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Frankenstein inspired by suicide of Mary Shelley’s half-sister, book reveals

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New collection of author’s diary entries provides tragic insight

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Some thoughts on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein.

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Department of English, Arizona State University

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“Mothering Monsters: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” by Anne K. Mellor

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⚡ Frankenstein: The Creation, the Monster, and the Tragedy of Ambition! 👁️✨

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The Infinite Monkey Cage - Series 14 - 200 Years of Frankenstein - BBC Sounds

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Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

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Frankenstein complete graphic audiobook read by Steve Parker

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Frankenstein: Birth of a Monster Documentary

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Frankenstein: Birth of a Monster Documentary

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BBC Documentary: Frankenstein: Birth of a Monster (2003)

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Every Monday through Friday, AudioFile 's editors recommend the best in audiobook listening. We keep our daily episodes short and sweet, with audiobook clips to give you a sample of our featured listens.

Perfect Halloween listening, guaranteed to give you chills. Host Jo Reed and AudioFile's Robin Whitten share their thoughts on a classic adapted for the stage-Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It's a riveting adaptation of a story within a story, as told by Mary Shelley, that is startlingly different from more familiar movie adaptations. Stacy Keach's deep voice is perfect for the monster, who is self-educated and sophisticated, but still a creature of Dr. Frankenstein. Seamus Dever's placid tones recall Captain Walton's rescue of the doctor in the arctic, while smooth-voiced Adhir Kalyan becomes Frankenstein himself, mad scientist and giver of life.

***

To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of Behind the Mic with AudioFile Magazine, subscribe and listen on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

Support for Behind the Mic comes from Blackstone Publishing, a 30-years plus strong independent audiobook publisher that is now also publishing print books and ebooks. This fall, Blackstone is publishing an array of stellar titles-Cecilia Aragon's memoir Flying Free, which tells the odds-defying story of how she became the first Latina pilot on the US Aerobatic Team; the historical fiction novel Escaping Dreamland by NY Times bestselling author Charlie Lovett; the YA dystopian thriller The Key to Fear from NY Times bestselling author Kristin Cast, and Don't Move -a horror novel from Darren Wearmouth and television star James S. Murray. Learn about these and more titles from Blackstone's Fall 2020 list at BlackstonePublishing.com.

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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Adapted by Kate McAll, Read by Full Cast

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Every Monday through Friday, AudioFile 's editors recommend the best in audiobook listening. We keep our daily episodes short and sweet, with audiobook clips to give you a sample of our featured listens. Perfect Halloween listening, guaranteed to give you chills.

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As the story goes, eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley came up with the idea for Frankenstein one dreary summer night in 1816 while she and the poet Percy Shelley (her then lover, later husband), were vacationing in the Swiss Alps with Lord Byron, who suggested that they pass the time by each writing their own ghost story. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated," mused Mary, and the rest is literary history.

When she unleashed Frankenstein upon the world two years later, she did so anonymously. Nevertheless, word got out that the book's author was a woman ( gasp), and the ensuing early reviews were incredibly critical. One particularly misogynistic critic wrote, "The writer of it is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment."

The year before it was released, in anticipation of the myopic critical backlash, Percy Shelley wrote a rave review (sadly unpublished until 1832, ten years after had Percy drowned in the Gulf of La Spezia) of his new wife's remarkable debut.

Take note, literary couples: this is what supporting your spouse in their creative endeavors looks like.
Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.
"The novel of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, is undoubtedly, as a mere story, one of the most original and complete productions of the age. We debate with ourselves in wonder as we read it, what could have been the series of thoughts, what could have been the peculiar experiences that awakened them, which conducted in the author's mind, to the astonishing combination of motives and incidents and the startling catastrophe which compose this tale ... it is conducted throughout with a firm and steady hand. The interest gradually accumulates, and advances towards the conclusion with the accelerated rapidity of a rock rolled down a mountain ... We are held breathless with suspense and sympathy, and the heaping up of incident on incident, and the working of passion out of passion ... The pathos is irresistible and deep ... In this the direct moral of the book consists; and it is perhaps the most important, and of the most universal application, of any moral that can be enforced by example. Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked ... It is impossible to read this dialogue-and indeed many other situations of a somewhat similar character-without feeling the heart suspend its pulsations with wonder, and the tears stream down the cheeks! ... The general character of the tale indeed resembles nothing that ever preceded it ... an exhibition of intellectual and imaginative power, which we think the reader will acknowledge has seldom been surpassed."

-Percy Shelley, Athenaeum, November 10, 1832

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Read Percy Shelley's review of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

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As the story goes, eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley came up with the idea for Frankenstein one dreary summer night in 1816 while she and the poet Percy Shelley (her then lover, later husband), were vacationing in the Swiss Alps with Lord Byron, who suggested that they pass the time by each writing their own ghost story.

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Honestly . . . maybe.

It was Mary Shelley's birthday yesterday, and to celebrate her, let's pause for a moment to unpack one of the most frequently-circulated stories about her: that she had sex for the first time on top of her own mother's grave, with Percy Shelley. As sensational as this might sound, it isn't entirely apocryphal-it is a longstanding, accepted hypothesis. But there is also a much deeper context for why the teenage writer would have lost her virginity in this location (beyond her possessing a cool morbidity that has crowned her the Internet's favorite early-nineteenth-century Goth).

The story of this moody consummation actually begins on the night Mary Shelley was born: August 30th, 1797. Mary's mother, the brilliant nonconformist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, would die from complications following the childbirth. Wollstonecraft had been one of the most important writers of the eighteenth century-her 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which argues for the equal education of women and men, is the first English-language feminist text, and because of it, she is considered to be "the aesthetic foremother of feminist expository prose," to quote literary scholar Susan Gubar. She had already had a three-year-old daughter, Fanny, from a previous affair with an American businessman named Gilbert Imlay.

According to biographer Diane Jacobs, Little Mary, delivered by an esteemed midwife named Mrs. Blankensop from the Westminster Lying-In Hospital, had been born safely and successfully, but four hours after the birth, Wollstonecraft's placenta still had not been expelled. By now, she was at risk of a fatal hemorrhage, and so Wollstonecraft's lover (and husband of four months), the celebrated political philosopher William Godwin, summoned Mrs. Blankensop's colleague, Dr. Poignard, to assist with the extraction. Wollstonecraft's placenta had not only gotten stuck inside her, but it had also shattered, and Poignard had to remove the pieces, one-by-one, manually. It is understood by historians that he did not wash his hands before this, since this was not the practice at the time, and although he eventually removed all the debris and saved her from hemorrhaging, he also likely introduced bacteria into Wollstonecraft's body which caused the infection that killed her, eleven days later. Little Mary was raised by her father, understanding that her birth was, somehow, what killed her brilliant, famous, spectacular mother at the young age of thirty-eight.

Mary's literary career would be spent reckoning with her complicated relationships with both of her parents; in fact, the literary scholar Sandra Gilbert has famously argued that Frankenstein isn't simply a masculine-focused re-reading of Paradise Lost, as it has long been considered, but a retelling of Mary Shelley's own origin story, as a monstrous baby who wants to be loved by the parent whose life it has also destroyed.

Mary didn't simply grow up without a mother, she grew up with a dead mother. These are very different things. She was taken to her mother's gravestone in the Saint Pancras' Churchyard at a young age, and since they shared the same first name, Mary learned how to write her name from tracing the engraving on her mother's headstone. Indeed, as Gilbert writes, her "only real 'mother' was a tombstone." Thus, Wollstonecraft's grave was the place Mary would turn into her own safe haven. Muriel Spark notes that she lugged her books there, and would read, by herself. Gilbert notes that she fervently re-read her mother's writings, over and over. Her installation at her mother's grave seems to have been an attempt to commune with her mind-to learn from her, as much as possible. As Bess Lovejoy notes in JSTOR Daily, Mary would especially spend time there when her father wound up marrying their annoying next-door neighbor Mary Jane Clairmont in December of 1801, when she was four years old. It was her private, peaceful place. And it was the place where, many years later, she brought the poet Percy Shelley when she wanted to declare her love for him.

Percy Shelley met Mary Godwin in 1812. He was nineteen, she was fourteen. He was a great admirer of Mary's father's work, and joined the family for dinner. The two didn't meet again for two more years, when Mary was sixteen, Percy was twenty-one and by now married to another sixteen-year-old girl named Harriet, with whom he already had a child. It didn't matter. Mary was completely enchanted by Percy, the literary world's up-and-coming bad boy-some of whose poetic compositions were rejected for publication for being too edgy. He was a big spender, and a big believer in free love (excuse me while I roll my eyes forever). Mary's stepmother had been leery of him; according to biographer William St. Clair, she believed that Percy had been flirty with all three young women in their home: Mary, her half-sister Fanny, and their stepsister Claire "Jane" Clairmont, who was only eight months younger than Mary. She believed all three girls had fallen for the handsome poet, whom his good friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg famously claimed looked "wild, intellectual, unearthly."

But Percy and Mary would often sneak off together, taking secret walks. They frequently walked through the churchyard, and read together in Mary's favorite place. On Sunday, June 26th of that same year, Mary Godwin took Percy to the cemetery again. She told him that she loved him first, and he immediately reciprocated. It seems that they did have sex shorty thereafter, since the following day, in Percy's own journals, he wrote that a fantastic thing happened that made him consider that day his new, real "birthday."

Scholars believe that they did have sex for the first time in this place (with Mary's biographer Martin Garrettt acknowledging the long-held "tradition" of this assumption), since the grave was the location for much of their courtship. Indeed, as Gilbert notes, it was the place for most of Mary's emotional activity: "reading, writing, or love-making." But, as Lovejoy notes in her article, it was hardly a macabre setting for them: "the cemetery was not merely a repository of rotting corpses, but a site of knowledge and connection: It was a place where she read to deepen her literary education and her communion with her mother, and a place where she was inducted into mysteries of sexuality. Literary, familial, and carnal knowledge were all bound together in one place." After all, it wasn't only Mary Wollstonecraft's burying ground, but it was also the location of her marriage to Godwin, which took place a mere four months before her death. For mother and daughter, and their lovers, this was a place which collapsed disparate observances of the flesh, where abstract bonds could be made real-new lives, and afterlives, beginning, alike.

On 28 July 1814, Percy left his wife Harriet and eloped with Mary, though they didn't technically wed, since (I'm just going to stress this again) Percy already had a wife. They traveled to France, bringing along Mary's stepsister Claire Claremont, for some reason. William Godwin, Mary's father, an anarchist writer who had once condemned marriage as imprisonment, was not pleased with this situation, especially after he learned about Percy's issues with debt. It seems that Mary had believed her engagement to Percy, and their embracing progressive ideas of free love, would be in line with the radical ideologies held by her own parents, when they had been young. But Godwin grew very distant from his daughter, after she absconded for France, which tortured Mary more.

During their honeymoon, Mary became pregnant, which became relatively joyless after Percy and her stepsister Claire (who went by "Jane") began to spend a lot of time together, and in all likelihood began an affair. They traveled slowly from Calais across the continent, shaking off the pursuit of Mary's stepmother, who had attempted to join them and eventually convince them to return home. They didn't want to go back, but sooner or later, they ran out of money. And when Mary wrote to her father to ask for assistance, she was dismayed when he flatly refused to help.

When they returned to England, they learned that Percy's wife Harriet had given birth to a son. But in February of the following year, 1815, Mary herself gave birth to a little girl, two-months premature. She was dead by the beginning of March, and this plummeted Mary into a deep depression. According to St. Clair, she was haunted by the specter of her dead baby. But when Percy's received a large inheritance that summer, from a dead relative, he took their whole coterie to Bishopsgate, to rest. It's unknown how she spent that time (her journal from this period has been lost), but in January of 1816, Mary gave birth to a boy, whom she named William, after her father. That summer, the group all traveled to Geneva, where they convened with Percy's friend Lord Byron (who had by now gotten Jane pregnant), John William Polidori and others. This is the famously rainy, unpleasant summer where the group, stuck inside too long, began to tell ghost stories, and where Mary would begin to write the story that would become Frankenstein. Evidently, Mary was tormented by her lack of ideas, frustrated that every night she had not come up with a story to tell the crowd. But then she had an idea, for a story about a body that could come back to life (makes a lot of sense, given the amount of time spent with her mother's corpse, doesn't it?). According to biographer Emily Sunstein, this was the moment she, the eighteen-year-old Shelley, felt herself "first [step] out from childhood into life."

The inspired Mary and her company returned to England in September, but they could not have imagined the heartbreak that would meet them there. In October of 1816, Mary recieved several terrifying letters from her half-sister Fanny (who had always been left at home during these adventures) expressing suicidal intent, which sent Percy on a quest to try to find her before something dreadful happened. He was unsuccessful, and the following day, Fanny's body was found in a hotel room in Swansea, Wales, next to a suicide note and a bottle of laudanum. Two months later, Percy's wife Harriet was also found dead of suicide, drowned in the Serpentine, a lake in London's Hyde Park. Her family prevented Percy and Mary from taking custody of his two children. His counsel suggested to him that he might present as a more viable guardian of the children if he had a more responsible domestic arrangement, so he proposed to Mary, who was pregnant, again.

They finally got married on December 30th, 1816, two and a half years after they first announced their love for one another in the shadow of Mary Wollstonecraft's grave.

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Did Mary Shelley actually lose her virginity to Percy on top of her mother's grave?

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Honestly . . . maybe. It was Mary Shelley's birthday yesterday, and to celebrate her, let's pause for a moment to unpack one of the most frequently-circulated stories about her: that sh...

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Birth of Frankenstein

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Robert Symes investigates the background to Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. (1986)

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When Mary Shelley first unleashed Frankenstein on the world, just over 200 years ago, it was met with a few pretty mixed reviews. (With the exception of this glowing rave from her husband, the poet Percy Shelley, who had anticipated the backlash and wanted to sing the praises of his wife's masterpiece like a good, supportive husband.)

But the best bad review by far goes to this anonymous critic (COWARD!) who wrote in The British Critic in 1818:

We need scarcely say, that these volumes have neither principle, object, nor moral; the horror which abounds in them is too grotesque and bizarre ever to approach near the sublime, and when we did not hurry over the pages in disgust, we sometimes paused to laugh outright; and yet we suspect, that the diseased and wandering imagination, which has stepped out of all legitimate bounds, to frame these disjointed combinations and unnatural adventures, might be disciplined into something better. We heartily wish it were so, for there are occasional symptoms of no common powers of mind, struggling through a mass of absurdity, which well nigh overwhelms them; but it is a sort of absurdity that approaches so often the confines of what is wicked and immoral, that we dare hardly trust ourselves to bestow even this qualified praise. The writer of it is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.

Excuse you, sir.

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Oh, look: an early misogynistic review of Frankenstein.

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When Mary Shelley first unleashed Frankenstein on the world, just over 200 years ago, it was met with a few pretty mixed reviews. (With the exception of this glowing rave from her husband, the poet...

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On 17 June 1816, John William Polidori recorded in his diary that "The ghost stories are begun by all but me." Polidori was Lord Byron's physician and had accompanied the poet and hypochondriac to Switzerland, where Byron rented the Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva. They had been joined there by the poet Percy Shelley, his lover Mary Godwin (whom Percy married later that year) and her half-sister Claire Clairmont. The weather in Switzerland-indeed across the globe-was atrocious. The year 1816 was "The Year Without A Summer": due to a gigantic volcanic eruption on the Indonesian island of Tambora the previous year, volcanic ash had been hurled into the stratosphere and remained there for years, blotting out sunlight and drastically altering weather patterns. Daytrips were out of the question for much of their stay, and so the previous evening, while watching storms thundering across the lake, Byron had suggested to the assembled company that they should each write a ghost story.

The next day, Polidori recorded "Began my ghost story after tea." Mary Shelley later recalled:

Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole-what to see I forget-something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her, and was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted.

This story-if it ever existed-has not survived, but Polidori may well have been distracted by what happened later that evening. At midnight, he noted, as Mary breastfed her four-month-old baby child, the group

really began to talk ghostly. L[ord] B[yron] repeated some verses of Coleridge's "Christabel", of the witch's breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. Threw water in his face and gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs. S[helley], and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him.

The following day he again noted "began my ghost-story"-presumably a different story, and perhaps influenced by the Christabel fiasco the previous night. The new story became his unregarded novel Ernestus Berchtold; or, the Modern Oedipus, published in 1819.
"Daytrips were out of the question for much of their stay, and so the previous evening, while watching storms thundering across the lake, Byron had suggested to the assembled company that they should each write a ghost story."
Byron had abandoned his own story after a few pages, although nevertheless it was published (without his permission) in 1819 as "A Fragment." "A Fragment" returns to the Turkish vampire figure of The Giaour, describing the mysterious Augustus Darvell, who is in the grip of some curious and undiagnosed wasting disease. Darvell and the unnamed narrator travel to Turkey, intending to visit the Greek ruins at Ephesus, and their journey takes them through a desolate landscape of Greek, Christian and Islamic ruins to a remote cemetery. Darvell disconcertingly murmurs, "I have also been here before" and states that he will soon die. He demands that the narrator conceal the news of his death, throw an Arabic ring he has into certain springs on the ninth day of the month at noon, and the following day wait at a ruined temple. A stork with a live snake writhing in its beak contemplates Darvell as he makes these plans, and Darvell asks to be buried where the bird is perched. The moment it flies away he dies and begins to turn black and decompose with unnatural rapidity; the narrator buries him as instructed, and there the text ends.

"A Fragment" is a curtailed vampire narrative. The metamorphosis of the flesh, the burial ground and the abnormal post-mortem state link it to the earlier 18th-century history of vampires, and doubtless Darvell would have risen from the dead. But Byron also introduces calculatedly exotic elements, notably the spell with the ring, and the stork and snake-a familiar enough pairing, but here suggesting a disturbing inversion of the ancient lore that storks deliver new babies. Although "A Fragment" hardly has a prominent place in the Byron canon, its mood was transfused into Polidori's next story.

