0.

RENAISSANCE
Humanism: God is not the centre of the universe anymore, human beings become the
centre of the world (instead of the centre of universe). This means a break with previous
traditions. They began to explain the universe with science rather than theology. Eg.
Descartes' Discourse on Method.

Enlightenment: A new emphasis in reason, rationality. All of a sudden, science

becomes the means through which universe is explained. An empirical way to look at the
world. Basic principles of the Enlightenment: the universe as a jigsaw puzzle (reason needed
to be used in order to complete the big picture that explained the whole universe  science
can explain everything), symmetry. The idea that man is in control of nature.

This principles are applied to literature as well (regularity, symmetrical structures,

elegant language, very planned…).

1. ROMANTICISM (1775-1830)
They propose a shift in attitude from rationality and science. Romanticism was a
revolutionary new movement. They don’t try to capture the reality, but the feelings of a
particular moment (impressionism). Some new ideas about the artistic expression arose
from German philosophers as:

- Hamann: the most important thing of the human beings is not rationality; we should
centre on the individual experience rather than in the whole universe. Art and
passion are necessary, creativity is necessary. For him, myths are more interesting
than reality (vs. realism).
- Herder: representative of an aesthetical movement that questions the reason and
claims for the essence of the artist. Folk songs are important because they represent
the heritage of a certain group of people (they show the true identity of a group of
people). The value of things for themselves.
- Edmund Burke: some principles on how we should appreciate art and beauty. The
Beautiful: what is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing. The Sublime: what has the
 power to compel and destroy us. It can be dangerous but fascinating. Burke’s idea of
the sublime goes beyond natural beauty and goes into the realms of awe, or ‘terror’.
The sublime is, for Burke, ‘productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is
capable of feeling’. Terror, emotion, feeling: all these represent a break from the
intellectual rigours of the Augustan age, and are in one sense a reaction against the
new pressures of society and bourgeois concerns.
- William Gilpin: the word “picturesque”. He established some principles about how to
perceive nature, how to observe and picture the nature that surrounds us. Emphasizes
not our imposing view, but something that inspires awe, the landscape. A correct
picturesque scene must include:

o Texture: it has to be rough, intricate, varied, broken (vs. the Enlightenment or

Neoclassical ones that were geometrical, proportionate, harmonious).
o Composition: the painting has to be formed by 3 different elements: the
foreground (dark with a “front screen” or “side screen”), the central part
(middle “distance”; with a lighter main object) and the background (lighter
too).

o Viewpoint: a low viewpoint to emphasise the sublime.

Gothic novels were precursors of Romanticism (The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries
of Udolpho, The Monk…) cannot be explained by reason. There grew a new interest for:

- The dark, death, fear.

- Emphasis on the supernatural and medieval past (not set in England). The
protagonist was a male, a kind of monster and the setting of these stories was usually
in a Mediterranean place (Italy, Spain).
- Abducted women.
- Transgression against them.
 1.1 Robert Burns (1759-1796, Scotland)
He was a precursor to Romanticism. He was interested in folk songs, in ballades from
villages… he was a wealthy man who wrote about simple people in a simple language (some
compositions in the vernacular Scots dialect).

A Red, Red Rose

O my Luve is like a red, red rose

That’s newly sprung in June; Simile: comparing his life with a rose

O my Luve is like the melody

That’s sweetly played in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, Stanza of 4 lines  quatrain

Rhythm: iambic tetrameter
So deep in luve am I; Rhyme: ABCB
And I will luve thee still, my dear, Ballad (folk song)

Till a’ the seas gang dry.

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;
I will love thee still, my dear,

While the sands o’ life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only luve!

And fare thee weel awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,

Though it were ten thousand mile.

There is an emphasis in nature. It is a celebration of man’s role and man’s passions in

nature. Usually ballads were about life in the countryside (Scotland). He emphasizes the red
colour: it is a symbol that represents passion, love.

Metaphors about love and nature: “nature is eternal and so is my love”.

