Scarica Appunti su Frankenstein e scrittore e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! MARY SHELLEY’S LIFE She was born in London in 1797 . ⦿ Her mother died but she received an excellent education from her father. ⦿ Her father encouraged her to write stories , and allowed her to be present at the conversation he had with many of the leading intellectuals and poets of the day. ⦿ Among these poets there was P.B. Shelley, who was an ardent admirer of her father. Mary and Pierce fell in love and ran off to Europe, wandering through France, Switzerland, Germany. ⦿ In 1816 Mary began to write Frankenstein. They settled in Geneva in Byron’s villa. Mary and Pierce married in 1816, after Shelley first wife committed suicide, and lived in Italy with her child. ⦿ She lost several children, which caused her a nervous breakdown and only a son survived. ⦿ In 1822 her husband died in a storm, while he was sailing with a firiend ⦿ She returned to Enlgand, she published the work of her husband and earned her living through writing , but never again wrote anything as successeful as Frankenstein. ⦿ Mary Shelley died of a brain tumour in 1851. In 1816 Pierce and Mary passed most of the with Byron, the physician William Polidori at Lake Gneva. During a stormy night, when they were reading ghost stories, Byron proposed they should each write a ghost story. Mary decided to participate, saying she had been inspired by a a nightmare she had had that night. It took her many month to write the story and she did not comolete it until she had left Switzerand. It was the best story of the book and when it was published anonymously in 1818. THE STORY Dr. Frankenstein is a brilliant scientist devoured by the ambition to create life from inanimate matter. He succeeds in giving life, by electric shocks, to a human-looking frame he has put together out of organs from dead men’s bodies. The doctor is frightened by his own creature , and the monster then runs away. He later reappears in the Swiss Alps, where he finds that all the people he comes across reject him because of his monstrous appearance. This enrages him against mankind. Then he kills Frankenstein’s little brother, his best friend and his wife as a revenge. In the end Frankenstein sails to the North Pole to escape from the monster, but it is the monster who wounds the doctor mortally, accusing him and the rest of mankind of lacking compassion towards him, and thus pushing him to murder. He then leaps from the ship onto an ice raft which is soon borne away by the Arctic sea. ! Frankenstein, a Swiss scientist, creates a human being by joining parts of corpses. ! The result of the experiment is ugly and revolting. ! The monster becomes a murderer. ! At the end he destroys his creator. ! The story is introduced by a series of letters written by Walton, a young explorer on an expedition voyage to the North Pole, to his sister, Margaret Walton Saville. MAIN CHARACTERS Both Captain Walton and Doctor Frankenstein tried to go beyond human limits. The monster is complementary to his creator: they both suffer from isolation and they both begin with a desire to be good. NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE Epistolary Novel: Walton writes letters to his sister There are 3 different narrators: - Walton - Frankenstein - The creature Chinese boxes - Walton informs his sister - Frankenstein informs Walton The creature informs Frankenstein ➢ Frankenstein is a Romantic version of the very ancient dream of the creation of artificial life. ➢ Its lasting appeal comes from two factors : ➢ 1) it derives from the Romantics’ interest in the effects of science on man ➢ 2) it exploits the horrific and macabre of the Gothic tales. Of the tale of terror Mary Shelley’s novel posseses the emotional language, the atmosphere of suspence and danger. It differs from many Gothic novels because it ignores certain features and substitutes the supernatural with science.