Polidori had studied medicine at Edinburgh and had written a treatise on somnambulism, and his professional interest was clearly piqued by the serious scientific interest afforded to vampires in the previous century. A shadow of vampirism lies upon his aborted story about the "skull-headed lady" who ends up, like Juliet, in the tomb of the Capulets-Juliet of course rises vampire-like from this tomb, before discovering that Romeo, believing her to be dead, has already killed himself. Polidori would have been familiar with the notes to Southey's Thalaba and to Byron's own Giaour (if only through Byron's recollection of them) and Christabel presumably provoked talk of the seductive powers of the undead. So it was that Polidori discussed Byron's aborted vampire narrative at the villa with the countess of Breuss, who urged him to write his own version. The results-Polidori's third story undertaken at the villa-were to be far from forgettable.

Polidori commenced work, but then his situation changed rapidly. As the Swiss trip drew to a close in early September, an exasperated Byron fired his cantankerous physician; Polidori consequently used his tale to revenge himself on his former employer. He aimed to expose the haughty lordling as a cruel seducer-Mary Shelley's half-sister Claire Clairmont being pregnant at the time with Byron's child, and hardly the first victim to fall for his diabolical charms. His portrait of Lord Ruthven was therefore of a sexual delinquent and predator, powerfully attracted to the virtuous and the virginal. He drew on anti-heroes such as the rapist Robert Lovelace from Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Clarissa (1747-48), the malevolent monk Schedoni of Ann Radcliffe's novel of terror The Italian (1797), and the repugnant libertines who inhabit the Marquis de Sade's repellent novel Juliette (1797-1801), such as the cannibal giant Minski (who has furniture made of human bones) and the obsessive necrophiliac and criminally depraved Cordelli. He also drew on Lady Caroline Lamb's scandalous novel Glenarvon (1816). Byron had deserted Lamb in the midst of their passionate affair, and Lamb exacted her revenge by basing the novel's pitiless anti-hero on her former lover; Lord Glenarvon's name is Clarence de Ruthven.
"As the Swiss trip drew to a close in early September, an exasperated Byron fired his cantankerous physician; Polidori consequently used his tale to revenge himself on his former employer."
Polidori's portrait is not conventionally erotic: Ruthven has a "dead grey eye" that seems not to perceive character or humanity; he is cadaverous and the "deadly hue" of his face is never lit with vivacity; and he all but ignores women as an inferior species. Yet he has strong features and a compelling voice, and his apparent indifference to women carries a masochistic allure. He is also wealthy and perversely generous, sharing his wealth in the most decadent ways possible: by financing the dissolute in their pursuit of vice and leading them into disgrace-or to the gallows. He is a lone wolf, subverting morals. And then his dead eyes fall upon women, his tender prey.

Ruthven dies in Greece after being shot by robbers. He has already started rotting before his death, but has time to swear his companion, the protagonist Mr Aubrey, to keep silent about him for a year and a day. His body is placed on a summit to catch the first rays of the moon, whereupon it disappears. Aubrey then discovers through forensic deduction that Ruthven must have killed his Greek paramour Ianthe, who was found with blood on her neck and breast, "and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein." As Aubrey sinks into delirium, Ruthven rises from the dead and seduces Aubrey's innocent young sister, who is likewise found to have glutted his thirst for fresh blood. As if in ironic sympathy to the plight of both his lover and his sister, Aubrey dies from a hemorrhage. Lord Ruthven, meanwhile, escapes; he is, as is clear from the title of the story, "The Vampyre."

Inspired by Gothic poetries, then, Polidori literally romanticizes the vampire into an enthralling outrage of sexual bloodlust. But that was not the end of it. Polidori's tale was delivered to the countess of Breuss and nothing was heard of it for two-and-a-half years. Then, on 1 April 1819, it was published in the New Monthly Magazine as "A Tale by Lord Byron." It had been sent to the publisher Henry Colburn with a note that certain tales had been written by Byron, Polidori and Mary Shelley; Colburn inferred that the story in question was by Byron and, in order to capitalize on his notorious reputation, published it as such.
"Polidori's portrait is not conventionally erotic: Ruthven has a "dead grey eye" that seems not to perceive character or humanity; he is cadaverous and the "deadly hue" of his face is never lit with vivacity; and he all but ignores women as an inferior species."
Polidori was livid: Byron had apparently stolen his story. He immediately wrote to Colburn, insisting it is " not Lord Byron's, but was written entirely by me at the request of a lady." Polidori admitted that Byron's "Fragment" had provided particular incidents-"his Lordship had said that it was his intention of writing a ghost story, depending for interest upon the circumstances of two friends leaving England, and one dying in Greece, the other finding him alive, upon his return, and making love to his sister"-although, of course, Byron's "Fragment" never reached the point of the dead man rising and seducing the sister. Polidori accordingly requested a correction, proper attribution and compensation, and insisted that any further publication be suppressed. He himself supplied a statement correcting the claims made about the tale. Notwithstanding this, "The Vampyre" continued to be attributed to Byron throughout the century-and was celebrated across the continent as further proof of his wayward genius.

"The Vampyre" was not only attributed to Byron, though; it was also supplemented in the New Monthly Magazine and subsequent reprintings by prefatory material about Byron and the Villa Diodati retreat (including the episode regarding the effect of Christabel on Percy Shelley), together with an account of vampirism. This description of vampires locates them in Arabia and Greece (following Southey and Byron), as well as in Hungary, Poland, Austria and Lorraine (following Ossenfelder and Bürger). It gives details of blood-engorged corpses taken from the earlier medical reports, and the account of Paole given in Britain in The Craftsman (1732). The sexual content of the tales is underlined-they rise from their graves to "feed upon the blood of the young and beautiful"-and instructions for slaying vampires are provided: staking, decapitation and cremation. This self-proclaimed "monstrous rodomontade" concludes with a long quotation from The Giaour, and references to Thalaba, "the veracious Tournefort" and Calmet-again. It has to be said that the concise details given in this note concerning "this singularly horrible superstition" were to prove at least as influential as Polidori's narrative.

Polidori, in presenting the vampire as a depraved and amoral English aristocrat, triggered a cultural sensation. Rather than being at the borders of Europe, the vampire was at the debauched edges of society, a Byronic anti-hero. But although he was careful not to over-stress the medical aspects of vampirism, Polidori's vampire nevertheless helped to reignite interest in the scientific phenomenon of vampirism from a new perspective. In 1819, the Imperial Magazine published a feature on vampires that discussed Polidori's tale, reprinted Polidori's letter and the account of vampirism given by the New Monthly, and considered whether vampires were fictitious or not. The anonymous author argues that the leading idea of the literary vampire is that the vampire is a supernatural fiction, but a thread of fey doubt runs through the language:

The Vampyre is represented as a mere creature of the imagination; to which have been ascribed fictitious powers, corresponding, in their application, with those which we attribute to sylphs, fairies, elves and genii . . . Under its imposing aspect, the mind of the reader is insensibly transported into a region of enchantment . . . Awakened from this poetic delirium, when we reach the conclusion of the tale, reason once more regains its dominion over fancy; but, unfortunately, instead of following that steady light, which is necessary to all just discrimination, we suddenly fall into an opposite snare, and hastily conclude that the Vampyre has no kind of existence, except in the dreams of poets, and the fables of romance.

The writer is aware that literature inoculates readers against vampires, but recognizes that despite this they maintain some sort of presence, a state of unbeing that carries a trace of reality. They are more than mere fictions.

__________________________________

From The Vampire: A New History. Courtesy of Yale University Press. Copyright © 2018 by Nick Groom.

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On the Very Scary Rise of the First Literary Vampire

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On 17 June 1816, John William Polidori recorded in his diary that "The ghost stories are begun by all but me." Polidori was Lord Byron's physician and had accompanied the poet and hypochondriac to Switzerland, where Byron rented the Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva.

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Mellor articles are a good place to start

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Aldrich and Isomaki, "The Woman Writer as Frankenstein"

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Women as the Submissive Sex in Frankenstein

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Women as the Submissive Sex in Frankenstein

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In Mary Shelley's , the author characterizes each woman as passive, disposable and serving a utilitarian function. Female characters like Safie, Elizabeth, Justine, Margaret and Agatha provide nothing more but a channel of action for the male characters in the novel. Events and actions happen to them, usually for the sake of teaching a male character a lesson or sparking an emotion within him. Each of Shelley's women serves a very specific purpose in Frankenstein.

First, Justine's character is a very passive, seldom vocal character in the novel. She is tossed back and forth between her family and the Frankensteins, until she is ultimately framed for the murder of William Frankenstein. Justine defies the expectations of one wrongfully accused of manslaughter, remaining tranquil and peaceful. In her own words, she explains

"God knows how entirely I am innocent. But I do not pretend that my protestations should acquit me; I rest my innocence on a plain and simple explanation of the facts..." (65).

Not only do her speech and actions demonstrate passivity, but the simple act of being framed proves this to be the purpose behind her character: "But I have no power of explaining it...I am only left to conjecture concerning the probabilities by which it might have been placed in my pocket" (66). Thus, Justine becomes an inactive, docile victim of circumstance.

The next female character encountered is the young cottager's daughter Agatha, whom the monster studies. Agatha's purpose, as a kind and gentle female, is to exhibit and embody all virtue and sensitivity. These are the first lessons learned by the monster; he has never seen such tenderness before now. Agatha most moves him in her interactions with her blind father:

"Agatha listened with respect, her eyes sometimes filled with tears, which she endeavored to wipe away unperceived" (93).

Agatha's female character, through its inactive and tender nature, serves to teach the monster his first lessons on healthy human relationships and love.

The monster's next lesson comes from another female close to Agatha. When Safie arrives at the cottagers' from Arabia, she must be tutored to learn English. As the monster continues his observances of the happy family, Safie's lessons become his own as well. Thus, because of a passive female, the monster's first academic education results:

"My days were spent in close attention...and I may boast that I improved more rapidly than the Arabian...I could imitate almost every word that was spoken...I also learned the science of letters" (99).

It is inconsequential to the novel whether Safie herself learns the language, as long as the lessons being taught to her are influencing and furthering the monster. She is a means to his educational end, becoming yet another passive, action-channeling female character.

Perhaps the most important emotional channel in the novel is Frankenstein's betrothed Elizabeth. Described as a submissive, gentle character from the beginning, Elizabeth has always been a soft spot for her fiancé. Frankenstein views her as a possession: "I looked upon Elizabeth as mine - mine to protect, love and cherish. All praises bestowed on her I received as made to a possession of my own" (21).

Frankenstein's monster, well aware of this weakness and filled with the madness that results from parental neglect, murders Elizabeth in order to hurt his creator as deeply as possible. Even when her life is threatened, however, Frankenstein still holds the game of wits between himself and his monster above protecting Elizabeth. Instead of staying with her and guarding her on his wedding night, he patrols the premises:

"She left me, and I continued some time walking up and down the passages of the house and inspecting every corner that might afford a retreat to my adversary...when suddenly I heard a shrill and dreadful scream" (173).

Elizabeth has become another inert victim in this game of insanity and male-centered mayhem. She has been demeaned and reduced to a simple tool of revenge, along with the other female characters appearing in Frankenstein.

Lastly, Margaret's character has perhaps the most passive role of all. She is useful to us as an audience because without her, there is no reason for Walton to relay his story. Yet, we never meet this character nor do we know if she really exists, if she ever reads the story and gets the letters, or if she has anything to say about it. She is the most distant and passive female character in the novel and also the most necessary to the novel as a whole.

Though all of the female characters mentioned were created by a female author, each of them has a very demeaning characterization. Shelley's women are objectified, used, abused, and easily discarded. None of them, save Margaret, survive the novel and all of them live their fictional lives to serve a very specific function and impact a man's life.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, or, The modern Prometheus. London: Penguin Books, 2003.

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Women as the Submissive Sex in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"

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In Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", the author characterizes each woman as passive, disposable and serving a utilitarian function. Female characters like Safie, Elizabeth, Justine, Margaret and Agatha provide nothing more but a channel...

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Sex and Sexual Violence in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”

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Anyone in pursuit of knowledge is bound to encounter sex somewhere along the way. In the early 19th century, a period during which sex was unspeakable, fiction writers developed a distinct penchant for the unknown.[2] Mary Shelley…

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The Romantics - Eternity (BBC documentary)

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Frankenstein's Monster Real Story Full Documentary

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History Channel

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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - A Documentary (FULL MOVIE)

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Here are some of the most important quotations from the text:
Walton's Narrative

'I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man'.

'...ascertaining the secret of the magnet...'.

'...my father's dying injunction had forbidden my uncle to allow me to embark on a seafaring life'.

'...I preferred gory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path'.

'...but I bitterly feel the want of a friend'.

'What can stop the determined heart and resolved will of man?'

'I never saw a man in so wretched condition'.

'He must have been a noble creature in his better days, being even now in wreck so attractive and amiable'.

'One man's life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought for the dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race'

'Unhappy man! Do you share my madness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me- let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!'

'Will you smile with the enthusiasm I express concerning this divine wanderer?'

'You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine have been.'

Victor's Narrative

'And when, on the morrow, she presented Elizabeth to me as her promised gift, I, with childish seriousness, interpreted her words literally and looked upon Elizabeth as mine - mine to protect, love, and cherish.'

'The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine.'

'No human being could have passed a happier childhood than myself. My parents were possessed by the very spirit of kindness and indulgence.'

'It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn.'

'Natural philosophy is the genius that regulated my fate.'

'Wealth was an inferior object.'

'...electricity and galvanism ... was at once new and astonishing to me.'

'Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction.'

'M Krempe was a little squat man, with a gruff voice and a repulsive countenance; the teacher, therefore, did not prepossess me in favour of his pursuits.'

'In a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.'

'Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed?'

'Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.'

'A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.'

'Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?'

'The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials'.

'Sometimes I grew alarmed at the wreck I perceived that I had become...'

'It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils'.

'...I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.'

'...I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms...'

'His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken but he did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs.'

'A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic structure, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon to whom I had given life.'

'During this whole wretched mockery of justice I suffered living torture.'

'Ever since I was condemned, my confessor has besieged me; he threatened and menaced, until I began to think that I was the monster that he said I was. He threatened excommunication and hell fire in my last moments if I continued to obdurate.'

'She was no longer that happy creature who in earlier youth wandered with me on the banks of the lake, and talked with ecstasy of our future prospects.'

'...men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other's blood.'

'These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving.'

'...its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes.'

The Creature's Narrative

'All men hate the wretched.'

'How dare you sport thus with life?'

'Do your duty towards me.'

'Have I not suffered enough, that you seek to increase my misery?'

'I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous.'

'Believe me, Frankenstein: I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity; but am I not alone, miserably alone?'

'The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own defence before they are condemned.'

'The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me, until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons, I escaped to the open country...'

'..the barbarity of man.'

'He raised her, and smiled with such kindness and affection that I felt sensations of a peculiar and overpowering nature...'

'What chiefly struck me was the gentle manners of these people; and I longed to join them, but dared not.'

'I saw no cause for their unhappiness; but I was deeply affected by it. If such lovely creatures were miserable, it was less strange that I, an imperfect and solitary being, should be wretched.'

'A considerable period elapsed before I discovered one of the causes of the uneasiness of this amiable family: it was poverty, and they suffered that evil in a very distressing degree.'

'I often took his tools, the use of which I quickly discovered, and brought home firing sufficient for the consumption of several days.'

'I viewed myself in the transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am...'

The table below describes the relevance of the key quotatations:

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Quotations - Frankenstein by Mary Shelly - Revision World

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Here are some of the most important quotations from the text: Walton's Narrative 'I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man'. '...ascertaining the secret of the magnet...'.

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"to curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart" - Shelley

Unhappy man! Do you share my madness? Have you drank also of the intoxicating draught?

The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream

I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality

I was absorbed by a gloomy and black melancholy that nothing could dissipate. The image of Clerval was forever before me, ghastly and murdered.

Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?

I perceived in the gloom a figure...a flash of lightning illuminated the object, and...instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy demon

Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful

Thus spoke my prophetic soul, as, torn by remorse, horror, and despair I beheld those I loved spend vain sorrow upon the graves of William and Justine

Devil...do you dare approach me?...Begone, vile insect! Or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust!

I saw an insurmountable barrier placed between me and my fellow-men; this barrier was sealed with the blood of William and Justine.

I am the assassin of those most innocent victims; they died by my machinations.

I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path (W)

What can stop the determined heart and resolved will of man? (W)

chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose.

pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

Think not, Walton, that in the last moments of my existence I feel that burning hatred and ardent desire of revenge I once expressed

seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition

Remember me with affection, should you never hear from me again (W)

So strange an accident has happened to us that I cannot forbear recording it (W)

Hear me - let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips.

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.

NOTE: I didn't learn all of these for the exam, neither should this be considered a total, complete list. Just a handy selection of quotes that I found covered most of the main themes of Frankenstein!

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Frankenstein Quotes by Key Gothic Themes

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"to curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart" - Shelley Unhappy man! Do you share my madness? Have you drank also of the intoxicating draught?

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www.teachit.com

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Frankenstein Teaching Series Video One: Mary Shelley and Frankenstein

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Book Riot

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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is 200 years old, but the story is as fresh as a...reanimated corpse? Wait. Let me start over.

Through many adaptations, retellings, and reimaginings, and with the Mary Shelley biopic hitting theaters this month, the story of Victor Frankenstein and the monster he gives life remains one that is known throughout our culture, even outside of literary circles.

I went back to the text to see how relevant it is in its original form, and pulled these 40 quotes to show how truly great Frankenstein is. Please note: these Frankenstein quotes are pulled from the 1818 edition of the novel; Shelley edited it significantly for a new edition in 1831, which is the version that was most widely available until not too long ago. I chose to go back to the original (though edited by Percy Shelley) text for this project. These Frankenstein quotes are from Volume One of the book only; it was difficult not to copy out the entire text, as it is so beautifully written, so I chose instead to highlight the best quotes from the first third.

Frankenstein Quotes About Friendship

You may deem me romantic, dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend.

I never saw a more interesting creature: his eyes have generally an expression of wildness, and even madness; but there are moments when, if one performs an act of kindness towards him, or does him any the most trifling service, his whole countenance is lighted up, as it were, with a beam of benevolence and sweetness that I never saw equalled.

I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship.

I, who had ever been surrounded by amiable companions, continually engaged in endeavouring to bestow mutual pleasure, I was now alone.

[...] I believed myself totally unfitted for the company of strangers.

Nothing could equal my delight on seeing Clervel [...]. I grasped his hand, and in a moment forgot my horror and misfortune; I felt suddenly, and for the first time during may months, calm and serene joy.