Exaggerated metaphors (hyperboles). He talks about time (the distant future of his love).
 Romantic characteristics: he emphasizes on the individual (his personal experience),
and he focuses on passion. His love is so strong that the poem breaks certain conventions:
e.g. in 3rd stanza he repeats the rhyme ‘dear’  romanticism: do not follow the rules, they do
what they feel like. He transcends natural boundaries, there is something eternal beyond
nature, for example his love.

The Romantic temperament prefers feelings, intuition, and the heart. The Classical
writer looks outward to society, Romantic writers look inward to their own soul and to the
life of the imagination; Romantic writers are attracted to the irrational, mystical and
supernatural world. They celebrate the freedom of nature and of individual human
experience. Romantic literature is generally critical of society and its injustices, questioning
rather than affirming, exploring rather than defining.
 1.2 William Blake (1757-1827, London)
He thought about his art as a combination of poems and images. He was a mystic: a
spiritual person, against the church. His collection Songs of Innocence and Experience
emphasizes the contrast between visions of the early life and visions of later experience. He
belongs to the romantic tradition because he was in favour of the subjective view, the
personal experience. He had a particular way of living. He had strong religious views
(visions from an early age). He studied as the Royal Academy of Arts and there it was
appreciated that he was an innovator as an engraver as well as a poet.

His life was spent in rebellion against the rationalism and he rejected the formal restrictions
of Augustan poetry. The major opposition reflected in his poetry is a contrast between the
order of the eighteenth century and the sense of liberation felt in the 1790s as a new century
approached. Blake makes extensive use of symbolism in his poetry. Innocence is symbolised
by children, flowers, lambs or particular seasons. Oppression and rationalism are
symbolised by urban, industrial landscapes, by machines, by those in authority and by social
institutions.

Nurse’s Song

When the voices of children are heard on the green

And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast

And every thing else is still

Then come home my children, the sun is gone down

And the dews of night arise
Come come leave off play, and let us away

Till the morning appears in the skies

Echo. Same rhyme
No no let us play, for it is yet day
And we cannot go to sleep
Besides in the sky, the little birds fly Rhyme: ABCB
(internal rhyme 3rd line,
but no internal rhyme in
And the hills are all cover’d with sheep
4th stanza)
 Well well go & play till the light fades away
And then go home to bed
The little ones leaped & shouted &laugh’d

And all the hills echoed

The theme of the poem is the children’s innocent and simple joy.

General ideas of echoes: call and response. The nurse’s perspective (first two stanzas)
and the children’s perspective (3rd, 4th stanzas). The nurse is at rest but the children want to
keep playing. In the last stanza, the children laugh and there is a correspondence with nature
(‘and the hills echoed’)  circularity.

SYMBOLS:
- Morning (light, youth, hope) vs night (danger, dark). Night is not perceived as
something negative, children do not think about death.
- Birds: freedom (children playing freely).

- Sheep: innocence, ignorance, they don’t reflect about dangers of life. Happiness and
harmony in the countryside (pastoral, idyllic).

There may be a contrast between the experience of the nurse and the innocence of the
children.

The Garden of Love

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And Thou shalt not. writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore. ( Reference to the past)
And I saw it was filled with graves,
Internal rhyme: a
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
reflection of the
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, latter stages of life
 And binding with briars, my joys &desires.

The poem starts with ‘I’, it emphasizes on the individual. The speaker may be one of
the children in the Nurse’s Song that has come back as a grown-up to where he used to play
(‘on the green’).

SYMBOLS:
- Chapel: criticism of the church.
- Gates/shut: exclusion, inaccessible, repression.
- Flowers: life.
- Graves/tomb-stones: death. Maybe they were there when they were children, but they
didn’t see them because they didn’t know about death.
‘Binding with briars, my joys & desires’ = Using Christianity as a way of oppression.

