Talk:Frankenstein/Notes

Notes on sources for rewrite of Frankenstein article:

Aldiss: "On the Origin of Species: Mary Shelley"

"On the Origin of Species: Mary Shelley"

Baldick: In Frankenstein's Shadow

In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing

Bann: "Frankenstein": Creation and Monstrosity

"Frankenstein": Creation and Monstrosity

Behrendt: Approaches to Teaching Shelley's Frankenstein

Approaches to Teaching Shelley's "Frankenstein"

Editions by Stephen C. Behrendt

• Manuscript fragments of Frankenstein are held in Abinger Shelley collection at the Bodleian Library (11)

Choosing a Text of Frankenstein to Teach by Anne K. Mellor

• 1818 text: Compared to the 1831, it has "greater internal philosophical coherence", closer to Shelley's "original conception", and "more convincingly related to [its] historical contexts" (31). "In Frankenstein, these contexts are biographical (the recent death of Mary Shelley's first baby and her dissatisfactions with Percy Shelley's Romantic ideology), political (her observations of the aftermath of the French Revolution in 1814-16), and scientific (the experiments with galvanic electricity in the first decade of the nineteenth century)." (31)
• 1818 vs. 1831 - thematic differences: "The most striking thematic differences between the two published versions of the novel concern the role of fate, the degree of Frankenstein's responsibility for his actions, the representation of nature, the role of Clerval, and the representation of the family." (31-32)
• Percy Shelley's contributions

• James Rieger gives PBS a lot of credit for shaping Frankenstein and Mellor disputes his argument (32)
• "it was Percy who suggested Frankenstein's trip to England be proposed by Victor himself, rather than by his father" (32)
• PBS made about 1000 corrections to the manuscript (32)
• "Percy Shelley's numerous revisions of Mary's original text damaged as well as improved it." (32)
• "Percy Shelley did improve the manuscript of Frankenstein in several minor ways: he corrected three factual errors, eliminated a few grammatical mistakes, occasionally clarified the text, substituted more precise technical terms for Mary's cruder ones, smoothed out a few paragraph transitions, and enriched the thematic resonance of the text." (33)
• "Percy Shelley misunderstood his wife's intentions. He tended to see the Creature as more monstrous and less human than Mary did, and he frequently underestimated the flaws in Victor Frankenstein's personality." (33)
• PBS changed the last line of the novel. MS wrote: "He sprung from the cabin window as he said this upon an ice raft that lay close to the vessel & pushing himself off he was carried away by the waves and I soon lost sight of him in the darkness and distance." (33) Percy wrote: "He sprung from the cabin-window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance." (34)

• "Mary's version, by suggesting that Walton has only lost sight of the Creature, leaves open the troubling possibility that the Creature may still be alive, while Percy's flat assertion that the Creature is lost provides the reader a more comforting closure of the novel's monstrous threats." (34)

• "By far the largest number of Percy's revisions were stylistic. He typically changed Mary's simple, Anglo-Saxon diction and straightforward or colloquial sentence structures into more refined, complex, and Latinate equivalents." (34)

• MS: "Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was also a favorite pursuit and if I never saw any I attributed it rather to my own inexperience and mistakes than want of skill in my instructors."
• PBS: "Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favorite authors, the fulfillment of which I most eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistakes, than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors." (34)

• Biographical background that inflected the revisions of 1831: "between 1818 and 1832 Mary Shelley's philosophical views changed radically, primarily as a result of the pessimism generated by the deaths of Clara, William, and Percy Shelley; by the betrayals of Byron and Jane Williams; and by her severely straitened economic circumstances. These events convinced Mary Shelley that human events are decided not by personal choice or free will but by an indifferent destiny or fate." (36)

Gender and Pedagogy: The Questions of Frankenstein" by William Veeder

Bennett: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction

• Frankenstein is MS's "masterpiece" (2)
• "Politicized themes of power and responsibility...are central to Frankenstein" (30)
• The initial incentive behind the story was a night of reading ghost stories with PBS, Byron, and John Polidori (30)
• Shelley's composition of Frankenstein was influenced by "Godwin and Wollstonecraft's Enlightenment agenda" and political conversations held that summer (31)
• Frankenstein plays out the exploration of power on four different narrative levels" (31): 1) letters from Walton to his sister Margaret; 2) Victor's story; 3) the Creature's story; 4) the Felix and Safie tale (31-32)

• The four stories are similar; for example, Walton "[acts] out an applied, secular exploration, whereas Frankenstein's quest for the secret of life is on a metaphysical and theoretical scale." (32)

• Unlike Dante and Milton's epics, Frankenstein has "no stable, reliable narrator. Instead, the reader alone must evaluate the validity of a character's words and actions." (34).
• "The Modern Prometheus": "In the Greek myth, the result of Prometheus's actions, like Christ's, is redemptive suffering for humanity. Frankenstein's quest, conversely, reveals itself to be more for the attainment of personal, godlike power than for societal advancement." (35)
• Creature: He is "a Rousseauian natural savage who evolves from a condition of instinctual goodness to learned evil" (35); he is an outsider (36); "When he breaks from this model [of Shelleyan reason and love] and emulates the power system prevalent in the nineteenth century, he, like his creator, becomes both victim and perpetuator of that system." (36)
• "Frankenstein...may be seen as a republican form of the Prometheus myth. Power, in this telling, is in the hands of mortals, who also have the capability to bring light to their own civilization." (36) Power is therefore not in God's hands, but in humanity's and humankind can alter the state of the world (36).
• Contemporary reviews feared the religious implications of the novel; they wanted to read it as a warning against, for example, "attempting to usurp God's power", but Bennett notes that "this [is a] misreading of the novel's reformist idealism" (37).
• "For the Shelleys...scientific experimentation served as a paradigm for political experimentation: both offered the means to create a better world." (37)

• "Far from condemning scientific exploration, Mary Shelley adopted this major enthusiasm in England at the time as a germane metaphor through which to examine age-old political inequities." (38)

• MS was familiar with the works of Humphry Davy and Erasmus Darwin (38)
• "The conservative appropriation of the novel as a warning against scientific research...continues to this day to deflect the novel's reformist intentions. Within the terms of the novel, Frankenstein's limitation is not that he enters sacred realms but that he fails to take responsibility for his own actions." (39)

• Frankenstein's "actions destroy the larger community, including his young brother William, Justine, Elizabeth, and Clerval. Frankenstein's failure, then, is a parable for the failure of the nineteenth-century socio-political structure to take responsibility—material and spiritual—for the greater populace." (39-40)

• "Frankenstein, through its author, interpolates the woman as the creator, who comments on a failed socio-political system engineered and controlled by men. It also aligns her with visionary political reformers—among them her parents and P. B. Shelley—who embraced the Enlightenment belief in the potential improvement of humanity." (40-41)

Bohls: "Standards of Taste, Discourses of 'Race'"

"Standards of Taste, Discourses of 'Race', and the Aesthetic Education of a Monster: Critique of Empire in Frankenstein"

Botting: Making Monstrous: "Frankenstein", Criticism, Theory

Making Monstrous: "Frankenstein", Criticism, Theory

Clery: Women's Gothic

Women's Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley

Chapter 4: Mary Shelley

• The preface to the first edition of Frankenstein suggests that the Gothic is "a laboratory of the mind", which possible scenarios can be explored (117). Quote from the Preface: "The event on which the interest of the story depends...was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it developes; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield." (117)
• Shelley had "extensive knowledge of the Gothic tradition" and "observation of the passions was both a political and an aesthetic imperative in her immediate circle" (126).
• "The repertoire of skeletons and spectres that had stood the Gothic pioneers [e.g. Clara Reeve and Ann Radcliffe] in such good stead, have been effectively made redundant by M. G. Lewis's excesses." (127)
• "Like all innovative successes Frankenstein was both deeply familiar to its original audience, and shockingly new. One aspect of its familiarity was the conflict between passion and sentiment, a form of dramatization that can be traced through the history of Gothic from Otranto onwards. On the one hand, the ruling passion that elevates, isolates and torments; on the other, the gentle sentiment which binds on individual to another, nurturing and comforting. In Shelley's novel these two principles are bleakly, even programmatically, opposed." (127) - Frankenstein's ambition causes him to sacrifice his familial ties (127-128)

