Botting, 1996: 98) It is often considered a premature manifestation of the emerging values of Romanticism. Although the gothic genre is somewhat shadowy and difficult to define it can be seen as having a number of characteristics or conventions. This can be observed in Frankenstein including the ‘stereotypical settings, characters and plots, an interest in the sublime, the production of excessive emotion in the reader, an emphasis on suspense, the notion of the double and the presence of the supernatural.’ (Botting, 1996: 102) The genre develops more than an understanding of the various modes of destructive violence, social repressions, and disturbing sexual energies characterizing particular moments of modernity. It begins to be integral to the formation self-representation and maintenance of the modern world we inhabit. The degree in which the protagonist characters in the novel portrayed as either innately virtuous or evil and its contribution to their identity. The novel Frankenstein finds itself a victim of psychoanalytical criticism. The purpose of this essay is to investigate the identity of Frankenstein and his relation to the creature using the psychoanalytic theory.
This essay will discuss the evidence showing the reason why the creature is a more appealing character by observing closely the relationship between Victor Frankenstein and his monster. In addition, the epistolary form used in the novel as well as character development will also be referenced. The monster represents a part of Frankenstein's fr...
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... the horrific result of in her novel. Frankenstein is more than a ghost story; it is a social narrative and a political manifesto.
Neither Victor nor his creation displays actions or attitudes that constitute “goodness” under this particular perception of human nature. Yet the creature continues to prove him more sympathetic than his creator does because he is far more aware of his own wrongness than Victor is. Victor is appallingly hypocritical; the monster is merely realistic, and indignant towards Victor’s hypocrisy. The creature's acknowledgment for his need of affection is present throughout the entirety of the novel. By acknowledging that he lacks affection, he discovers he needs to search for it since Frankenstein suppressed him from it. It is because affection is unachievable for the creature, despite his efforts, which makes him the victim of this novel.
Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, has captured people’s attention since it was first written. People often wonder how much of Mary Shelley’s life is documented in her novel. From the theme of parental abandonment, to the theme of life and death in the novel, literary scholars have been able to find similarities between Frankenstein and Shelley’s life. The Journal of Religion and Health, the Journal of Analytical Psychology, and the Modern Psychoanalysis discuss the different connections between Shelley’s life and Frankenstein. Badalamenti, the author of “ Why did Mary Shelley Write Frankenstein?” in the Journal of Religion and Health, primarily discusses the connection between Victor
Frankenstein is the story of an eccentric scientist whose masterful creation, a monster composed of sown together appendages of dead bodies, escapes and is now loose in the country. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelly’s diction enhances fear-provoking imagery in order to induce apprehension and suspense on the reader. Throughout this horrifying account, the reader is almost ‘told’ how to feel – generally a feeling of uneasiness or fright. The author’s diction makes the images throughout the story more vivid and dramatic, so dramatic that it can almost make you shudder.
In Frankenstein, Victor’s monster suffers much loneliness and pain at the hands of every human he meets, as he tries to be human like them. First, he is abandoned by his creator, the one person that should have accepted, helped, and guided him through the confusing world he found himself in. Next, he is shunned wherever he goes, often attacked and injured. Still, throughout these trials, the creature remains hopeful that he can eventually be accepted, and entertains virtuous and moral thoughts. However, when the creature takes another crushing blow, as a family he had thought to be very noble and honorable abandons him as well, his hopes are dashed. The monster then takes revenge on Victor, killing many of his loved ones, and on the humans who have hurt him. While exacting his revenge, the monster often feels guilty for his actions and tries to be better, but is then angered and provoked into committing more wrongdoings, feeling self-pity all the while. Finally, after Victor’s death, the monster returns to mourn the death of his creator, a death he directly caused, and speaks about his misery and shame. During his soliloquy, the monster shows that he has become a human being because he suffers from an inner conflict, in his case, between guilt and a need for sympathy and pity, as all humans do.
Victor was consumed with all the information he had learned from school and his own experiments and he did not care to offend anyone who would try to show affection. The monster wanted Victor to create a monster just as hideous as he was because he didn’t want the other creation to find attention from someone else due to the fact that the female monster would be scary. Victor did abandon the monster and that was a selfish act because he didn’t want the burden of something that was unable to fend for itself to consume him; furthermore, the reason why the monster killed Victor Frankenstein’s younger brother was the selfish act of revenge.