CHARACTERISTICS OF ROMANTICISM

1. The poetic “I”: the personal experience, subjectivity, emotions. The poet is the
central part of the poem. Poets see themselves as the elected to explain their
experience to the rest of the world  arrogant tone.
2. Nature and awe: nature is to be enjoyed. The sublime: nature inspires fear and
fascination at the same time.
3. The exotic, the “far away” and the “long ago” : it seems to go against some of the
romantic characteristics such as the folk poems… but the stories are set in far-away
places from England. Many poets look for inspiration in the Middle Ages or in the
Classical Antiquity.
4. The supernatural/abnormal: they are fascinated with the supernatural (e.g. myths)
and abnormal states of mind (e.g. madness, the effects of drugs in the human
psyche…), imagination (medieval legends, fantastic beings, Gothic novel…).
5. The everyday, the rural: reflected by colloquial speech, poetry about everyday
experiences and about normal people. In contrast with the supernatural and
imagination.
6. Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages : experiences taking place in the distant
past. It is related to understanding myths as the source of everything, there is a
fascination towards the Classical myths.
1.3 First Generation of Romantic Poets

1.3.1 William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

He was born in the Lake District, which was a romantic scenery for Englishmen. He
participated in the French Revolution. He needed to walk around in order to get inspiration
for his poetry. His walking tours include The Alps (1790) and Wales (1791). He wanted a war
between England and France in order to establish the equality of power (aristocracy no longer
in the higher stratum of society) claimed by the French also in England.

Lyrical Ballads (1798): Collaboration Wordsworth-Coleridge. They wrote an aesthetic

manifesto of the Romantic movement. Wordsworth perceived poetry as “a spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings that has its origin in emotion recollected in tranquillity”. He
wanted to restore simplicity to poetry, he wanted to use conversational tone, and he had the
ideal of natural theology.

Wordsworth celebrates the spirit of man, living in harmony with his natural
environment and away from the corrupt city. For him, the child was the single most
important source of wisdom and truth. His language frequently moves towards the language
of everyday speech and the lives of ordinary people.

The Tables Turned (1798)

ROMANTIC CHARACTERISTICS:

- The everyday, the rural: paying attention at the common things. Placing nature above
everything else. Nature is described as harmonious (stanza 2: ‘freshening’, ‘sweet’ 
something that makes you come alive, things that teach you, things that make your life
richer).
- Natural theology.
- Emotions over science.
- Conversational tone.
- Words with religious connotations, he constantly establishes comparisons.
- Several references to books, criticising them. Described as ‘dull’.
- Restoring simplicity in poetry: the form of the poem is simple, he is conventional in his
rhyme scheme (iambic tetrameter).
 1.3.2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834, London)

He was a prodigious child and he went to Cambridge, but he was not able to finish his
studies. He was addicted to drugs from very early on and he had many problems due to that.
In 1817 he wrote ‘Biographia Literaria’, based on his lectures.

Poems of mystery and demonism: ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (Lyrical Ballads),
‘Christabel’ (an allegory in which sinister and grotesque images form a distant past have an
everyday reality). Coleridge combines the ordinary experience with the supernatural, he
wanted to give the supernatural a feeling of everyday reality.

Frost at Midnight

ROMANTIC CHARACTERISTICS:

- Nature: Frost could symbolise silence and quietness as in the countryside, also an
illness or death or even loss of inspiration (and the need of silence of a cottage to be able
to perceive the world). Midnight could be a symbol for night, unknown, darkness, death,
silence, old age. ‘Sea, hill and wood. This populous village!’ he is personifying and
humanizing nature.

Coleridge grew up in London, so this poem is a complaint about his childhood.

There is a duality of natural vs. urban life, where there are positive comments for rural
lifestyle: the poet is happy because his child will grow in a natural landscape. Two
characters in the poem too: Coleridge himself and his son. Stanza 4: a reference to
natural theology. God is everywhere in nature.
- The everyday: it is a rural landscape, any nature, ordinary.
- Imagination: you can mirror yourself with nature. You can be inspired by nature to
create wonderful things.
- Subjectivity: the poet is self-centred, individualistic, talking about “I” all the time.
Personal experience.

