how's that daniel i don't know what happened she's still gone um next week
there's no class here it's online okay um presumably because they are
setting up for the exams or something that's the normal reason um and
something else ah yes and for everybody i'm pretty sure that next term this
group is at 6 45 so it's much later uh it's the third uh class as it were
but i mean to confirm that with the center um rather than just throwing up
or whatever um but that was what they told me at the beginning of the
course so i assume that's still still the case um so i will try to remember
to remind everybody about that good uh so we won't come anybody else was
confident it's a lot happened to daniel or dan seems to have gone so do you
have any questions about he's back again hello daniel back um do you have
any questions about frankenstein you don't know do you have any questions
about frankenstein not anyone that i haven't heard a lot well i have 60
pages of questions about frankenstein yeah i will keep us all busy um right
so question number one what genre does frankenstein belong to history novel
we could say okay that's one possibility any others you're very quiet one
second uh i have a problem because irene is very loud and you're very quiet
again please it's a romantic novel it's a romantic novel um uh possibly why
would you say it's a romantic novel uh i was going to ask you because you
know we have a video in each unit a video from didac lawrence and he says
frankenstein is a romantic novel with a prominent gothic component to me
it's more classic than romantic but he says it's a romantic novel with a
gothic component okay um i think our starting point has to be that labels
occur after the events and are always going to be approximations especially
if a uh a work of literature is um original it's likely to not completely
fit into a category into a pigeonhole um okay so we've got two ideas there
but it could be romantic or it could be gothic um i don't know i don't know
i don't know i don't know i don't know i'm not going to contradict you that
but we will look at those two questions let's start with the question of
gothic why might we call this gothic we have the elements of terror uh
abandoned castles the darkness castle not castle uh yeah not really here in
france sometimes in some nature natural scenery where victor uh didac would
say that nature is more of an important characteristic of the romantic than
the gothic that's one point for didac any any other suggestions why might
we say it's gothic well it's perfectly reasonable to suggest that it's
gothic yes if the the scene also in the symmetry of symmetry and graveyard
i can't quite understand you okay no i say the that uh there are also a
scene in a symmetry and graveyard i can't presumably can you can you write
it down because the the microphone seems to be distorting a little bit
you'd write it on the chart i i was thinking about the concept of
prometheus where this has to do a bit with the gothic okay that's another
figure a figure concerned with the improvement of science of the humanity
in general silence science okay well um i'm not sure if he really is
writing uh ah cemeteries and graveyards okay but enough i mean it's a
little bit tangential isn't it not hugely important, but yes, they do come
up. One of the, as I was going to say, the idea that this could be Gothic
makes sense because we know that Mary Shelley had read all of the major
works of Gothic literature at this time, so all of the Anne Radcliffe stuff
and Horace Walpole and the monk by Matthew Lewis, etc. She was well read on
Gothic literature. One suggestion is that it's important, the fact that the
stories are nested. You know the Chinese box structure where you have a
story within a story within a story? That is a characteristic of Gothic
literature. However, a man called William Nels says that this type of
structure is so common in world's literature that you can't really
associate it with Gothic. So that's slightly controversial. The best,
probably the best checklist that we could find is in Eve Kosovsky's The
Coherence of Gothic Conventions, where she mentions a long list of
conventions and characteristics of Gothic literature. And we have things
like sleep-like or death-like states, which of course we have some of that
in this novel. Doubles, doppelgangers, etc. We have that. The discovery of
obscure family ties, we can more or less accept that. The possibility of
incest, and then there's the whole question, you know, the precise nature
of the relationship with Elizabeth, etc. And so there are a number of those
sorts of elements. Another Gothic trope is encounters by moonlight. I think
you mentioned darkness, somebody. So the idea of people meeting under
moonlight and Victor meets the creature three times under moonlight at
night. So that could be seen as an element. But of course, this relevance
of science, whereas, which is not really a part of the Gothic, and the fact
that this is taking the possibilities of science at that moment and drawing
logical conclusions of where it was going. So that would not be so much an
element of Gothic. As is the anchoring in time and space. We have, the
Gothic doesn't tend to have a specificity of time or place. So we have all
of these dates on the letters. Does anybody know any relevance of the
supposed dates on the letters? I mean, we have the day of the week, the
date, and the year is seventeen dash dash on all of the letters. Does
anybody know any references that that might relate to? You haven't seen the
video I recommended. No? Yes? Right. The first letter in the novel is
potentially around the time that Mary Shelley was conceived. The length of
the action of the novel is about nine months. And the last date of the
novel, the days coincide with 1796, 1797. And the last date in the novel
would be two days after Mary Wollstonecraft's death. So I mean that could
be a coincidence. It could be just she had a calendar lying around. But it
does seem to suggest that there is that biographical evidence and there is
a specificity of time and of course place. You know, we have lots of
geographical references. That's not very Gothic to be so interested in
trying to create that sort of realism. If we do accept this as a Gothic
novel then we can say that this is the best selling Gothic novel of all
time. And it's certainly the most influential Gothic novel of all time.