• "The inhuman passion of Frankenstein will give birth to a nonhuman being. The being is definitively alienated from human society - more absolutely solitary than any figure yet to appear in Gothic writing, and therefore unrivalled in his lawlessness." (128)

• "Frankenstein almost always refers to his creation as a 'daemon', rarely as a 'monster', supporting the idea that it is metaphysically 'other', an emanation of the soul - his soul - rather than a living creature in its own right. At the same time, its hideous physicality is repeatedly emphasized: shrivelled yellow skin, water eyes, black lips, massive and distorted frame." (128)

• "By the end, Frankenstein is as perfectly alone in the world as the monster, kept alive only by the guilty tie, fitted only for the mad pursuit across the arctic wastes during which the two figures merge into extinction." (128-129)

• "Walton is himself a divided character, who seeks glory and new worlds, like Frankenstein, but also sustains familial bonds in his correspondence with his sister, and longs for a friend in his self-imposed exile." (130)
• Book was published on 1 January 1818 (131)
• Shelley was paid £28 by Lackington, her publisher, after her bill for book purchases had been deducted (131)
• Walter Scott reviewed Frankenstein in the March 1818 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, writing that "the work impresses us with a high idea of the author's original genius"; he believed PBS to have written it (132)
• "The majority of the other reviews [other than Scott's] were also favourable, all echoing Scott's observations on the author's uncommon powers of mind and imagination. Even those few critics who condemned the work on the grounds that it provided no moral conclusion, conceded as much." (132)
• John Wilson Croker attacked the novel in the Quarterly Review in January 1819. This was a Tory publication, so it follows that it would attack a Godwinian novel (132).

"Once it was generally known that MS, not PBS, had authored the text, reviews did not generally start reviewing the book differently - there was not much of a "sexual double standard" in the reviewing (132).

Donawerth: Frankenstein's Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction

Frankenstein's Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction

Dunn: "Narrative Distance in Frankenstein"

"Narrative Distance in Frankenstein"

• Shelley commented that Mary wrote Frankenstein "for amusement" and "as an expedient for exercising any untried resources of the mind". She opposed the glorification of domestic affection and universal virtue appearing in fiction. (408)
• "Several critics have complimented the subtlety of its concentric narration, 'strangely wrought ... with reality at the outside and horror at the core.'" (408)
• "Frankenstein structurally dramatizes the failure of human community" (408)
• Frankenstein's narrative expresses a desire for "filial, fraternal, and conjugal unions" (409)
• Walton's frame story is scornful of domestic affections; by the end, though, he recants. He at first parallels Frankenstein's "intense searchings" with a "restless ambition". He finds and realizes the value of connection but never presently understands himself. (409)
• "Like both the Creature and Frankenstein, Walton seeks an audience and occasion for his narration, and like each of them he addresses himself to a person too distant to comprehend the story's full impact." (410)
• Frankenstein's narrative is far more "horrible" than Walton's, and it becomes apparent that Walton's assessment of Frankenstein as a person of impeccable judgment is disproven by Victor's own narrative. (411)
• Frankenstein urges Walton to "forgo ambition and seek tranquility" yet cannot do so himself. (411)
• Walton begins telling his story in the epistolary method to his sister, then moves to a journal. (412)
• In the end, Walton returns home but this end might be "as desolate as the waste into which the Creature plunges." (412)
• "Walton's abortive effort to entertain his sister, his inability to probe his own consciousness, and his failure to communicate deeply with Frankenstein should alert readers to his value as a distancing narrator." (412)
• Frankenstein, like Walton, lacks "reflective powers" in his narration. (413)
• Frankenstein and Walton "grow anticommunal in their quests" unlike the Creature, who longs for community. (414)
• The Creature's encounter with the DeLaceys causes him to develop "self-contempt" and to "curse his creator" for making him resemble a human. (414)
• "Frankenstein is concerned with a fragmenting society in which communication remains incomplete." (416)
• Frankenstein's story is "one of reaction to, not reflection upon, the Creature's acts." (416)
• "Thus, while repeating one another's stories, the narrators of Frankenstein remain half-strangers to one another." (417)
• "It may be argued that Mary Shelley was mainly interested in conveying the essence of a nightmare vision as forcefully and dramatically as possible and had no interest in developing the sense of ironic distance among her narrators." (417)

Eberle-Sinatra: Mary Shelley's Fictions

Mary Shelley's Fictions

Ellis: The Contested Castle

The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology

Forry: Hideous Progenies

Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of "Frankenstein" from Mary Shelley to the Present

Freedman: "Hail Mary"

"Hail Mary: On the Author of Frankenstein and the Origins of Science Fiction"

Gigante: "Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein"

"Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein"

• The "ugly" is not covered by categories of the 18th century, such as the sublime, nor the 19th century's grotesque. (565)
• "Because the ugly is assumed to be everything the beautiful is not, it emerges as a mere tautology." (565)
• "[U]gliness in Frankenstein is less of an aesthetic experience than a question of survival." (566)
• Ugliness distinguished from the uncanny: "while something may be uncanny for one person and yet not so for another, the ugly is universally offensive." (566)
• While the uncanny threatens a return to Freud's repressed childhood, the ugly threatens a return to the "universally repressed". (567–8)
• "The ugly is that which threatens to consume and disorder the subject." (569)
• Victor's method of describing the Creature mixes beauty with "unsightly features" in a way that "disrupt[s] aesthetic representation". (570)
• "[T]he Creature's 'depthless' eye serves as the prototype for various hideous progeny, including the 'dead grey eye' of Polidori's vampire" (571)
• "In Gulliver's Travels (1726), another one of the many books Mary Shelley was reading during the genesis of Frankenstein, Swift illustrates a similar phenomenon." (573)
• Edmund Burke's definition of "ugly":
  • "[T]he ugly is that which the beautiful is not." (569)
  • Ugliness is not the opposite of "proportion and fitness"; something can be ugly and "with a perfect fitness to any uses". The Creature is ugly but not deformed. (574)
  • Ugliness is not equated with the sublime (575)
• "However the principal factor of sublime experience-being elevated from terror to a comprehension of greatness-is absent from Victor's experience." (575)
• Kant asserts that ugliness is a function of one's image of an object, not the object itself. Beauty entails good, and therefore ugliness entails evil. (576)
• There is an ideal of beauty from which to distill good; however, there is no ideal of ugliness from which to distill evil. (576–7)
• "Thus unlike the 'creeping horror' that overtakes the Freudian subject of the uncanny, the response to the ugly is immediate." (578)
• "If the aesthetic can be considered the only mode of transcendence left in a highly rational, empirical age, then the de- aestheticizing ugly comes fraught with all the horror of not just primal but final chaos, of apocalyptic destruction." (579)
• "And it is this very 'chain of existence,' from which the Creature is excluded, that keeps the other characters in the novel in existence-paradoxically, by repressing their "real existence.'" (581)
• As Victor considers social connections the essence of being "made up", as his family connections disappear he becomes "unmade-up". (582)
• "Ultimately, the same may be said for Frankenstein. Shelley's novel has been traditionally criticized as uneven, a chaotic intertextual jumble." (582)
• The Creature "escapes" from Shelley's frame story and takes on a life of his own. (582)
• "Frankenstein. The fact that it is common, if not de rigueur, for audiences to equate the Creature himself with Frankenstein (and consequently, Frankenstein) confirms the premise that no matter how one may attempt to contain it, the ugly ultimately bursts forth to consume whatever it confronts: in this case, Mary Shelley." (583)