Study had before secluded me from the intercourse of my fellow-creatures, and rendered me unsocial; but Clervel called forth the better feelings of my heart; he taught me again to love the aspect of nature, and the cheerful faces of children.

"How sweet is the affection of others to such a wretch as I am!"

"Farewell, sweet lady, dearest Elizabeth, my beloved and only friend; may heaven in its bounty bless and preserve you; may this be the last misfortune that you will ever suffer. Live, and be happy, and make others so."

Frankenstein Quotes About Nature & Science

I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.

What may not be expected in a country of eternal light?

How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow [...]

Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth.

It may appear very strange, that a disciple of Albertus Magnus should arise in the eighteenth century; but our family was not scientifical, and I had not attended any of the lectures given at the schools of Geneva. My dreams were therefore undisturbed by reality; and I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life.

The natural phaenomena that take place every day before our eyes did not escape my examinations.

When I was about fifteen years old, [...] we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunder-storm. [...] I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight.

"Chemistry is that branch of natural philosophy in which the greatest improvements have been and may be made [...]. A man would make but a very sorry chemist, if he attended to that department of human knowledge alone."

The summer months passed while I was thus engaged, heart and soul, in one pursuit. It was the most beautiful season; never did the fields bestow a more plentiful harvest, or the vines yield a more luxuriant vintage: but my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature.

It was a divine spring; and the season contributed greatly to my convalescence.

I contemplated the lake: the waters were placid; all around was calm, and the snowy mountains, "the palaces of nature," were not changed.

[...] vivid flashes of lightning dazzled my eyes, illuminating the lake, making it appear like a vast sheet of fire; then for an instant every thing seemed of a pitchy darkness, until the eye recovered itself from the preceding flash.

Frankenstein Quotes About Life & Death

I never saw a man in so wretched a condition.

"Alas! I regret that I am taken from you; and, happy and beloved as I have been, is it not hard to quit you all? But these are not thoughts befitting me; I will endeavor to resign myself cheerfully to death, and will indulge a hope of meeting you in another world."

Yet from whom has not that rude hand rent away some dear connexion; and why should I describe a sorrow which all have felt, and must feel?

Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed?

To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death.

I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition, or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy; and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm.

After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.

It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.

Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?

I collected bones from charnel houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame.

"His friends mourn and weep, but he is at rest: he does not now feel the murderer's grasp; a sod covers his gently form, and he knows no pain. He can no longer be a fit subject for pity; the survivors are the greatest sufferers, and for them time is the only consolation."

Frankenstein Quotes About Regret

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.

Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, and continued a long time traversing my bed-chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep.

The form of the monster on whom I had bestowed existence was for ever before my eyes, and I raved incessantly concerning him.

Nothing in human shape could have destroyed that fair child. was the murderer! I could not doubt it. The mere presence of the idea was an irresistible proof of the fact.

Alas! I had turned loose into the world a depraved wretch, whose delight was in carnage and misery; had he not murdered my brother?

A thousand times rather would I have confessed myself guilty of the crime ascribed to Justine; but I was absent when it was committed, and such a declaration would have been considered as the ravings of a madman, and would not have exculpated her who suffered through me.

The tortures of the accused did not equal mine; she was sustained by innocence, but the fangs of remorse tore my bosom, and would not forego their hold.

What are your favorite Frankenstein quotes?

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40 FRANKENSTEIN Quotes From Mary Shelley's Classic | Book Riot

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Mary Shelley's classic novel is just as relevant today. These 40 Frankenstein quotes to show how truly great this classic is.

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Mr Bruff

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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - Character Analysis of The Creature

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Frankenstein Teaching Series Video Two: Science and Knowledge

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Frankenstein, feminism, and literary theory

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Frankenstein, feminism, and literary theory

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DIANE LONG HOEVELER

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Click chapter link 7

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Aimed at students in the final year of secondary education or beginning degrees, this readable book provides the ideal introduction to studying English literature. Doing English: explains what 'doing English' really means introduces current ideas about literature, contexts and interpretations bridges the gap between 'traditional' and 'theoretical' approaches to literature, showing why English has had to change and what those changes mean for students of the subject.

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Video SparkNotes: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein summary

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Professor Heather Keenleyside - University of Chicago

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Don't Reanimate Corpses!

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Don't Reanimate Corpses! Frankenstein Part 1: Crash Course Literature 205

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Frankenstein, Part 2: Crash Course Literature 206

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Good notes on Paradise Lost

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A Cultural History of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

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"Frankenstein" (1818) — A Summary of Modern Criticism

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"Frankenstein" (1818) — A Summary of Modern Criticism

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Victorian Web

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ver the course of time, Frankenstein's monster has usurped the very name of his creator, Victor Frankenstein, the precocious student of natural philosophy from Geneva, where Mary Shelley was living with two gifted poets, her husband, Percy, and George Gordon, Lord Byron, when she conceived the strange Gothic tale. A period of bad weather in Switzerland bred a compact between Byron, Percy, and Mary, that while at the Villa Diodati, each should write the kind of story the trio were so enjoying reading. Numerous twentieth-century films attest to the story's durability, perhaps because of what science has become in western society over the past two centuries. The subtitle, "The Modern Prometheus," suggests the mythic dimensions of the three-fold tale. The author, incredibly not quite nineteen at the time of composition (and, moreover, a teenaged mother), draws a correspondence between young Frankenstein's hope of scientific glory prompting him to manufacture a monster and God's creating the archangel who would become the rebel Satan. God's making of man is also at issue in the epigraph that Mary Shelley takes from Milton's Christian epic of creation and original sin, Paradise Lost:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould Me man?

Shelley's fable thus enquires into the responsibility of the Creator for the misery and evil in His created world.

Mary Shelley was no ordinary nineteen-year-old; rather, as the daughter of radical novelist William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and the wife of one of the leading second-generation Romantic poets, she was, as Gilbert and Gubar style her, "one of England's most notable literary heiresses" (221). After endlessly studying her mother's and father's works, Mary Shelley went on to read voraciously: contemporary Gothic novels; works in French and German; Milton's Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Comus, Areopagetica, and Lycidas; the works of the great Romantics - her husband, Byron, Coleridge, and Wordsworth; and, shortly before writing Frankenstein, Swift's Gulliver's Travels . From seventeen to twenty-one, moreover, Mary was almost continually involved in physical procreation: pregnant, confined, or nursing. "For her developing sense of herself as a literary creature and/or creator seems to have been inseparable from her emerging self-definition as daughter, mistress, wife, and mother" (Gilbert and Gubar: 224).

For Gilbert and Gubar, the Miltonic creation epic is central to the meaning of Frankenstein; indeed, they maintain that Mary Shelley's novel is a nineteenth-century, Romantic, and Feminist reading of Paradise Lost:

Like Victor Frankenstein, his author and superficially better self, the monster enacts in turn the roles of Adam and Satan, and even eventually hints at a sort of digression into the role of God. Like Adam, he recalls a time of primordial innocence, his days and nights in "the forest near Ingolstadt," where he ate berries, learned about heat and cold, and perceived "the boundaries of the radiant roof of light which canopied me" (88, ch. 11). Almost too quickly, however, he metamorphoses into an outcast and Satanic figure, hiding in a shepherd's hut which seems to him "as exquisite . . . a retreat as Pandemonium . . . after . . . the lake of fire" (90, chap. 11). . . . . Eventually, burning the cottage and murdering William in demonic rage, he seems to become entirely Satanic: "I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me" (121, chap. 16) . . . . At the same time, in his assertion of power over his "author," his mental conception of another creature (a female monster), and his implicit dream of founding a new, vegetarian race somewhere in "the vast wilds of South America," (131, chap. 17), he temporarily enacts the part of a God, a creator, a master, albeit a failed one. [Gilbert and Gubar, 235-36]

Undoubtedly a part of Mary Shelley's recreation of Milton's epic in novel form is the Edenic quality of the valleys, rivers, and lakes in Frankenstein; moreover, the monster learns language from the De Laceys' reading of Paradise Lost, the syntax and diction of which become the models for his own speech throughout the novel.

Another pattern that both Anne Mellor in "The Female in Frankenstein" and William Veeder in "Frankenstein: Self-Division and Projection" discuss is that of name symbolism, which reinforces Victor Frankenstein's hubris in trying to eliminate the female as he attempts to win eternal fame as the founder of a new line of superhumans. Instead of submitting himself to the will of the community and the family, the scientist asserts his ego by challenging the laws of nature. Whereas the Russian sea-master sacrifices his hopes for marriage that his beloved may marry the man of her choice and Clerval sacrifices his plans to attend university to nurse the stricken Victor, Walton and Frankenstein make no concessions in their quest for greatness. While Walton's polar expedition (actuated by the wrong-headed notion acquired as a child that Hyperboreans lead a paradisal existence at an iceless North Pole) threatens the lives of his crew, Frankenstein acknowledges that his experiment has loosed a killer upon unsuspecting humanity. In contrast to the phallocentric Frankensteins, the De Lacey family (unlike the Frankensteins, impoverished, but like them and the Godwins after Mary's birth lacking a matriarch) shares work and responsibility equally between male and female in an atmosphere of rational companionship, mutual concern, and love. As their symbolic names suggest, Felix embodies happiness, Agatha goodness. They are then joined by Safie (sophia or wisdom). Safie, the daughter of the Turkish merchant, is appalled both by her father's betrayal of Felix and by the Islamic oppression of women he endorses; she has therefore fled from Turkey to Switzerland, seeking Felix. Having reached the De Lacey household, she promptly becomes Felix's beloved companion and is taught to read and write French. Safie, whose Christian mother instructed her "to aspire to higher powers of intellect, and an independence of spirit, forbidden to the female followers of Mahomet" (p. 119), is the incarnation of Mary Wollstonecraft in the novel. Wollstonecraft too traveled alone through Europe and Scandinavia; more important, she advocated in

A Vindication that women be educated to be the "companions" of men and be permitted to participate in the public realm by voting, working outside the home, and holding political office. [Mellor, 222-223]

Significantly, the "loners" of the tale, Walton and Frankenstein, seek limited male companionship, relegating the females in their lives to correspondents rather than companions. Moreover, it is Victor's destruction of his bride, who is to be his sole companion, that prompts the monster to murder Elizabeth on her wedding night.

Veeder notes that the female correspondents stand for the balance and judgment ('keeping') that the polar explorer and the natural philosopher, both obsessed by dreams of glory and heroic accomplishment, tend to lack. Both Victor and Walton have violated the will of a father in pursuing their vain and reckless schemes, and have left their sisters.

"Margaret" is a jewel, a "pearl" of great price. "Saville" suggests the native and communal through the French "sa ville." If Mary had not wanted this French connection, she would have used the traditional English spelling, Savile. . . . .Together "Margaret" and "Saville" give to this native jewel the imprimatur of Mary Shelley's own initials, M. S. . . . . "Walton" as "walled-town" suggests the isolation inevitable to Prometheans like Robert and Professor "Waldman." Only by leaving Robert's bachelor realm behind - without even the trace of a middle initial - can Margaret reach Saville, that native community which is the union of male with female and the ideal of Agape. [Veeder, 82-83]

Veeder adds that not only "Robert" ("bright in fame") but also the Russian cities that serve as the jumping-off points for his polar expedition have symbolic significance. "The very motion of his journey is away from the female and toward the male, away from Margaret and on to Peter (Petersburgh) and Michael (Archangel), away from sa ville and on to the ultimately phallic pole" (88).

Whereas modern critics have focussed on the eponymous character, in his review of an apparently male author's book Percy Bysshe Shelley shifts attention from Victor (perhaps recognizing in that character his own personality traits) to the monster, whom he terms a "Being."

Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked. Requite affection with scorn; - let one being be selected, for whatever cause, as the refuse of his kind - divide him, a social being, from society, and you impose upon him the irresistible obligations - malevolence and selfishness. [Rpt. in Veeder 226 from The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley 6]

Two further articles examine Frankenstein from the perspective of psychology and behavioural patterns. In "The Tempest-toss'd Summer of 1816," John Clubbe discusses how both Shelleys and Lord Byron were influenced by the notion then in vogue that individual and national character were profoundly shaped by climate, and specifically how the novel was written during one of Europe's most inclement summers. "With the onset of the rain and the cold," writes Clubbe, "the thoughts of those closeted within [Geneva's Villa Diodati] turned inward" (31). All three Romantic writers were fascinated by the Alpine thunderstorms ("bises or 'north-easters'") which brought a strange chiaroscuro to the Swiss landscape, investing it with mysterious blackness and sublime lightning. Such storms indeed constitute a pattern in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: "For her, a storm embodied the unknowable, elemental power of against which man's being, his rational intellect especially, appeared puny and helpless" (33). That lightning should be able to reanimate a corpse was within the realm of possibility for early nineteenth-century Europeans, whose world was not yet wholly mapped and whose scientists such as Cuvier were beginning to unearth fossil evidence that huge monsters once walked the planet. Only fifty years before, Cook had discovered Australia, and the polar regions remained a mystery. "In 1816 the eerie creations imagined by Mary Shelley, both creature and novel, seemed all too possible" (37).

Paul Youngquist in another 1991 article subjects the feminism implicit in Frankenstein to a psychological rather than a New Historicist examination.

For Shelley, body is fate; all idealizings, cultural and personal, liberal and feminist, mask more profound - and irrational - imperatives. If it is ugliness that fuels the monster's social exclusion, it is beauty that drives his revenge: he destroys what he cannot possess. Hence the inadequacy of Wollstonecraft's arguments [in A Vindication of the Rights of Women] that reason is natural and beauty mere ornament. [344]

Through authorship, Mary Shelley slipped the mortal bonds of bodily regeneration. Youngquist argues that Shelley's Frankenstein is the author's alterego, producing a creature free from the defilement of sexual procreation and the taint of mortality.That a male without sexual contact can reproduce is a feminist fantasy, for the laboratory's replacing the womb frees woman from the constraints of the body. Justine and Elizabeth escape the defilement of sexual procreation, dying sacrificial virgins and therefore pure; they, along with Saphie and Agatha are reflections of the Ideal Woman, biologically immaculate because uncontaminated by sexual know-ledge and motherhood. The book's female characters are "such an insipid lot" (349) because they are not characters at all, but mere symbols, sacrificial virgins and dead mothers who must atone for Victor Frankenstein's usurpation of procreation.

Mothers in Frankenstein are categorically dead because their biological function is primordially defiled. . . . . Mary Shelley's own life as child and mother bore ample witness to this paradox [that life lives upon death]. It has become almost obligatory for critics of Frankenstein to cite the long list of deaths that dogged the early life of its author: her mother Mary Wollstonecraft expiring eleven days after Mary's birth; her half-sister Fanny Imlay poisoning herself and referring obliquely in her suicide note to her illegitimacy; Percy's first wife Harriet Westbrook dying pregnant by another at the time of her suicide; and finally, Mary's first daughter passing quietly two weeks after her premature birth. All of these deaths implicate the mother by exaggerating the proximity of life's origin and end. (351)

The monster, however, is not a fully formed individual, but an "abortion," a defilement of the human form, and so deeply repulsive to all (including himself) who see him. "The monster is an ugly botch because he incarnates a male fantasy of creative autonomy" (347). The fault is not the monster's but his creator's; the monster is a sympathetic consciousness trapped in a repulsive form that even Victor, his mother-and-father, detests. The creature's appearance immediately makes manifest his creator's violation of social norms, for the monster's ugliness exemplifies his impurity; his very form contradicts Wollstencraft's liberal feminism for it "demonstrates openly the implied imperatives of corporeal life: there can be no transcendence of sex, no rationalist utopia oblivious to the body" (344).

Selected List of References

Blamires, Harry. "Mary Shelley." The Age of Romantic Literature. Harlow, Essex: Longman/York Press, 1990. 115-116.

Boyd, Stephen. "Frankenstein as a Novel." Mary Shelley: Frankenstein. Harlow, Essex: Longman and York Notes, 1994. 52-55.

Clubbe, John. "The Tempest-toss'd Summer of 1816: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." Byron Journal 19 (1991): 26-40.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. "The Films of Frankenstein." Approaches to Teaching Shelley's Frankenstein, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt. New York: MLA, 1990. 166-179.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan. "Horror's Twin: Mary Shelley's Monstrous Eve." The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. 213-247.

Mellor, Anne K. "The Female in Frankenstein." Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988. Pp. 220-232.

Veeder, William. Mary Shelley and "Frankenstein": The Fate of Androgyny. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Youngquist, Paul. "Frankenstein: The Mother, the Daughter, and the Monster." Philological Quarterly 70, 3 (Summer 1991): 339-359.

Wheeler Winston Dixon, "The Films of Frankenstein." Approaches to Teaching Shelley's "Frankenstein", ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (New York: MLA, 1990): 166-179.

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Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" (1818) - A Summary of Modern Criticism

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ver the course of time, Frankenstein's monster has usurped the very name of his creator, Victor Frankenstein, the precocious student of natural philosophy from Geneva, where Mary Shelley was living with two gifted poets, her husband, Percy, and George Gordon, Lord Byron, when she conceived the strange Gothic tale.

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AO3 - Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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AO3 - Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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Letter III - Shelley intertextual link

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Rime of the Ancient Mariner   Orson Welles

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Teacher Guide

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A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - 1792

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Lecture - Uni of Bristol

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Romantic Poetry - Considered Intellectually refined, not 'low culture' like Gothic novels

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Romantic Poetry - Considered Intellectually refined, not 'low culture' like Gothic novels

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Percy Bysshe Shelley - Mutability

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"Mutability" by William Wordsworth (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

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Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ozymandias

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Victorian Web - Biography of Mary Shelley

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Victorian Web - Biography of Mary Shelley

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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, by Richard Rothwell. © National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 1235.

ary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on 30 August 1797, the daughter of eminent parents. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was the foremost feminist thinker of her generation, remembered today for her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a passionate plea for state- regulated education for girls. She laid the utmost stress on female independence. Mary's father, William Godwin, was a radical political philosopher and novelist (he wrote both Political Justice and Caleb Williams). Mary's parents adhered to revolutionary principles both in politics and in their private lives, but in spite of despising the institution of marriage they took the step after all to facilitate Mary's entrance into society. However, Mary Wollstonecraft died ten days after the birth of her daughter from puerperal fever. Her daughter from an affair with Gerald Imlay, Fanny, lived with William Godwin and his new-born child.

