NAME : MAHIDA BHUMIKA PRAKASHBHAI
M A SEM -1
ROLL NUMBER : 5
ENROLLMENT NUMBER :3069206420200021
PAPER 3 ( LITERATURE OF THE ROMANTICS)
TOPIC : MARY SHELLY'S FRANKENSTEIN AS A SCIENCE FICTION
⚫ AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Mary Shelley’s best-known book is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus , a text that is part Gothic novel and part philosophical novel; it is also often considered an early example of science fiction. It narrates the dreadful consequences that arise after a scientist has artificially created a human being. She wrote several other novels, including Valperga , The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck , Lodore , and Falkner ; The Last Man , an account of the future destruction of the human race by a plague, is often ranked as her best work. Her travel book History of a Six Weeks’ Tour recounts the continental tour she and Shelley took in 1814 following their elopement and then recounts their summer near Geneva in 1816.
⚫ FRANKENSTEIN ⚫
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared in the second edition, which was published in Paris in 1821.
Shelley travelled through Europe in 1815 along the river Rhine in Germany, stopping in Gernsheim, 17 kilometres away from Frankenstein Castle, where two centuries before, an alchemist engaged in experiments. She then journeyed to the region of Geneva, Switzerland, where much of the story takes place. Galvanism and occult ideas were topics of conversation among her companions, particularly her lover and future husband Percy B. Shelley. In 1816, Mary, Percy and Lord Byron had a competition to see who could write the best horror story.After thinking for days, Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein after imagining a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he had made.
Though Frankenstein is infused with elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement, Brian Aldiss has argued that it should be considered the first true science fiction story. In contrast to previous stories with fantastical elements resembling those of later science fiction, Aldiss states that the central character "makes a deliberate decision" and "turns to modern experiments in the laboratory" to achieve fantastic results. The novel has had a considerable influence on literature and popular culture and spawned a complete genre of horror stories, films, and plays.
Since the publication of the novel, the name "Frankenstein" has often been used to refer to the monster, rather than his creator.
⚫ Summary ⚫
Captain Walton's introductory narrative
Frankenstein is a frame story written in epistolary form. It documents a fictional correspondence between Captain Robert Walton and his sister, Margaret Walton Saville. The story takes place at an unspecified time in the 18th century . Walton is a failed writer who sets out to explore the North Pole in hopes of expanding scientific knowledge. During the voyage, the crew spots a dog sled driven by a gigantic figure. A few hours later, the crew rescues a nearly frozen and emaciated man named Victor Frankenstein. Frankenstein has been in pursuit of the gigantic man observed by Walton's crew. Frankenstein starts to recover from his exertion; he sees in Walton the same obsession that has destroyed him and recounts a story of his life's miseries to Walton as a warning. The recounted story serves as the frame for Frankenstein's narrative.
Victor Frankenstein's narrative
Victor begins by telling of his childhood. Born in Naples, Italy, into a wealthy Genevan family, Victor and his younger brothers, Ernest and William, are sons of Alphonse Frankenstein and the former Caroline Beaufort. From a young age, Victor has a strong desire to understand the world. He is obsessed with studying theories of alchemists, though when he is older he realizes that such theories are considerably outdated. When Victor is five years old, his parents adopt Elizabeth Lavenza, the orphaned daughter of an expropriated Italian nobleman, whom Victor later marries. Victor's parents later take in another child, Justine Moritz, who becomes William's nanny.
Weeks before he leaves for the University of Ingolstadt in Germany, his mother dies of scarlet fever; Victor buries himself in his experiments to deal with the grief. At the university, he excels at chemistry and other sciences, soon developing a secret technique to impart life to non-living matter. He undertakes the creation of a humanoid, but due to the difficulty in replicating the minute parts of the human body, Victor makes the Creature tall, about 8 feet in height, and proportionally large. Despite Victor's selecting its features to be beautiful, upon animation the Creature is instead hideous, with watery white eyes and yellow skin that barely conceals the muscles and blood vessels underneath. Repulsed by his work, Victor flees. While wandering the streets the next day, he meets his childhood friend, Henry Clerval, and takes Henry back to his apartment, fearful of Henry's reaction if he sees the monster. However, when Victor returns to his laboratory, the Creature is gone.