Victor Frankenstein and his creature are the most influential characters in
Gothic fiction. And of course if we want to draw lines, we can go anywhere
from the Planets of the Apes to Metropolis to Blade Runner to whatever you
like. This is hugely influential on Gothic literature in all its forms. One
important element of the Gothic is the uncanny way in which the dead impose
their wishes on the living. And so we have things like Victor's mother's
dying wish is that he marries Elizabeth and immediately after creating the
creature Victor links his dead mother with Elizabeth in his incestuous
nightmare. So this idea that there is this influence of not necessarily
ghosts as we understand them, fully blown ghosts, but the fact that dead
people can impose their will on the living like that is relevant. In terms
of the other story we have the fact that Walton's father's father on his
deathbed forbade him to go to sea. He said you cannot go to sea and of
course Walton does not respect that. So those sorts of things are
important. Now be careful to some extent because for example in Pride and
Prejudice we will see there's a situation where the family is affected by a
ghost. There's a clause in the contract of the ownership of the house where
the Bennets live where it can only be inherited by a male. So if that was
in a gothic novel we would say this is the dead imposing their will on the
living. There's absolutely no way please do not say that Pride and
Prejudice was a gothic novel. Pride and Prejudice. So there are situations
where you will get clauses in contracts for example and it has nothing to
do with the gothic but it's a possible element. Victor's reason for
destroying the female creature is that a race of devils would be propagated
upon the earth which might make the very existence of the species of man a
condition precarious to the rule of terror. So there's this idea of the
threat against humanity multiplying. Of course that's a pretty silly
argument if you think about it because presumably it would be much easier
to make a sterile and infertile female monster than a fertile female
monster if Victor Frankenstein is capable of creating human life then one
would imagine it's not that difficult to create a female monster who is not
capable of reproducing. So it's a little bit of a silly argument which we
may not notice or we may notice. There are some arguments for it being
gothic or being under the influence of gothic. Why might we say it is
romantic it's part of romantic literature? We have elements of beauty of
nature, the sublime the poetic language. Well the first thing I would say
is that it's almost impossible to have a romantic novel. Why? Why would I
say that? Because of the time period. Because of what? Because of the time
period. No. No, no, no. Can anybody give me the name of any fairly romantic
novels? Romantic in the sense of The Romantics not romantic in the sense of
Danielle Steel. Basically a necessary characteristic of the romantic is the
sublime. That intensity of emotion. And it's absolutely impossible to
maintain that intensity of emotion throughout a whole novel. That is why it
is something which lends itself quite well to poetry, to odes and that sort
of thing. But a romantic novel would just be appalling. It's too much
because that intensity of emotion just cannot be sustained over the length
of a novel. Ironically we have a situation where three times Walton uses
the adjective romantic to describe himself. Which is curious because the
word romantic was not applied to the poets, the lake poets and the other
poets that we call romantic nowadays until the 1840s. So the word was not
used in this literary sense for another 25 years or 24 years. But we
actually do have Walton using the word to describe himself in his first two
letters to his sister. Romanticism rejected a lot of the conclusions and
the scientific certainties of the Enlightenment and we can see a lot of
that happening in Frankenstein. If there's the idea in the Enlightenment
that you will have liberal progress constantly and that science will be
ever widening and ever making human life better, the Romantics generally
rejected that idea and of course there is a strongly anti-scientific vein
in this novel. There is the element of the creature going from innocence to
experience. He ends up sadder but wiser and as we study the Romantics next
term you will see that this process of innocence to experience becoming
sadder but wiser is absolutely fundamental to Romantic literature. The
monster says I was benevolent and good, misery made me a fiend in chapter
10 and then chapter 13 he says sorrow only increased with knowledge. So
there's this idea one of the basic tenets of Romanticism is that children
are innocent and sweet and perfect absolute nonsense of course, children
are horrible we won't go into that. That is the idea of Romanticism and
then the world's the innocence of children but they become more, they reach
a greater understanding of the world as we grow up and so you become as I
say sadder but wiser. Other themes of Romanticism for example isolation,
isolation is important and of course Walton is to some extent isolated in
his relationship with the rest of his crew he wants to continue, they don't
and Victor Frankenstein is constantly isolated and of course the monster is
or the creature is socially isolated throughout the novel. We've all
mentioned the idea of sublime nature, the sublimity of nature. The creature
says my spirits were elevated by the enchanting appearance of nature the
past was blotted from my memory, the present was tranquil and the future
gilded by bright rays of hope and the anticipation of hope so that's a very
romantic idea that nature is very nice. Both Victor and Walton and
Elizabeth and Clairvile feel astonished by sublime nature so there's this
continual theme that nature is regenerative blah blah blah Victor and the
creature feel consolation as a result of their interaction with nature
maternal nature bade me weep no more one of them says. Storms and
quintessentially sublime nature as they contain danger, fear terror and
vastness so the use of storms that we have regularly in the novel. Storms
in the novel tends to be premonitions of impending tragedy. Nature of
course is also linked to the power of imagination and the Promethean power
and limitations of humankind are also explored so we've got lots of
romantic ideas there. There are also direct references to romantic
literature. Does anybody remember any? Paradise Lost is hugely important
for the romantics but it's not in itself romantic literature because of the
time period. Sorry, I don't understand. There is some poem of Shelley
mentioned in the novel. One second, sorry. I think there is a mention to
Shelley's poem in the novel. For some reason the connection is very bad
with your microphone. Could you write it? Sorry, you were saying? Oh,
Virta, right. Okay, so Virta is directly related to romantic literature and
there's more than three books. There's Pliny's Lives of the Great Romans.