Before her marriage to poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite the fact that she had grown up without ever knowing her birth mother Mary always referred to herself as "Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin." After her marriage, she dropped the "Godwin," but hung on to her mother's name, signing her letters "MWS."

William Godwin courted various women looking for a new mother for the two girls until he finally met Mary Jane Vial (better known as Clairmont) and married her on 21 December 1801. Mary Jane had two children, Charles and Jane, who later called herself Claire. Her stepmother did not encourage Mary Godwin's intellectual curiosity and did not bring her up according to her mother's principles. Mary never went to school, but was taught to read and write at home. Her father encouraged her to use her imagination, so she started "scribbling" at a very young age. He also gave her access to his extensive library of English authors. He allowed her to sit quietly in a corner and listen to his political, philosophical, scientific or literary discussions with his friends, among them the literary lions William Wordsworth, Charles and Mary Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt. The only formal training Mary received came from a music master.

The family lived at Somers Town, where William Godwin and his wife opened a publishing firm (M. Godwin and Co.) and a shop retailing children's books. In 1810, the Godwin Juvenile Library published the first work by Mary Godwin: Mounseer Nongtongpaw, a verse poem which extended the five-stanza song of the same name that Charles Dibdin had published in 1808. It is a humorous account in an iambic pentameter ballad of John Bull's trip to Paris and the resulting linguistic misunderstandings.

Outwardly Mrs Godwin was a good mother and took sufficient bodily care of her stepchildren. Nevertheless, Mary hated her because she saw in her stepmother everything her mother had not been: a philistine, a devious and manipulative conservative. She also blamed her stepmother for alienating her father from her, as William Godwin withdrew almost entirely into his study and left the running of the household to his second wife.

By 1812 things between Mary and Mrs Godwin had come to such a head that William Godwin sent Mary to board with an acquaintance, William Baxter, and his family in Dundee for several months. Mary took to the Baxters at once. They showed her a different kind of family: closely knit and fond of each other. "Mary Godwin came to idealize the bourgeois family as the source both of emotional sustenance and of ethical value. They inspired her later fictional representations of the nuclear family as a community of mutually dependent, equally respected, and equally self-sacrificing individuals" ( see Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley, Routledge: New York and London, 1989).

When Mary returned from Scotland for a visit to London, Percy Bysshe Shelley, heir to a man of fortune in Sussex, had introduced himself as a disciple to her father. In 1811 Shelley had been expelled from Oxford after publishing a pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheism. His family were aghast, especially when he, barely nineteen, married Harrier Westbrook, and took her and her sister Eliza to Ireland with him, where he distributed his pamphlet. He went on to Wales to support William Madock's socialist community development, then fled to London. His marriage started to go wrong after the birth of their daughter, when Harriet lost interest in spiritual pursuits. Shelley turned increasingly to other women for comfort and intellectual sympathy.

Shelley, then 20, met Mary, then 15, at her father's house when he dined there with his wife and sister-in-law. By the time Mary returned to London for good nine months later, her father had become financially dependent on Shelley. When Shelley and Mary met again on 5 May 1814, he became immediately attracted to her beauty, her intellectual interests and her evident sympathy for him. They began to go on daily walks to the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft at St Pancras churchyard, and here they declared their love for each other on 26 June 1814. When Godwin found out on 8 July, he immediately wrote to Shelley and forbade Mary to see Shelley again.

On 18 July 1814, Mary fled with Shelley to France, after he had threatened to commit suicide. They took Jane Clairmont with them. Mrs Godwin followed them to Calais, but failed to win Jane back. William Godwin broke off contact with his daughter for the next 3 ¸ years. Shelley, Mary and Jane proceeded to Paris. Mary had taken a box containing juvenile writings and letters to Paris, which Shelley had promised to read, but didn't. When they travelled on to Switzerland, the box was left behind, and Mary never saw it again. Thus she was unable to establish her own literary credentials, like her mother had done. Shelley always encouraged Mary to write, but neither he nor she ever saw her as his literary equal. Shelley set himself up as her literary mentor. Nevertheless she was the more literary prolific during these first weeks of living together. Her journal and her letters home became the basis for her History of A Six Weeks Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, with Letters descriptive of a Sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni, published in 1817. She modelled the book on her mother's Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), which had first attracted her father's attention to Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Godwin enthused about the natural scenery, seeking out not sublimity, but beautiful tranquillity. She kept her distance from the people she met on their travels.

On 13 September 1814, the travellers returned to London. Here Harriet Shelley, by now six months pregnant, sued for custody of her children and for financial support. Percy's father had cut off his allowance, so Shelley was in dire straits. Shelley and Mary tried to keep up their daily routine of both writing in the mornings, Mary doing the housekeeping in the afternoons, visiting and reading, but at times Shelley had to hide from his creditors. Probably he and Jane became lovers during that winter. Shelley renewed his friendship with Thomas Hogg, who had always tried to share Shelley's women. He now started to pursue Mary, with Shelley's approval, but she was pregnant and would not accept him. Shelley probably sought to get even with her over his liaison with Jane, who changed her name to Claire early in 1815. Nine separate sections from Mary's journal are missing during that year, Claire's journal does not survive, Hogg's Life of Shelley breaks off in mid-1815,and from Shelley only a few notes to his solicitors survive, so documentation is scant.

Mary grew more and more irritated with Claire, who had a tendency towards hysteric fits. On 6 January, 1815, Shelley's grandfather died, leaving his estate entailed on Percy Bysshe Shelley and his oldest male heirs after the death of his father. Shelley now was able to negotiate and allowance from his father after he renounced a second landed estate. Shelley could also pay off his debts and settle an allowance on Harriet. Godwin broke his silence and demanded that Shelley lend him money, which he did. It was never repaid.

Mary gave premature birth to a daughter, Clara, on 22 February 1815. The infant died two weeks later. Shelley was indifferent to the fate of his female offspring, he went off with Claire and left Mary to be consoled by Hogg, who now joined the household. Mary grieved very much over the death of her daughter. Mary pressed for Claire to go, which she did, but only for a while. In 1816, she was back in London. Claire became Lord Byron's lover some time during that winter, despite his obvious lack of affection.

While Claire was away in 1815, Mary and Shelley took several trips together, yet Mary was unnerved by his restlessness. They set up house in Bishopsgate, and tried to settle into a routine of reading and writing. Mary studied Latin and Greek and read Locke and Bacon. On 24 January, 1816, she gave birth to a healthy son, William. Meanwhile, Percy Shelley's health deteriorated; as a warm climate was considered necessary for his weak heart, Claire persuaded Mary and Shelley to accompany her to Switzerland to meet Lord Byron at Lake Geneva. This meant an effective return of Claire to the Shelley household ö she did not leave it again until October 1820.

By June, the Shelley household had settled on the shores of Lake Geneva, near Lord Byron. Byron and Shelley immediately became friends and went sailing together. Mary was in an emotionally difficult situation. She had craved a mother's love all through her life and bitterly regretted being alienated from her father. The relationship between Shelley and Claire undermined her self-esteem. The powerful erotic attraction of both Shelley and Byron did more to distract her, so on 16 June, at the age of eighteen, she had a "waking nightmare". The story is well known: Mary herself told how she, Shelley, Lord Byron and Doctor Polidori, Byron's physician, after reading ghost stories to each other, agreed to each write an equally horrible story. She could not think of anything for a couple of hours (as Dr. Polidori remembers, she herself erroneously remembered a couple of days), then after a discussion of the powers of galvanism and some experiments by Erasmus Darwin, fell into a trance which showed her a student standing beside a corpse he had animated. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus was conceived. Mary had been having nightmares about the death of her daughter, and her anxiety obviously brought on the "waking dream". As she was writing the novel, Mary increasingly identified with the abandoned child. A child deprived of a loving family becomes a monster, as the Creature itself knows. The Creature's argument that lack of love has made him evil is partially derived from Jean Jacques Rousseau's seminal educational treatise in narrative form, Emile, in which the French philosophe argues that lack of a mother's love permanently damages a child. Mary felt ambivalent towards her creation and called it her "hideous progeny."

Mary Shelley consolidated the Gothic as a particularly female form of novel. She deviated from the tradition in so far as her central character is not a woman. Mary based her novel on the latest discoveries in the sciences of her day. She created the genre of science fiction. Before publishing the manuscript, Mary gave it to her husband to edit; he made numerous revisions. He is largely responsible for changing her simple Anglo-Saxon style into more Latinate, ornate wording, as the hand-written additions to the manuscript show. Certain alterations by Shelley serve to make the Creature less human, e.g. he names it "an abortion", and to soften Victor Frankenstein's errors. The fair copy that Mary sent to the printers no longer exists. The proofs, sent directly to Mary Shelley, were read by both the writer and her husband.

The writing of the narrative of Frankenstein took almost exactly nine months, the nine months before the birth of the Shelleys' daughter Clara Everina (born 2 September, 1817). In September 1816, Mary, Percy Shelley, William, and Claire returned to England. On 10 December, the body of Harriet Shelley was found in London's Serpentine, into which she had jumped in order to commit suicide. Percy Shelley was denied custody of his and Harriet's two children in the following year. On 30 December, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin married Percy Bysshe Shelley at St Mildred's, London

Mary finished Frankenstein on 14 May. The novel was published in March 1818. In 1831, Mary revised Frankenstein for Colburn and Bentley's Standard Novel Series. By then, her philosophical convictions had radically changed; her personal tragedies, together with her financial straits and her despair over her feelings of guilt, had convinced her that material forces beyond any human - not free will or personal choice - control the course of events. Her organic conception of nature was now replaced by a conception of nature propelled by brutal, machine-like force. Human beings are reduced to puppets manipulated by external forces. Victor Frankenstein is presented in amore sympathetic way, he is held less responsible for his actions. He is the victim of circumstances, not the perpetrator of evil. The earlier ideology of the loving family has now turned into maternal love as a self-destructive force. Experience had taught Mary Shelley that her earlier Utopianism and her belief in a world without monsters were untenable.

In March 1818, the Shelleys, Claire and her and Byron's daughter Allegra Alba travelled to Italy to deliver the girl into Lord Byron's care. In August Shelley accompanied Claire to Venice to see her daughter, who was ill. He ordered Mary to follow him with the children, although Clara was ill herself. She died shortly after the arrival in Venice. Mary blamed Shelley for her death, as he had forced her to rush the sick child across Italy and had neglected to consult a doctor in Padua, as he did not want to interrupt his talks with Byron. On 7 June, 1819, Mary's second child William died of Malaria in Rome. She withdrew from her husband, whom she blamed for the death of both children. Shelley did not share her grief, but instead left her alone to stay in the company of Claire and Maria Gisborne. In her grief, Mary began writing Mathilda, a father-daughter incest fantasy, which was not published during her lifetime. It shows much of the hostility Mary felt both towards her father and her husband.

In October 1819, the Shelleys moved to Florence, where Percy Florence was born on 12 November. His birth brought Shelley and Mary closer again. She was depressed by claims, however, that Shelley had fathered a child on their nursemaid Elisa in December 1818. Elisa's husband kept asking for money.

On 27 January 1820, the Shelleys moved to Pisa, where Mary began writing Valperga in September. In January 1821, Edward and Jane Williams moved to Pisa and soon became close friends of the Shelleys. As Mary withdrew more and more from him, Shelley sought solace from Jane Williams and Emilia Viviani, for whom he wrote Epipsychidion, a celebration of erotic love. Mary had been suffering from depression since the summer of 1819. In June 1821, Mary finished the second volume of Valperga.

In May 1822, the Shelleys moved to La Spezia, where Mary miscarried on 16 June during her fifth pregnancy. On 8 July, Shelley and Edward Williams set sail in Shelley's sailboat Don Juan (named, of course, after his friend Lord Byron's best-seller) and were found drowned ten days later. Mary suffered from intense feelings of guilt towards her dead husband, particularly so as at times she had wished her husband were dead. Shelley's friends blamed her, as she did herself, for having made Shelley's last year unhappy. In reparation, she committed herself to the preservation of his memory. She was going to publish his poems, a biography and to idolize him. She overcompensated by turning him into a half-god. This prevented any normal relationship between herself and another man. Her desire to write a biography, however, was blocked by Shelley's father, who was ashamed of his renegade son. So she appended large biographical notes to her 1824 and 1839 editions of his poetry. She also painted an idealized portrait of him in her roman ‡ clef, The Last Man.

Mary and Percy Florence returned to London in August 1823. They found themselves impoverished. Mary immediately turned to writing articles, novels, encyclopaedia entries, stories and reviews. She turned away from Gothic and futurist novels to historical and sentimental ones, set in fourteenth-century Italy (Valperga), the Yorkist uprising in fifteenth-century England (Perkin Warbeck) or the fashionable world of early nineteenth-century society (Mathilda, Lodore, and Falkner), stressing her belief that a woman's fulfilment came from a loving relationship with another person and stable family relations. She saw herself as a follower, not as an active agent, and felt unable to take a stand on behalf of women's rights.

After Percy Shelley's death, Mary had expected that Lord Byron would become her protector and in that role would advance her the money to return to England, but he abruptly withdrew his initial support. Mary then turned increasingly to women friends for support. After her return to England in 1823, she assumed that she and Jane Williams would live together for ever. However, Jane went behind Mary's back to Leigh Hunt and Hogg, complaining about Mary's having mistreated Shelley in their last year together. Other female friends of Mary's later years could not fulfil her demands for a mother-like absolutely loyal loving companion either. Emotionally disappointed, Mary turned back to her first love, her father.

William Godwin welcomed Mary on her return to London in 1823. They lived close to each other and met almost daily. But his financial troubles prevented him from giving her the emotional and financial security she needed. She refused all offers of marriage, namely from John Howard Payne, an American actor-manager (1825), and the writer Prosper Mérimée. Edward John Trelawny suggested in 1831 that fate might have thrown him and Mary together, but she refused him, too, although she had retained his friendship since her husband's death.

Late in 1823 Valperga was published, a book sharply critical of military glory at the expense of family relationships and the suffering of the innocents. Mary also collected and edited Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. She had to recall the unsold copies, though, at the insistence of Sir Timothy Shelley, who feared scandal. In February 1824, Mary began writing The Last Man, which can be read as her attempt at coming to terms with both Lord Byron and Shelley. The work is the first English example of an end- of-the-world novel, set in a far distant future. Mary tests her ideas of the egalitarian family against human egotism, temporal mutability and the brute forces of nature which annihilate individual achievement through chance, accident and death, thus contradicting the more optimistic stances of both her father and her husband and their utopian idealism. Instead of following the idea of Godwin and Burke, that history leads ultimately to perfection, Mary depicts a history that can abruptly stop. She also introduces the theme of shared marital love being lost love; trust is destroyed. She portrays the self-destructive side of motherhood, a mother who lives for her children only cannot acquire a life of her own. In this deeply pessimistic novel, women cannot find fulfilment within nor without the family.

In February 1826, The Last Man was published. In September of that year, Harriet Shelley's son Charles died, and Percy Florence became heir. Sir Timothy doubled Mary's allowance to 200 pounds per year, which still did not make her financially secure. In January 1828 Mary began writing The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, an adventure story set during the Yorkist rebellion in the fifteenth century (published in May 1830). She also wrote The Sisters of Albano, the first of fourteen stories she published in the journal The Keepsake. In January 1831, Mary began writing Lodore, part of which she had to re-write in 1834 after a section was lost either in the post or by her publishers. The novel was published in 1835.

The education of Mary's son Percy Florence at Harrow proved too costly when she boarded him there, so she left London and moved to Harrow herself to cut down on cost. Sir Timothy did little to help her and his heir.

In 1835, Volume I of the Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal was published for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopedia series. Mary contributed articles on the lives of Petrarch, Boccaccio and Machiavelli. When Volume II came out in October, Mary had contributed the lives of Metastasio, Goldoni, Alfieri, Monti and Foscolo.

On 7 April 1836, William Godwin died of catarrhal fever and was buried beside Mary Wollstonecraft in St. Pancras Churchyard. In the year following, Mary suffered greatly. In 1837, she published the novel Falkner, another book on the theme of the (foster) father- daughter relationship. Again Mary demonstrates that a woman's fulfilment lies within the family. Also in 1837, Volume III of the Lives was published, with Mary contributing essays on Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón. In the same year, Percy Florence took up his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge. July 1838 saw the publication of Volume I of the Lives of the most Eminent Men of France with essays by Mary on the lives of Montaigne, Rabelais, Corneille, Rochefoucauld, Molière, La Fontaine, Pascal, Mme. de Sévigné, Racine, Boileau, and Fénelon. In 1839, Mary contributed essays on Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Mme Roland and Mme. de Staël for Volume II. In the same year, she also published Volumes I through IV of her husband's Poetical Works, complete with notes, at monthly intervals. In November, she published her edition of his Essays, Letters. During the following years, Mary spent much of her time travelling in mainland Europe with her son, who graduated from Cambridge in 1841. She was gathering material for a new book, Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843, published in 1844. In July 1843, Mary returned to England, stopping on the way to visit Claire in Paris.

In 1844, Sir Timothy died, leaving the baronetcy and his heavily indebted estate to Percy Florence. In 1849 Mary was able to move into Field Place, the Shelley country home at Bournemouth, with Percy Florence and his wife Jane. When she found that her son was financially secure, Mary lost her will to live. She suffered from various kinds of psychosomatic illnesses and nervous attacks. Finally, she died from a mysterious paralysis on 1 February 1851. She was buried between her mother and her father, whose remains had been transferred from St. Pancras, at St. Peter's churchyard in Bournemouth.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was a feminist only insofar as she followed her mother's ideas about unrestricted education for women and equality within a marriage. However, she endorsed the ideal of the bourgeois family, and could not envisage a place for herself outside it. By adhering to that ideal, she automatically accepted its intrinsic hierarchy, the claim to male superiority, and the unequal distribution of power between parents and children.

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A Biographical Sketch of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)

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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, by Richard Rothwell. © National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 1235. ary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on 30 August 1797, the daughter of eminent parents. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was the foremost feminist thinker of her generation, remembered today for her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a passionate plea for state- regulated education for girls.

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This page is under perpetual construction! It was last updated April 24, 2018.
This list is meant to assist, not intimidate. Use it as a touchstone for important concepts and vocabulary that we will cover during the term. Vocabulary terms are listed alphabetically.

