Context Flashcards
‘my mother was dead’
the first person voice here really creates a link to Shelley’s personal experience of her mother’s death
‘doth walk in fear and dread’
‘a deadly weight yet hanging around my neck’
Shelley takes these ideas from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, use of intertextuality to describe victors state.
‘my country, my beloved country’
links to Macbeth when Macduff expresses his anguish ‘bleed, bleed poor country’ because the country is suffering in the hands of a tyrant, similar to how victor feels about the monsters actions
‘i bore a hell within me’
in earlier gothic fictions, evil is located as an external force e.g. ghosts/ demons, Shelley changes in 19th century, indicating how true horrors lie within
‘i ought to be thy Adam but I am rather the fallen angel’
‘Paradise Lost excited different and far deeper emotions’
the monster alludes to satan from Milton’s paradise lost because it is one of the primary things he reads and bases his knowledge of language on it. Also Percy Shelley helped edit the novel and it was one of his favourite works.
‘my sensations had, by this time, become distinct’
Shelley was reading Locke’s essay on human understanding at the time of writing Frankenstein therefore it may have had some influence in the way she portrays the monster and how he develops his understanding of the world.
‘Orkneys as the scene of my labours’
Skara Brae is the oldest civilisation known to man and is situated in the Orkneys, victor goes back to the history of humanity to create the female.
‘more miserable than man ever was before’
the language of persecution is often found in Romantic poetry, Shelley seems to critique this with Victors ego-centrism and constant exaggeration of his depressed state.
‘thrown across the bed, her head hanging down’
the image of Elizabeth’s corpse is similar to that of Fuseli’s painting ‘The Nightmare’ however, the demon sits upon her chest in this image, whereas Shelley’s monster escapes.