Gilbert and Gubar: The Madwoman in the Attic

The Madwoman in the Attic

7: Horror's Twin: Mary Shelley's Monstrous Eve

• In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley "take[s] the male culture myth of Paradise Lost at its full value--on its own term, including all the analogies and parallels it implies--and rewrite it so as to clarify its meaning....this apparently docile way of coping with Miltonic misogyny may conceal fantasies of equality that occasionally erupt in monstrous images of rage, as we shall see in considering Frankenstein." (220)
• "Frankenstein (1818) is one of the key Romantic 'readings' of Paradise Lost. Significantly, however, as a woman's reading it is most especially the story of hell: hell as a dark parody of heaven, hell's creations as monstrous imitations of heaven's creations, and hellish femaleness as a grotesque parody of heavenly maleness." (221)
• "a number of writers have noticed the connection between Mary Shelley's 'waking dream' of monster-manufacture and her own experience of awakening sexuality, in particular the 'horror story of Maternity' which accompanied her precipitous entrance into what Ellen Moers calls 'teen-age motherhood.'" (222)
• Frankenstein is a novel about reading and writing; "Any theorist of the novel's femaleness and of its significance as, in Moers's phrase, a 'birth myth' must therefore confront this self-conscious literariness....Mary Shelley explained her sexuality to herself in the context of her reading and its powerfully felt implications." (222)
• Shelley intensely studied the books of her mother and father (222-23)
• At the same time as MS was reading many of the works of Milton (1815-17), she was writing Frankenstein and defining her roles as wife, mother, mistress, and daughter. The novel "is a female fantasy of sex and reading, then, a gothic psychodrama reflecting Mary Shelley's own sense of what we might call bibliogenesis, that Frankenstein is a version of the misogynistic story implicit in Paradise Lost." (224)
• "Frankenstein consists of three 'concentric circles' of narration...within which are embedded pockets of digression containing miniature narratives" (224-25)
• Frankenstein, Walton, and the monster, "like Shelley herself, appear to be trying to understand their presence in a fallen world, and trying at the same time to define the nature of the lost paradise that must have existed before the fall. But unlike Adam, all three characters seem to have fallen not merely from Eden but from the earth, fallen directly into hell, like Sin, Satan, and--by implication--Eve. thus their questionings are in some sense female" (225)
• "given the Miltonic context in which Walton's story of poetic failure is set, it seems possible that one of the anxious fantasies his narrative helps Marry Shelley covertly examine is the fearful tale of a female fall from a lost paradise of art, speech, and autonomy into a hell of sexuality, silence, and filthy materiality." (227)
• Almost all of the characters in the novel are orphans (227); these orphans and their stories are a way to retell the fall (227).
• "a universal sense of guilt links such diverse figures as Justine, Felix, and Elizabeth, just as it will eventually link Victor, Walton, and the monster" (228); characters take on guilt which may not be theirs, such as Justine confessing to killing William (228)
• "the barely disguised incest at the heart of a number of the marriages and romances the novel describes: Elizabeth and Victor, for example (228)
• "the streak of incest that darkens Frankenstein probably owes as much to the book's Miltonic framework as it does to Mary Shelley's own life and times." (229) Victor and Elizabeth are Adam and Eve, for example (229); Frankenstein and his monster are Sin and Satan (229)
• Title and symbolism: "not only do Frankenstein and his monster both in one way or another enact the story of Prometheus, each is at one time or another like God (Victor as creator, the monster as his creator's 'Master'), like Adam (Victor as innocent child, the monster as primordial 'creature'), and like Satan (Victor as tormented overreacher, the monster as vengeful fiend)." (230)
• "though Victor Frankenstein enacts the roles of Adam and Satan like a child trying on costumes, his single most self-defining act transforms him definitively into Eve" - he has a child (232)
• Victor is not the "masculine, Byronic Satan of the first book of Paradise Lost, but always, instead, the curiously female, outcast Satan who gave birth to Sin." (233)
• "Because he has conceived--or, rather, misconceived--his monstrous offspring by brooding upon the wrong books, moreover, this Victor-Satan is paradigmatic, like the falsely creative fallen angel, of the female artist, whose anxiety about her own aesthetic activity is expressed, for instance, in Mary Shelley's deferential introductory phrase about her 'hideous progeny'" (233)
• "But if Victor-Ada is also Victor-Eve, what is the real significance of the episode in which away at school and cut off from his family, he locks himself into his workshop of filthy creation and gives birth by intellectual parturition to a giant monster? Isn't it precisely at this point in the novel that he discovers he is not Adam but Eve, but Satan but Sin, not male but female? If so, it seems likely that what this crucial section of Frankenstein really enacts is the story of Even's discovery not that she must fall but that, having been created female, she is fallen, femaleness and fallenness being essentially synonymous." (234)
• The creature identifies with Adam, Satan, and God (236-37).
• The creature reads books that MS read in 1815 and "typify the literary categories she thought it necessary to study: the contemporary novel of sensibility, the serious history of Western civilization, and the highly cultivated epic poem." This suggests that the creature reflects MS herself. (237)
• The creature identifies itself with Eve as well. For example, it sees its horribly disfigured body in the pool of water. "In one sense, this is a corrective to Milton's blindness about Eve. Having been created second, inferior, a mere rib, how could she possibly, this passage implies, have seemed anything but monstrous to herself? In another sense, however, the scene supplements Milton's description of Eve's introduction to herself" because her narcissism is monstrous. (240)
• "the monster's physical ugliness represents his social illegitimacy, his bastardy, his namelessness" (241)

Heffernan: "Looking at the Monster: Frankenstein and Film"

"Looking at the Monster: Frankenstein and Film"

• Film versions of Frankenstein confirm Percy Shelley's assertion that language "is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, . . . than colour, form, or motion." by depicting a narrow view of the creature's "inner life" compared to the novel. (135)
• In James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), the creature is silent and thus relegated to telling his story through "gesture and expression". (135)
• In Whale, Elizabeth, Victor (named Henry), and Victor's father all survive. (136)
• The creature is not silent in Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), but his narrative is likewise cut. (136)
• However, the films force us to face the creature's appearance, something the novel does not do (136)
• The creature longs to be "seen longingly" and not detested, thereby representing a gender-neutral source of power but also masculine vulnerability (137-8)
• Branagh's film shows the creature's desire for Justine, but none show the creature's true ambivalence about wanting to be seen longingly but not wanting to be seen at all (138)
• Shelley's text strongly implies sight - the films that show things not seen in the book suggest that we are given license to see and imagine them. (139)
• The "animation" in Frankenstein was first depicted in film by Thomas Edison's film company. (140)
• The mythical concept of animation "looks both backward and forward", from the creation of man and woman in Genesis to Victor's unnatural metamorphosis. (140)
• The scene when Victor sees Elizabeth on the street and she turns into his mother's corpse effectively reverses what he had hoped to do ("renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption" [F, p. 53]). Branagh called this transition "supremely cinematic". (141)
• Some parts of the novel are uncinematic, however, such as the creature's recounting of what he learned from Goethe, etc. "Nevertheless, the visual medium of film highlights something at once crucial to the novel and virtually invisible to the reader: the repulsiveness of the creature's appearance. (141)
• One of the problems filmmakers face in objectifying the creature is showing how, when Victor chose parts meant to be beautiful, the result horrified him so. (143)
• Branagh graphically depicts Victor's revulsion against newborn life, as laid out by Moers and others. (143)
• Branagh actually shows the crude stitching not mentioned in the book, to highlight how the assembled creature could revolt Victor. (144)
• Karloff's creature in Whale's Frankenstein elicited sympathy through his actions and expressions, and is thus not "unequivocally ugly". (145)
• Whale's film includes many departures from the book, including the creature receiving a brain labeled "abnormal", thus ensuring that his personality would be as monstrous as his exterior. (147)
• In Young Frankenstein, the creature, who has received Friedrich Frankenstein's brain, ends up marrying Elizabeth, suggesting he is "normal". (150)
• Branagh depicts Victor as being far more passionate and vital than Shelley does. (153)
• Branagh also highlights something that Shelley merely implies: that the death of Victor's mother motivates him to fight death and complete his project. (153-4)
• After Branagh's creature kills Elizabeth, Victor sews her head onto Justine's body and reanimates her. The creature sees this as an affirmation of his own humanity and tries to claim her for his own. In the end, Elizabeth rejects both of them. (154)
• This scene highlights some themes in Shelley: Victor's obsession with his dead mother, the contradictions innate in creating life from a dead body, the creature's desire for a mate, and "Victor's unwitting substitution of Elizabeth for the mate he destroyed". (154)
• Departures from the plot of the novel may help our understanding of it, and also help us relate to the creature. (156)
• Although the scene in Young Frankenstein where Friedrich Frankenstein has the creature doing a tap-dancing routine in front of an audience is outrageous and silly, it illustrates that the creature has become a source of entertainment in popular culture. (156)
• Young Frankenstein parodies not so much the novel as earlier film versions of Frankenstein such as Whale's.
• "Film versions of Frankenstein violate the tacit compact made between novel and reader precisely by showing us what the novel decorously hides." (157)