Although the Creature later went on to commit crimes, he was not instinctively bad. Victor’s Creature was brought into this world with a child-like innocence. He was abandoned at birth and left to learn about life on his own. After first seeing his creation, Victor “escaped and rushed downstairs.” (Frankenstein, 59) A Creator has the duty to teach his Creature about life, as well as to love and nurture him. However, Victor did not do any of these; he did not take responsibility for his creature. One of the first things that the creature speaks of is that he was a “poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing; but feeling pain invade me on all sides, (he) sat ...
Frankenstein, speaking of himself as a young man in his father’s home, points out that he is unlike Elizabeth, who would rather follow “the aerial creations of the poets”. Instead he pursues knowledge of the “world” though investigation. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the meaning of the word “world” is for Frankenstein, very much biased or limited. He thirsts for knowledge of the tangible world and if he perceives an idea to be as yet unrealised in the material world, he then attempts to work on the idea in order to give it, as it were, a worldly existence. Hence, he creates the creature that he rejects because its worldly form did not reflect the glory and magnificence of his original idea. Thrown, unaided and ignorant, into the world, the creature begins his own journey into the discovery of the strange and hidden meanings encoded in human language and society. In this essay, I will discuss how the creature can be regarded as a foil to Frankenstein through an examination of the schooling, formal and informal, that both of them go through. In some ways, the creature’s gain in knowledge can be seen to parallel Frankenstein’s, such as, when the creature begins to learn from books. Yet, in other ways, their experiences differ greatly, and one of the factors that contribute to these differences is a structured and systematic method of learning, based on philosophical tenets, that is available to Frankenstein but not to the creature.
Even when Victor rejects him, the monster still seeks love from society and performs unselfish acts. He seeks the love from others. Longing for company, the monster stays in the cottage without revealing him and watches the family that lives there. By watching them he learned how to speak and read. The monster tried to understand the meaning of “beauty”. He somewhat understood why people he had interacted with had treated him ill and he realized that it was because they were frighten by his hideous appearance. “The absolute other cannot be selfed, that the monster has properties which will not be constrained by proper measure”(Spivak). This goes back to the idea of “other”, now the monster himself understand that he 's different from human, that he doesn 't have the properties as human do so he must be interior to them. Furthermore we see that by watching the family in the cottage, the monster soon starts to love the family. He liked the way they had affection and love they had for each other. “The gentle manners and beauty of cottagers greatly endeared them to me; when they were unhappy, I felt depressed; when they rejoiced, I sympathized in their joy”(Shelly100). This shows that the monster was very loving and caring towards the family as would a innocent
Romantic writer Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein does indeed do a lot more than simply tell story, and in this case, horrify and frighten the reader. Through her careful and deliberate construction of characters as representations of certain dominant beliefs, Shelley supports a value system and way of life that challenges those that prevailed in the late eighteenth century during the ‘Age of Reason’. Thus the novel can be said to be challenging prevailant ideologies, of which the dominant society was constructed, and endorsing many of the alternative views and thoughts of the society. Shelley can be said to be influenced by her mothers early feminist views, her father’s radical challenges to society’s structure and her own, and indeed her husband’s views as Romantics. By considering these vital influences on the text, we can see that in Shelley’s construction of the meaning in Frankenstein she encourages a life led as a challenge to dominant views.
As can be seen Frankenstein utilises many of the conventions of the gothic genre and can thus be considered a gothic novel. Its links to the Romantic movement are also evident. The stereotypical settings, characters and plots, interest in the sublime, emphasis on suspense, the production of excessive emotion in the reader ( particularly that of terror and horror), the presence of the supernatural and the notion of the ’double’ are all features of Frankenstein that illustrate this.
