# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Frankenstein"  excerpt from Chapter 5 by Mary Shelley  (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

# data[].attributes.headline
19. Song- Pairing
 Contemporary Music and Canonical Literature

# data[].attributes.subject
19. Song- Pairing
 Contemporary Music and Canonical Literature

# data[].attributes.body
Akon, Lonely

# data[].attributes.headline
18. Song- Pairing
 Contemporary Music and Canonical Literature

# data[].attributes.subject
18. Song- Pairing
 Contemporary Music and Canonical Literature

# data[].attributes.body
The Eagles, Desperado

# data[].attributes.headline
17. Song - Pairing
 Contemporary Music and Canonical Literature

# data[].attributes.subject
17. Song - Pairing
 Contemporary Music and Canonical Literature

# data[].attributes.body
Green Day - ''Boulevard Of Broken Dreams''

# data[].attributes.headline
16. Song- Pairing
 Contemporary Music and Canonical Literature

# data[].attributes.subject
16. Song- Pairing
 Contemporary Music and Canonical Literature

# data[].attributes.body
The Who - Behind Blue Eyes

Frankenstein's themes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Here we are in Horace Walpole's house, Strawberry Hill. This is the place where both the Gothic revival in architecture and Gothic fiction began. The whole thing is a fake or theatrical version in miniature of what a Gothic or medieval castle might be. But it's not just architecturally that this house is important, because it's also very important in literary terms.

One night when he's asleep in his bedroom upstairs and dreams of a gigantic armoured fist appearing on the staircase behind me - and that inspires him to write The Castle of Otranto. This is published in 1764 and begins this enormously powerful tradition that continues to the present day in hundreds of books, television programmes and films.

Gothic fiction is fascinated by strange places. On the one hand very wild and remote landscapes and on the other, to very imprisoning places. So, if you think of the end of Frankenstein, there on the wild, arctic wastes. Well the other one is somewhere like Dracula, where you get imprisonment of poor Jonathan Harker, whose a nice, modern young man - goes off to Central Europe and he's suddenly captured by Count Dracula and imprisoned in this violently, archaic world. So, it's a sudden transformation, both in the space that he's living in and the place that he goes to. It's also, of course, a change in the kind of time that Dracula's living in. He moves from a modern world - this is a world of typewriters, of recording equipment, of stenography, of modern trains - suddenly to a world that reaches back into most archaic and distant sense of time. And that's very typical of all Gothic fiction. It wants to see the relationship between the modern world and the past - not as one of evolution or development - but of sudden juxtaposition and often violent conflict, in which the past erupts within the present and deranges it and one of the most powerful motifs of that is, of course, the ghost. The thing that you think is dead but comes back vividly alive in the present.

So, at the heart of Gothic fiction is the question of power. On the one hand it tends to be drawn to very powerful, often supernaturally powerful, or obscenely powerful figures and on the other, to people who are completely vulnerable. He seems to want to do this to explore the limits of what it is to be human - to be driven by either internal desires or forces outside yourself that make you or compel you to do things you don't want to do. And that, of course, gives it an enormous scope to explore the positions, say of women, in 19th-century society or 18th-century society - the way that women often are forced into situations in which they are confronted by irrational kinds of desire or need to which they are vulnerable and which may make their very life at risk.

Gothic novels are full of perverse, weird and dangerous kinds of sexuality. It's often fascinated by incest, by same sex desire, by violence, by abduction, by rape. So, Gothic is a kind of writing that can make explicit, what is often held back within more normal kinds of writing. On the one hand, it's fascinated by total sexual power, by these obscene patriarchal figures, who seem to be able to have no restraints whatsoever on their desire. It's also constantly drawn to the figure of the vulnerable young woman and her possible triumph over these apparently, unbeatable forces.