Hodges: "Frankenstein and the Feminine Subversion of the Novel"

"Frankenstein and the Feminine Subversion of the Novel"

• Shelley's narrative subverts "patriarchal narrative conventions". (155)
• Novels recreate patriarchal culture and ideology; Nancy Armstrong argues that the feminine connection to the novel is due to "ideology and cultural myth" rather than feminine nature or culture. (155)
• Armstrong and others argue that the novel serves patriarchal culture by conforming to its grammar and the novelistic conventions of "sequence, finality, and integrity". (156)
• In response, the female author can chose to "deform" the patriarchal language to show its weaknesses. (156)
• The grounds on which Frankenstein is criticized (for example, that is it not a fully developed narrative), serve to illustrate that the text breaks free of the conventional literary framework. (157)
• In many ways, Shelley adopts the masculine voice; one way is by marginalizing her female characters. In doing so, she gives herself the opportunity to undermine it from within. (157)
• The identity of the self needs transformation in order for women to have a voice; in F, Shelley subverts the identity of the narrative by splitting it into three narrators (Walton, Victor, and the creature). (157)
• At the same time, Shelley demonstrates that to change man's form is to create a monster. (158)
• Shelley's female characters do not escape typical female destinies, but Shelley subverts their fates by making the entire narrative unnatural and the ending unlikely. (158)
• The creature articulates the condition of being partly inside but partly outside a culture; his acquisition of language and Victor's distrust of his narrative illustrate the same point. (160)
• Shelley's writing style, which she was criticized for, shows that "language is an artificial cultural production, a view best articulated by the monster". (161)
• Shelley attempts to conform to the expectations of the system, as does the creature, who is already labeled as evil by that system. (161)
• Shelley willfully disrupts the male narrative, but accepts convention by calling her own narrative "hideous". (162)

Hoeveler: Gothic Feminism

Gothic Feminism

Holmes: Shelley: The Pursuit

Shelley: The Pursuit

Knoepflmacher: The Endurance of "Frankenstein"

The Endurance of "Frankenstein"

Lew: "The Deceptive Other"

"The Deceptive Other: Mary Shelley's Critique of Orientalism in Frankenstein"

• Frankenstein contains many Orientalist elements, including Robert Walton's and Henry Clerval's desire to get to the Orient and Safie's desire not to return to an Oriental harem; Mary Shelley was reading Orientalist works at the time and modeled the novel's structure after Orientalist fictions (255).
• Mention of Caroline Beaufort being linked to the dream-maiden in Percy's "Alastor" (255-6)
• Characters such as Victor and the creature read and absorb lessons from works such as The Arabian Nights, Ruins of Empires, and Lives; Mary Shelley was reading these same books. (256)
• Mary's frequent exposure to Charles Lamb, an East India Company employee, partly shaped her "intellectual heritage"; we can see by looking at Walton, Clerval, and Safie that she worked this heritage into the texture of her novel.

London: "Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity"

"Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity"

Macdonald and Scherf: "Introduction"

"Introduction" to Frankenstein

Mellor: Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters

Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters

Miles: Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy

Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy

O'Flinn: "Production and Reproduction: The Case of Frankenstein"

"Production and Reproduction: The Case of Frankenstein"

Poovey: The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer

The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer

4: "My Hideous Progeny": The Lady and the Monster

• "Even though they praised the power and stylistic vigor of Frankenstein, its first reviewers sharply criticized the anonymous novelist's failure to moralize about the novel's startling, even blasphemous, subject." (122)

• Quarterly Review: "Our taste and our judgment alike revolt at this kind of writing, and the greater the ability with which it may be executed the worse it is—it inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners, or morality; it cannot mend, and will not even amuse its readers, unless their taste have been deplorably vitiated—it fatigues the feelings without interesting the understanding; it gratuitously harasses the heart, and only adds to the store, already too great, of painful sensations." (122)

• "Frankenstein calls into question, not the social conventions that inhibit creativity, but rather the egotism that Mary Shelley associates with the artist's monstrous self-assertion." (122)
• "In the 1818 text, Shelley's model of maturation begins with a realistic depiction of Lockean psychology; young Victor Frankenstein is a tabula rasa whose character is formed by his childhood experiences." (122)
• "In this dramatization of Victor Frankenstein's childhood, Mary Shelley fuses mechanistic psychological theories of the origin and development of character with the more organic theories generally associated with the Romantics. Like most contemporary Lockean philosophers, she asserts that circumstances activate and direct an individual's capacity for imaginative activity; the inclination or predilection thus formed then constitutions the basis of identity. But when Shelley combines this model with the notion...that an individual's desire, once aroused, has its own impetus and logic, she comes up with a model of maturation that contradicts the optimism of both mechanists and organicists....Mary Shelley characterizes innate desire not as neutral or benevolent but as quintessentially egotistical." (123)
• "Frankenstein's particular vision of immortality and the vanity that it embodies have profound social consequences, both because Frankenstein would deny relationships (and women) any role in the conception of children and because he would reduce all domestic ties to those that center on and feed his selfish desires." (124) - "Mary Shelley is actually more concerned with this antisocial dimension [of the Frankenstein's quest] than with its metaphysical implications. In chapter 5, for example, at the heart of her story, she elaborates the significance of Frankenstein's self-absorption primarily in terms of his social relationships." (124)
• "Liberating the monster allows Frankenstein to see that personal fulfillment results from self-denial rather than self-assertion, but it also condemns him to perpetual isolation and, therefore, to permanent incompleteness. This fatal paradox, the heart of Mary Shelley's waking nightmare, gives a conventionally 'feminine' twist to the argument that individuals mature through imaginative projection, confrontation, and self-consciousness." (125)
• "Shelley does not depict numerous natural theaters into which the individual can project his or her growing desire and from which affirmative echoes will return to hasten the process of maturation. Instead, she continues to dramatize personal fulfillment strictly in terms of the child's original domestic harmony, with the absent mother now replaced by the closest female equivalent...In this model, Shelley therefore ties the formation of personal identity to self-denial rather than self-assertion; personal identity for her entails defining oneself in terms of relationship (not one but many)"—not, as Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth would have it, in terms of self-assertion, confrontation, freedom, and faith in the individualistic imaginative act."(126-27)
• "Like forces in the natural world, Frankenstein's unregulated desire gathers strength until it erupts in the monster's creation; then the creature actualizes, externalizes, the pattern of nature—Frankenstein's nature and the natural world, now explicitly combined—with a power that destroys all society. In other words, the pattern inherent in the natural world and figuratively ascribed to the individual becomes, through the monster, Frankenstein's literal 'fate' or 'destiny.'" (127)
• "Shelley's decision to divide the novel into a series of first-person narratives...has the effect of qualifying her judgment of egotism." (128)
• "The creature makes one final attempt to form a new society; but when Frankenstein refuses to create a female monster, it is condemned, like its maker, to a single bond of hatred." (129)
• "The monster carries with it the guilt and alienation that attend Frankenstein's self-assertion; yet, because Shelley realistically details the stages by which the creature is driven to act out its symbolic nature from its point of view, the reader is compelled to identify with its anguish and frustration. This narrative strategy precisely reproduces Mary Shelley's profound ambivalence toward Frankenstein's creative act...the pathos of the monster's cry suggests that Shelley identified most strongly with the product (and the victim) of Frankenstein's transgression: the objectified imagination, helpless and alone." (129)
• "Because of its three-part narrative arrangement, Shelley's readers are drawn in a relationship with even the most monstrous part of the young author; Shelley is able to create her artistic persona through a series of relationships rather than a single act of self-assertion; and she is freed from having to take a single, definitive position on her unladylike subject. In other words, the narrative strategy of Frankenstein, like the symbolic presentation of the monster, enables Shelley to express and efface herself at the same time, and thus, at least partially, to satisfy her conflicting desires for self-assertion and social acceptance." (131)
• Frankenstein and Walton: both "motivated by an imaginative obsession that scorns a literal-minded, superficial conception of nature"; "ambition masquerades as a benevolent desire to benefit society", but in reality it is egotism; "indulging desire is actually a transgression against domestic relationships" (132)
• Walton does not allow his ambition to take over his relationships, in the end, like Frankenstein did. (132)
• Revisions to 1831 Colburn and Bentley's Standard Novels Series edition:

• "The most extensive revisions, some of which were outlined soon after Percy's death in 1822, occur in chapters 1, 2, and 5 of Frankenstein's narrative; their primary effects are to idealize the domestic harmony of his childhood and to change the origin--and thus the implications--of his passionate ambition. As a consequence of the first alteration, Frankenstein's imaginative self-assertion becomes a more atrocious 'crime'; as a result of the second, he is transformed from a realistic character to a symbol of the Romantic overreacher....in her new conception of Frankenstein's development she depicts him as the helpless pawn of a predetermined 'destiny,' a fate that is given, not made." (133)
• "Originally a cousin, Elizabeth becomes a foundling in 1831--no doubt partly to avoid insinuations of incest--but also to emphasize the active of benevolence of Frankenstein's mother, who, in adopting the poor orphan, is now elevated to the stature of a 'guardian angel.' This alteration...is only one of a series of changes that idealize the harmony of Frankenstein's childhood home....In 1831 [Elizabeth] becomes much more like the Victorian Angel of the House" (134)
• "in the 1831 version the seeds of Frankenstein's egotism germinate more rapidly within the home, for Shelley now attributes his fall not primarily to accidents or to his departure but to his own innate 'temperature' or character....Shelley radically reduces the importance of external circumstances and underscores the inevitability of the overreacher's fall." (134)
• "In 1831 Shelley also elaborates Frankenstein's misunderstanding of the natural world" (136)
• "in 1831 Shelley also alter her portrait of Robert Walton in order to remove the alternative of self-control she now wants to deny to Frankenstein." (136)
• "Of the three narrations that compose Frankenstein, the monster's history receives the least attention in the 1831 revisions--no doubt because Mary Shelley sympathized even more strongly with the guilt and alienation that shadow the egotist's crime. Moreover, by implication, the monster is now the appropriate extension of the curse of the creative artist, not the product of the self-indulged imagination." (137)

• 1831 preface:

• "Her primary desire in this introduction is to explain--and justify--the audacity of what now seems to her like blasphemy" 9137)
• "Shelley wants most of all to assure her readers that she is no longer the defiant, self-assertive 'girl' who once dared to explore ambition and even to seek fame herself without the humility proper to a lady." (137)
• "Her 1831 version of the dream that inspired the novel makes clear what Shelley is so eager to disavow: the monster's creator, now referred to specifically as an artist, transgresses the bounds of propriety through his art." - Shelley distances herself from this (138)
• "as she imagines creativity, she imagines exiling her own imaginative energy into a landscape that is fatal to figuration and that freezes all attempts to transform or disguise the self. In such a world, the monster--and, by extension, the female artist--is doomed." (139)
• "the terror that Shelley associates with artistic creation comes not just from the guilt of exceeding one's proper role or from the fatal claims of the literal" (139)
• Shelley justifies the creation of her story in 1831 by attributing it to others and external forces (141)

• "For Mary Shelley, the imagination is properly a vehicle for escaping the self, not a medium of personal power or even self-expression. She therefore associates the imagination with images of flight, escape, and freedom; writing she associates with monstrosity, transgression, and failure." (140)
• "In 1831, then, when Shelley revised her depiction of Frankenstein, she invested him with both the guilt she had come to associate with her original audacity and the feeling of helplessness she had learned to invoke in order to sanction and explain that audacity....Paradoxically, this wholehearted acceptance of an essentially subordinated and passive role...affords Mary Shelley precisely the grounds she needed to sanction her artistic career....In her depictions of the monster and the 1831 Frankenstein, Mary Shelley elevates feminine helplessness to the stature of myth." (142)

Rauch: "The Monstrous Body of Knowledge"

"The Monstrous Body of Knowledge in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein"

Rieger: "Dr. Polidori and the Genesis of Frankenstein"

"Dr. Polidori and the Genesis of Frankenstein"

• First sentence of article: "The received history of the contest in writing ghost-stories at Villa Diodati during the 'wet, ungenial' June of 1816 is well known to every student of the Byron-Shelley circle. It is, as we shall see, an almost total fabrication." (461)
• The first section of the article is about Polidori and Byron
• The article goes into great detail about the differences between Polidori's diary and Shelley's preface to the third edition of Frankenstein
• "The importance of all this is that it shifts critical emphasis with regard to Frankenstein, enabling us for the first time to see this novel totally divorced from and unembarrassed by the Gothic tradition...The Fantasmagoriana could not in any case have been much of a source" (470)

Schor: Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley

The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley

1: Making a "monster": an introduction to Frankenstein (Anne K. Mellor)

• For an "influence" section: "one of the most powerful horror stories of Western civilization" and "The condemners of genetically modified meats and vegetables now refer to them as 'Frankenfoods,' and the debates concerning the morality of cloning or stem cell engineering constantly invoke the cautionary example of Frankenstein's monster." (9)
• "From the feminist perspective which has dominated discussions of Frankenstein' in the last decade, [the novel] is first and foremost a book about what happens when a man tries to procreate without a woman. As such, the novel is profoundly concerned with natural as opposed to unnatural modes of production and reproduction." (10)
• The novel "articulates in unprecedented detail the most powerfully felt anxieties about pregnancy and parenting." (10) Just previous to writing it, MS herself had lost a child as well as given birth (10).
• Central theme: "Victor Frankenstein's total failure as a parent. The moment his child is 'born,' Frankenstein rejects him in disgust, fleeing from his smiling embrace, and completely abandoning him." (10) The novel then charts the results of this abandonment.
• MS described the book as her "hideous progeny" - "This metaphor of book as baby suggests Shelley's anxieties about giving birth to her self-as-author. But Shelley's anxiety about her authorship did not derive from what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have famously called a female 'anxiety of authorship,....Rather, her anxiety was produced by both Godwin's and Percy Shelley's expectation that she would become a writer like her mother." (11)
• The exploration of the repression of sexual desire in the novel places it within the Gothic novel tradition. However, unlike other Gothic novels written by women, her protagonist is male and she does not have a clearcut villain. (12)
• The novel includes "charged homosocial relationships" which may "suggest the perversity of denying female sexuality". Ex: Victor and Clerval and Walton and Frankenstein (13)
• "By using three male narrators, Mary Shelley explores in minute detail the outsized, inhuman Romantic ambitions shared by Frankenstein and Walton, and scrutinizes their effects on the creature at the novel's core." (14)
• "Percy Shelley's editorial revisions often improved the novel by correcting misspellings, using more precise technical terms, and clarifying the narrative and thematic continuity of the text, but on several occasions he misunderstood his wife's intentions and distorted her ideas....By far the greatest number of Percy Shelley's revisions attempt to elevate his wife's prose style into a more Latinate idiom. He typically changed her simple Anglo-Saxon diction and straightforward or colloquial sentence structures into their more complex and stylistically heightened equivalents. He is thus largely responsible for the stilted, ornate, putatively Ciceronian prose style about which so many readers have complained." (14)
• Changes to the 1831 text: "In the 1818 text, Frankenstein's free will, his capacity for meaningful moral choice, is paramount: he could have abandoned his quest for the 'principle of life,' could have cared for his creature, could have protected Elizabeth. But in the fatalistic and surprisingly unChristian vision of the 1831 edition, such moral choices are denied to him....In the 1831 text, Mary Shelly replaces her earlier conception of nature as organic, benevolent, and maternal with a mechanistic view of nature as a mighty juggernaut, impelled by unconscious, amoral force....Crucially, Mary Shelly now undercuts the positive ideal of a loving, egalitarian family, embodied in the De Laceys, which had undergirded the 1818 edition of Frankenstein...in the 1831 edition, Shelley portrays the bourgeois family far more negatively, as the site where women are oppressed, silenced, even sacrificed, and racial prejudices are formed." (16-17)
• science: Frankenstein is based "upon an extensive understanding of the cutting-edge science" of the time the book was written (17), namely Humphry Davy, Erasmus Darwin, and Luigi Galvani
• SF: The novel is "said to initiate the genre of science fiction" (17)
• From Davy, Shelley drew her use of chemical terminology and the idea that a chemist tries to change the world around him (18)
• From Darwin, Shelley drew the idea that a scientist should carefully study everything around him, not alter it (18)
• From Galvani, Shelley drew the inspiration for Frankenstein's experiment. He "had attempted to prove that electricity was the life force by reanimating dead frogs with electrical charges" (18).
• critique of science: "Through the work of Victor Frankenstein, Mary Shelley mounts a powerful critique of the early modern scientific revolution: of scientific thinking as such, of the psychology of the modern scientist, and of the commitment of science to discover the 'objective' truth, whatever the consequences." (18)
• The novel asks epistemological questions about the nature of humanity. Creature agrees with the French philosophes, saying that humans are innately good. Frankenstein agrees, with Christian doctrine, citing original sin (20).
• Throughout the novel, the body signifies the morality of the character. For example, the creature is assumed to be evil because he is ugly. This is based on phrenology and other science of the time. The novel also points out that such assumptions may be incorrect. For example, the only person who feels sympathy for the creature is the blind father of the De Lacey family. (20-21)
• "Mary Shelley's literary purposes are primarily ethical...she wants us to understand the moral consequences of our ways of reading or seeing the world, of our habit of imposing meanings on that which we cannot truly know." (22)
• "Victor and his creature are virtually fused into one being, almost one consciousness, during their final race across the icy wastes of the North Pole....And when each boards Walton's ship, each articulates the same feelings of intermingled revenge, remorse, and despair." (23)
• "Throughout the first edition of her novel, Shelley implicitly endorses a redemptive alternative to Frankenstein's egotistical attempt to penetrate and manipulate nature. This is an ethic of care that would sympathize with and protect all living beings, that would live in beneficial cooperation with nature, and that would bring about social reform not through a violent French-style revolution but rather through peaceful, gradual evolution." (23-24)