- Emotions: the dominant emotion is loneliness. He feels nostalgia about his childhood.
These feelings related to the symbol of the fire.

The “inmates” of the speaker’s cottage are all asleep, and the speaker sits alone,
solitary except for the “cradled infant” sleeping by his side. The calm is so total that the
silence becomes distracting, and all the world of “sea, hill, and wood, / This populous
village!” seems “inaudible as dreams.” The speaker says that it thrills his heart to look at his
beautiful child. He enjoys the thought that although he himself was raised in the “great city,
pent ’mid cloisters dim,” his child will wander in the rural countryside, by lakes and shores
and mountains, and his spirit shall be molded by God, who will “by giving make it [the child]
ask.” All seasons, the speaker proclaims, shall be sweet to his child, whether the summer
makes the earth green or the robin redbreast sings between tufts of snow on the branch.

COMMENTARY:
The speaker of “Frost at Midnight” is generally held to be Coleridge himself, and the
poem is a quiet, very personal restatement of the abiding themes of early English
Romanticism: the effect of nature on the imagination, the relationship between children
and the natural world, the contrast between this liberating country setting and city, and the
relationship between adulthood and childhood as they are linked in adult memory. Rather
than seeing the link between childhood and nature as an inevitable, Coleridge seems to
perceive it as a fragile, precious, and extraordinary connection, one of which he himself was
deprived.

The objects surrounding the speaker become metaphors for the work of the mind and
the imagination, so that the fluttering film on the fire grate plunges him into the recollection
of his childhood. His memory of feeling trapped in the schoolhouse naturally brings him back
into his immediate surroundings with a surge of love and sympathy for his son. His final
meditation on his son’s future becomes mingled with his Romantic interpretation of nature
and its role in the child’s imagination, and his consideration of the objects of nature brings
him back to the frost and the icicles, which, forming and shining in silence, mirror the silent
way in which the world works upon the mind; this revisitation of winter’s frosty forms brings
the poem full circle.

Kubla Khan or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.

ROMANTIC CHARACTERISTICS:
 Nature: it is a natural landscape where there are natural elements like the river and the
sea. It is a vision in his dream and 2/3 of his poem stays in his dream because he is
interrupted. Present in the 3rd stanza.
  Imagination: an exotic landscape about a real character, but this story was about a
dream after having taken opium. Everything is taken from his imagination and his
dream.
 The exotic: an exotic place but mixed with the poet’s experience. It is a quiet and
beautiful scenery (1st stanza) that suddenly becomes a violent, fatal and sublime one (2nd
stanza). It is the long-ago and the far-away setting.
 Subjectivity: it is about the poet’s experience in his dream.
 Emotion: the tone of the poem is delirious and hysterical at times (e.g. exclamation
marks), especially in the last part of the poem.
Surprised about the exoticism of the place. The girl could be his muse or the inspiration
that he has lost. He is imagining how it could be like if he could remember the whole
poem and he compares himself to God like Wordsworth.
 The supernatural: ‘haunted’, ‘holy and enchanted’. References to the demon.

Kubla Khan represents exotic and intensely mystical flights of the imagination.
Coleridge presents an exotic landscape which has often been interpreted as symbolising the
movement of the creative imagination. The poem opens with a basic contrast between the
River Alph, a potentially destructive force, and the pleasure-dome, a source of deep
perception and understanding. Coleridge embodies the essence of the poetic imagination, the
most powerful of the human senses which is alone capable of perceiving the underlying
harmony of all things and of understanding the truth about the world.
1.4 Second Generation of Romantic Poets
They renewed what their ancestors had developed and created new elements. All of
them died quite young: Byron (36), Shelley (30) and Keats (26). It was The Golden Age of
Poetry.

