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Transcript

Frankenstein

Themes

Narrative structure

Language

  • Epistolary novel, written through the medium of several letters. Adds realism (helps with the ghost story fear factor) to the narrative, as we learn through accounts, demonstrating different points of view without the need an omniscient narrator.
  • Russian doll style structure/mise en abyme makes the story seem like a detective story, as we piece the story together

Narrative and narratology

alone

Letter I II, V ...

narrative isolates us, as it is a mise en abmye, a Russian doll type that is typical of the Gothic genre.

Prejudice

Ambition- Walton is blinded by ambition on his quest for knowledge, just as Victor is blinded by his ambition to defy nature and almost play God. Could the story be a parallel or an analogy to the faults of playing God?

Isolation- physically, emotionally, mentally-links to the gothic genre significantly.

Nature- antagonistic relationship between Victor and nature. Nature as a barrier, not only between Victor and science but physically (chase of Frankenstein)

Romanticism-

Gothic-

Religion- Biblical references are threaded throughout the book. References to Milton's paradise lost is

Intertextuality- references to other utterances, since words and linguistic/grammatical structures pre-exist the individual speaker and the individual speech. Intertextuality can take place consciously, as when a writer sets out to quote from or allude to the works of another.

Mise en abyme – narrative or philosophical moments of infinite regression.

Chinese boxes or other infinite regressive features are often used for comic effect, the

French term emphasizes the terror of emptiness that is also part of the free play of

language where language has only the most tangential, arbitrary and conventionalized

relationships with reality.

The uncanny

Imagery

Disturbance of the familiar

Main quotes

Ambition and fallibility

Helene Cixous

Mulvey

De Beauvoir

over reaching ambition,

transgression

woman as a giver, not a taker

loneliness, sublime

motifs

passionate, extremes,

"What can stop the determined heart and resolved will of man?" - Walton, this idea of determination and revenge resonates between both Walton and Victor's narrative

So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein—more, far more, will I achieve; ... and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, a monster, a blot upon the earth from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?

You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains—revenge, henceforth dearer than light of food! I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery.

I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.

The fallen angel becomes the malignant devil. Yet even the enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.

whose Christian mother instructed her "to aspire to higher powers of intellect, and an independence of spirit, forbidden to the female followers of Mahomet"

abandonment, lonliness,

sublime man vs nature

biblical intertextuality

Syntax

Word placement

prejudice

Word choice

"savage"- Walton to describe Frankenstein

Monsters language learns from Milton, and from the De Laceys

Context

Portrayal of women

  • Ghost story
  • Gothic genre
  • Contemporous belief was that children inherited their parent's temper, and during the time of the monster's creation, Frankenstein was afixed in a state of raging passion and zelor for science, that the monster seems to have egotistical ambition too.

Analogies/comparisons to other texts

Critical essays

Biblical references through out

Elizabeth has become another inert victim in this game of insanity and male-centered mayhem. She has been demeaned and reduced to a simple tool of revenge, along with the other female characters appearing in Frankenstein.

Margret's presence is passive completely, as she is simply reduced to be a listener, a voiceless character. Yet she is the most important character in the novel as the story is directed to her.

Application

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