2: Frankenstein, Matilda, and the legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft (Pamela Clemit)

• Reviewers noticed that Frankenstein was akin to Godwin's works, but did not agree how (26-27)
• Godwin and his works were seen as "dangerously subversive" (28)
• Political Justice (1793): In it, "Godwin argued that individuals, by the exercise of reason and judgment, have the power to emancipate themselves from the false opinion on which government is based, leading to the gradual dissolution of all legislative restraints." (28)
• Caleb Williams (1794) - "a novel dramatizing the impact of aristocratic corruption on the individual" (28)
• Memoirs - Godwin "not only politicized Wollstonecraft's arguments in favor of women's rights to equality and self-determination, but also conceptualized her as an agent of revolutionary social change" (28)
• "Mary Shelley was brought up to share [Godwin and Wollstonecraft's] central belief in the duty of engagement in public debate on all pertinent moral, social, and political issues as a means of contributing to the general welfare." (28)
• Early in MS and PBS' relationship, including during the time when Frankenstein was being written, both reread all of Godwin's and Wollstonecraft's works, keep notes about their reactions in a journal (30).
• "Frankenstein's central, flawed aspiration to create 'a new species,' which 'would bless [him] as its creator and source', has often been read as a specific critique of Godwin's utopian idealism, as set out in the first edition of Political Justice." (31) but it is more like Godwin's and Wollstonecraft's fictions, which reevaluate this French Revolutionary fervor. (32)
• "As in the best-known Godwinian novels of the 1790s, Caleb Williams and Maria, Frankenstein achieves a balance between psychological and social concerns, and between personal and political allegory. The central, highly charged relationship between creator and creature reenacts the complex bond of fear and fascination between the aristocrat Falkland and his servant Caleb....In her choice of a multiple narrative mode, Mary Shelley was also influenced by Maria, in which Wollstonecraft presents several first-person narratives telling the same, mutually reinforcing story of the social oppression of women in different classes of society. Mary Shelley similarly presents several versions of the same tale, but this time the stories are told from competing angles, highlight her dissolution of moral and cultural certainties." (32)
• St. Leon: "In St. Leon as in Frankenstein, overweening public ambitions, symbolized by secret occult practices, lead to the breakdown of family life....the novel's final message is equivocal: while St. Leon warns against the neglect of domestic ties in pursuit of the ideal, he is still fascinated by the prospect of wealth and power. Similarly, Frankenstein is ultimately unwilling to abandon his misguided revolutionary ambitions, despite their human cost." (32)
• "images of simultaneous creativity and destruction underscore Mary Shelley's rewriting of the Prometheus legend as a critique of Rousseauvian 'enthusiasm,' in which the use of competing first-person narratives assigns the task of evaluation to the reader in Godwin's manner" (33)
• "Mary Shelley's use of symbolic European locations highlights the associations between Frankenstein and the autobiographical Rousseau" (33) - Geneva
• "Frankenstein's rejection of his creature makes him guilty of a crime that made Rousseau notorious: parental abandonment" (34) - both defend abandoning their children
• "Mary Shelley's most powerful critique of Frankenstein occurs when she allows the creature to tell his own story. In contrast to Frankenstein's melodramatic outbursts, the creature's measured eloquence reflects a Rousseauvian sensibility, tempered by Godwinian logic." (34)
• "The creature's life story is both the tale of a beleaguered individual surviving against the odds and an allegorical account of the progress of the human race." (35)

3: Frankenstein, feminism, and literary theory (Diane Long Hoeveler)

• "Frankenstein has figured more importantly in the development of feminist literary theory than perhaps any other novel, with the possible exception of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre." (45)
• Ellen Moers coined the term "female gothic" in Literary Women to define a genre written by women focusing on a "'young woman who is [a] simultaneously persecuted victim and courageous heroine'" (46); "Moers was one of the first critics to recognize that Frankenstein evolved out of Shelley's own tragic experience as a young, unwed mother of a baby who would live only a few weeks. For Moers, Frankenstein is a 'birth myth' that reveals the 'revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences.'" (46); "Moers reads Shelley's novel as a sublimated afterbirth, in which the author expels her own guilt for having caused her mother's death and for having failed to produce a healthy son and heir for Percy (as his legal wife Harriet had done three months earlier)." (46)
• Gilbert and Gubar interpret Frankenstein through Paradise Lost, with the Victor-as-Eve reading assuming great significance. They coined the term "bibliogenesis". Their "chief contribution...lies in their recognition that Victor's role 'is paradigmatic, like the falsely creative fallen angel of the female artist, whose anxiety about her own aesthetic activity is expressed....[quoted above]" (48)
• Poovey "focuses on the conflict between proper, conduct-book femininity identity and improper female, original, Romantic self-assertion...Poovey's analysis focuses on Shelley's ambivalent responses to the ideology of motherhood, as well as on her condemnation of masculine Romantic egotism, epitomized in her husband's naively idealistic - perhaps cavalier - attitude to marriage vows, family responsibility, and societal conventions." (48)

4: Frankenstein and film (Esther Schor)

5: Frankenstein's futurity: replicants and robots (Jay Clayton)