One really useful term for thinking about Gothic writing, is the uncanny. Now this is a term that comes from Sigmund Freud - so something that's new but that also takes us back to something, either in our own psychological past, or something in the world that's archaic. Often Gothic fictions drive onwards to these uncanny moments for the reader, in which you suddenly recognise somebody who seems unfamiliar and strange - in fact, has an identity that you already know. So, figures that are not quite human, that look human but are not entirely human, like dolls, wax works, automata - these are very characteristic marks - not just of Gothic but particularly of the uncanny.

In the mid 18th century, critics and writers became more and more fascinated by experiences that don't seem to fit within their normal category of what's beautiful and what's pleasurable. They get fascinated by - what's it mean to be in the middle of a storm at sea, or to see a shipwreck, or to be on the top of a high mountain in a great wind. And the work that they use more and more to describe this is - the sublime. The sublime isn't harmonious, balanced and beautiful - which had traditionally been the concern of the aesthetic but is often terrifying and awesome and overwhelming and Gothic is absolutely at the centre of that move to the sublime and sublimity in understanding the world.

Gothic particularly tends to appear at moments of political and social crisis, so there's an enormous increase in the number of Gothic novels written in the 1790s. There's another burst at the end of the 19th century, so at moments of great political change, particularly following the French Revolution in 1789, the Gothic seems a way of trying to master and understand these enormous changes. That's a religious crisis too. The Catholic Church is despoiled, its abbeys and its monasteries are closed and that feeds into the Gothic sense of doubt about the supernatural.

Gothic is fascinated by the supernatural. In Matthew Lewis's famous novel, The Monk, Satan himself appears at the end of the book and the main character, Ambrosio, sells his soul to the devil. But, there's also a very different kind of writing, like that of Ann Radcliffe, who's the other great Gothic novelist of the 1790s, where there is no supernatural. There do appear to be ghosts but, in fact, by the end of the novel all those ghosts have been explained in a naturalistic way. So, there are two different kinds of Gothic - one that uses the supernatural, as it were, and expects us to believe in it - and the other that gives a natural or realistic explanation of it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Here we are in Horace Walpole's house, Strawberry Hill. This is the place where both the Gothic revival in architecture and Gothic fiction began. The whole thing is a fake or theatrical version in miniature of what a Gothic or medieval castle might be.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Video SparkNotes: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein summary

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Photo: Getty Images

Quick Facts
"As a child, I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to 'write stories.'""I am an unfortunate and deserted creature; I look around, and I have no relation or friend upon earth.""I beheld the wretch, the miserable monster I had created."

London, England, United Kingdom

London, England, United Kingdom

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

English writer Mary Shelley is best known for her horror novel "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus." She was married to poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Who Was Mary Shelley?

Writer Mary Shelley published her most famous novel, Frankenstein, in 1818. She wrote several other books, including Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), the autobiographical Lodore (1835) and the posthumously published Mathilde.

Early Life

Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on August 30, 1797, in London, England. She was the daughter of philosopher and political writer William Godwin and famed feminist Mary Wollstonecraft - the author of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Sadly for Shelley, she never really knew her mother who died shortly after her birth. Her father William Godwin was left to care for Shelley and her older half-sister Fanny Imlay. Imlay was Wollstonecraft's daughter from an affair she had with a soldier.

The family dynamics soon changed with Godwin's marriage to Mary Jane Clairmont in 1801. Clairmont brought her own two children into the union, and she and Godwin later had a son together. Shelley never got along with her stepmother. Her stepmother decided that her stepsister Jane (later Claire) should be sent away to school, but she saw no need to educate Shelley.

The Godwin household had a number of distinguished guests during Shelley's childhood, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. While she didn't have a formal education, she did make great use of her father's extensive library. Shelley could often be found reading, sometimes by her mother's grave. She also liked to daydream, escaping from her often challenging home life into her imagination.

Shelley also found a creative outlet in writing. According to The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, she once explained that "As a child, I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to 'write stories.'" She published her first poem, "Mounseer Nongtongpaw," in 1807, through her father's company.

Husband

During the summer of 1812, Shelley went to Scotland to stay with an acquaintance of her father William Baxter and his family. There she experienced a type of domestic tranquility she had never known. Shelley returned to the Baxters' home the following year.

