Mary Shelley e Frankenstein, Dispense di Inglese

Scarica Mary Shelley e Frankenstein e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! MARY SHELLEY Mary Shelley was born on 30 August 1797 in London. She was the daughter of the philosopher and a political writer William Godwin, and the famed feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft. The Godwin household had a number of distinguished guests during Mary’s childhood, including William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the William Wordsworth. Mary was self-educated and made a great use of her father’s expensive library. In 1814 Mary met the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was still married to his first wife when the fled England together. Mary and Percy traveled in Europe for a long time. In the summer of 1816 the Shelleys where in Switzerland with Jane Clairmont, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, and during one rainy day Byron suggested that they should all try to write a horror story: Mary won the competition with what would become her most famous novel: Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus. And the book was published anonymously in 1818, due to female writer’s condition, and many thought that Percy had to written it. Mary and Percy Shelley were finally able to marry in December 1816. Mary Shelley died of brain tumor on the 1 February 1851 in London. FRANKENSTEIN, OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus was published anonymously in 1818, because probably people wouldn’t have bought it if they knew a woman had written it. In the tradition of the Gothic novel, it offers dramatic settings like dark laboratories, mountain landscapes and the icy wastes of the North Pole, with grim atmospheres, episodes of horror and violence. The work is technically an epistolary novel, told through the letters of an English arctic explorer, Walton. Mary Shelley had the inspiration to write Frankenstein in a nightmare in which she dreamed a student assembling a creature that, at some point, begins to show signs of life. PLOT The story is introduced by a series of letters written by Robert Walton, the captain of a ship bound for the North Pole, to his sister in England. They had reached the northernmost part of Russia when they came across a curious and gigantic being riding a sled. Mr. Walton and the company did not get suspicious but, going on with their journey, they met a dying man who was looking for someone or something. His name was Victor Frankenstein and he was following a monstrous creature. Walton takes Frankenstein aboard his ship, where he tells him his strange story. Dr Frankenstein was born in Geneva and studied science at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany. After his mother died, he tried to discover the secret of giving life to inanimate matter, to bring her back to life. Thanks to his professor notes he succeeded. Using body parts from corpses, he assembled a monstrous creature and gave it life. Being aware of having created a monster, Frankenstein abandoned it. The creature's horrible appearance inspired fear and loathing in everybody it met, but endowed also with human feelings it also became lonely and miserable. As a reaction to the rejection it encountered, the monster learnt to hate men. It killed Frankenstein's brother, William, and succeeded in incriminating Justine, a servant girl of the Frankenstein family, who was unjustly executed for murder. Frankenstein caught up with the monster on a glacier in Switzerland. The creature persuaded the reluctant Frankenstein to create a female companion for him. Frankenstein nearly completed this second monster but was horrified with his work and destroyed it. The monster took revenge on Frankenstein, killing his good friend Henry Clerval and then murdering Elizabeth, the girl Frankenstein was about to marry. Frankenstein, now determined to exact revenge, pursued his creature as far as the Arctic. This brings us back to the beginning of the novel and Frankenstein's rescue by Captain Walton. A few days later, Walton finds the monster weeping over Victor's dead body, full of sorrow and remorse. The creature now wishes to end its unhappy, lonely existence, to prevent someone from creating another creature like it, and walks off onto the polar ice where it will die. THE STRUCTURE Mary Shelley's novel has a complex structure. Technically it is an epistolary novel, it opens with the narrating voice of Robert Walton, whose letters to his sister provide a framework for the main narrative. But there are two other narrators: Frankenstein, telling the story of his life and experiments and the monster himself, explaining the reasons for his behavior. The use of multiple narrators highlights the various relationships between author and reader and allows to present three different points of view. The reader therefore read the story as Walton's sister reads her brother's epistolary account, while Walton listens to Frankenstein's story. CHARACTERS The main characters in Mary Shelley’s work are three:  scientist Victor Frankenstein  the monstrous creature he created  Robert Walton All of them experience a deep research anxiety: Frankenstein is determined to replace God and tries to give life to a creature; the monster searches in vain for someone who can love him; the sailor Walton, trying to make a contribution to scientific and geographical progress, wants to reach the North Pole more quickly, searching for a route through the West. A ROMANTIC PROMETHEUS The complete title of Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus makes a clear reference to the myth of the Greek titan Prometheus, an important figure for Romantic poets, and alludes to scientists’ aspiration of being able to technically do anything, so the central theme of Shelley’s work. However, there are two versions of the Prometheus story that Mary Shelley tries to unify: 1. Greek mythology Prometheus, who stole the fire from the gods and gave it to humanity: he was then eternally punished for his deed. Prometheus was chained to a rock where his liver was eaten away every day only to be regenerated nightly due to his immortality. 2. the Roman reworking of the legend of Ovid (from the Metamorphoses), in which Prometheus molds human beings from clay. Victor, attempting to become a modern Prometheus as he tries to give humanity the secret of life itself, clearly oversteps the limits of human nature. He is punished though through the death of the people he loved the most and in the final through his own death, as he attempts to destroy the monster he has created.