Seymour: Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley

• "Science and physicianships were frequent topics of conversation in Godwin's home, especially when Anthony Carlisle, a staunch believer in medical experiments, was visiting." (44) - Told of Aldini's experiment with running electricity through a corpse (44)
• "it seems likely that an early version of Frankenstein's enclosing story began here in Dundee, in the days when Mary remembered sitting under the trees in the garden or on the bleak slopes...It is likely that the tale of a journey to the Arctic wastes had already taken shape when, in 1816, her thoughts began to revolve around a novel." (78)
• Lost records: "Unfortunately for us, her daily record of life at Geneva occupied the last pages of the lost journal of 1815–16. She must have drawn on these entries for the vivid account which she wrote in 1828 as her contribution to Thomas Moore's The Life of Lord Byron, with his Letters & Journals (1830–1). Tactfully presented by Moore as having been Shelley's wife in 1816, Mary's identity as his source of information was concealed....Writing out her recollections for Moore, Mary shifted and compressed events for dramatic effect in the confident belief that nobody would contradict her version." (153)
• Polidori was mistaken about some facts of the 1816 summer, but not all; for example, he thought Mary and Claire were sisters but he was aware that Claire was Byron's mistress (154)
• "Polidori was less of a fool than Mary made him sound in the account she gave Moore and in her 1831 Preface...he had been a brilliant student at Edinburgh, and had published a play and a discourse on the death penalty before the age of twenty." (154)
• Polidori's "diary suggests that he fell a little in love with Mary" (154).
• The "casual conversation" which prompted the idea for Frankenstein may have been one between Polidori and Mary Shelley on 15 June 1816 when they discussed the "central idea", which was "for the manufacture of life in a being assembled from animal and human parts" (155).
• William Lawrence, who was a doctor to both Mary and Percy, gave two lectures relevant to Frankenstein in March 1816. "His crime was to attack the received view of life as an entity separate from, and superior to, the physical body. Creation, Lawrence argued, had nothing to do with God, providence or any tale presented in the Bible." (155) These lectures were part of the summer conversations of 1816.
• "Shelley, Claire and Mary visited Diodati [on 16 June 1816]. Byron, who was in the habit of staying up until three in the morning, suggested they should amuse themselves by reading a French translation of some German fantasy tales. Of the several which provide possible influences on Frankenstein – one concerned the animating of a corpse's stolen head – Mary singled out two in her 1831 Preface to the novel." (156)
• Various versions of the night emerged (156); "In [Percy] Shelley's account only Frankenstein emerged from the storytelling evening. Mary, in 1828, was ready to confirm this, telling Moore that her novel sprang straight from the storytelling session." (156); "By 1831, when a third edition of Frankenstein was published, following a series of stage versions of the story, Mary had a new explanation....She wrote now that she had not begun or even thought of a tale until some time after the story session. Stressing the point, she recalled how all the others...had started at once....Day after day, Mary remembered in 1831, she had been tormented with inquiries about her tale....This assertion is undone by Polidori's diary in which, writing at the time as Mary was not, he stated that they all, with the exception of himself, began writing at once." (157)
• "There is...a startling likeness between the way the story of Frankenstein was supposed to have come to her, in a waking dream, and the supposed origin of Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan'." (157-58)
• Alps trip: CC, MS, and PBS left for the Alps on 21 July 1816; they went to Chamonix and the mer de glace (158-9)
• 21 August: "Mary noted that she and [Percy] Shelley had a long discussion about her story" (160); PBS read "Christabel" to MS - "This...may have been the moment when Mary's imagination at last took flight, quickened by Shelley's reading and by her recent journey to a landscape of terrifying isolation and grandeur." (160)
• "On eight days of the first two weeks of the month, she spent part of the evening at the Villa Diodati, together with Shelley and Byron; the conversations, to which she represented herself as a passive witness, often returned to their favourite subject that summer, the principle of life. A story was going the rounds that Erasmus Darwin had once made an experiment with a piece of vermicelli which, when sealed in a glass case, had" given motion. "Mary...became increasingly fascinated by the idea of spontaneous generation. 'Perhaps a corpse could be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things; perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.'" (160-61)
• "Watching the lightning leap across the distant mountain tops, listening to passionate discussions about the limits to which man's ambition to outdo nature might lead him, thinking of Shelley's own early years of experiments with electricity, of the strange ghost stories they had read, and of her tale of Walton's ambitious voyage, she felt the elements coalesce." (161)
• Took a break from writing between 25 August and 16 September (161)
• Byron's Manfred is similar to Frankenstein - "the idea of a magician haunted by his own guilt" (161)
• Slavery and Frankenstein: 14 August - Monk Lewis spent time with the group - "Joining in the spirit of the party, Lewis produced some hair-raising ghost stories which Mary faithfully copied into her journal. They have less bearing on Frankenstein than the fact that their narrator was fresh from a visit to his two slave plantations in Jamaica and full of concern about the slaves for whom he had come to feel affectionate responsibility....At some point, possibly as a result of Lewis's heated discussions with Byron and Shelley about the slave trade and unenlightened attitudes to black people, Mary decided to use her story to illustrate how environment and circumstances could act on an essentially virtuous being and lead him, through mistreatment, from light into darkness, into becoming what he was wrongly perceived to be." (162)
• Move to Albion House in Marlow, where MS is still working on Frankenstein in March 1817 (184)
• "On 13 May [1817], after a month of patient transcription, Mary noted that she had finished copying out her novel." (187)
• "These were not good times for controversial words and the manufacture of a creature from human parts without divine assistance was highly controversial. John Murray expressed keen interest in the novel, cautiously presented by [Percy] Shelley as his own work; he debated, and turned it down. Charles Ollier, Shelley's own new publisher, had either already rejected it or was still hesitating at the end of August when Frankenstein was finally taken on by the old firm of Lackingtons, which now dealt mainly in cheap books. Five hundred copies would be published in the late winter or early spring with a third or the net profits going to Mary, who retained the copyright. The author, by a convention of the time, would remain anonymous....Five hundred was a small run, even for those times, and the offer was not handsome" (190)
• Frankenstein was published in January 1818 (195)
• "In her home circle, Mary was showered with praise for the extraordinary powers of her imagination and the boldness of her idea; the outside world, able only to note that the book was respectfully dedicated to William Godwin and that the tone of the Preface sounded masculine, credited Shelley with the authorship." (195)
• Reviews were not all that favorable (selection follows):

• Quarterly Review - "rigidly right-wing critic" John Wilson Croker - "a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity"; his vitriol was probably increased because he thought PBS wrote it (196)
• La Belle Assemblée - "thought the book audacious and impious, but likely to win popularity by its originality and good style" (196)

Almost all of the reviewers thought the Creature's education was implausible. (196)

• Gentleman's Magazine praised "the author's inventive talent and descriptive gifts" (196)
• Monthly Review found the work "void of any moral or philosophical conclusions (196)
• Blackwood's Magazine (by Walter Scott) - PBS had sent him the novel and Scott thought it was by him; when MS wrote to thank him for his kind review, she revealed her own authorship; "This suggests that she was fully aware of the bold impiety of her invention, and of the implications of portraying man as creating man, aided only by science. The novel's dedication to her father was the nearest she dared come to exposing her connection to him and, consequently, doing him harm." (196)

• Frankenstein achieved its fame through word-of-mouth and privately-circulated copies (196-97)
• Godwin praises Frankenstein in November 1822: "Frankenstein is universally known...and respected. It is the most wonderful work to have been written at twenty years of age that I ever heard of." (319)
• Godwin "lightly revised" Frankenstein, after its first stage adaptation, and republished it as a two-volume novel (326)
• First adaptation: Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein by Richard Brinsley Peake, playing at the Lyceum; a one-hour show with music (326, 334)
• Appropriated for the stage, Mary's novel thrived. By the end of 1823, five versions of the story had appeared in London...There were two revivals in 1824....From [1826 on], hardly a year passed without some adaptation of Frankenstein, usually farcical, never serious, being performed. Mary made nothing from this pillaging of her work." (334-335)
• 1818/1831 changes:

• Elizabeth, originally Victor's cousin, becomes an orphan, so that the marriage is less risque. (406)
• Elizabeth is "reduced to a more passive role", like the sentimental heroines of the annuals Shelley had been writing for at the time. (406)
• "The Frankenstein family's involvement in Victor's career is ruthlessly pruned, emphasizing his solitude and absolving them from complicity." (406)
• "Fate replaces individual choice in the 1831 edition" (407)
• "Mary's most striking revisions were directed to stregthening the parallels between Victor Frankenstein and the explorer Robert Walton." (407)
• MS wrote in her Preface to the 1831 edition "I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper." Seymour interprets this to mean that Shelley wanted it to sell. She explains, "To help it do so, she presented the tale's conception in a story so romantic, so convincing that it has gripped the imagination of all readers ever since." (408) Seymour notes that this treated with skepticism and compared to Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (408).