1.4.1 Lord Byron (1788-1824)

He revelled against his family tradition, the aristocracy. He was bisexual and open-
minded. He went to Greece and Albania and wrote about his adventures. He became famous
as the scandalous aristocrat. He created the figure of a ‘Byronic hero’, a flamboyant
character, consciously creating a myth around his own person. He does autobiographical
poetry, since it deals with himself and was known for the scandals he caused, in fact, to be
related to him was to be stigmatised. His most famous work, “Don Juan” (1818). Byron is
the hero of all his works.

Don Juan (a fragment) “When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home”

The attitude of the poet is ironic: the irony is to try to sustain a series of values that
are not available any more. He claims that when a man does what he is supposed to do, does
not need to be rewarded. He fought for freedom in Greece, but now it seems that he laughs at
fighters for freedom. There is no guarantee that you will achieve glory, not in the modern
world. He is disenchanted, his tone is bitter, but he still keeps his passion  Byronic hero.
 1.4.2 Percy Shelley (1792-1822)

The poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley is similar to that of Keats in a number of respects,
but, unlike Keats, Shelley explores political and social questions more explicitly. Shelley
represents the more revolutionary and non-conformist element in English Romanticism and
was constantly critical of conventional authority. He was the individualist and idealist who
rebelled against the institutions of family, church, marriage and the Christian faith and against
all forms of tyranny. He started writing and publishing poetry while at Oxford University,
some three years before Keats’s first publication. (notes)

Ozymandias

1. Who’s doing the talking and what’s the effect of it?

The poet is telling the story from a traveller, but there is a third level of narration: the words
that Ramses II himself produced carved in the base stone of his statue. Its effect is a time
distance, an old tale that happened a lot of centuries ago (not personal experience).

2. What does the image of the statue in the desert represent?

It represents loneliness, sterility (desert= a barren place), ambition, death to tyrannical powers
or civilisations. The statue represents the power of the King who is not there anymore. The
statue is shattered, so even rock does not last forever  mutability (even the biggest
civilisation will break down to ruins). Nature is burying the statue.

3. Does everything end? What is the role of Art?

Yes, because everything changes, so its initial nature is not there any longer. Art is
represented by the statue, capturing the essence of the culture and its creator (since he tried to
perpetuate himself along with the statue). Art is also shown as a destroyer more than a creator
and Shelley will fight this sense of oppression along the poem. Art also endures, although it
can be eroded by nature. However, the echoes of these kingdoms and civilisations remain.
Everything is destroyed except from nature, which is perpetuated.

4. Formal aspects (rhyme, rhythm):

Sonet of 14 lines. He breaks the traditional way of making a sonnet: he breaks with rhyme
schemes, there is no shift in the 9th line, etc. This breaking with the rules reinforces the idea
of the mutability, which applies to human structures such as statues as well as poems. The
role of art is not to repeat the same pattern again and again  critique of civilisation which is
governed by totalitarian attitudes. We have to be new, art is something that needs to be
adapted from time to time.
 1.4.3 John Keats (1795-1821)

A main theme of Keats’s poetry is the conflict between the everyday world and
eternity: the everyday world of suffering, death and decay, and the timeless beauty and lasting
truth of poetry and the human imagination. His earliest poetry consists mainly of long poems,
some of them epic in style and concept. Endymion (1818) is written in four books and is
derived in style and structure from Greek legends and myths, the main theme. The odes
explore fundamental tensions and contradictions. Keats finds melancholy in delight,
pleasure in pain, and excitement in both emotional sensations and intellectual thoughts. He
contrasts dreams and reality, the imagination and the actual, the tangible and the intangible.
He celebrates beauty but at the same time he knows that all things of beauty must fade and
die. He experiences love and death with equal intensity, knowing that they are closely
connected.

He is not part of the aristocracy. He was orphan at 14 years old, but as he had a very
fine mind, he was given the opportunity to study though not what he liked (he studied
medicine in London, 1815). However, when he was 18, he approached a literary circle led by
Lee Hunt and his brother, both directed a journal (“The Examiner” a very critical one).
There he also met Shelley.