FABLE: A brief story illustrating human tendencies through animal characters. Unlike the parables, fables often include talking animals or animated objects as the principal characters. The interaction of these animals or objects reveals general truths about human nature, i.e., a person can learn practical lessons from the fictional antics in a fable. However, unlike a parable, the lesson learned is not necessarily allegorical. Each animal is not necessarily a symbol for something else. Instead, the reader learns the lesson as an exemplum--an example of what one should or should not do. The sixth century (BCE) Greek writer Aesop is most credited as an author of fables, but Phaedrus and Babrius in the first century (CE) expanded on his works to produce the tales we know today. A famous collection of Indian fables was the Sanskrit Bidpai (circa 300 CE), and in the medieval period, Marie de France (c. 1200 CE) composed 102 fables in verse. After the 1600s, fables increasingly became common as a form of children's literature. See also ,beast fable,and. Click here for a PDF handout discussing the difference between fables and parables.

FABLIAU(plural, fabliaux): A humorous, frequently ribald or "dirty" narrative popular with French poets, who traditionally wrote the story in octosyllabic couplets. The tales frequently revolve around trickery, practical jokes, sexual mishaps, scatology, mistaken identity, and bodily humor. Chaucer included several fabliaux in The Canterbury Tales, including the stories of the Shipman, the Friar, the Miller, the Reeve, and the Cook. Examples from French literature include Les Quatre Souhais Saint Martin, Audigier, and Beranger au Long Cul ( Beranger of the Long Ass).

FACETIAE: A bookseller's term for obscene or humorous books.

FAËRIE: Tolkien contrasted the fairy (the mythic creature) with Faërie, the latter being both the Otherworld realm where elves and fey creatures held sway and more generally the sense of magic and wonder associated with that place. Tolkien's understanding of the term changed over the years of his writing and scholarship, and he happily used the term as both a noun and an adjective, but in general the following were traits of Faërie:

(1) Faërie connected with the natural or wild word rather than urban or industrial life.

(2)In spite of those connections with nature, the area was innately supernatural, connecting more with imagination than with rationality or the mundane.

(3) It was a perilous realm that humans could temporily visit (but where they did not belong), an area of both great beauty and great danger. In following with Celtic tradition, however, creatures of that realm had the power occasionally to invade our mundane world if they so chose.

(4) The term Faërie connected directly to the spoken word in literature through its etymology going back to Latin fata (fate), the past participle of fari, to speak, i.e., "that which is spoekn") (Drout 184). One of the ways to enter into or experience Faërie was to read stories about aventures that occured there when humans entered that Otherworld.

(5) The magic of the place by definition was a serious enchantment--experiencing Faërie was incompatible with satire and humor, which distinguishes it from other imaginary worlds such as those of Jonathan Swift and so forth.

(6) Frequently, time passes differently in this Otherworld than it does in the mundane world, as is common in Irish legends about Fairy Circles, or Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia.

In Tolkien's scholarly writings, he focuses on examples such as the Fairy Queen of Spenser, Annvwyn in Welsh legends like the Mabinogion, the Land of the Ever-Young (Tir-na-nOg) in Irish legend, and so forth. Arguably, Lórien and the various Elf Kingdoms in The Lord of the Rings and the land of Faery in Smith of Wootton Major are examples of Tolkien's fiction where we see the influence of this idea. See also Other World and fantastic sublime.

FAIR COPY: A corrected--but not necessarily entirely correct--manuscript that a dramatist might submit to a theatre company, as distinct from the draft version known as "foul papers."

FAIRY TALE: In common parlance, a tale about elves, dragons, hobgoblins, sprites, and other fantastic magical beings set vaguely in the distant past ("once upon a time"), often in a pseudo-medieval world. Fairy tales include shape-shifting spirits with mischievous temperaments, superhuman knowledge, and far-reaching power to interfere with the normal affairs of humanity. Other conventions include magic, charms, disguises, talking animals, and a hero or heroine who overcomes obstacles to "live happily ever after." The most famous compilers include Hans Christian Anderson (Denmark), the Grimm brothers (Germany), and Charles Perrault (France). Fairy tales grew out of the oral tradition of folktales, and later were transcribed as prose narratives. Examples from the European tradition include the tales of Prince Charming, Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, and Cinderella. An example from Middle-Eastern tradition would be Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. In scholarly literature, fairy tales are also referred to by the German termmärchen. In spite of the stories' surface simplicity, many critics note that fairy tales often contain psychological depth, especially in terms of childhood anxiety and wish fulfillment. Modern writers such as Thackeray, Oscar Wilde, Ruskin, Anne Rice, Ursula Leguin, and Jean Ingelow have tried their hand at writing fairy tales. Some critics have suggested that the Wife of Bath's narrative in The Canterbury Tales and the lais of Marie de France also have qualities of the fairy tale--especiallywish fulfillment.

FAME/SHAME CULTURE: The anthropological term for a culture in which masculine behavior revolves around a code of martial honor. These cultures embody the idea of death before dishonor. Such civilizations often glorify military prowess and romanticize death in battle. Typically, such a society rewards men who display bravery by (a) engaging in risk-taking behavior to enhance one's reputation, (b) facing certain death in preference to accusations of cowardice, and (c) displaying loyalty to one's king, chieftain, liege lord, or other authoritative figure in the face of adversity. Those in power may reward such brave followers with land, material wealth, or social status, but the most important and most typical reward is fame or a good reputation. Especially in fatalistic fame/shame cultures, fame is the most valuable reward since it alone will exist after a hero's death. Just as such cultures reward bravery, loyalty, and martial prowess with the promise of fame, they punish cowardice, treachery, and weakness in battlewith the threat of shame and mockery. A fame/shame culture is only successful in regulating behavior when an individual's fear of shame outweighs the fear of death.This dichotomy of fame/shame serves as a carrot and stick to regulate behavior in an otherwise chaotic and violent society. Sample behaviors linked with fame/shame cultures include the in Anglo-Saxon culture, the act of "counting coup" among certain Amerindian tribes, displays of trophies among certain head-hunting tribes and the Irish Celts, and the commemoration of war-heros in national monuments or songs in cultures worldwide.

We can see signs of fame/shame culture in the heroic poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, where the poem "The Battle of Maldon" praises by name those warriors who stood their ground with Byrtnoth to die fighting the Viking invaders and condemns by name those men who fled the battle and survived. Characteristically, the poem lists the men's lineage in order to spread the honor or shame to other family members as well. The poem Beowulf also shows signs of fame/shame culture in the behavior of Hrothgar's coast-guard, who challenges over a dozen gigantic armed men, and the boasts () of Beowulf himself.

It is interesting that not all militaristic or violent cultures use the fame/shame social mechanism to ensure bravery and regulate martial behavior. Fame/shame cultures require men to deliberately seek the rewards of bravery and consciously fear the social stigma of cowardice. The point isn't that a hero is unafraid of death. The point is that the hero acts in spite of being afraid. In contrast, some martial cultures seek to short-circuit fear by repressing it or by encouraging warriors to enter altered states of consciousness. Medieval Vikings had the tradition of theberserker, in which the warrior apparently entered a hypnogogic, frenzied state to lose his awareness of fear and pain. Similarly, the path of bushido among the Japanese samauri was heavily influenced by the Buddhist doctrine of nirvana (mental and emotional emptiness), in which the warrior enters combat in a Zen-like emotional state, a mindset in which he is divorced from his emotions and thoughts so that his martial behavior is reflexive and automatic rather than emotional. The samauri class went so far as to have a funeral for living warriors as soon as they entered the service of a Japanese lord because the samauri accepted their own deaths as soon as they took the path of bushido, and were thus accordingly cut off from the ties of family and loved ones. See also .

FAMILIAR ADDRESS: Not to be confused with the animal known as a witch's familiar (see immediately below), the familiar address is the use of informal pronouns in Middle English and Early Modern English. Pronouns such as ", thy, thee, and thine" are familiar or informal pronouns used to speak either affectionately to someone of equal or lesser rank, or to speak contemptuously and callously to a lesser. Pronouns such as You [nominative], your, [objective], and imply a more formal and respectful sort of address. This division in Middle English and Early Modern English is akin to the division in Spanish between tu and , or the similar observance of tu and vous in French. In Shakespeare's plays and in Middle English literature, these pronouns provide actors with a strong hint concerning the tone in which words should be spoken.

FAMILIAR, WITCH'S: In the eyes of medieval and Renaissance churchmen, and in much of medieval and Renaissance literature, it was a common belief that witches kept familiars. These familiars were thought to be demonic spirits masquerading as small animals--perhaps a black cat, goat, dog, or toad. Inquisitors and churchmen held that such spirits presented themselves to witches and served them after the witches struck a bargain with diabolical powers. The three Weird Sisters in Macbeth open the play in a scene in which their familiars summon them away to work mischief.

FAMILY RHYME: In "family rhyme," rhyming is based on phonetic similarities. For the sake of contrast, consider what most people consider "normal" rhymes. In common perception, the rhyming syllables must have the same vowel sounds, and the consonant sounds after the vowel (if any do appear) must also have the same sounds, and the rhyming syllables typically begin differently. However, in family rhyme, the poet tries to replace one phoneme with a member of the same phonetic family. So, a plosive (such as b, d, g, p, t, or k) will "rhyme" with another plosive. A fricative (such as v, z, zh, j, f, th, s, sh, or ch) will "rhyme" with another fricative. Finally, a nasal like m, n, or ng will "rhyme" with another nasal. Thus, in family rhyme, the following words would be considered rhymes with each other: . Often the terms "" and inexact rhyme are used loosely and interchangeably for family rhyme.

FANCY: Before the 19th Century, the word fancy meant roughly the same thing as imagination as opposed to the mental processes of reason, logic, and memory. The Romantic poets, however, made a pivotal distinction between the two terms that proved integral in their theories of creativity. They used fancy to refer to the mental process in which memories or sensory perceptions are jumbled together to create new chimerical ideas. This process was similar but inferior to the higher mental faculty of imagination, which in its highest form, would create completely new ideas and entirely novel images rather than merely reassemble memories and sensory impressions in a different combination. Coleridge, in chapter thirteen of Biographia Literaria (1817), suggests that "Fancy . . . has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space." The fancy was limited to taking already-assembled ideas, images, and memories, and then reassembling them without altering or improving the components. Imagination, however, produced truly original work. Imagination was seen as (as Coleridge says) "essentially vital," functioning less like the Fancy's mechanical sorting and instead growing in a more organic manner. He claims imagination "generates and produces forms of its own," and it is capable of merging opposites together in a new synthesis. He claims: "imagination . . . reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image" [ sic]. Hence, imagination assimilates unlike things to create a new unity. This unity would be constituted of living, interdependent parts that could not function in a literary manner independent from the organic form of the whole, an idea that proved quite important to the New Critics of the early twentieth-century.

Many lesser critics of the late 19th Century misunderstood Coleridge, and they used the word fancy in reference to the process of producing a light-hearted, simple, or fanciful poetry and reserve the term imagination for more serious, passionate, or intense poetry. However, for the original Romantic critics and poets, the distinction in terminology marked two different types of creativity. They valued imaginative creativity more than fanciful creativity regardless of whether the poetry was serious or light-hearted.

FANTASTIC SUBLIME: David Sandner's term for the way 19th century Romantic poetry, fantasy literature, and children's literature partakes of the sublime. In ancient Roman aesthetics, Longinus long ago commented on the way that especially tall mountains, especially deep ravines, especially dark caverns, or especially bright lights can inspire in the viewer a sense of the sublime--a mixture of awe, beauty, and fear that could be simultaneously attractive and repellant or overwhelming. Although Sandner Sandner's focus was on 19th-century writers like George Macdonald, Kenneth Grahame, and Christina Rossetti, his observations are applicable to fantasy literature more broadly, in which fantasy writers often create in their works geographies and events in which overwhelming size, depth, distance, and so forth are striking features of those works..

FANTASY LITERATURE: Any literature that is removed from reality--especially poems, books, or short narratives set in nonexistent worlds, such as an elvish kingdom, on the moon, in Pellucidar (the hollow center of the earth), or in alternative versions of the historical world--such as a version of London where vampires or sorcerers have seized control of parliament. The characters are often something other than humans, or human characters may interact with nonhuman characters such as trolls, dragons, munchkins, kelpies, etc. Examples include J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, J. R. R. Tolkien's synthetic histories in The Silmarilion, Michael Moorcock's The Dreaming City, or the books in Stephen R. Donaldson's series, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. See alsoescapist literature. Contrast with magic realism, science fiction and speculative fiction.

FANTASY NOVEL: Any novel that is removed from reality--especially those novels set in nonexistent worlds, such as an elvish kingdom, on the moon, in Pellucidar (the hollow center of the earth), or in alternative versions of the historical world--such as a version of London where vampires or sorcerers have seized control of parliament. The characters are often something other than humans, or human characters may interact with nonhuman characters such as trolls, dragons, munchkins, kelpies, etc. Examples include J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, Ursula LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea, Michael Moorcock's The Dreaming City, or T. H. White's The Once and Future King. See also escapist literature. Contrast with magic realism, science fiction and speculative fiction.

FARCE (from Latin Farsus, "stuffed"): A farce is a form ofcomedy designed to provoke laughter through highly exaggerated caricatures of people in improbable or silly situations. Traits of farce include(1) physical bustle such as slapstick, (2) sexual misunderstandings and mix-ups, and (3) broad verbal humor such as puns. Many literary critics (especially in the Victorian period) have tended to view farce as inferior to "high comedy" that involves brilliant dialogue. Many of Shakespeare's early works, such as The Taming of the Shrew, are considered farces. Contrast withcomedy of manners.

: A medieval Spanish religious play, usually performed in sets rather than alone, with a comic interlude between plays or between acts. An example is Lucas Fernández's Farsas y eglogas al modo y estilo pastoril y castellano (Cuddon 333). should not be confused withfârsa, a type of boasting poem in the African Galla tribe that recites a of heroes and their deeds (Cuddon 333).

(French, "medley," or "rubbish"): Nonsense verse popular between 1200-1400 in medieval France, usually in eleven-line verse form, often in macaronic text. Their purpose appears to be mocking traditional closed-form poetry.

FAUSTIAN BARGAIN: A temptation motif from German folklore in which an individual sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge, wealth, or power. Marlowe's The Tragical Historie of Doctor Faustus revolves around this motif.

(French, "false friends"): (1) Words in two languages that might technically be cognates with each other (i.e., descended down two separate etymological branches to a common root word), but which are not equivalent in meaning because one or both of them have changed meaning over time from the original root word. For instance, the Spanish word and the English word look like cognates, and in fact, the English term was borrowed by way of French from the Spanish word. However, the English word has changed meaning to refer to humiliation, but in the original Spanish, the word means "impregnate." Even though technically descended from a common ancestor, and thus cognates, the two words are faux amis if we try to translate them as equivalents. (2) In a looser sense, faux amis can also refer to any false cognates in which two words look so similar morphologically they lure amateur linguists into believing they are related etymologically. Faux amis and false cognates are the bane of speakers learning a second language. Cf. and false cognate under cognate discussion.

FEATHERING: As Kathleen Scott describes this sort of decoration, it is "a spray form of decoration, consisting of short, slightly curving pen lines often ending in a lobe (after c. 1410 usually tinted green), gold motifs, and coloured motifs; [. . .] a basic element of 15th-century book decoration" (Scott 371).

FEMININE ENDING / FEMININE RHYME:See under discussion of .

FEMINIST WRITING: Writing concerned with the unique experience of being a woman or alternatively writing designed to challenge existing preconceptions of gender. Examples of feminist writings include Christine de Pisan's medieval work, The City of Ladies; Aemilia Lanyer's Renaissance treatise, Salve Deus, Rex Judaeorum (which presented the then-shocking idea that Adam was just as much to blame for the fall of man as Eve was in the Genesis account); Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication, and Susan B. Anthony's nineteenth-century essays (which presented the equally shocking idea that women in America and Canada should have the right to vote).

Many female students in my class preface their discussions of feminist writings by stating, "I'm not a feminist, but . . . ." This tendency always puzzled me, since it implies that feminism is something negative, radical, or always liberal. Worse yet, it implies that it's bad for women to want crazy, misguided things like education, equal health insurance, similar pay to what men earn in similar professions, freedom from harassment, and funding for medical problems concerning women, such as breast and uterine cancer research, which are the primary concerns of feminism. Somewhere toward the end of the twentieth-century, detractors of such writers have caricatured these demands as "man-hating" or "anti-family." As an antidote to such thinking, keep in mind the broader definition: a feminist is anyone who thinks that women are people too.

FESTSCHRIFT (Ger. "Celebration-Writing"; plural festschriften): A festschrift is a collection of essays or studies in book form, dedicated to a former teacher or professor in his or her advanced age--often when that scholar retires or reaches the rank of emeritus professor. The individual scholarly writings come from his or her students, who typically collaborate to organize the work and contact the publisher, and present the collection to the teacher upon its publication. They can be as small a single slender volume or as large as a multi-volume work. Typically, the last section includes a tabula gratulatoria, an extended list of academic colleagues and friends who send their regards and good will to the scholar. See dedication.

FEUDALISM: The medieval model of government predating the birth of the modern nation-state. Feudal society is a military hierarchy in which a ruler or lord offers mounted fighters a fief (medieval Latin " beneficium"), a unit of land to control in exchange for a military service. The individual who accepted this land became a vassal; the man who granted the land became known as the vassal's liege or his lord. The deal was often sealed by swearing oaths on the Bible or on the relics of saints. Often this military service amounted to forty days' service each year in times of peace or indefinite service in times of war, but the actual terms of service and duties varied considerably on a case-by-case basis. For instance, in the late medieval period, this military service was often abandoned in preference for cash payment or an agreement to provide a certain number of men-at-arms or mounted knights for the lord's use.

In the late medieval period, the fiefdom often became hereditary, and the firstborn son of a knight or lesser nobleman would inherit the land and the military duties from his father upon the father's death. Feudalism had two enormous effects on medieval society. (1) First, it discouraged unified government because individual lords would divide their lands into smaller and smaller sections to give to lesser nobles and knights. These lesser noblemen in turn would subdivide their own lands into even smaller fiefs to give to even less important rulers and knights. Each knight would swear his oath of fealty (loyalty) to the ones who gave him his lands, which was not necessarily the king or higher noblemen, let alone an abstraction like "France" or "England." Feudal government was always an arrangement between individuals, not between nation-states and citizens. (2) Second, it discouraged trade and economic growth. Peasant farmers called serfs worked the fields; they were tied to individual plots of land and forbidden to move or change occupations without the permission of the lord. The feudal lord might claim one-third to one-half of the serf's produce in taxes and fees, and the serfs owed him a set number of days each year in which they would work the lord's fields in exchange for the right to work their own lands. Often, they were required to grind their grain in the lord's mill and bake all their bread in the lord's oven in exchange for other fees. In theory, the male members of the community might be divided intobellatores (the noblemen who fought), orlaboratores (the agricultural laborers who grew the food), and (the clergy who prayed and attended to spiritual matters). In contrast, women were divided into their states commonly by sexual or marital status as widows, virgins, or wives. Ultimately, this simple tripartite division known as thethree estates of feudalism proved unworkable by the 1300s, and the necessity of skilled craftsmen, merchants, and other occupations was quite visible in spite of the theoretical model espoused in some sermons and political treatises.

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE: A deviation from what speakers of a language understand as the ordinary or standard use of words in order to achieve some special meaning or effect. Perhaps the two most common figurative devices are the --a comparison between two distinctly different things using "like" or "as" ("My love's like a red, red rose")--and the --a figure of speech in which two unlike objects are implicitly compared without the use of "like" or "as." These are both examples of tropes. Any figure of speech that results in a change of meaning is called a trope. Any figure of speech that creates its effect in patterns of words or letters in a sentence, rather than twisting the meaning of words, is called a scheme. Perhaps the most common scheme is parallelism. For a more complete list of schemes and tropes, see the schemes and tropes pages.

FIGURE OF SPEECH: A scheme or a trope used for rhetorical or artistic effect. Seefigurative language, above.

FILI: A class of learned Irish poet in pre-Christian and early Christian Ireland. Legally, a fili had similar status to a Christian bishop, and in pagan times, the fili carried out some spells and divinations appropriate to the druids, the priestly class among the Celts.

FILK: A specialized type of folk music or alternative music, often with narrative lyrics, that usually deals withscience fiction or fantasy and characters. The subject-matter is often not original to the musician, but rather taken from literature,pulp fiction, movies, and pop culture. In some cases, the song retells a story written by a famous science fiction author or explores in greater detail a particular scene or character first created by that author. Because this subgenre often is an homage to another's published work, it is usually performed informally rather than mass-marketed, thus avoiding copyright infringements. An example might be a song about Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek Enterprise set to the tune of "Jingle Bells," or a song about H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds meant to be performed to the tune of Handel's "Ode to Joy." Other filk songs might involve completely original music, and they might deal with technological or fantastic themes more generally rather than paying homage to a particular science fiction story. Likewise, a single filk song might makeallusions to several different works simultaneously. The only prerequisiteconvention of thegenre is that it be appealing to the people who frequent science fiction conventions and enjoy such literature and movies.

Filk is often written by amateur musicians or hobbyists. Fans traditionally perform the songs at science fiction conventions late at night after other scheduled events have ended. The filk movement first began in the 1950s, though it never became particularly widespread until the mid 1970s. The adjective/noun term filk comes from a typo--a misspelling of "folk music" in Lee Jacobs' essay, "The Influence of Science Fiction on Modern American Filk [sic] Music." The incorrect designation stuck and science fiction authors like Poul Anderson and Robert Asprin helped popularize the name through their friendly encouragement. Back formation or linguisticfunctional shift resulted in the verb to filk, which implies both "to sing or perform filk songs" and "to write songs about science fiction subjects." Various annual science conventions like the Ohio Valley Filk Festival (OVFF), the Nashville Musicon, and FilkOntario schedule regular filking events. Every year, OVFF offers a Pegasus award for excellence in Filk music.

FILIGREE WORK (also called vinework or vinery): A common type of decoration in medieval manuscripts. Scott defines it in the following manner: "Delicate, conventional designs, usually in gold, on a flat coloured surface, in overall patterns of curling vines, branches, and sprigs and/or leaves; used as a background to miniatures and initials and on band borders and miniature frames" (Scott 371).

FINNO-UGRIC: One of several language families outside the Indo-Euorpean family of languages. This family includes Hungarian, Estonian, Lappish, and Finnish.

FIRMAMENT (Septuagint Greek, stereoma "the beaten or hammered thing," Latin firmamentum, "the solid thing"): In Genesis, a mysterious substance described as "separating the lower waters from the upper waters" before the separation of dry land from the rest of the lower waters. In ancient cosmology, the firmament was thought to be a semi-translucent dome or vault of the sky. By medieval times, the theory arose that this firmament was the first of several translucent spheres encompassing the earth called the crystaline mobile. Extended discussion can be found here.

FIRST FOLIO: A set of Shakespeare's plays published in 1623. The "First Folio" included some thirty-six plays, and the editor of this publication took some care in the selection and accuracy of his texts, or at least more care than those editors who published earlier quartos. See and below.

FIRST LANGUAGE: The preferred or normal language a speaker chooses to communicate in--i.e., one's native or fluent language. Bilingual individuals might have more than one.

FIRST SOUND SHIFT: In Grimm's Law, the systematic transformation of the Proto-Germanic Indo-European stop sounds.

FIT (also spelledfitt, possibly from Old Norse fit, "a hem," or German Fitze, "a skein of yarn or the thread used to mark off a day's work"): A fit is a numbered division of a a poem, much like a canto. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is divided into four fits, and Chaucer's "Sir Thopas" contains three fits. Lewis Caroll's The Hunting of the Snark consists of eight fits. The practice of dividing a narrative poem into fits has fallen into disuse in most modern poetry. Cf. .

FIVE WOUNDS OF CHRIST: Medieval writers typically describe Christ as suffering five wounds, though they vary somewhat in which wounds they number. The most common numbering system lists the nail wound in Christ's hands and feet as four wounds, with the spear-puncture in his side as the fifth wound. This model does not count the crown of thorns as a puncturing wound. Another rarer system numbers these as moments in which Christ bleeds, listing them as (1) Christ's circumcision or, alternatively, Christ's sweating of blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, (2) the flogging at the hands of the Roman soldiers, (3) his being nailed to the cross, (4) the crown of thorns, and (5) the spear in his side. The Pearl Poet refers to the five wounds of Christ as numerologically significant as he expounds upon the pentangle on Sir Gawain's shield in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

FIXED-FORM: Another term for closed-form poetry. Seeclosed poetic form.

FLASHBACK: A method of narration in which present action is temporarily interrupted so that the reader can witness past events--usually in the form of a character's memories, dreams, narration, or even authorial commentary (such as saying, "But back when King Arthur had been a child. . . ."). Flashback allows an author to fill in the reader about a place or a character, or it can be used to delay important details until just before a dramatic moment.

: Also called a FLAT CHARACTER static character, a flat character is a simplified character who does not change or alter his or her personality over the course of a narrative, or one without extensive personality and characterization. The term is used in contrast with a round character. See ,round character, andcharacterization.

FLESH SIDE: In medieval manuscripts, this term refers to the side of a leaf of or that originally faced the internal organs of the animal, as opposed to the , which was the side of the skin that faced outward. Usually, the flesh side is whiter and softer than the hair side. The two sides are usually distinguishable in continental manuscripts, but it is often harder to distinguish them in insular texts (texts from Britain), because the custom in the British isles was to refrain from scraping the skins very deeply, so that both sides retain a suedelike surface and sometimes a stiff, cellulose character. See discussion of , , andmanuscript.

FLOURISHING: In medieval codices, this refers to "Ornamentation in pen-work, often red on a blue initial (but sometimes in lavender and occasionally in green), by means of sweeping lines and loops descending from patterns, often 'saw-tooth' at this period [1300 CE through 1499 CE], adjoining the letter" (Scott 370).

FLYTING: A contest of wits and insults between two Germanic warriors. Each tries to demonstrate his superior vocabulary, cleverness, and bravery. The verbal rivalry between Unferth and Beowulf in Beowulf is one such example in Anglo-Saxon literature.

FOCALIZATION: Dutch literary theorist Mieke Bal coined the term focalization to describe a shift in perspective that takes place in literature when an author switches from one character's perspective to another. She preferred the term focalization to the more traditional phrase "point-of-view" because the term called attention to the way a reader's focus shifts even as the point-of-view shifts. The term has become widespread in the school of literary theory known as narratology.

FOIL: A character that serves by contrast to highlight or emphasize opposing traits in another character. For instance, in the film Chasing Amy, the character Silent Bob is a foil for his partner, Jay, who is loquacious and foul-mouthed. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Laertes the unthinking man of action is a foil to the intelligent but reluctant Hamlet. The angry hothead Hotspur in Henry IV, Part I, is the foil to the cool and calculating Prince Hal.

FOLIO: A term from the early production of paper andvellum in the medieval period. When a single large sheet is folded once and sewn to create two leaves, or four pages, and then bound together, the resulting text is called a "folio." On a single sheet, the page visible on the right-hand side of an open book or the "top" side of such a page is called therecto side (Latin for "right"), and the reverse or "bottom" side of such a page (the page visible on the left-hand side of an open book) is called theverso side ( click here to see this visually). Folios are typically large books, twice the size of a quarto and four times the size of an octavo printing. Compare folio with and .

FOLK ETYMOLOGY: An incorrect but popular explanation for the origins of a word. For instance, popular folk etymology states that the word posh is an for "Port Outbound, Starboard Homebound"--the part of a luxury liner with the best view on either journey on a particular sealiner. In actual fact, the term posh predates the formation of the company supposed to have invented the term.

FOLKLORE:Sayings, verbal compositions, stories, and social rituals passed along by word of mouth rather than written down in a text. Folklore includes superstitions; modern "urban legends"; proverbs;riddles; spells; nursery rhymes; songs; legends or lore about the weather, animals, and plants; jokes andanecdotes; rituals at births, deaths, marriages, and yearly celebrations; and traditional dance and plays performed during holidays or at communal gatherings. Many works of literature originated infolktales before the narratives were written down. Examples in American culture include the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree; George Washington throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac river; Paul Bunyon cutting lumber with his blue ox, Babe; Pecos Bill roping a twister; and Johnny Appleseed planting apples across the west over a 120-year period. Manyfairy tales in Europe originate in folklore, such as "Snow White" and "Jack and the Beanstalk." In modern days, much academic work with folklore focuses on reports of UFO abductions, the Chupacabra [goat-chewing monster] legends of Mexico, urban legends, and outbreaks of public hysteria regarding nonexistent mass ritualized child-abuse and cannibalism. Contrast with . See alsofolkloric motifs and .

FOLKLORIC MOTIFS: Recurring patterns of imagery or narrative that appear infolklore and folktales. Common folkloric motifs include the wise old man mentoring the young warrior, the handsome prince rescuing the damsel in distress, the "," and the "trickster tricked." Others include "beheading games," "the exchange of winnings," and theloathly lady who transforms into a beautiful maiden (all common in Celtic folklore). These folkloric motifs appear infabliaux, infairy tales, in , in archetypal stories (see ), and in some of Shakespeare's plays.

FOLKTALE: Folktales are stories passed along from one generation to the next by word-of-mouth rather than by a written text. See further discussion underfolklore.

FOOL: Originally a jester-at-court who would entertain the king and nobles, the court jester was often a dwarf or a mentally incompetent individual. His role was to amuse others with his physical or mental incapacity. (While this may sound cruel to a modern reader, the practice also constituted a sort of medieval social security for such individuals who would otherwise be left to starve; a fool at court would at least be assured of food, shelter, and clothing.) In later centuries, the court fool was often a professional entertainer who would juggle, tell jokes, and generally amuse the king and his guests with keen wit. Such performers were often given an unparalleled degree of freedom in their speech. As long as they spoke their words in rhyme or riddle, the fool theoretically had the freedom to criticize individuals and mock political policy. In Shakespearean drama, the fool becomes a central character due to this immunity. The fool is also sometimes referred to as the though "clown" can refer to any bumpkin or rural person in Elizabethan usage (see above).

: Suggesting, hinting, indicating, or showing what will occur later in a narrative. Foreshadowing often provides hints about what will happen next. For instance, a movie director might show a clip in which two parents discuss their son's leukemia. The camera briefly changes shots to do an extended close-up of a dying plant in the garden outside, or one of the parents might mention that another relative died on the same date. The perceptive audience sees the dying plant, or hears the reference to the date of death, and realizes this detail foreshadows the child's death later in the movie. Often this foreshadowing takes the form of a noteworthy coincidence or appears in a verbal echo of dialogue. Other examples of foreshadowing include the conversation and action of the three witches in Shakespeare's FORESHADOWING Macbeth, or the various prophecies that Oedipus hears during Oedipus Rex.

FORESTAGE: The part of the stage "in front" or closest to the viewing audience.

FORM: The "shape" or organizational mode of a particular poem. In most poems (like sonnets), the form consists of a set number of lines, a set rhyme scheme, and a set meter for each line. Inconcrete poetry, the form of a poem may reflect the theme, topic, or idea of the words in the actual shape of the text on a piece of paper. In the or open-form poetry common to the modernist and postmodernist movements, the rigid constraints of form are often discarded in order to achieve a variety of effects.

FORNYRTHISLAG: An Old Norse Eddic form (inalliterative verse) with four-line stanzas in which acaesura splits each line. Each half-line has two accented syllables and either two or three unstressed syllables. Most of the Eddas are written in this structure.

FORSTERIAN: Informal, ironic, relaxed, and resembling the style, attitude, or tone found in E. M. Forster's writings.

FOUL PAPERS: Rough drafts of a manuscript that have not been corrected and are not to be sent to the printers. They are typically full of blotted out passages and scribbled revisions. Some of Shakespeare's surviving manuscript variants theoretically might be the result of the difference between his foul papers and "" (see above). Unfortunately, no definite sample of Shakespeare's foul papers actually survive to the present day except a possible in the play Sir Thomas Moore.

FOURFOLD INTERPRETATION: In the twelfth century, fourfold interpretation was a model for reading biblical texts according to one of four possible levels of meaning. The idea had a profound influence on exegesis and theology, but its principles also influenced medieval literature and medieval writers. Dante (c. 1300), for instance, claimed that his writings can be interpreted according to four possible levels of meaning ( The Divine Comedy being the classic example). The text can be read as (1) a or historically true and factual account of events (2) anallegorical text revealing spiritual ortypological truths, (3) atropological lesson that makes a moral point, or (4) an anagogical text predictingeschatological events in the last days or revealing truths about the afterlife--often seen as a mystically unique revelation for each reader. Often medieval interpreters saw a single passage or verse as operating on multiple levels simultaneously. For instance, consider the following Biblical excerpt:

While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks, and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, "Take and eat; this is my body" [Matthew 26:26].

Here, when Christ takes the piece of bread and offers it to his disciples, many readers would argue we cannot read his words literally. (Christ is not saying, "I am literally a piece of bread" or "My body is made up of bread," or even "Engage in cannibalism by eating my body while I hand you this piece of bread.") The statement is not meant to be understood that way, according to many theologians and exegetes, but rather it is symbolic in meaning. The passage symbolically indicates events yet to come, a prefiguration of both (1) Christ's crucifixion, in which his body would be broken and torn upon the cross, and (2) the coming ritual of Eucharist, in which the disciples will eat communion bread in commemoration of that sacrifice.

Oddly enough, this idea that Biblical literature can be read on multiple levels often unsettles some Christians who argue that every word is meant to be taken literally in the Bible. I personally suspect that, when people make such claims, they do not understand what the word literal means (either that, or they haven't read the Bible very astutely). They themselves do not interpret the Bible in such a manner, for they do not believe that the story of the Good Samaritan is literally a mere historical account about a person living in Samaria, but they readily interpret the passage tropologically as a hypothetical lesson Christ presents concerning neighborly behavior and Christian charity. Nor do they think that the Beast with seven heads and ten crowns in the book of Revelation will literally rise from the sea to ravage the land like some gigantic hydra-headed mutant Godzilla, but instead they typically read the beast as an eschatalogical symbol of a human Antichrist yet to come who will dominate the world. Neither do they read Psalm 46:1, "A mighty fortress is our God, an ever present bulwark in time of trouble," as a claim that God is literally a military installation or building. They (like most intelligent readers) intuitively know sometimes to make the leap from the literal meaning to the level of figurative, symbolic, or metaphorical meaning. They just don't admit that they are doing so--claiming they simply read every word in the holy text as a literal statement.

On the other hand, many of the in Church history result from the tricky question of when to make the jump from literal to allegorical interpretation. The Petrine Doctrine, for instance, originates in the Catholic church's literal reading of Matthew 16:17-19 and John 21:15-17. Protestant branches of Christianity do not tend to read the passage literally as an indication that Saint Peter and his papal successors have special authority over spiritual matters and the church. The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation (the idea that communion wafers and communion wine literally turn into the blood and body of Christ on the level of substancia while remaining unchanged in incidentals like appearance and taste) is another example in which the Catholic decision to read literally such scripture contrasts with Wycliffite doctrines of consubstantiation, in which the bread and wine remain materially bread and wine, but only symbolically or spiritually become the body and blood of Christ, or real presence--the doctrine that the essence of God permeates the bread and wine while leaving it physically unchanged. Other differences between Protestant sects originate in the same question. Should Christians interpret literally those passages in Corinthians and Timothy in which women are forbidden to have their hair uncovered in public, speak aloud in churches, or hold teaching jobs or positions of authority over males? Few modern Christians would, given the contextual evidence, but some denominations do read the passages literally and thus forbid women to be pastors or Sunday School teachers, or even to hold managerial positions in businesses, or act as elementary school teachers for male students, for instance. The question becomes at what point one should set aside a particular level of fourfold interpretation in favor of another.

In the same way, fourfold interpretation of medieval literature is equally tricky. Among medieval scholars, the term " Robertsonian" is often used in reference to critics who seek to apply exegetical principles of interpretation to secular texts--especiallytypological readings. (The name "Robertsonian"comes from an American scholar, D. W. Robertson, who is the most outspoken and well-known of such critics in the last half of the twentieth-century.) Other critics hotly contest such readings of literary text, especially when the literal subject-matter seems greatly at odds with the exegetical material.