• MS's obituary in the Athenaeum on 15 February 1851 mentioned Frankenstein: "Only for Frankenstein was the obiturist unreserved in his enthusiasm. Mrs Shelley had here achieved 'a wild originality unknown in English fiction'...'her "Frankenstein" will always keep for her a peculiar place among the gifted women of England.'" (539)

Smith: Frankenstein: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism

Frankenstein: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism

Spark: Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley

St Clair: "Impact of Frankenstein"

"Impact of Frankenstein"

3: The Impact of Frankenstein (William St Clair)

• Author aims: "From the wealth of surviving material, we know a good deal about what the author Mary Shelley and her collaborator P. B. Shelley hoped for from the writing and publishing of Frankenstein." - There are the prefaces and the review written by PBS (it was not unusual at the time for friends to review each other's works). "Frankenstein had a social, political, and ethical purpose. In accordance with the Godwinian theory of progress, in which the author and her collaborator both believed, Frankenstein, they hoped and intended, would help to change the perceptions, the knowledge, the understanding, and therefore ultimately the behavior, of those individuals who read or otherwise encountered it. Their book, they hoped, would contribute, in its small way, to the general intellectual and moral improvement of society" (41)
• Publishing: PBS negotiated for MS; "In 1817 P.B. Shelly was just one of many unknown and unsuccessful authors whose books could only be published at his own expense and risk, if at all. The notion that Mary Shelley was held back in the shadow of a famous and successful male author is an anachronistic casting back of modern presumptions." (41)
• Publishing: Frankenstein was rejected by Murray and probably by Longman, the two leading publishers; PBS's publisher, Ollier, also rejected the novel; Lackington deal: "Although they too declined to buy the copyright either in whole or in part...they offered to print the book at their expense, taking all profits, if there were any, from the first edition, the implication being that if the book did well, the author would benefit from a second edition. P.B. Shelley countered with an offer of half profits, and in August Lackington contracted to publish a single edition of 500 copies, dividing the net profits one-third to the author, two-thirds to the publisher." (41-42)
• Design of the book: Anonymous, three volumes, expensive, "intended to be sold primarily to commercial circulating libraries, with perhaps less than half the edition expected to go to individual buyers"; "Frankenstein was only stretched to three volumes by printing few words to the line, few lines to the page, and few pages to the volume." (42)
• Publisher: "The plea in the preface for the book to be taken seriously was largely ignored when the book was reviewed in the literary press" (42) since Lackington specialized in magic, horror, and supernatural texts.
• Sales: "The whole edition of 500 copies was sold to the retail booksellers almost as soon as the copies were printed, so passing all the remaining sales risks to them, and the book reached its initial readers over the following months and years." MS made money, in fact; "in 1818 Mary Shelley, with her third share, was commercially a far more successful author than P.B. Shelley. The first edition of Frankenstein had outsold all the works of her husband put together. It made more money than all P.B. Shelley's works would fetch in his lifetime." (43)
• Second edition: Lackington did not pursue a second edition. The chapter seems to imply that Lackington had many other novels, many of which were not so controversial (43).
• First stage version: 1823, Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein - they needed to permission from the publisher or the author (43)
• Second edition: Godwin negotiated for a second edition from a different publisher; it had small changes but was "unnecessarily extravagant" and "still at a high retail price"; it also included Mary Shelley's name; copies were still available in the 1830s (43-44)
• 1831 edition: MS sold the copyright for 600 shillings (44); this became part of Bentley's Standard Novels series (new preface and some substantial changes) (44)
• Bentley: A new Bentley was published each week (usually old novels that had almost fallen out of copyright that Bentley had bought up); bound, one-volume works; less the one-fifth the price of the new works; half the weekly wage of a clerk or skilled manual worker (45)
• Bentley's Frankenstein: initial print run was 3,500 and the novel turned a profit (45); Bentley's retained the copyright throughout much of the nineteenth century (the novel came out of copyright around 1880 (49))
• "By the mid 1850s, when the price of Frankenstein was down to 2.5 shillings, demand for all the Bentley's Standard Novels had fallen to a trickle and the series was allowed to die." (47)
• Out of print: "With one exception, for most of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, Frankenstein was out of print. It had also disappeared from the circulating libraries." (47)
• Copyright:"Unable to think of a way to profit from the property themselves, the copyright owners were determined, it would seem, like the dog in the manger, to deny others the opportunity to do so. While in copyright, Frankenstein was never issues as a yellow back or as a shilling shocker, never abridged, turned into a chapbook or other adapted for the huge numbers of lower-income readers who joined the reading nation in the middle of the nineteenth century." (47-48) - the problem lay in the 1842 Copyright Act, which "handed over the copyright ownership of much of the literature of the Romantic period to private monopolists" (48)
• Readers and success: "For the first fourteen years of its life as a novel, Frankenstein existed in about a thousand copies, far fewer than most of the works of Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott sold on publication day. However, although the main facts and numbers about the book's early publishing history were published long ago, many currently available editions intended for students still spread the error that the book sold well from the beginning." (48); "During the first forty years of Frankenstein, between seven and eight thousand copies were printed and sold, still fewer than Byron and Scott commonly sold in the first week....The readership during the first fifty years of the book's existence was largely confined to a narrow slice of men and women at the topmost end of the income scale." (48-49)
• Popularity: As soon as the novel was released from copyright "in about 1880", the price dropped and many copies were printed. "In the first year, the first reprint of Frankenstein sold more copies than all of the previous editions put together. By the 1890s Routledge had sold 40,000 copies, and soon Frankenstein was available in a range of editions adapted to different groups of book buyers." (49)
• Audience: "Some of the late-nineteenth-century reprints are books for the poor and the poorly education, offered with well-intended condescension to men and women who had previously lived largely without books." (49)
• Audience: "In the Victorian higher literary culture too, attitudes were ambivalent. Frankenstein remained morally (and perhaps politically) suspect, and the books was seldom reprinted for a middle-class readership. The late-nineteenth-century feminists, suffragists, and reformers, who wanted to promote Mary Shelley as an example of a woman of achievement in her own right, found her book an embarrassment." (50)
• Sales for the first half of the twentieth century: "According to the recorded sales of the main available edition, that of Everyman's Library, the total annual sales for the whole British which included India, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and other English speaking countries overseas other than those in North America, only rarely went above 500 a year. At a time when the United Kingdom alone had a population of about 50 million and reading was still the main entertainment, these are very modest figures." (50)
• Stage: "During most of the nineteenth century, it was not the book but stage adaptations of the story which kept Frankenstein alive in the culture." (51)
• Stage: "The English Opera House, where Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein opened in 1823, was able to hold about 1,500 persons. The Coburg Theatre, where Frankenstein, or the Demon of Switzerland opened shortly afterwards, held 3,800....Every single night one of the Frankenstein plays was performed, it brought a version of the story to more men and women than the book had in ten or twenty years." (52)
• Stage: "Early in its stage life Frankenstein was frequently amalgamated with The Vampyre...as a part of a general muddling of gothic, horror, and comedy." (53)
• Style of stage productions: "From the start, the stage Frankensteins mocked themselves. They are full of topical allusions and jokes, mostly probably now irretrievable....The story was cut, added to, transformed into pantomime or farce, combined with other stories, parodied, burlesqued, and reduced to cliche, tag, and catch phrase." (53)
• Popular culture: "Comparing the dates of the books and the main stage and film adaptations, we can see how they interacted, conferring publicity and customers on one another. In 1823 and again in 1831, the novel was revived by the stage versions, Likewise, the stage versions of the 1850s may have been stimulated by the Hodgson edition. In the 1880s, when its copyright expired, the reprinting of the novel led to a new play version, which in its turn stimulated more reprints. There was a surge in sales of the Everyman edition of the book in 1931-32 after the appearance of the 1931 James Whale film starring Boris Karloff." (53)
• "most of those who used, heard, and understood Frankenstein expressions in Victorian times were unlikely to have read the book...The Frankenstein phrases of Victorian times do not come laden with hidden meanings or evoke the riches of the literary text." (55)
• There is an excellent appendix, with a publishing history, a list of some 19th-century stage versions, a list of some 19th-century examples of Frankenstein in popular culture, and some films.

Stableford: "Frankenstein and the Origins of Science Fiction"

"Frankenstein and the Origins of Science Fiction"

Sunstein: Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality

Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality

Tropp: Mary Shelley's Monster

Mary Shelley's Monster

Williams: The Art of Darkness

The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic