Tension and Dread in Chapter V

How does Mary Shelley use elements of the Gothic in Chapter 5 to create an atmosphere of tension and dread?

Victor Frankenstein is an obsessed scientist who is trying to make a living human being out of dead body parts. He uses dead body parts because he had to get body parts from somewhere where nobody would find out because it was illegal. Therefore he got his body parts from criminals that had been hung. However not everything goes to plan, the Monster comes to life and tries to fit in with everybody else. He is kind to them and all he wants to do is make friends. Consequently when people see him, they see him to be a vicious monster that is going to hurt them, they don’t realise that all he wants to do is fit in. For example he lived in the woods in some stables for a while, he watched a family through a crack in the wall and learnt how to read, write and live like a human. One night the Monster went outside and spent all night picking all the potatoes for them. In the morning the family rushed outside and saw all the potatoes sitting in their wagon. Their first instinct was that it was a spirit that lived in the woods. They then left gifts for him outside to say thank you.

In Frankenstein, Shelley tried to show that a person is shaped by the way that they are treated and their environment. She wanted people to understand that Frankenstein’s monster was born like a baby, innocent and free, and she showed the reader in the novel that it was the way that he was treated that made him who he was. The way that the monster was created would have been seen as immoral by the reader, although he was clearly not evil to begin with, despite the way that he had been created. However the way that he appeared led people...

... middle of paper ...

...n impact on the reader such as “dreary” this makes the reader picture the scene. Mary Shelley’s background affected the novel because when she was younger her mother died so she had that on her mind when she was writing the novel, this could have affected some of the words that she used. Shelley’s fear and anxieties are also shown in the novel because she had a fear of giving birth to a deformed child; furthermore in the novel the monster is deformed when he is ‘born’. Mary Shelley uses the gothic to add tension and dread into chapter five because the gothic is associated with dark and depressing things such as death. Gothic is also known for things like churches and monsters. These fit well with chapter five because when the monster is being created Frankenstein is in an old church. Furthermore the atmosphere is dark and misty; this will make the reader feel tense.