...most readers tend to sympathize with Frankenstein because of the way in which he is mentally and physically harmed by his creation. However, one must also realize that while Frankenstein is a victim in the novel, he also exhibits features that make him a monster. These monstrous qualities, however, stem from his passion for science and his desire to create life. Not only does the reader criticize and pity Frankenstein, but the reader also empathizes with Frankenstein’s creation. He was unjustly shunned by society because of his physical appearance. On the other hand, the reader realizes that like Frankenstein, the creation can not be sympathized with entirely. He too exhibits traits that make him appear villainous. It is the duality of these two characters that make Frankenstein and his creation two of the most appealing characters of the nineteenth century.
Mary Shelley’s world renowned book, “Frankenstein”, is a narrative of how Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant chemist, succeeds in creating a living being. Although Frankenstein’s creation is benevolent to begin with, he soon turns murderous after being mistreated by humans. His anger turns towards Frankenstein, as he was the one who brought him into the world that shuns him. The Monster then spends the rest of the story trying to make his creator’s life as miserable as his own. This novel is an excellent example of the Gothic Romantic style of literature, as it features some core Gothic Romantic elements such as remote and desolate settings, a metonymy of gloom and horror, and women in distress.
Harold Bloom, a well-known American critic explores Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to find true meaning. Throughout his essay, he gives answers to the lingering question of who the real monster is. He also paints a clear picture of a major theme in the novel, the Romantic mythology of the self. Through reading his essay, it opens up new light to Mary Shelley's novel. It gives new meaning to the monster and his creator.
Like all works that have been taught in English classes, Frankenstein has been explicated and analyzed by students and teachers alike for much of the twentieth and all of the twenty-first century. Academia is correct for doing so because Frankenstein can appeal to the interests of students. Students, teachers and experts in the areas of medicine, psychology, and sociology can relevantly analyze Frankenstein in their respective fields. However, Peter Brooks explains in “Godlike Science/Unhallowed Arts: Language and Monstrosity in Frankenstein” that Shelly had presented the problem of “Monsterism” through her language. According to Brooks, Monsterism is explicitly and implicitly addressed in Shelly’s language. While this may be correct, Brooks does it in such a way that requires vast knowledge of subjects that many readers may not be knowledgeable in. After summarizing and analyzing the positive and negative qualities of Brooks’ work, I will explain how the connection of many different fields of study in literature creates a better work.
The role of the imagination in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein is a vital when defining the work as Romantic. Though Shelley incorporates aspects that resemble the Enlightenment period, she relies on the imagination. The power of the imagination is exemplified in the novel through both Victor and the Creature as each embarks to accomplish their separate goals of scientific fame and accomplishing human relationships. The origin of the tale also emphasizes the role of the imagination as Shelley describes it in her “Introduction to Frankenstein, Third Edition (1831)”. Imagination in the text is also relatable to other iconic works of the Romantic Period such as S. T. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria in which he defines Primary and Secondary imagination. The story as a whole is completely Romantic in that it is filled with impossibilities that seem to have come from a fairy tale. The imaginative quality of the plot itself is a far cry from the stiff subject matter of the Enlightenment period. Frankenstein is wholly a work of Romanticism both from the outside of the tale and within the plot. Shelley created the story in a moment of Primary imagination filling it with impossibilities that can only be called fantastical. Imagining notoriety leads Victor to forge the creature; the creature imagines the joy of having human relationships. The driving factor of the tale is the imagination: imagining fame, imagining relationships and imagining the satisfaction of revenge. Shelley’s use of the imagination is a direct contradiction to the themes of logic and reason that ruled the Enlightenment Period.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or; The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818, is a product of its time. Written in a world of social, political, scientific and economic upheaval it highlights human desire to uncover the scientific secrets of our universe, yet also confirms the importance of emotions and individual relationships that define us as human, in contrast to the monstrous. Here we question what is meant by the terms ‘human’ and ‘monstrous’ as defined by the novel. Yet to fully understand how Frankenstein defines these terms we must look to the etymology of them. The novel however, defines the terms through its main characters, through the themes of language, nature versus nurture, forbidden knowledge, and the doppelganger motif. Shelley also shows us, in Frankenstein, that although juxtaposing terms, the monstrous being everything human is not, they are also intertwined, in that you can not have one without the other. There is also an overwhelming desire to know the monstrous, if only temporarily and this calls into question the influence the monstrous has on the human definition.