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Frankenstein influences within Mary Shelley's life
Loss of innocence in Frankenstein
Frankenstein influences within Mary Shelley's life
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The key figures in Romanticism addressed many of the same issues. Such connectivity is marked in William Blake’s poems “Infant Sorrow” and “On Another’s Sorrow”, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shelley, like Blake, argues for continual development of innocence to experience, and through the character of Victor Frankenstein’s creation, Mary Shelley suggests the equilibrium of innocence and experience offers insight into the human condition. The shift is distinguished by what Blake states in plate 3, stanza 2 of “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”: “Without contraries is no progression” (112). Any event, idea, or emotion that is contrary to the innocent human conscience is a progression to experience. In Frankenstein, the balance and shift of innocence and experience is evidenced by the creature’s observance of the De Lacey’s, the misfortune that befalls him in his wandering, and finally, the progression of experience reaches maturation through murder.
A careful analysis of the creature’s initial human interaction shows a steady shift from innocence as the creature experiences the world around him. Frankenstein’s creation is simple and child-like in conscience yet aged and abhorred in appearance. Although a paradox, the creature is akin to an adult child: innocent and naïve, but forced to experience the world. Blake recognizes this concept in his poem “Infant Sorrow” in which he states, “Into the dangerous world I leapt: / Helpless, naked, piping loud, / Like a fiend hid in a cloud” (ll. 2-4). One rarely thinks of a newborn baby as a “fiend”. It seems more believable to observe the grotesque form of the creature as a fiend. However, both the infant and Frankenstein’s creation entered the world with veiled and “clouded” eyes, unable ...
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... for his actions, likewise, humans continue to, at the least, coexist with their fellow man, abiding by laws and regulations. It is hopeful then that in the world today, the balance of innocence and experience is not entirely overturned.
Works Cited
Blake, William. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. Eighth Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. (111-120).
Blake, William. “Infant Sorrow”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. Eighth Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. (95).
Blake, William. “On Another’s Sorrow”. Classical Poetry: Songs of Innocence. Passions in Poetry Foundation: 11 Nov. 2008. .
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Second Edition. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.
In the novel ‘Frankenstein’ the creature is presented through many narrative voices, it is through Victor's narrative that we see the Creature as a 'wretch', 'daemon' and a 'fiend'. Mary Shelley chooses to present the creature as a ‘fiend’ due to circumstance beyond the creature’s control
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The Creature was born capable of thing such as love and sympathy though he lost these capabilities as a result of how he was treated. The creature’s heart was ‘fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy’ but wrenched with misery to ‘vice and hatred’. On a cold night in November, Victor Frankenstein brought his creation to life. This creation has thin black lips, inhuman eyes, and
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
A predominant theme in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is that of child-rearing and/or parenting techniques. Specifically, the novel presents a theory concerning the negative impact on children from the absence of nurturing and motherly love. To demonstrate this theory, Shelly focuses on Victor Frankenstein’s experimenting with nature, which results in the life of his creature, or “child”. Because Frankenstein is displeased with the appearance of his offspring, he abandons him and disclaims all of his “parental” responsibility. Frankenstein’s poor “mothering” and abandonment of his “child” leads to the creation’s inevitable evilness. Victor was not predestined to failure, nor was his creation innately depraved. Rather, it was Victor’s poor “parenting” of his progeny that lead to his creation’s thirst for vindication of his unjust life, in turn leading to the ruin of Victor’s life.
Through the use of extended metaphors, Frankenstein’s creature is compared to as a newborn baby. When he first woke up, he stated that he felt, “a strange multiplicity of sensations seized [him], and
Infant Sorrow by William Blake is about the birth of a child into a dangerous world. The meaning behind this poem is that when a baby is born, they are entering a place that is unfamiliar to them and is full of hazardous circumstances and then seeks for safety and comfort by sulking on the mother's breast. Instead of blatantly telling the reader, Blake uses several poetic devices to deliver the meaning of Infant Sorrow. Some of the devices he uses are images, sound, figurative language, and the structure to bring out the meaning of his poem.
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.
In Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789 and 1794), William Blake arouses readers' minds and leads them into a path of finding their own answers and conclusions to his poems. He sets up his poems in the first book, Songs of Innocence, with a few questions as if they were asked from a child's perspective since children are considered the closest representation of innocence in life. However, in the second book, Songs of Experience, Blake's continues to write his poems about thought-provoking concepts except the concepts happen to be a little bit more complex and relevant to experience and time than Songs of Innocence.
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.
Frankenstein and his abominable creation are two characters inexorably linked with eachother, as father and son, as inventor and invention, and even as reflections of eachother. Their conflict deals with themes of the morality of science and the fears of child birth, and their characters are drawn from a wealth of experience and reading. Shelley’s doppleganger of mankind is like a twisted vision of reality; based in some sense on reality but wildly taken out of proportion, the monster is so inhuman that it cannot reconcile itself with its master or the world of humanity. Its tragic story serves as a warning of what mankind could become as well as a reflection of Shelley’s own personal demons, and her creation has changed the face of literature.
The human race’s complexity is so muddled with various desires, styles, and actions that even a substantial response could only explain a fragment of human nature, but, even with the intricacy of humanity, there is a barrier an ethical conscience held by the human race as a whole that separates actions human and inhuman. In Mary Shelly’s novel Frankenstein, the characters Dr. Frankenstein and the creature he reanimates walk along the separation line between human and inhuman. Shelly uses the idealisms like Promethean desire and existential questions to exemplify the natural yearnings that humans strive for as they search for their purpose and aspire for something greater. Frankenstein’s creature and Frankenstein illustrate both human and inhuman qualities as they exemplify natural human desires, but also simultaneously act in eerie and coldhearted ways that separate them from natural human society.
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Although both Blake and Wordsworth show childhood as a state of greater innocence and spiritual vision, their view of its relationship with adulthood differs - Blake believes that childhood is crushed by adulthood, whereas Wordsworth sees childhood living on within the adult. In the William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the vision of children and adults is placed in opposition to one another. Blake portrays childhood as a time of optimism and positivity, of heightened connection with the natural world, and where joy is the overpowering emotion. This joyful nature is shown in Infant Joy, where the speaker, a newborn baby, states “’I am happy, Joy is my name.’” (Line 4-5).