Keats had always severe economic difficulties, so he will usually live in friend’s
houses, who acted as Maecenas for him. Charles Brown, an intellectual and a doctor, took
care of him. Keats became fascinated with poetry when he found Chapman’s translation of
The Odyssey (not Pope’s) and was encouraged by Lee Hunt to take up poetry. Therefore,
strong emotions and poetry set off his imagination, leaving medicine aside.

In 1817, he wrote “Endymion”, his 1st book of poems, but he was not really happy
with it because he wanted it to be better than it was. For its production, he placed himself in
an intensive reading of indispensable readings borrowed from his friends at home; however
this poem will be a foretaste of his later poetic achievements, although he was impatient
with it.

Death is a romantic hallmark and the experience of loss also stayed with him all life
(his parents, brother, friends).
 In 1818, he gets bad reviews of Endymion and causes him a big depression. For that
he will embark in a walking tour with Charles Brown in Lake District and Ben Nevis. A very
romantic tour but also exhausting that makes him very ill (he shows the 1 st signs of
tuberculosis that had killed his brother).

As he is very ill tries to make the most of his time and starts writing a lot until he has
a writer’s block. Then, he meets Fanny Brawne, his 1st love, who will unblock him. In 1819,
he will write his best poetry: “The Eve of St Agnes”, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”… They
combine sensory experiences (5 senses immersed in the poem) and treat life as a tangle of
opposites (dichotomy between life-death).

 “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” Beauty is the mind, a sort of commitment for
the artist).
 “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty” inextricably connected together.
 “If poetry doesn’t come as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at
all” words are supposed to be the essence of a poem, of a poet, something nearly
organic.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

1. To what effect does Keats use natural imagery in this poem?

It is autumn and birds are not singing, there is a change in the scenery (images of
solitude, decay, sadness). Lilies are white, the rose is fading, sedges are withered…
representation of the last moments of life, agonizing. Images of water.

2. What’s real and what’s fantasy?

Part of it is a dream and some other part is real, but it is difficult to separate one from
another.

3. What kind of love is described in the poem?

It talks about a strange love affair, since he is abducted by her singing  he is
enchanted and brought to her cave. There is a certain level of obsession too (he is pale
and feverish) even though he is enchanted against his will. She speaks in a strange
language  he can’t understand the concept of true love she has, since men and women
have different concepts of love. For men love is related to obsession, illness whereas for
women is something deeper, inner feelings.
4. How is the woman portrayed?
Beautiful, strange, mysterious. He becomes obsessed with this woman. Woman is the
image of sex in this poem.
1.5 Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
She was the first writer to use the science fiction genre. Constant presence of death in
her life. She was 18 when she wrote Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. She was
brought up by William Godwin alone, since her mother died at childbirth. He had liberal
political theories and was well read, what made her quite a precocious girl and met Percy
Shelley when she was 16 years old (her future husband). It was a turbulent relationship with
years of hardship, debts and ostracism they weren’t on the verge of dying but they lost
some of their children. However, she and her husband will be writing all the time. After her
husband’s death (1818), Mary Shelley went back to England in 1821 and became more
conservative and settled up a life of letters. She wrote:

• Historical novels: Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), contributing to her
solid reputation as a writer.
• Science fiction: The Last Man (1826). Political radicalism but not the same her
parents and husband were familiar with. Her ways were sympathy and cooperation as
keys to social reform and played a main role in the active participation of women in
society. In 1816, the origins of Frankenstein (1818) were set in Villa Diodati, Geneva.
Byron, Polidori and the Shelleys were there, and one stormy afternoon they were
bored due to a strong storm and decided to start a challenge of ghost stories. Mary was
not very interested in it and the rest pressured her to write something. Polidori created
the 1st vampire story in England and Mary had a nasty and waking nightmare that was
the set up of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. It was like that because
previously, they had been reading German ghost stories translated into French and had
hot debates about science: electricity, nature, life/death…

Origins of Frankenstein:

Prometheus Brings Fire to Mankind (1817) by Henry Friedrich, Prometheus Bound

(1846-47) by Thomas Cole, Prometheus Chained (1611-12) renaissance ideas brought
new ideas (religious reform, Copernicus’ ideas, mankind importance (humanism)).
Prometheus, then, represents the leadership of humankind, defeating or challenging Gods
or old ideas.
 Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus he was a rebel against Zeus and helped man
giving him tools and knowledge (civilization). Prometheus is portrayed as a saviour of
men against Zeus’ wrath and as punishment, he is bounded and birds eat up his liver
eternally. Prometheus as the creator.