There's Volni's The Ruins of Empire so there's a few more but yes Shelley's
poetry. Is there a direct reference to her husband's poetry? I can't
remember. What we certainly do get is Victor identifies Clairvile with the
persona of Wordsworth in Tintin Abbey. The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,
good, okay, that was certainly referenced implicitly. One of the poems, I
just thought I was saying about Tintin Abbey, one of the poems that we will
be studying next term in at the end of February I think is lines written a
few miles above Tintin Abbey by Wordsworth and there's a direct reference
to that there. On the other hand however we could, it has been argued that
Frankenstein seems to criticise Romanticism in the self involved
individualism of the Romantic poems. A lot of the Romantics and especially
Wordsworth but it's all sort of me, me, me, me, me, me, me it's all about
themselves and it is very self involved and rather tiresome after a bit it
has to be said. I always find Romantic poetry rather adolescent it's, I
mean it is some of it is very great poetry but it is it does tend to be
slightly immature in a number of its attitudes but maybe that's just
because I'm old but anyway so the novel demonstrates that the Romantic
response to the Enlightenment is as thought of danger to the human
community as were the Enlightenment doctrines themselves. If the Romantic
questioning of Enlightenment ideas is accepted there's also a questioning
of the Romantic response to those ideas. I think perhaps the most important
idea most important Romantic value that you get in this novel and its
fundamentals of this novel is the idea that once you create something there
are basically two options it'll either be still born, it'll either
basically just be dead and not be successful or it will develop a life of
its own and that can be as true of Satan and Man in Paradise Lost or
Blake's Tiger, again I'm referring to that before you actually study
Blake's Tiger but if anybody is aware of the poem The Tiger by Blake it's
one of the probably the most famous poems in the English language The
French Revolution is something set in motion if you like, simplifying it's
set in motion by the bourgeoisie but then it gets out of control the people
who start the revolution cannot contain it and it destroys most of them we
could even say the same thing about the novel Frankenstein Frankenstein is
created by Mary Shelley but Frankenstein in the popular conscience is
something hugely bigger than Mary Shelley's novel a lot of the popular
beliefs about Frankenstein have very little to do with the novel because
the novel has developed, or the legend of Frankenstein has developed a life
of its own we could say the same thing about the Mona Lisa was painted and
of course it has become a cultural icon and it has simply developed on its
own if you are a conspiracy theorist we could say the same thing about
Covid-19 you create it and it develops a life of its own we could even say
that about a normal child everybody when they have children has the idea of
how they expect the children to grow up never fulfil 100% what the parents
expect of them so again once you create something it develops a life of its
own and that is a very important concept to understand romantic ideals or
tenets another novel which is half way between gothic and romantic is
Charles Brockton Brown's Wayland or The Transformation it is basically a
story which you will recognise from sort of series B films and this type of
thing about a ventriloquist puppet which develops a life of its own it is a
little bit related to Pinocchio and all that sort of thing which again we
know very surely had read and in this novel there is the reflection had I
not rationally set in motion a machine over whose progress I had no control
and which experience has shown me was infinite power again that's very much
the same you could imagine exactly the same words being spoken by Victor
Frankenstein because of this power of relationship between the creator and
the created and a certain inversion of that power of relationship there is
a point in the novel where the creature tells Victor you are my creature
but I am your master obey so there is the idea of that inversion of roles
and we get that type of inversion of roles the chaser chased in the novel
by William Godwin whose name I have forgotten but that idea of roles being
interchanged is pretty typical of romantic literature as well Victor's
destruction of the half made female creature can be seen as a futile
attempt to regain control of the creation by denying it itself another
element which is closely associated with romanticism I suppose it's not
necessarily part of the romantic tenets but it is very much associated with
them is laudanum which is basically just liquid opium and we have a
situation where Percy Bysshe Shelley used it recreationally and to dull the
pain of his nepharisis I don't know what nepharisis is but it was painful
and he used laudanum to dull it Byron took laudanum recreationally Fanny
Imbley committed suicide by overdosing on laudanum Mary Wollstonecraft and
Percy Bysshe Shelley both tried to overdose on laudanum but failed much of
Coleridge's poetry was composed under the influence of laudanum and we have
the situation in the novel where Victor takes laudanum after Clairvaux's
murder so laudanum again appears in the novel there is no direct evidence
we have no proof that Mary Shelley ever took any laudanum but it would have
been readily available to her if she had shown any interest and given the
influence on her and the importance of Byron in both of their lives it's
quite possible that she tried but we don't know I'm not accusing her at all
incidentally there is archaeological evidence that the ancient Greeks drank
laudanum so it may be behind the creation of some of their myths so if we
use a little bit of imagination and if we're talking about romanticism it's
quite possible that the whole Prometheus myth all of the classical
references that we have in Frankenstein could go back to a society that was
generating these stories using laudanum as well so this whole rupture with
rationalism rupture with enlightenment one means of getting to that
situation where you're not being logical you're being much more intuitive
etc is through drugs and there's a lot of it about for these people of
course all these things were completely available at this time you could
get cocaine you could get laudanum, you could get opium just by going to
your apothecary or your chemist store without any type of prescription you
just bought it so it was both common and was generally speaking not
socially isolating because there wasn't the same level of social rejection
people who took drugs at that time of course another way of seeing this
novel is as the first work of science fiction and that is primarily because
we have a situation where strange things happen wonderful things happen
terrible things happen without any need for divine intervention God is not
anywhere to be seen in controlling the actions that's not absolutely new we
could say exactly the same about the way of the world the way of the world
is basically a sort of agnostic society not referred to but the idea of the
idea of something like the way of the world is that there is it's just a
normal group of people who you could imagine running into in the street
whereas this is there are incredible events so whatever we could include
elements of science fiction here as well So your conclusion to the question
in the exam what genre is the novel Frankenstein I think it would be quite
good to refer to the idea that Frankenstein the novel is a literary monster
it's made up of bits and pieces taken from a variety of genres and formed
into a coherent living novel so if you were to get a question on these
lines for me at least I mean in one sense the best conclusion would be just
to repeat the Dax conclusion because he's the one who's going to be
correcting your exams but if you want to be slightly more interesting than
just agreeing with the person who is in charge of the course then a
conclusion where you say there are elements of this this this and this but
it is within the nature of the novel this idea of creating something living
out of bits from other entities it is not it doesn't fit happily into any
one genre What was the socio-historical context of the novel Frankenstein?
