Riassunti completamente sostitutivi del libro su Mary Shelley e Frankenstein, Dispense di Inglese

Scarica Riassunti completamente sostitutivi del libro su Mary Shelley e Frankenstein e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! MA RIASHELUEN BIOGRAPHY FRANKENSTEIN, OR THE MODERN PROME THEUS Mary Shelley was born in 1797 and she was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. - Her father was an anarchist and a philosopher, - Her mother, Mary, was a feminist philosopher and a novelist who died only ten days after giving birth and she's the woman after whom Mary shelly took her name. - Both her parents were influenced by the ideas of the French revolution, in fact they were part of a small radical group which included other important men of letters of the time such as William Blake. - When Mary was four years old, her father (William) got married with another woman : Mary Jane Clairmont who already had daughters. In Particular Mary's stepmom and one of her stepdaughter were the cause of many sufferances and troubles during her early life. - We know that Godwin's house was visited by some of the most famous writers of those days, like the romantic poet Coleridge and the philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley who is the man Mary Shelley fell in love with, as a matter of fact they married and Mary Godwin took his surname “Shelley”. «In 1814, when Mary was only 17 years old, they fled to France and decided to rent an house on the banks of lake Geneva, near Byron's rented villa: Villa Diodati That is the place in which Frankenstein was written and in which the story takes place - In 1822 the couple moved to Lerici, in Italy, where one day Percy set sail in a storm and he was found drowned ten days later. - During her life she lost three children. - After Percy's death, her father got ill so she went to England to take care of him, despite the fact that he rejected her. - She continued to publish and write, and at the end she died in England in 1851 because of a brain tumor. Frankenstein was written between 1817 and 1818, when Mary Shelley was only 18 years old, and it's dedicated to William Godwin, her father. The story was written in Villa Diodati, in Geneva, and it was probably the result of a competition between Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori to see who could write the best horror story. Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818, because as we know at the time women writers were not taken seriously as they didn't have the same level of education and legal status of men. Prometheus was the titan that stole fire from gods to give it to new life breaking natural humans, so he defied rules and was punished gods and was punished — too. In a similar way Frankenstein create a »We can consider the book as an autobiographical novel because Mary Shelley was an outcast (like the monster), she was rejected by her own father; and we can connect the fact that Mary Shelley lost her mother very early to the fact that Victor Frankenstein found a way to bring back people to life, and it seems that Mary Shelley made him find a way to THE PLOT The plot is very simple: Victor Frankenstein was a Swiss scientist who managed to create a human being by joining parts selected from various corpses. Despite his careful preparation, the result of his experiment is an ugly and revolting monster that at the end becomes a murderer and destroys his creator (Victor Frankenstein) The story is not told chronologically, but it's told through a series of letters written by Robert Walton to his sister Margaret Walton Seville behind whom Mary Shelley hides herself. Walton is a young explorer on a voyage of expedition to the North Pole to discover something new and achieve fame. During the voyage the ship got stuck and a few time later the crew rescued a nearly frozen man who was Victor Frankenstein that was following the monster and started to tell Walton his story THESETTING The story takes place all over Europe: from Geneva, to the Alps, and then France, England and Scotland as well as the university at Ingolstad. The North Pole (but also the Alps) are the most important settings because they are perfect to express the sense of sublime. This setting is also used to show the state of mind of the two characters, that are characterized by being depressed, empty and lonely. We have to underline a particular characteristic connected to the setting that helps us understand the monster: in fact the monster was created near Frankenstein's university and so this contributes to highlight the monster's propensity to knowledge. THE ORIGINS In the introduction Mary Shelley writes about the origin of the story, so where the ideas comes from. The inspiration derived from many elements: - the reading of ghost stories - speculation about the re-animation of corpses - her personal anxieties and memories of the sense of loss when her mother died (she sympathises with the monster because of the social injustice that both Mary and the monster suffered, they both were excluded and rejected) - but also the intellectual stimulation of Shelley and Byron All these elements combined together are at the origins of the nightmare that so terrified her and inspired her for the story. THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE In Frankenstein Mary Shelley included many aspect of her personal attitude, starting from the sense of justice and education given by her parents, but an important element is the science, in particular the relationship between science and nature. Mary and her husband were very interested in chemistry and they were always aware of the latest scientific theories and experiment such as Galvani's experiment in which through a combination of electric energy made a dead frog move. The intention of Mary Shelly was also to criticize this kind of use of science that doesn't respect natural laws. Mary Shelley caught the dark side of progress and she represents this concept by demonstrating the outcome/result of an experiment that does not respect nature. This aspect is typical of the Romantic poetry that always exalts the natural aspect of the “double” for example - the country instead of the industrialized city - the innocent child instead of the corrupted adult LITERARY INFLUENCES - The monster can be considered Rousseau's natural man : a man in a primitive state who is not civilized; he, however, rapidly discovered the negative aspect of both the state of nature and the civilization. - There is also the influence of John Locke that we can find in the description of monster's self awareness and his education by experience. - The ghost stories she read at Villa Diodati, even if Frankenstein differs from the gothic tradition because it's not set in a castle and it doesn't deal with supernatural events. - There's the influence of the Romantic Poetry in particular the ballad “The rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” by Coleridge; both the ballad and Mary Shelley's novel are tales of a crime against nature (the creation of Frankenstein in Mary Shelley, and the Mariners shooting of the Albatros in Coleridge) - The myth of Prometheus: Prometheus was the In a similar way titan that stole fire Frankenstein create from gods to give itto a new life braking humans, so he defied natural rules and was gods and was punished too. punished ) and it's the perfect example of overreacher just as Victor Frankenstein