Victor falls ill from the experience and is nursed back to health by Henry. After a four-month recovery, he receives a letter from his father notifying him of the murder of his brother William. Upon arriving in Geneva, Victor sees the Creature near the crime scene and becomes convinced that his creation is responsible. Justine Moritz, William's nanny, is convicted of the crime after William's locket, which contained a miniature portrait of Caroline, is found in her pocket. Victor knows that no one will believe him if he tries to clear Justine's name, and she is hanged. Ravaged by grief and guilt, Victor retreats into the mountains. While he hikes through Mont Blanc's Mer de Glace, he is suddenly approached by the Creature, who pleads for Victor to hear his tale.
Captain Walton's conclusion
At the end of Victor's narrative, Captain Walton resumes telling the story. A few days after the Creature vanishes, the ship becomes trapped in pack ice, and several crewmen die in the cold before the rest of Walton's crew insists on returning south once it is freed. Upon hearing the crew's demands, Victor is angered and, despite his condition, gives a powerful speech to them. He reminds them of why they chose to join the expedition and that it is hardship and danger, not comfort, that defines a glorious undertaking such as theirs. He urges them to be men, not cowards. However, although the speech makes an impression on the crew, it is not enough to change their minds and when the ship is freed, Walton regretfully decides to return South. Victor, even though he is in a very weak condition, states that he will go on by himself. He is adamant that the Creature must die.
Victor dies shortly thereafter, telling Walton, in his last words, to seek "happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition." Walton discovers the Creature on his ship, mourning over Victor's body. The Creature tells Walton that Victor's death has not brought him peace; rather, his crimes have made him even more miserable than Victor ever was. The Creature vows to kill himself so that no one else will ever know of his existence and Walton watches as the Creature drifts away on an ice raft, never to be seen again.
⚫Frankenstein and the Monster
The Creature
Although the Creature was described in later works as a composite of whole body parts grafted together from cadavers and reanimated by the use of electricity, this description is not consistent with Shelley's work; both the use of electricity and the cobbled-together image of Frankenstein's monster were more the result of James Whale's popular 1931 film adaptation of the story and other early motion-picture works based on the creature. In Shelley's original work, Victor Frankenstein discovers a previously unknown but elemental principle of life, and that insight allows him to develop a method to imbue vitality into inanimate matter, though the exact nature of the process is left largely ambiguous. After a great deal of hesitation in exercising this power, Frankenstein spends two years painstakingly constructing the Creature's body , which he then brings to life using his unspecified process.
In the novel, the creature is compared to Adam, the first man in the Garden of Eden. The monster also compares himself with the "fallen" angel. Speaking to Frankenstein, the monster says "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel". That angel would be Lucifer in Milton's Paradise Lost, which the monster has read. Adam is also referred to in the epigraph of the 1818 edition:
The Creature has often been mistakenly called Frankenstein. In 1908, one author said "It is strange to note how well-nigh universally the term "Frankenstein" is misused, even by intelligent people, as describing some hideous monster."Edith Wharton's The Reef describes an unruly child as an "infant Frankenstein." David Lindsay's "The Bridal Ornament", published in The Rover, 12 June 1844, mentioned "the maker of poor Frankenstein". After the release of Whale's cinematic Frankenstein, the public at large began speaking of the Creature itself as "Frankenstein". This misnomer continued with the successful sequel Bride of Frankenstein , as well as in film titles such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
⚫ FRANKENSTEIN AS A SCIENCE FICTION
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein can be read from two main levels; as a science fiction and as human nature. The whole novel moves around the invention of a scientist and the result of it. Dangerous aspect of experience in the scientific field is the subject matter of the novel.