In England, in Europe I mean it's written, it's not written in England but
of course England is if you like important because both Mary and her editor
Percy and people who were first in touch with the novel John Polidori and
Lord Byron were all English more or less but John Polidori was of Italian
extraction but was grew up in England went to university in Edinburgh Okay
different things to take into different things to give context here One is
that Britain was facing a vast public debt because of the Napoleonic Wars
Britain was able to win the Napoleonic Wars basically because of its
banking system it was able to borrow lots and lots of money, the British
government could borrow lots of money to pay for the Napoleonic Wars but
there was this monstrous debt that had been created. Any other relevance of
the Napoleonic Wars? Since we mentioned them There were hundreds of
thousands of people who were mutilated and disfigured all across Europe as
a result of over 20 years of war with baskets, with cannons things like
that well before the age of plastic surgery it would have been very very
normal to see people with grotesque distraction to their appearance so the
idea of coming regularly across people who are physically monstrous but not
internally monstrous who might receive a certain amount of rejection from
society because of their appearance they did nothing more than perhaps
fight for their countries etc would have been relatively normal and that is
a context, I'm not saying that this novel is about the wounded or the
Napoleonic Wars but that is a context in which these things happen another
very interesting context which I only discovered this when I was preparing
the tutorial for the 12th year running this year was a cartoon by George
Cruikshank there's a man called Gilray and there's another man called
George Cruikshank and they are incredibly important as cartoonists in this
period I think we saw with the blue stockings there are cartoons of the
blue stockings attacking each other having cat fights between the blue
stockings cartoons are a very important part of popular culture and when I
upload the notes for the discussions for the team's discussion you will see
the cartoon can you see that one second this cartoon which is by Cruikshank
dated 1814 and the subtitle of the cartoon is The Modern Prometheus so
again we have a very direct potential association and it's very possible
that Mary Shelley who of course was still in England at the time picked up
on this title of The Modern Prometheus the illustration as I say you will
see it when you see the notes I'm sorry maybe visible here but it's a
picture of Napoleon basically as the modern Prometheus other things
happening another big problem in Britain at the time was you had hundreds
or hundreds of thousands probably of disgruntled soldiers and sailors in a
typical situation of massive enlistment to people in the navy in the army
and the Napoleonic wars and when the Napoleonic wars end everybody just go
home and be unemployed and there's no particular help for these people and
so that was a big problem the population of the country was increasing very
very quickly not exactly the population of London London was generally
still a population sink and a lot of people died in London so the actual
natural population of London was not growing London was growing but because
people in the countryside coming into London not because the population
there was growing in itself the indigenous population but there was also
another very important element in 1816 and 1817 was the crop failures
across Europe why were there crop failures? anybody remember? well it's the
same reason that the same reason that the Shelleys and Byron's holiday was
ruined it was basically 1816 was known as the year without a summer and if
I remember correctly it was the volcano Tambora, I think it is I get
confused between volcanoes I think it's Tambora exploded in Indonesia and
basically sent volcanic ash and things all the way around the world into
the northern hemisphere and so there were bread riots all across Europe and
very big social problems because of that so there's sort of the idea
amongst the aristocracy that we finally got rid of these horrible
republican ideas from France and then of course you have a repeat because
of people being in a pretty desperate situation and there are food riots
and all sorts of things so socially in Britain you have the Rebecca riots
in Wales where one of the things in it's a little bit like the Comunidad de
Madrid a lot of the roads in Wales were private roads where you had to pay
people didn't like this having payage, having roads that you had to pay for
when people were pretty desperate was not at all popular and so what the
Welsh men would do is they would dress up as women, put on women's clothes
to make themselves less recognisable and go at night and destroy the
turnpikes which is the controls the payage controls on the roads and you
had the captain's swing riots in England I think in Yorkshire and of course
you had the whole Luddite movement does everybody know the word Luddite?