FOURFOLD MEANING: Another term for fourfold interpretation, this word refers to the medieval idea that every passage in the Bible can be interpreted according to at least one of four possible levels of meaning. The text can be read as (1) a or historically true account of events (2) anallegorical text revealing spiritual ortypological truths, (3) atropological lesson that makes a moral point, and (4) an anagogical text predictingeschatological events in the last days or the afterlife, or mystical revelations concerning spiritual matters unique to each individual reader. See discussion underfourfold interpretation.

FOURTH WALL: Sometimes referred to as the "third wall," depending upon how a stagebuilder numbers the sides of the stage, the fourth wall is an imaginary wall that separates the events on stage from the audience. The idea is that the stage is constructed with a cutaway view of the house, so that the people sitting on the audience can look through this invisible "fourth wall" and look directly into the events inside. Such stages precludetheater in the round (see below), and they require a modifiedstage set up in with an expensive reproduction of an entire house or building, often complete with stairs, wallpaper, furniture, and other bits to add verisimilitude. This type of stage became increasingly common within the last two centuries, but the money involved in constructing such stages often precludes their use in drama, leavingarena stages fairly popular.

FRAGMENT: An incomplete piece of literature--one the author never finished entirely--such as Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"--or one in which part of the manuscript has been lost due to damage or neglect--such as the Finnesburgh Fragment or "The Battle of Maldon." Chaucerian scholars also use the term fragment to describe the individual sections of the Canterbury Tales in which the various tales have to each other internally but lack links to the other sections of the Canterbury Tales so that scholars cannot reassemble them all into a single cohesive text. At the time of Chaucer's death, he left behind ten fragments that can be organized in various ways to make a larger narrative. These fragments are bits of narrative linked together by internal signs such as pieces of conversation or passages referring to an earlier story or the story about to come next. The fragments are usually designated with Roman numerals (I-X) in modern editions of the text, but the Chaucer Society uses alphabetical designations to refer to these fragments (i.e., Fragments A-I). Only between Fragments IX-X and (in the case of theEllesmere family) between Fragments IV-V do we find explicit indication of an order. Consequently, modern editors differ in the order the tales are presented. Click here to download a PDF handout discussing the order of these fragments and the controversialBradshaw Shift.

FRAME NARRATIVE: The result of inserting one or more small stories within the body of a larger story that encompasses the smaller ones. Often this term is used interchangeably with both the literary technique and the larger story itself that contains the smaller ones, which are called , "framed narratives" or "embedded narratives." The most famous example is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in which the overarching frame narrative is the story of a band of pilgrims traveling to the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury. The band passes the time in a storytelling contest. The framed narratives are the individual stories told by the pilgrims who participate. Another example is Boccaccio's Decameron, in which the frame narrative consists of a group of Italian noblemen and women fleeing the plague, and the framed narratives consist of the tales they tell each other to pass the time while they await the disease's passing. The 1001 Arabian Nights is probably the most famous Middle Eastern frame narrative. Here, in Bagdad, Scheherazade must delay her execution by beguiling her Caliph with a series ofcliffhangers.

FRANKENSTEIN MOTIF: A motif in which a created being turns upon its creator in what seems to be an inevitable fashion. The term comes from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a nineteenth-century novel in which Victor Frankenstein stiches together the body parts of condemned criminals and then reanimates the resulting patchwork creature using electricity. However, the motif itself dates back much earlier to medieval legends of the Golem, an animated clay figure controlled by Hebrew kabbalists. The Frankenstein motif warns against hubris in human creators. This admonishment occasionally appears in thoughtful science fiction exploring the ethical responsibility of creating new life, but it even more frequently appears in anti-intellectual diatribes against knowledge "mankind was not meant to know." In the later case, the Frankenstein motif expresses general anxieties about the rapidity of technological change. Examples of the Frankenstein motif appear in H. G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau, Crichton's Jurassic Park, and Greg Bear's novella Blood Music. The power of the motif is such that, when Hollywood adapts science fiction literature into film, the resulting movie often incorporates the Frankenstein motif even if the original literature did not--such as the adapation of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot and associated stories into the 2004 movie i, Robot starring Will Smith. (The latter adaptation is particularly striking in that Asimov's original short stories in the I, Robot collection usually depict robots positively as a foil to morally flawed humanity, a departure and antithesis to the Frankenstein motif found in earlier works like R.U.R.)

: A medieval profession akin to a cross between a landlord and a real estate agent. In the early medieval political system of feudalism, society was divided theoretically intothree estates: (1) knights and the nobility, (2) the clergy, and (3) agricultural laborers known as serfs. This unrealistically simple tripartite division gave way to increasing complexity in later centuries. The growth of craftsmenguilds, the increasing number of yeoman, the development of town charters and metropolitan life, and labor shortages caused by the Black Death--these all contributed to the demise of the pure feudal system. Scarcity of labor forced noblemen to pay their laborers, and the aristocrats became increasingly strapped for cash to support their lavish lifestyles. The only wealth they possessed was land, so an increasing number of them began selling land for cash. The nouveau riche members of the bourgeoisie, rich merchants in silk, wool, wine and other goods, seized upon this opportunity to buy large swathes of land from ever more impoverished nobility, which they in turn rented out to other freemen. The new landowner, the franklin, was usually snubbed as parvenu by the typical aristocrat, especially since the franklins were famous for dressing up like noblemen and putting on aristocratic airs in spite of thesumptuary laws against such dress. The reputation for being social climbers was perhaps well deserved, given that many of these new landowners attempted to "buy" their way into aristocratic ranks by marrying their sons and daughters into the ranks of nobility in return for cash payments. Probably the most famous franklin in literary history is Chaucer's Franklin, whose lavish displays of generosity in the General Prologue are only matched by his blatant attempts to flatter the Knight (through complimenting the Knight's son, the Squire) and his attempt to redefine the qualities of nobility later in the Canterbury Tales.

FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE: A style of third-person narration that mingles within it traits from first-person narration, often shifting pronouns, adverbs, tense, and grammatical mode. The term comes from the French " style indirect libre," and Flaubert's use of this technique in French literature strongly influenced English-speaking authors like James Joyce. M. H. Abrams provides a hypothetical example for illustrative purposes in A Glossary of Literary Terms:

Thus, a direct, "He thought, 'I will see her home now, and may then stop at my mother's," might shift, in an indirect representation, to: "He would see her home then, and might afterward stop at his mother's" (Abrams 169).

Though most scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature emphasize Flaubert's contribution, the technique does predate him. Chaucer himself uses it in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, where the narrator Geoffrey describes the Monk's attitude to monastic rules [I (A) 183-88], and moves from direct quotation of dialogue into a paraphrased list of the Monk's main arguments presented as if the narrator were the one speaking.

FREE MORPHEME: Any morpheme that can function by itself as a word, such as the two morphemes it and self found in the word itself. This is the opposite of abound morpheme, one that only makes sense when it is part of a larger word--such as the bound morpheme ept in the word inept, or the morpheme gruntle in the word disgruntled.

FREE VARIATION: A sound substitution that does not hinder understanding or meaning--such as pronouncing the first syllable of either with an /I/ or an /aI/.

FREE VERSE: Poetry based on the natural rhythms of phrases and normal pauses rather than the artificial constraints of metrical feet. Commonly called vers libre in French (the English term first appears in print in 1908), this poetry often involves the counterpoint of stressed and unstressed syllables in unpredictable but clever ways. Its origins are obscure. Early poetry that is similar to free verse includes the Authorized Bible translations of the Psalms and the Song of Songs; Milton clearly experimented with something like free verse in Lycidas and Samson Agonistes as well. However the Enlightenment's later emphasis on perfect meter during the 1700s prevented this experimentation from developing much further during the 18th century. The American poet Walt Whitman first made extended successful use of free verse in the 19th century, and he in turn influenced Baudelaire, who developed the technique in French poetry. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we find several poets using some variant of free verse--including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, and e. e. cummings. Do note that, within individual sections of a free verse poem, a specific line or lines may fall into metrical regularity. The distinction is that this meter is not sustained through the bulk of the poem. For instance, consider this excerpt from Amy Lowell's "Patterns":

I shall go
Up and down,
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace
By every button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?

Here, we find examples of rhythmical regularity such as the near-anapestic meter in one line ("and the SOFTness of my BOdy, will be GUARDed from em BRACE"). However, the poet deviates from this regularity in other lines, which often vary wildly in length--in some passages approaching a prose-like quality.

FRENCH SCENE: A numbering system for a play in which a new is numbered whenever characters exit or enter the stage. Cf. .

FREUDIAN CRITICISM: A psychoanalytical approach to literature that seeks to understand the elements of a story or character in a story by applying the tripartite model of the psyche developed by the late nineteenth-century psychologist, Sigmund Freud. In Freud's thinking, the mind was divided into three components:

the ego (conscious mind and sense of self, from the Latin word for "I")

the superego (a subconscious collection of inhibitions, guilty feelings, and anxieties superimposed on the mind by half-forgotten parental punishments, social rebukes, instilled ethics and the necessary conventions of civilized behavior)

the id (a mindless, self-destructive tangle of instinctive unverbalized desires and physical appetites, from Latin "it")

Closely linked to this tripartite division were concepts such as wish fulfillment, the Freudian slip, the Oedipal complex, and thanatos (the death wish).

FREUDIAN SLIP: A slip of the tongue in which a person means to say one thing, but accidentally substitutes another word or phrase in a suggestive or revealing manner. For instance, suppose a young man were attracted to the physical features of a young woman. He tries to make nonchalant small-talk about the cold weather rather than gawk at her breasts. He means to say, "Awful nippy out, isn't it?" He actually states, "Awful nipply out, isn't it?" This error is a Freudian slip in which his subconscious desires have revealed themselves through verbal errors.

: A diagram of dramatic structure, one which shows complication and emotional tension rising like one side of a pyramid toward its apex, which represents the of action. Once the climax is over, the descending side of the pyramid depicts the decrease in tension and complication as the drama reaches its conclusion and FREYTAG'S PYRAMID denouement. A sample chart is available to view. Freytag designed the chart for discussingtragedy, but it can be applied to many kinds of fiction.

FREYTAG'S TRIANGLE: Another term for Freytag's Pyramid (see above).

FRICATIVE (also called spirant): In linguistics, any sound made by tightening but not completely closing the air passage.

FRONS SCENAE: At the back of the stage, this wall faced the audience and blocked the view of the players'tiring-house. In Shakespeare's heydey, the Globe Theater had two doors flanking the centraldiscovery space with a gallery above (see Greenblatt 1139).

FRONT VOWEL: In linguistics,a vowel made with the ridge of the tongue located near the front of the oral cavity.

FU POETRY: Flowery, irregular "prose-poem" form of Chinese literature common during the Han period. It was first perfected around the year 100 BCE, and it became increasingly common thereafter. Cf.shih poetry.

FUNCTIONAL SHIFT: The linguistic equivalent of poetic anthimeria, in which one part of grammatical speech becomes another. An especially common type of functional shift in everyday grammar is taking a noun and treating it as an adjective. For instance, we might take the noun clay and use it to modify another noun like statue, resulting in a clay statue. Functional shift has been a rich source of new word usages in English--especially in the Renaissance; however, many traditionalists today frown on function shifts, insisting dialogue and e-mail are nouns but not verbs, and so on.

FUNCTION WORD: A part of speech--usually abstract and existing in a limited number of examples--which marks grammatical structure rather than referring to something concrete. Examples include prepositions, articles, and conjunctions.

FURIES: Three bloody chthonic spirits in Greek and Roman belief charged with tormenting individuals who murdered family members. Named Tisiphone, Euryale, and Alecto, these spirits would fly up from the underworld invisibly to punish murderers and those who contaminated holy places with miasma. They would track down offenders via scent and then whisper madness and insanity in the ears of that guilty party. Like harpies (distinct but vaguly similar supernatural creatures), the Furies' forms mingled aspects of vultures and women. It was thought they would dance or stamp on the roofs of houses where such murderers lived, and they were associated with the cycle of bloodshed and vengeance rather than justice. They play prominent roles in the Oresteia trilogy, including Agamemnon.

Later in the medieval tradition, Dante reinvents or rebrands the Furies (along with the gorgon Medusa) as symbols of madness. These spirits end up guarding the ramparts of Dis, the city of demons where intellectual sin faces Hellish punishments. In the encounter with the Furies, Virgil has to cover Dante's eyes to prevent his petrefaction. As a symbol of reason, Virgil is helpless against them and cannot bypass them until the divine intervention of an angel thrusts the evil spirits out of the way and forces open the drawbridge or gates blocking the path through the Inferno.

FUTHORC: The runic alphabet used by the Norse and other Germanic tribes. The Anglo-Saxon letters ash, thorn, wynn, and edh (or - eth) used in early medieval England were borrowed from futhorc. Click here for more information.

FUTURISM: As Harkins describes it, a modernist poetic movement begun in Italy under Marinetti's tutelage in 1910, later spreading to Russia under the leadership of Velemir Khlebnikov. The Russian Futurism movement reacted against the mysticism and aetheticism of the symbolism movement. The Russian Futurists sought to shock the audience at any cost, to scrap the "stifling" cultural tradition of Russia's past, and to reinvent Russian vocabulary through neologisms (127).

I consulted the following works while preparing this list. I have tried to give credit to specific sources when feasible, but in many cases multiple reference works use the same examples or provide the same dates for common information. Students should examine these resources for more information than these humble webpages provide:

Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. [Originally published 1977 as Griechische Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche.] Trans. John Raffan. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.

Carrick, Jake. E-mail interview. 28 April 2016.

Crow, Martin and Virginia E. Leland. "A Chronology of Chaucer's Life and Times." As condensed and reproduced in Larry Benson's The Canterbury Tales, Complete. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. xxiii-xxv.

Elkhadem, Saad. The York Dictionary Literary Terms and Their Origin: English, French, German, Spanish. York P, 1976.

Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. "Glossary." A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 2nd ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. 317-29.

Smith, David P. "Glossary of Grammar Terms." [Miscellaneous handouts made available to students in Basic Greek at Carson-Newman University in the Fall Term of 2006.]

Velásquez, Lito. E-mail communication. 26 October 2015.

Williams, Jerri. "Schemes and Tropes." [Miscellaneous handouts made available to her graduate students at West Texas A & M University in the Fall Term of 1993.]

Zireaux, Paul. E-mail Interview. 21 June 2012.

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anglo-saxon bible classic classical classics genres greece greek literature poetry medieval mythology renaissance roman schemes students tropes chinese genre rhetoric resources beowulf chaucer china english middle mishal rome transcription

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This page is under perpetual construction! It was last updated April 24, 2018. This list is meant to assist, not intimidate. Use it as a touchstone for important concepts and vocabulary that we will cover during the term. Vocabulary terms are listed alphabetically. FABLE: A brief story illustrating human tendencies through animal characters.

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Lynd Ward's Illustrations of Frankenstein

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Lynd Ward's Illustrations of Frankenstein

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Lynd Ward's illustrations for Frankenstein

Lynd Ward (1905 - 1985) was an American artist best known for his wood engravings - in particular, his novels without words, in which he tells a story entirely through woodcuts. His style combines Art Deco with German Expressionism.

Ward's woodcuts illustrated a 1934 edition of Frankenstein, published in New York by Harrison Smith and Robert Haas. These are outstanding, not only for excellence and power of design, but especially for insights into a disturbing and powerfully poetic work.

More than any other illustrator, Ward grasped the ambivalence with which the author of Frankenstein, Percy Bysshe Shelley*, portrayed the "monster" (also called "Being", "creature", "fiend", "demon", "wretch", and "devil"). As seen by Lynd Ward, the Being is both pathetic and terrifying; his body is both athletic and deformed. You can pity him, sympathize and even identify with him, without quite wishing to hold his hand or let him cry on your shoulder.

To see the front cover of my rather worn copy of the 1934 Frankenstein, illustrated by Lynd Ward,click here.

Below are descriptions and links to all of Ward's full-page illustrations for Frankenstein - almost all of his illustrations for chapter headings - and a few of the more interesting small illustrations. Click on a description to go to the annotated illustration on another web page. Then click the RETURN or BACK button on your browser to return to this page.

Full Page Illustrations:

p. 27:Elizabeth as a child.

p. 55:The newly created monster tries to get in bed with Victor Frankenstein.

p. 69:Victor Frankenstein and his friend Henry Clerval walk in the country outside Ingolstadt.

p. 91:Justine in prison.

p. 107:The monster and Victor Frankenstein confront each other in the Swiss Alps, on a field of ice.

p. 115:Villagers stone the monster.

p. 125:The monster gazes into a pool.

p. 137:Safie's father, an "unfortunate Mahometan", in prison.

p. 151:Felix, son of De Lacy, attacks the monster.

p. 161:The monster strangles little William.

p. 171:Victor Frankenstein finds solitude in a boat.

p. 187:Victor Frankenstein reconsiders making a female monster.

p. 201:Irish villagers carry the lifeless body of Henry Clerval.

p. 217:Elizabeth looks out a window.

p. 227Elizabeth's lifeless body sprawled on the bed.

Smaller Illustrations:

Title Page:Victor Frankenstein in anguish.

Preface:Hand of Creator, creature.

p. 1:Captain Walton in Petersburgh.

p. 5:Sails of ship, sun.

p. 10:Ship in high waves.

p. 11:Ship surrounded by icebergs.

p. 21:Houses in Geneva.

p. 27:Young man and woman walking in the countryside.

p. 35:Carriage transporting Victor Frankenstein to Ingolstadt.

p. 44:Victor Frankenstein robbing a grave.

p. 53:Victor Frankenstein with chemistry equipment.

p. 61:Houses in Ingolstadt.

p. 70:Female figure (Elizabeth?) by coffin of little William.

p. 83: Judges, prison.

p. 102:River and bridge in the Alps.

p. 110:The monster in open country at night.

p. 119:Felix chops wood; Agatha watches.

p. 127:Safie on horseback.

p. 140:Felix outside the hut.

p. 141:De Lacy playing guitar.

p. 151:The monster flees.

p. 162:Victor Frankenstein in thought.

p. 179:London.

p. 199:Irish villagers staring at Victor Frankenstein.

p. 211:Hand clutching hand.

p. 212:Ship and boat.

p. 223:Elizabeth and Victor by lake.

p. 232:Victor quits Geneva.

p. 241:Walton's sword.

p. 242:The monster on Arctic ice.

p. 259:Arm [of the monster] going down in flames.