Frankenstein

1st edition: 1818  influenced by Percy Shelley (500 words written by him). He
deleted Mary’s religious references and developed the novel’s scientific and political
themes. Elizabeth and Victor’s relationship is incestuous, since they were real cousins.

2nd edition: 1831  she eliminated most of her husband’s contributions. She was
more conservative in terms of colonialism, family relationships and education. She also
erases negative references to aristocracy. Less radical and more superfluous.

• FORMAL ISSUES:

 Narrators: frame story, told by different narrators. (1) Walton writing about his own
expedition in an unexplored territory, (2) Victor’s story, (3) the monster’s
perspective. Different worlds come into play: Walton’s real story, Victor’s fantastic
tale and the monster’s science fictional/ unreal story. Contrasting versions of reality.

In the story we move from 1 to 2 to 3 and then back to 2 and 1. Tension between fire
(2) and ice (1,3) by using the structure of the story.

 Style: Mary Shelley uses an ominous tone (sad, dark, tragic, fatalistic) to relate this
story.

 Issues of genre: Sometimes it has been labelled as a gothic novel, some others as
science fiction (creation of the monster, going beyond the limits of science) or even
an allegory (an extended metaphor or meaning, a symbolic narrative like for
instance Gulliver’s Travels).

 THEMES:

 Friendship: Clerval-Victor, they are different in their likings (whereas Victor likes
sciences, Clerval likes Eastern languages) but they belong to the same social class
and city (share the same background) and have some points in common like
travelling. Henry Clerval is considered a flat character. He is the ideal friend. He
embodies a different view of nature: nature is good for him positive view of life.
 Marriage: they are all conventional ideas about it through this novel. Victor will
marry Elizabeth, since she is his duty, a belonging of his (the typical conventional
role of female in society). This is completely different to Mary Shelley’s life. She is a
narrative tool and a flat character. Women’s role is downplayed on the whole
story.

 Family: completely destroyed by Victor’s actions. There are a successive amount of

deaths, most of them caused directly by the monster and some others indirectly such
as Justine’s (accused of killing Victor’s brother) or his father’s (dying from grief).
Therefore, Victor contaminates his environment until the point of killing all his
loving ones. Apart from him and the monster, which are round characters, the rest of
characters are narrative tools.

o The monster is raised up by observing nature and especially De Lacey family,

where each of its members embodies classical virtues like happiness (Felix),
goodness (Agatha) and wisdom (Safie). He learns how to communicate using
language by looking and listening to them. However, when they meet him they
will judge him by his physical presence and will be abhorred.

 Free will/destiny: despite of Victor’s privileged background, he causes misfortunes

to everyone he knows and tries to justify himself by accusing destiny of everything
(saying “nothing I can do”), although he also wants to bear the guilt. He does not
take responsibility of what he has created. However, he shows some sense of
responsibility in deciding not to create the second monster for the best of the society.
But it was his own decision to create the monster too, so it’s not all about fate.
Dichotomy between Victor’s free will and the monster’s predestination because of
all the bad prejudices about him.

o Which is the ethical predicament then? According to the Calvinist

doctrine, you are doomed to sin, but in this novel there is a more general sense
of responsibility along with a specific one in the scientific one where God is
not present, man has to be charged with the responsibility.

o Victor Frankenstein is seen as the modern Prometheus, using technology to

create his own species and he is punished by the monster and by himself too.
The monster is wretched, helpless and lonely and because of all this he will
start hating people since the moment he discovers the mean nature of humans
 (especially since the moment when he saves a girl of been drown and he gets
shot). Victor tries to justify himself for the creation of the monster it was his
destiny, his father introduced him to Agrippa’s knowledge and ideas or Dr.
Waldman was very charismatic. Frankenstein rejects his responsibility by
crying, being a martyr and facing such as an ordeal doing a pilgrimage in a
quest for redemption. He is very ambitious (playing God) and proud,
neglecting his other duties with her family and friends and letting his personal
project become his main drive force for vanity. He is the real monster.