Luddite yes Arantxa no ok good I'll just write it down Luddite is like that
yes exactly so if you have to be if you have a great level of imagination
imagine a situation in which machines take people's jobs away very
difficult to imagine in our society and so you had especially you had a lot
of cotton mills where highly skilled people's highly skilled jobs were
being destroyed by the new machines so the the weavers were led by a sort
of legendary probably fictional figure called Captain Ludd which is why
they were called Luddites and they broke into factories and destroyed the
machines where they could so there's probably a higher level of civil
disturbance of violence of pre-revolutionary type situation in Britain than
for a long time shall we say it's a very difficult situation the first five
years after the end of the Napoleonic War again you would perhaps imagine a
situation where because of because of the victory in the Napoleonic War
because Britain was an unrivaled superpower after the Napoleonic War in the
world basically dictated all sorts of things all sorts of policy imposed
globalisation what we would today call globalisation on the rest of the
world etc etc you'd think it would be a great period of prosperity but it's
not and there are peaceful reform movements like the Chartists who want
universal democracy at least for all adult men they tend to be violently
repressed most famously in the Peterloo massacre there was a completely
peaceful demonstration of over 100,000 people in Manchester and the local
authorities sent in the dragoons so these demonstrators who were doing
nothing illegal a lot of them were treated like were basically soldiers
were sent in like the soldiers that had been used against the French army
in the Napoleonic Wars so that's why it was called the Peterloo this is in
St Peter's Field so to make a reference to Waterloo and the violence of the
authorities and really because of the that was very scandalous in Britain
at the time the authorities made some efforts to try to improve the
situation let things get completely out of hand if the authorities had
continued to overreact British history might have been very different
interestingly the first person to compare the French Revolution to some
type of monster was in fact Mary Wollstonecraft's nemesis Edmund Burke who
on a number of occasions talked about the revolution revolutionaries being
like a monster and we know again that Mary Wollstonecraft read I think all
of the words of Edmund Burke one of the great things about studying
Frankenstein is that if you study Shakespeare or something like that in a
lot of cases you have to say these ideas were floating around in the in the
context and you just have to assume that Shakespeare had access to ideas
like the new historicists do we don't have that with Mary Shelley Mary
Shelley in her diaries tells us every single book that she reads and she
reads and she reads she's a massive reader and the reason why you can have
an 18 year old producing a novel that's this important is because she
through books has had an incredible education both basically following the
policies advocated both by Mary Wollstonecraft and especially by William
Godwin the idea of giving young people free access to books let them choose
the books they want to read and if they read as long as they read it that's
the important thing which of course most educationalists I think would
think is quite a good idea he well it wasn't actually a bookshop it may
have been actually a bookshop I'm not quite sure certainly he published
books by other people as well so he worked sort of as an editor amongst
other things yes I think it was basically a bookshop basically there was
easy access to books that's the important thing okay similarly the anti
Jacobin review in 1800 called the followers of Godwin and Wollstonecraft
and of course the greatest follower of Godwin and Wollstonecraft was their
daughter Mary Shelley Mary Godwin Shelley he called them the spawn of
monsters so this idea of associating these writers these ideas with is is
floating around in the atmosphere in all sorts of areas both as
conservatives and also what was the scientific context of this novel there
was a lot of advance especially with electricity that the Galvanists okay
so we have this whole idea of the importance of electricity there is a
debate at the time which is called the vitalist debate and it became most
important in 1814 between people who had the idea that life could
spontaneously generate itself from material from matter and other people
who believed that there needed to be some sort of force to generate life
and there was a big debate between John who argued that life needed a vital
force similar to electricity to ignite and William Lawrence who argued that
it was the result of functional interdependence of the organised body we
don't really need to worry too much about the details of that debate
suffice it to say that William Lawrence was Percy Shelley's personal
physician so there is a direct family relationship there John Polidori as
you know was part of the whole gothic nightmare inventing game that
produced Frankenstein was very very up on all of this these new ideas and
we have the ideas of Erasmus Darwin who was also developing the ideas of
evolutionary processes at this time it's actually quite sad because a lot
of the ideas of Charles Darwin were already in existence in Erasmus
Darwin's poem The Temple of Nature in the footnotes of 1803 now Charles
Darwin proved these ideas scientifically but there is this rather ponderous
not very good poem written by his grandfather which actually has a lot of
those ideas beforehand and exists the idea and in his term spontaneous
generation there seems to be an echo of that within the novel in fact
before that we have in 1740 Abraham Tremblay discovered that when certain
kinds of fresh water polyps and when you cut them into pieces each piece
becomes a separate separate polyp so there is this idea of division of life
bringing bits of life back together again and at the instigation of Louis
XV Jacques de attempted to make an automaton with the heart, veins and
arteries but he died in 1782 before completing the task so we actually have
real historical people who are trying to create sort of recreate the human
beings in more or less the same period what about the Walton episode any
idea about the origins of that that seems to be very much inspired in
Constantine Phipps Royal Naval Expedition to the North Pole of 1773 now
obviously you have all sorts of Royal Naval Expeditions probably much more
famously the expeditions of Captain Cook in a similar time period but this
expedition was quite famous at the time because one of the people who
participated in it was a 15 year old teenager called Horatio Nelson so
