Mary Shelley, Frankensteinand its Fascinations

Lectured by A-jenTaipei Medical University

Fall, 2007

About the author,Mary Shelley(1797-1851)

•Daughter to William Godwin (An Enquiry into Political Justice) and Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) (1792)•Mistress and wife to Percy Bysshe Shelley, the great Romantic poet•Write the story of Frankenstein on a ghost story contest on a trip to Switzerland, she was only 19 then•Claim to emerge between waking life and sleep, arguably under dosage of opium

About the author,Mary Shelley(1797-1851)

•Frankenstein was an immediate success since its anonymous publication

•As a teenager, Mary Shelley brought to the occasion a background of grim experience, vivid fear and powerful ambition

•Life and love as associated with disappointment and tragedy

•A story of beauty and terror, ambition and disappointment, intellectual reaching and fear of knowledge, love and hate•Full of powerful and conflicting hopes and anxieties•See in traditional opposites—birth and death, pleasure and pain, masculinity and femininity, power and fear, writing and silence, innovation and tradition, competitiveness and compliance, ambition and suppression—things that overlapped and resisted easy borders and definitions

Themes:•A story of beauty and terror, ambition and disappointment, intellectual reaching and fear of knowledge, love and hate•Full of powerful and conflicting hopes and anxieties•See in traditional opposites—birth and death, pleasure and pain, masculinity and femininity, power and fear, writing and silence, innovation and tradition, competitiveness and compliance, ambition and suppression—things that overlapped and resisted easy borders and definitions

Literary Influences:•John Milton’s Paradise Lost

•Greek Mythology Prometheus

•Prometheus Unbound both by Aeschylus and Shelley

•Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothius Story (1764)

Achievements and modern review:•One of modernity’s best known and most powerful stories•The archetype of scientist-creates-monster myth•From ignored and popular writer to major writer and cultural heroine, esteemed as one of the major Romantics•Evaluation changed over the past two decades, to be appreciated in its own right•Not just canonical, but also paradigm-breaking and exemplary

Historical Context:•1750s Benjamin Franklin establishes the electrical nature of lighting through experiments using kites•1764 James Hargreaves invents the spinning jenny for textile manufacture•1769 James Watt patents his steam engine•1771 the first spinning mill for cotton thread•1774 Joseph Priestley discovers oxygen•1776 Declaration of Independence•1777 establishes the oxygen and nitrogen basis of air

Historical Context:•1785 James Watt and Matthew Boulton install a steam engine in an English cotton factory•1789 the French Revolution•1800 Alessandro Volta develops the electric battery•1806 the first steam-driven textile mill open in Manchester•1814 the British navy develops the first steam-driven warship; George Stephenson invents the steam locomotive

Historical Context:•1818 James Blundell performs the first successful transfusion of human blood•1825 the first railroad operates in England•1832 England’s Parliament outlaws body-snatching for medical research•1837 Samuel Morse invents the electric telegraph•1840 Charles Darwin publishes Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle

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Cinematic Representations of Frankenstein

The 1931 film version Directed by James Whale; Starring Boris Karloff & Colin Clive

                                                                   

Cinematic Representations of Frankenstein

Cinematic Representations of Frankenstein

Cinematic Representations of Frankenstein

Cinematic Representations of Frankenstein

Cinematic Representations of Frankenstein

Frankenstein (1994) Dir. Kenneth BranaghStarring Robert De Niro, Kenneth BranaghHelena Bonham Carter

Musical Representations of Frankenstein

Theatrical Performance of Frankenstein

Book Covers of Frankenstein

Cartoon Representations of Frankenstein

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Frankenstein in Animations

Frankenstein in Pop Culture

Thank you for your attention.