The monster, Victor's reaction itself is a kind of scientific achievement around which the whole plot structure is designed. The protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a scientist and driven by ambition of scientific curiosity. His quest for absolute knowledge and power has ended in his own destruction. So the novel shows that thoughtlessness causes destruction to themselves. Shelley shows the dangerous aspects of modern scientific world. How the scientific investigation goes beyond human control due to the excess focus on it without proper attention has well been presented in the novel.
Thus the whole novel is about scientific ambition of the protagonist. It is said that one of the most important quest of scientific aspect is the quest of a new kind of creation. But most of the scientists are unknown about how their invention will be resulted at last. They are thoughtless about the further coming danger and destructions of science. Victor Frankenstein is one of the representative figures of modern scientists who created monster due to his excess focus in the quest of scientific knowledge but at last he lost the control over his own creation. Rather Victor Frankenstein compelled to lose his own family members and his own creation became the very cause of his own destruction. He was over curious man to learn the hidden law of nature due to his fervent love for science, this event of the novel is very symbolic for the development of modern science. It allows to have the deep thought in the field of science. In this way as the protagonist and all his activities in the holistic plot structure of the novel moves around the scientific subject matter together with its consequences. So the novel can be analyzed as a science fiction.
Frankenstein and the Origins of Science Fiction
Frankenstein is one of those literary characters whose names have entered common parlance; everyone recognizes the name and everyone uses it. The recognition and the usage are often slightly uncertain most people know it from the film versions, which are significantly different from the book, and some people have to be reminded that the name is that of the scientist, not the monster that the scientist made but this uncertainty is not entirely inappropriate to a work whose implication and significance are rather problematic.
The popularity of Frankenstein both as a literary classic and as a fuzzy set of ideas bears testimony to the remarkable vividness of Mary Shelley's vision, but it also reflects the protean quality of its central motifs, which can be interpreted in several different ways so as to carry several different messages. The most common modern view of the story aided and perhaps sustained by Boris Karloff's remarkable performance in the 1931 film version and its sequel is that it is an account of the way in which 'monstrousness' arises, involving diseased brains, inadequate control over one's actions and resentment against the unthinking horror with which most people react to ugliness. The most common view based on the book alone sees it as an allegory in which a scientist is rightly punished for daring to usurp the divine prerogative of creation. A closely-related interpretation regards Victor Frankenstein as an archetypal example of a man destroyed by his own creation; in this view the story becomes a central myth of the kind of technophobia which argues that modern man is indeed doomed to be destroyed by his own artefacts.
The text of Frankenstein begins with a series of letters written by the explorer Robert Walton, who has been trying to navigate his ship through the Arctic ice in the hope of finding a warm continent beyond it, akin to the legendary Hyperborea. Modern readers know full well that this was a fool's errand, but that was not at all certain in 1818. Thus, although Walton's situation is clearly symbolic one of the Gothic conventions which Frankenstein does adopt is that the weather is symbolic of human emotions, so his entrapment in the ice signifies that Walton's noble ambitions have unfortunately alienated him from the warmth of human companionship it should not be taken for granted that Mary Shelley saw him as a lunatic who should have known better. Nor should we assume that Walton's encounter with Victor Frankenstein, who is similarly lost in the ice-field and in whom Walton recognizes a kindred spirit, was in her eyes a meeting of damned men.
Thus, Mary did not begin the work of ideative elaboration with the premise of her story, but with its crucial image. The beginning and the end of the story are both extrapolations of that single instant, the one constructed in order to explain how it came about and the other to follow it to its implicit conclusion. Both are consistent, to a degree, with the visionary moment, but they are not really consistent with one another, in the way that they would have been had the author extrapolated an ending from the apparent premises contained in the beginning. Because the fact that the story was to be horrific was accepted as an axiom, much of what was eventually presented as the logic of the story the 'explanation' of how the nightmare confrontation came to take place was formed by way of ideative apology, not as a set of propositions to be examined on their own merits.
⚫Refferences
Frankenstein as a science fiction http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/stable.html
Themes of Frankensteinhttps://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanfiction/frankenstein-as-a-science-fiction.html#.YCifsVPhVPw
Author's biography https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley .
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