Nelson went to the North Pole which made this particular expedition quite
famous and eventually the expedition had to turn back because of the ice so
the idea of going to the North Pole but failing and having to come back
because of the ice is part of Nelson's life story so it was reasonably well
known Nelson incidentally was famous for having at the age of 15 on this
expedition he killed a polar bear I think he killed a polar bear with a
knife or dagger which is difficult to believe but anyway I would imagine
that polar bear against 15 year old without a gun is much more likely to
win the polar bear that is the story John Polidori who was also very young
he was 21 and as you know participated in the competition of writing a
frightening short story had recently graduated from Edinburgh University
with a degree in medicine and he had his thesis was about bad dreams so
again no doubt there could be some influence from him on the whole nature
of the idea of dreams having to do with what might a biographical approach
to Frankenstein look like how was Mary Wollstonecraft present in Mary
Shelley's life what can we see about Mary Wollstonecraft in this novel the
absent mother ok very good absent mothers missing mothers Victor is
motherless Elizabeth is motherless Justine is motherless Agatha is
motherless Safi is motherless the creature is motherless so there is a
certain tendency there it's like a Mel Gibson film and indeed Elizabeth
inadvertently kills Victor's mother by passing on scarlet fever to her just
as Mary Shelley inadvertently kills her own mother Mary Wollstonecraft
through filperial fever in the aftermath of her birth for William Godwin
and for Mary Wollstonecraft followers Wollstonecraft represented the finest
feminist radicalism while for many others she was a scandalous and shameful
figure both perspectives no doubt would have made it difficult for Mary
Shelley to relate to her dead mother both as larger than life heroine and
also as this woman of scandal both would be quite difficult for a very
young person to try to relate to and would have been problematic in her
relationship with him we know that Mary Shelley read and reread obsessively
all of her mother's works a huge number of works she read everything her
mother had written almost as if they were scripture almost like they were
religious texts she wanted to connect with her mother through her mother's
writing and this Marian obsession if we can call it that extended into the
family home there was a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft over the fireplace
in the family sitting room which obviously was Jane Claremont William
Godwin's second wife was not very happy about and so there is this presence
of Mary Wollstonecraft's figure again the dead influence in the living if
you like in the Godwin home and remember that Mary Shelley used to meet
Percy Shelley at Mary Wollstonecraft's grave and so there's this idea of
veneration the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft as well if you are ever in
London I highly recommend you go to the church of St Pancras it's a
fascinating church where you can visit Mary Wollstonecraft's grave it's
very close by there is also another grave which has a very strange design
and you think why does that shape look so familiar to me you think about it
and eventually if you investigate there is a grave with a type of
rectangular stone above it with sort of square shapes on this stone and the
person who invented the famous London telephone boxes the red telephone
boxes in London based it on this grave the shape of the telephone boxes is
based on this grave it's like having a telephone box in stone in marble and
the church itself is a Norman church which is 1000 years old so it's an
interesting place to visit if you do go to London I do recommend it and for
example we know that in 1915 when Frankenstein was conceived we know that
Mary Shelley was re-reading Vindication of the Rights of Women so it's all
present it's all there however it's also true that Frankenstein seems to go
out of its way to exclude women and women's issues there is I think a very
conscious attempt just simply associated with oh this is a novel of the
daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft writing a novel to develop the ideas of her
mother and we really do not see that here there are elements of Godwin and
Wollstonecraft's concepts about a balanced humanist education in terms of
the fact that we have this the education that is received by Sappy is very
much the sort of liberated female education that Wollstonecraft is
suggesting blah blah blah and of course indirectly that is the education
that the monster received but we'll talk about that later um remember that
in the words of Wollstonecraft the patriarchy well she doesn't use the word
patriarchy but you know what I mean turns women into irrational monsters
the fact that women most women in contemporary society did not get a proper
education they spend all their time learning how to play the piano and say
a few things in French and that sort of thing rather than learning how to
think um turn them into irrational monsters so there is the idea of the
monster there as well how is William Godwin present in Frankenstein Godwin
believed in a hierarchy of pleasures so intellectual feeling, sympathy and
self-approbation are nobler than the pleasures of the senses according to
Godwin and the creature's pleasures we echo this progression first he takes
delight in birdsong and moonlight now you can enjoy these types of
intellectual sympathy with nature at a basic level then he enjoys learning
and finally he feels sympathy with other people of course they don't feel
sympathy with him but we can see Godwin's hierarchy of pleasures reflected
in the monster's experience the creature enjoys a sort of self-led
education based on reading advocated by the most avant-garde 20th century
educational theories he ends up reading what might be considered the canon
of his day Milton, Plutarch, Goethe, etc Volney which led him naturally to
the existential questions of humanity what did this mean who was I what was
I when did I come what was my destination that's what it says in the novel
where do we come from what are we doing here and what is the future of
humanity the great questions of humanity are asked by the monster creature,
whatever we want to call him however he lacks a pedagogical guide to help
him in his quest for knowledge the idea of somebody like Godwin is that you
allow a child or young person to choose the books they want to read they
read the books and then we talk to the young person about the books that
they bring and so you help them to develop ideas about books and about
other things the creature reads the books but doesn't have that possibility
to interact with somebody to reflect on the ideas moreover he receives an