In 1814, Mary began a relationship with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Percy Shelley was a devoted student of her father, but he soon focused his attentions on Mary. He was still married to his first wife when he and the teenaged Mary fled England together that same year. The couple was accompanied by Mary's stepsister Jane. Mary's actions alienated her from her father who did not speak to her for some time.

Writing 'Frankenstein' and Other Works

Mary and Percy traveled about Europe for a time. They struggled financially and faced the loss of their first child in 1815. Mary delivered a baby girl who only lived for a few days. The following summer, the Shelleys were in Switzerland with Jane Clairmont, Lord Byron and John Polidori. The group entertained themselves one rainy day by reading a book of ghost stories. Lord Byron suggested that they all should try their hand at writing their own horror story. It was at this time that Mary Shelley began work on what would become her most famous novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.

Later that year, Mary suffered the loss of her half-sister Fanny who committed suicide. Another suicide, this time by Percy's wife, occurred a short time later. Mary and Percy Shelley were finally able to wed in December 1816. She published a travelogue of their escape to Europe, History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), while continuing to work on her soon-to-famous monster tale. In 1818, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus debuted as a new novel from an anonymous author. Many thought that Percy Bysshe Shelley had written it since he penned its introduction. The book proved to be a huge success. That same year, the Shelleys moved to Italy.

While Mary seemed devoted to her husband, she did not have the easiest marriage. Their union was riddled with adultery and heartache, including the death of two more of their children. Born in 1819, their son, Percy Florence, was the only child to live to adulthood. Mary's life was rocked by another tragedy in 1822 when her husband drowned. He had been out sailing with a friend in the Gulf of Spezia.

Later Years

Made a widow at age 24, Shelley worked hard to support herself and her son. She wrote several more novels, including Valperga and the science fiction tale The Last Man (1826). She also devoted herself to promoting her husband's poetry and preserving his place in literary history. For several years, Shelley faced some opposition from her late husband's father who had always disapproved his son's bohemian lifestyle.

Death

Shelley died of brain cancer on February 1, 1851, at age 53, in London, England. She was buried at St. Peter's Church in Bournemouth, laid to rest with the cremated remains of her late husband's heart. After her death, her son Percy and daughter-in-law Jane had Mary Shelley's parents exhumed from St. Pancras Cemetery in London (which had fallen into neglect over time) and had them reinterred beside Mary at the family's tomb in St. Peter's in Bournemouth.

Legacy

It was roughly a century after her passing that one of her novels, Mathilde, was finally released in the 1950s. Her lasting legacy, however, remains the classic tale of Frankenstein. This struggle between a monster and its creator has been an enduring part of popular culture. In 1994, Kenneth Branagh directed and starred in a film adaptation of Shelley's novel. The film also starred Robert De Niro, Tom Hulce and Helena Bonham Carter. Her work has also inspired some spoofs, such as Young Frankenstein starring Gene Wilder. Shelley's monster lives on in such modern thrillers as I, Frankenstein (2013) as well.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"As a child, I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to 'write stories.'" "I am an unfortunate and deserted creature; I look around, and I have no relation or friend upon earth." "I beheld the wretch, the miserable monster I had created."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
0:00 / 1:34•Watch full video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) trailer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This test covers the entire story of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as told through the Townsend Press Frankenstein/Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde version.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
© 2018 Shmoop University, Inc. All rights reserved.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Frankenstein Quotes (What was Said) Quiz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
© 2018 Shmoop University, Inc. All rights reserved.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Frankenstein Themes (For the Most Part) Quiz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
© 2018 Shmoop University, Inc. All rights reserved.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Frankenstein study guide contains a biography of Mary Shelley, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Oxford University Press USA publishes scholarly works in all academic disciplines, bibles, music, children's books, business books, dictionaries, reference books, journals, text books and more. Browse our more than 30,000 titles on www.oup.com/us.

# data[].attributes.body
You need to read the novel first.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Frankenstein quiz that tests what you know. Perfect prep for Frankenstein quizzes and tests you might have in school.