 Walton’s role: he is the 3rd narrator and wants to discover new worlds; however,
knowledge can be dangerous. Both, Victor and him are insanely ambitious and they
want glory and fame for going into the unknown. Walton is not alone; he travels with
his crew since he is his captain. His part in the novel highlights an area of conflict
such as that of scientific discoveries or limits and also the ways of human condition,
contributing with a didactic point or lesson in the story.

What is the relationship between Victor Frankenstein and his creature? What do
they have in common?
Their relationship is a complete irresponsibility, an irresponsibility that Victor evades.
Their relationship is that of a completely irresponsible father, as Victor creates the monster.
However, the roles are reversed: at first, the monster is bad, and Victor betrays God by
creating life whereas the monster betrays his creator (Victor), but then, Victor becomes a
monster. There are two pictures that are very similar to each other.

Who is the protagonist?

Both characters are round characters. Both of them are lonely in society (Shelley
considers it a human condition). The monster decides that Victor has to suffer in the same
way that he does.

What is the Creature’s education like, and what is the result?

The monster is raised up through observation at De Lacey family (Felix, Agatha,
Safie). The blind man is the only one accepting the monster from the very beginning, as he
does not have prejudices of society. From this family, the monster also learns about feelings
such as hate, repulsion from society and revenge. The starting point for his free will is his
knowledge, knowledge about good and evil.
 He is something similar to Victor; he is rejected and left behind, completely alone. He
causes pain and suffering for other people.

What is your interpretation of the ending?

There is a change of roles between Victor and the monster. The monster cries in the
death of Victor, since he does not have an identity anymore, he wants to fire himself. Fire and
ice appear at the end of the story (symbolic).

There is a similarity between Walton and Victor. Both explore the unknown. Walton is
warned of the dangers of exploring without limits. In the end he comes back home and does
not dare to continue his trip.

Is it Frankenstein a critique of science or a social critique?

It is both. In society, whenever something like physical appearance is different from
mainstream tendencies is considered horrific. The monster feels lonely and the negative
responses he gets from society makes him feel despair. There is also a critique to human
behaviour, especially, to our tendency to justify ourselves for our crimes (Victor and Walton
committed betray against themselves, their families and friends due to their obsession for a
bigger knowledge and justified their acts as a way to achieve that knowledge; the monster felt
sad and guilty of having killed so many people and justified himself by saying it was Victor’s
fault).

The critique of science would be the non-established limits of this field and the
aberrations that can be created in behalf of it.

What makes Frankenstein an essentially Romantic novel?

Nature is described as sublime (mountains of Switzerland and Chamonix), something
that has a profound effect in human beings, able to destroy you. There are a lot of
dichotomies as a result of the relationship of the monster with nature, for instance, the
monster is just an opposite to nature (created by man, something that could never occur
naturally). However, the Victor-monster meetings take place in impressive landscapes or
situations (= the monster is related to the sublime) like Swish mountains, Scottish barren
isles, wedding night-storm… In this way, the monster is related to initiating untamed projects
in science too.

Emotions are heightened; there are powerful feelings and states of mind such as
madness, despair, envy. Tensions like nature vs. creative powers are also portrayed in
Frankenstein, with Victor as its main representative he is the prototypical romantic hero
with a large ego, obsessed with himself; an artist interpreting the unknown for the rest of
humankind (like Wordsworth).

Also the biographical points of Mary Shelley are a common romantic feature. The role
of man at this time with scientific progress and new inventions is a clear point in the novel
too.