education in sentiment sensibility through his reading but the expectations
this generates cannot be fulfilled in a social world so the idea is that
you become a person of sentiment a person of feelings a person who has
sensibility and that means that you interact with other human beings in a
better way the creature receives this education in sentiment but cannot
interact with other human beings because everybody else just sees him as a
monster because he's big and hideous and as a result requires the
rebelliousness of Milton's Satan coupled with the melancholia of Werther so
if you like he is the romantic project gone wrong because it's rejected by
society as you mentioned the sorrows of Werther or the sorrows of the young
Werther were especially important in Mary Shelley's life she would have
known that her father referred to Mary Wollstonecraft as a female Werther
so one of the family nicknames for her mother was a female Werther he
mentions that in his memoir of the author and that he and Mary
Wollstonecraft were reading Werther together the nights before their
daughter was born so Werther was present if you like at her birth so that
is a very important point knowledge is a mixed blessing for the creature as
it was for Adam and Eve sorrow only increased with knowledge reading gives
the creature expectations that cannot be fulfilled in the social world at
the same time of writing Frankenstein Mary Shelley was afraid that she and
her offspring could suffer the same social ostracism that her mother and
Fanny Imley had experienced they would be monstrous outcasts only suicide
only the suicide of Harriet prevented this so you have a situation where
effectively in a British society that was becoming increasingly
conservative Mary's situation as an unmarried woman with Herschel she would
likely have a more and more complicated life and be rejected more and more
socially as for example was the case of you had Nelson the one request that
Nelson made very contemporary was that Lady Hamilton his lover was cared
for and she was completely rejected by society and died in absolute poverty
even though Nelson had to some extent saved Britain there wasn't any
charity extended to her despite that but of course because Harriet
Shelley's wife committed suicide Mary and Shelley were able to get married
quite quickly afterwards rather indecorously quickly it has to be said but
that meant that she was therefore Mrs Shelley and therefore any children
that were born after that were perfectly legitimate and that was not a
problem very silly ideas but those were the ideas at the time it is very
easy to take a sort of moralist position and blame Mary and Percy
especially Percy for Harriet's suicide etc it should be said that Harriet
committed suicide when she found out that she was pregnant by another man
not by Percy so her life was also very very complicated I mean it's the
problem of course is this typical situation where you can have lots of sort
of liberal ideas about free love but those ideas are not applied equally to
men and to women so women who are in the romantic circles can sort of
inside the romantic groups can play that game but outside those romantic
groups they're going to be much more complicated than the men are so it's
thoroughly unfeigned of course Nick? Yes but it seems to be a lot of
suicide at the time no because there seems to be a lot of suicide yes a lot
very opportunity muy oportuno for the for the lovers yeah sure all I'm
saying is that the um the reason for her suicide was more complex than just
because her husband had abandoned her and she was now pregnant from her
next unmarried relationship so it was more complicated than that I'm not
getting Percy off the horse as you will see I'm not a huge fan of Percy
this Shelley and his poetry also her mother tried to commit suicide no no
as a result of the stories of Berta suicide became very fashionable this
was basically the idea of the intolerable um the intolerable nature of life
and therefore the only option if you had this level of sensibility to be
what we would call today a romantic was to commit suicide was made
fashionable by Berta and it's something like 40,000 people in Europe
committed suicide after having read the stories of Berta I mean the stories
of Berta have been called the most deadly book ever written because so many
people committed suicide having read it so yes but I mean the same thing
happened to Fanny Imlay also committed suicide also committed suicide yes
not a I suppose that's an element of of course yes yeah but and that we can
see that as a reflection here but yes lots and lots of people killing
themselves okay Mary Shelley's Percy Shelley's elopement was partially
provoked by her father's writings about sorry anti-marriage writings yet
hypocritically Godwin repudiated Mary until she finally married Percy
Bysshe Shelley while at the same time demanding Shelley's financial support
so again hugely hypocritical Godwin you say you write and say that marriage
is an outdated institution then your daughter runs off with a man who
thinks you're wonderful you repudiate your daughter but you still expect
financial help from the young man she's run off with and you only accept
her when when she gets married to him you know it all doesn't make very
much sense but we all have our contradictions so a motherless self-educated
close observer of human behaviour who had been rejected by her father and
desperately seeks an intimate enduring relationship with sympathetic beings
has written a novel about a motherless self-educated close observer of
human behaviour who has been rejected by his father and desperately seeks
an intimate enduring relationship with sympathetic beings we can very much
get a feeling that the creature parallels Mary Shelley's own experience
with the physical justice Godwin famously argued that crime was the result
of a flawed environment and education rather than the consequence sorry a
flawed environment and education rather than the consequence of any
original sin or capacity for depravity so you have this idea that people do
evil because they haven't received enough kindness and they haven't
received enough education and that is what you have to change in society
which is an idea which we can see reflected in the novel how is Mary
Shelley's life reflected in Frankenstein well that idea that the novel
starts on the same day and then it takes nine months that is a pregnancy
one thing that Richard Allen points out is that as a child Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin had no name that was exclusively her own and so was
in a way as nameless as the creature she's called Mary Wollstonecraft which
is just her mother's name Godwin which is her father's surname even as an
adult after writing the novel she becomes Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
Shelley but she doesn't have her own identity in terms of anything that is
absolutely hers she is just a product of bits of other people joined
together most of Mary Shelley's life up until and beyond the writing of
Frankenstein was dominated by her love-hate relationship with her
stepsister Clare Claremont who she alternately admired and despised but
never seemed to be riddled Clare Claremont of course followed the Percy and
Mary in escaping the Godwin family and followed them around became part of
the group and of course had Byron's child Clare was just eight months
younger than Mary Shelley but in some ways was her doppelganger very very
close in age of course in life experience almost a type of unnatural way
how was Frankenstein influenced by Mary Shelley's experience with maternity
um right ok I think we need to be careful about this it's tempting to link
Frankenstein to the appalling frequency of infant mortality in her family
in 1815 Mary Percy's 12 day old daughter Clare dies in 1816 Mary
Wastcraft's daughter 22 year old planning inlay committed suicide on the
9th of October possibly because she was in love with Percy in 1816 Percy's
wife Harriet in an advanced state of pregnancy drowns herself on the 10th
of December in 1818 Mary and Percy's one year old daughter Clara number 2
died in 1819 Mary and Percy's three year old son William died in 1820
Shirley's daughter with an unnamed mother one year old Elena died in 1822
Clare Claremont's daughter by Byron the five year old Allegra died Mary
suffered an almost fatal miscarriage in the same year in 1826 Harriet and
Percy's son 12 year old Charles died however notice that all but Clara's
the first Clara's death occurred after the conception of Frankenstein you
could say that they are developing the novel they are editing the novel
during some of those deaths but in terms of their personal experience there
is just that one very newborn baby dying in that experience Stephen said
the circumstances of Mary Wollstonecraft Mary Shelley's childbirth and the
Mary Shelley Clara 1 childbirth are enough for Elena Moyers to see the
central theme as birth and death for instance in her journal Mary Shelley
recounts how she and Percy Shelley were able to reanimate their dead baby
by rubbing it in front of the fire in one of her dreams but the baby did
not really die they were rubbing it in front of the fire and it came to
life again so as is absolutely natural this was a serious emotional had a
serious emotional impact on her one contemporary reviewer referred to
Frankenstein as a literary abortion so there is that sort of idea of
abortion floating around in the environment and in 1831 Mary Shelley
herself described her novel as a hideous progeny Mary reinvented herself in
1831 sorry in the 1831 edition as a stable conservative matriarch by giving
Mary Shelley Mary Shelley's Mary Shelley was given the title of Mary
Shelley Mary Shelley was given the title of Mary Shelley Mary Shelley the
title of Mary Shelley was given the title of Mary Shelley as a So, a little
bit like what we will see with William Wordsworth. She travels all the way
from this very radical group when she was a teenager to being highly
conservative in the last stages of her life, which is common, not that
strange, but it is curious perhaps. We're going to have bing-a-ling-a-ling
a bit. Well, how is Percy Shelley reflected in the novel? What elements of
Percy Shelley can we see in this novel? As you say in your notes that all
the things that Mary Shelley didn't like about him were reflected in the
monster, oh no, in Victor. Victor, right. It's quite interesting that one
of the... names, one of the pseudonyms that Percy adopted when he was a
child and later was Victor. He liked the name Victor and he applied the
name Victor to himself on a number of occasions. So that could well be
relevant, it's not just any old name. So Mary idolised Percy, but from
modern research it's clear that he regularly cheated on her, and abandoned
her. For significant periods of time. Percy Shelley was possibly manic
depressive and he regularly expressed thoughts of suicide, which of course
Goethe had made fashionable, as I mentioned. Like Victor, Percy used law
and needed periodic isolation. Like Victor, what Percy said and what he did
were frequently in conflict. Like Victor, Percy had been a spoiled child by
his mother and sisters, but his later unconventional beliefs and behaviour
estranged him from them. When Percy became overcome by emotion, he would
lie down staring at the sky to gain inner peace. Victor does the same thing
in volume three, chapter one. Percy's mad enthusiasm for science. Seems to
be reflected in the characterisation of Victor. In his youth, Percy read
books on both science and alchemy and conducted chemical experiments.
Percy's and Godwin's marital reluctance may be reflected in Victor's
disinclination to marry. We have this situation where Victor pokes off
getting married to Elizabeth for seven years. And the idea, initially the
idea was that Wollstonecraft and Godwin were not going to get married. And
they were to some extent ridiculed by their friends when they finally did
get married for the sake of their daughter. And so that reluctance to get
married may be relevant. In the poem Alasdair or the Spirit of Solitude,
written in 1815, Percy describes a young poet probing the deep mysteries of
nature by forcing some lone ghost to render up the tale of what you are. So
there is to some extent this idea as a ghost, not as a physical creature.
But there is that idea in this poem written by Shelley the year before
Frankenstein was. At the same time, Clairvaux seems to reflect the ideal
version of Percy Shelley. This doubling is strengthened by Victor's remarks
that in Clairvaux, I saw the image of my former son. So there's the
doppelganger idea there and the double idea there. Romantics tended to
believe that men should find their own love. And Clairvaux is often
characterised in similar terms as Elizabeth. For example, he is a kind and
attentive nurse, which is quite a feminine characterisation. He is more
interested in literature than in science. Again, we tend to associate
literature more with feminine interest. Or feminine sensibilities. Whereas
science is much more masculine in terms of the values of society. Both
Percy Shelley's mother and sister were called Elizabeth. So the names are
not fortuitous in this novel. OK, that looks like it's time. I don't know
why the bell hasn't rung. But we will continue next time. I repeat. There
is no physical class next week. We will do the class online from home. So
please don't turn up to class because there won't be anybody here. Why is
that so? So see you next week and bye. Bye, Nick. Thank you. Thank you.
Bye.