* For the case that Percy Bysshe Shelley (rather than his second wife Mary) is the author of Frankenstein, see the description and reviews of my book, The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (2007).Click here.

I write books and am proprietor of Pagan Press, a small book publisher. Each of our books is unique and well produced. Please check out the Pagan Press BOOKLIST - John Lauritsen

Back toThe Frankenstein Pages.

For John Lauritsen's home pageclick here.

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Lynd Ward's illustrations for Frankenstein.

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Lynd Ward's illustrations for Frankenstein Lynd Ward (1905 - 1985) was an American artist best known for his wood engravings - in particular, his novels without words, in which he tells a story entirely through woodcuts. His style combines Art Deco with German Expressionism.

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Film that documents the 'Ghost Story Competition' between Shelley, Byron & Poldori

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Famous for expedition of Arctic

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Sir James Clark Ross (15 April 1800 - 3 April 1862) was a British Royal Navy officer and polar explorer known for his explorations of the Arctic, participating in two expeditions led by his uncle Sir John Ross, and four led by Sir William Parry, and, in particular, for his own Antarctic expedition from 1839 to 1843.

Ross was born in London, the nephew of Sir John Ross, under whom he entered the Royal Navy in 1812, accompanying him on Sir John's first Arctic voyage in search of a Northwest Passage in 1818. Between 1819 and 1827, Ross took part in four Arctic expeditions under Sir William Parry, and in 1829 to 1833, again served under his uncle on Sir John's second Arctic voyage. It was during this trip that a small party led by James Ross (including Thomas Abernethy) located the position of the North Magnetic Pole on 1 June 1831, on the Boothia Peninsula in the far north of Canada. It was on this trip, too, that Ross charted the Beaufort Islands, later renamed Clarence Islands by his uncle.

In 1834, Ross was promoted to captain. In December 1835, he offered his services to the Admiralty to resupply 11 whaling ships which had become trapped in Baffin Bay. They accepted his offer, and he set sail in HMS Cove in January 1836. The crossing was difficult, and by the time he had reached the last known position of the whalers in June, all but one had managed to return home. Ross found no trace of this last vessel, William Torr, which was probably crushed in the ice in December 1835. He returned to Hull in September 1836 with all his crew in good health.

From 1835-1839, except for his voyage with Cove, he conducted a magnetic survey of Great Britain with Sir Edward Sabine.[citation needed ]

Between 1839 and 1843, Ross commanded HMS Erebus on his own Antarctic expedition and charted much of the continent's coastline. Captain Francis Crozier was second-in-command of the expedition, commanding HMS Terror. Support for the expedition had been arranged by Francis Beaufort, hydrographer of the Navy and a member of several scientific societies. On the expedition was Joseph Dalton Hooker, who had been invited along as assistant ship's surgeon. Erebus and Terror were bomb vessels -an unusual type of warship named after the mortar bombs they were designed to fire and constructed with extremely strong hulls, to withstand the recoil of the heavy weapons. The ships were selected for the Antarctic mission as being able to resist thick ice, as proved true in practice.

In 1841, James Ross discovered the Ross Sea, Victoria Land, and the volcanoes Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, which were named for the expedition's vessels. They sailed for 250 nautical miles (460 km) along the edge of the low, flat-topped ice shelf they called variously the Barrier or the Great Ice Barrier, later named the Ross Ice Shelf in his honour. The following year, he attempted to penetrate south at about 55° W, and explored the eastern side of what is now known as James Ross Island, discovering and naming Snow Hill Island and Seymour Island.

Ross reported that Admiralty Sound appeared to him to have been blocked by glaciers at its southern end. Ross's ships arrived back in England on 4 September 1843. He was awarded the Grande Médaille d'Or des Explorations in 1843, knighted in 1844, and elected to the Royal Society in 1848.

Search for Franklin's lost expedition

In 1848, Ross was sent on one of three expeditions to find Sir John Franklin. The others were the Rae-Richardson Arctic expedition and the expedition aboard HMS Plover and HMS Herald through the Bering Strait. He was given command of HMS Enterprise, accompanied by HMS Investigator, Because of heavy ice in Baffin Bay he only reached the northeast tip of Somerset Island where he was frozen in at Port Leopold. In the spring he and Francis McClintock explored the west coast of the island by sledge. He recognized Peel Sound but thought it too ice-choked for Franklin to have used it. In fact Franklin had used it in 1846 when the extent of sea ice had been atypically low. The next summer he tried to reach Wellington Channel but was blocked by ice and returned to England.[citation needed ]

He was married to Lady Ann Coulman. He died at Aylesbury in 1862, five years after his wife. A blue plaque marks Ross's home in Eliot Place, Blackheath, London. His closest friend was Francis Crozier, with whom he sailed many times.

He also lived in the ancient House of the Abbots of St. Albans in Buckinghamshire. He is buried with his wife in the local churchyard of St. James the Great, Aston Abbotts. In the gardens of the Abbey there is a lake with two islands, named after the ships Terror and Erebus.

Ross, played by British actor Richard Sutton, is a secondary character in the 2018 AMC television series The Terror, portrayed in a fictionalized version of his 1848 search for Franklin's lost expedition, as well as in the 2007 Dan Simmons novel on which the series is based. Ross is also mentioned continuously by Jules Verne in his novel The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.[citation needed ]

The Ross seal, one of the four Antarctic phocids, first described during the Ross expedition

The James Ross Strait, Ross Bay, Ross Point, and Rossoya in the Arctic are all named after him

RRS James Clark Ross is a British Antarctic Survey research ship.

Ross's gull, a small gull, the only species in its genus, that breeds in the high arctic of northernmost North America and northeast Siberia

Ross Dependency, Ross Island, Ross Ice Shelf and Ross Sea in the Antarctic are all named after him

Mont Ross, the highest mountain, at a height of 6,070 feet (1,850 m), in the Kerguelen Islands, is named after Ross

1. ^ Bossi, Maurizio; Vieusseux, G.P. (1984). Notizie di viaggi lontani: l'esplorazione extraeuropea nei periodici del primo Ottocento, 1815-1845. Naples: Guida. ISBN 8870423999.

2. ^ Ross, James (1847). A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions, During the Years 1839-43. 2. London: John Murray.

3. ^ Appletons' annual cyclopaedia and register of important events of the year: 1862. New York: D. Appleton & Company. 1863. p. 749.

4. ^ Mowat, Farley (1973). Ordeal by ice: the search for the Northwest Passage. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd. p. 250. OCLC 1391959.

5. ^ 1) [Bertrand, Kenneth John, et al, ed.] The Geographical Names of Antarctica. Special Publication No. 86. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Board on Geographical Names, May 1947. 2) [Bertrand, Kenneth J. and Fred G. Alberts]. Gazetteer No. 14. Geographic Names of Antarctica. Washington: US Government Printing Office, January 1956.

Coleman, E. C. (2006). The Royal Navy in Polar exploration: from Frobisher to Ross. Stroud: Tempus. ISBN 9780752436609.

Ross, J.; Ross, J. C. (1835a). Narrative of a second voyage in search of a North-west passage. 1. London: A. W. Webster. OCLC 1049894753.

Ross, J.; Ross, J. C. (1835b). Narrative of a second voyage in search of a North-west passage. 2. London: A. W. Webster. OCLC 579644792.

Ross, J. C. (1847a). A voyage of discovery and research in the southern and Antarctic regions. 1. London: John Murray. OCLC 62006339.

Ross, J. C. (1847b). A voyage of discovery and research in the southern and Antarctic regions. 2. London: John Murray. OCLC 81909940.

Wilson, J. G.; et al., eds. (1900). "Ross, Sir John" . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 5. New York: D. Appleton & Co. p. 330.

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Sir James Clark Ross (15 April 1800 - 3 April 1862) was a British Royal Navy officer and polar explorer known for his explorations of the Arctic, participating in two expeditions led by his uncle Sir John Ross, and four led by Sir William Parry, and, in particular, for his own Antarctic expedition from 1839 to 1843.

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Frankenstein - Thug Notes Summary and Analysis

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Literary Criticism of Volume 1, Chapter 4

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Literary Criticism of Volume 1, Chapter 4

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DEFINITELY WATCH

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Frankenstein on the couch: how literary critics help us explore our dreams, secrets and fears

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3 Part Series - Part 1: Story; Part 2: Books within the Book; Part 3: Feminism

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3 Part Series - Part 1: Story; Part 2: Books within the Book; Part 3: Feminism

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Early in the morning of 10th December1816 a man called John Levesley, a pensioner of the Chelsea Hospital, was making his way to Kensington across Hyde Park when he saw something floating in the waters of the Serpentine. It was the body of a young woman. It looked, he later told the inquest, as if she had been in the lake for some days, but there were no obvious signs of violence, and the natural conclusion was that she had taken her own life. As was customary in such cases, the remains were taken to the Fox and Bull inn on Knightsbridge, where a hastily-convened inquest passed a verdict of 'found dead'.

A sad tale, you might think, but hardly a remarkable one. Only that is exactly what it was. Because there are four further facts about this story which make it not just remarkable, but one of the most enduring mysteries of 19th-century literary history.

First, the young woman in question had been missing for nearly a month, having left her last-known lodgings on November 9th; second, she had taken those lodgings under a name - Harriet Smith - which was not her own; third, she was discovered in an advanced state of pregnancy, despite the fact that she had been estranged from her husband for over two years; and last, and most explosively, the husband in question was not only the eldest son of a baronet, but the noted radical, atheist and poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Shelley himself was not in London at the time, having recently returned from spending the summer in Geneva, in the company of Lord Byron, Byron's mistress Claire Clairmont, and Claire's step-sister, who also happened to be the woman for whom Shelley had deserted his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Mary was by then already working on the early drafts of the book that would become Frankenstein.

Shelley and the two young women had taken rooms in Bath on their return, and it was there that he received a letter from his friend Thomas Hookham, telling him of Harriet's death. Within days the body had been buried under its assumed name, and the briefest of notices had appeared in The Times, which made no mention of Shelley's wife's name - real or otherwise - and ended with the words, "a want of honour in her own conduct is supposed to have led to this fatal catastrophe", in a veiled reference to her pregnancy.

Indeed the whole thing was hushed up so extraordinarily efficiently that I for one was left wondering whether some person or persons unknown had intervened. And in due course this same intriguing fact became one of the driving ideas behind my own novel about the Shelleys, A Treacherous Likeness (published now as A Fatal Likeness in the US).
Elopement and abandonment
Shelley had married Harriet Westbrook five years before, when he was 19 and she still at school. She was a friend of Shelley's younger sisters, and he met her soon after being sent down from Oxford in early 1811. The evidence is murky (as it so often is with Shelley), but he seems to have suffered some sort of nervous collapse that summer, and yet by August 26th he and Harriet had eloped and were on their way to Scotland to be married.

At 16, his new bride was pretty, vivacious and sweet-natured - as Shelley's friend Thomas Love Peacock put it, "She had a good figure, light, active and graceful... The tone of her voice was pleasant; her speech the essence of frankness and cordiality... to be once in her company was to know her thoroughly." It's easy to see why the dashing, intelligent and hot-headed young poet might have appealed to her, and she would have been too inexperienced to see through that glittering surface to discern the unpredictable and violent-tempered young man he often was. But why Shelley should have been induced to elope with such a nice but undeniably naïve girl is still something of a mystery, and all the more so when you consider the vehemence of his ideological opposition to the very idea of marriage.

Whatever his reasons - and scarcely two months later he was already laying the blame for the entire enterprise at Harriet's door - by early 1814 the marriage was in trouble. The philosopher William Godwin had long been one of Shelley's heroes, and Shelley had begun an acquaintance with him by letter in 1812, but it was only two years later that the poet first met Godwin's 16-year-old daughter, Mary. Within weeks he had eloped for the second time, and with a second teenaged girl.

Harriet was by now the mother of a daughter little more than a year old and pregnant with another child. Abandoned and betrayed, she was forced to return to her father's house and suffer all the ignominy and social stigma that her husband might carelessly disdain, but she had no choice but to endure. Neither maid nor married, widow nor wife.
Suicide - or something more sinister?
We know little of Harriet's life for the next two years. Her son Charles was born in November 1814, and she remained at the Westbrook house in Chapel Street. Then suddenly, in September 1816, she was gone, leaving her children behind. It emerged later that she went first to lodgings in Hans Place, Knightsbridge, telling the landlady she was married and her husband abroad (which was not so very far from the truth, as far as it went). Though her main reason for telling this story was no doubt to account for her increasingly obvious pregnancy. Indeed it was probably the impossibility of concealing this any longer that forced her to flee her parents' house in the first place. Even now, we do not know who was the father of that baby, though some biographers have suggested that Shelley himself may have been responsible, as the two of them could have met in London about the time her unborn child must have been conceived.

After her death, rumours circulated that she had in fact taken a lover, perhaps a 'Major Ryan', perhaps a Captain in the Indian Army, or even that she had "descended the steps of prostitution until she lived with a groom of the name of Smith". That last allegation comes from a letter by Shelley, which was seized upon many years after his death by Lady Shelley, his formidable daughter-in-law (who of course never met him). She took it upon herself to wage a relentless campaign to rehabilitate Shelley's sullied reputation for the benefit of the Victorian public, and a good part of this consisted in exonerating Shelley's behaviour towards his first wife at Harriet's expense.

The Godwins do not emerge with much credit in this sorry affair either. William Godwin was instrumental in passing on a - frankly ludicrous - rumour that Harriet had been unfaithful to Shelley even before he left her, and as time went on the blackening of Harriet's name extended to her allegedly 'low' social standing, her lack of intelligence (at least in comparison to the über-intellectual Mary Godwin), and even to the possibility that she had a drink problem, which was founded solely, as far as one can tell, on the fact that she had a rosy complexion and her father kept a tavern.

So how did Harriet Shelley die? Some of her more passionate advocates have gone so far as to suggest that Godwin could have killed her, or had her killed, the theory being that she was standing in the way of Shelley marrying his daughter (and the stridently anti-marriage Godwin did indeed insist on a wedding less than a month after Harriet's death). It sounds far-fetched, but there is one small fact that appears to support it, and which cannot otherwise be easily explained: Godwin notes Harriet's death in his diary on 9th November, but no-one knew she was dead until several weeks later, when her body was found.

But by far the likeliest explanation is that she did indeed take her own life, as the inquest concluded. Even before she was married she had been strangely obsessed with suicide, talking calmly of killing herself even before people she scarcely knew. And the letter she left behind leaves little room for doubt that she met her death by her own hand. It is heart-breaking to read, the depths of her despair visible not just in her words but in the document itself, in the disjointed lines, the poor spelling, and the broken grammar:
When you read this letr. I shall be no more an inhabitant of this miserable world. do not regret the loss of one who could never be anything but a source of vexation & misery to you all belonging to me. .. My dear Bysshe ... if you had never left me I might have lived but as it is, I freely forgive you & may you enjoy that happiness which you have deprived me of... so shall my spirit find rest & forgiveness. God bless you all is the last prayer of the unfortunate Harriet S--- You can see a facsimile of Harriet's suicide letter on the Shelley's Ghost exhibition website.

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'This Fatal Catastrophe': The Sad Life and Strange Death of Harriet Shelley

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She was discovered in an advanced state of pregnancy, despite the fact that she had been estranged from her husband for over two years; and last, and most explosively, the husband in question was not only the eldest son of a baronet, but the noted radical, atheist and poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

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Frankenstein Teaching Series Video Three: The Genre of Frankenstein

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The uncanny is the psychological experience of something as strangely familiar, rather than simply mysterious. It may describe incidents where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context.

Ernst Jentsch set out the concept of the uncanny later elaborated on by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, which explores the eeriness of dolls and waxworks. For Freud, the uncanny locates the strangeness in the ordinary. Expanding on the idea, psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan wrote that the uncanny places us "in the field where we do not know how to distinguish bad and good, pleasure from displeasure", resulting in an irreducible anxiety that gestures to the Real. The concept has since been taken up by a variety of thinkers and theorists such as roboticist Masahiro Mori's uncanny valley and Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection.[citation needed ]

Philosopher F. W. J. Schelling raised the question of the uncanny in his late Philosophie der Mythologie of 1835, postulating that the Homeric clarity was built upon a prior repression of the uncanny.

In The Will to Power manuscript, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche refers to nihilism as "the uncanniest of all guests" and, earlier, in On the Genealogy of Morals he argues it is the "will to truth" that has destroyed the metaphysics that underpins the values of Western culture. Hence, he coins the phrase "European nihilism" to describe the condition that afflicts those Enlightenment ideals that seemingly hold strong values yet undermine themselves.

Uncanniness was first explored psychologically by Ernst Jentsch in a 1906 essay, On the Psychology of the Uncanny. Jentsch defines the Uncanny as: being a product of "...intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one's way about in. The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it." He expands upon its use in fiction:

In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.

Jentsch identifies German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann as a writer who uses uncanny effects in his work, focusing specifically on Hoffmann's story "The Sandman" (" Der Sandmann"), which features a lifelike doll, Olympia.

The concept of the Uncanny was later elaborated on and developed by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay "The Uncanny", which also draws on the work of Hoffmann (whom Freud refers to as the "unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature"). However, he criticizes Jentsch's belief that Olympia is the central uncanny element in the story (" The Sandman"):

I cannot think - and I hope most readers of the story will agree with me - that the theme of the doll Olympia, who is to all appearances a living being, is by any means the only, or indeed the most important, element that must be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by the story.

Instead, Freud draws on a wholly different element of the story, namely, "the idea of being robbed of one's eyes", as the "more striking instance of uncanniness" in the tale.

Freud goes on, for the remainder of the essay, to identify uncanny effects that result from instances of "repetition of the same thing," linking the concept to that of the repetition compulsion. He includes incidents wherein one becomes lost and accidentally retraces one's steps, and instances wherein random numbers recur, seemingly meaningfully (here Freud may be said to be prefiguring the concept that Jung would later refer to as synchronicity). He also discusses the uncanny nature of Otto Rank's concept of the "double".

Freud specifically relates an aspect of the Uncanny derived from German etymology. By contrasting the German adjective unheimlich with its base word heimlich ("concealed, hidden, in secret"), he proposes that social taboo often yields an aura not only of pious reverence but even more so of horror and even disgust, as the taboo state of an item gives rise to the commonplace assumption that that which is hidden from public eye (cf. the eye or sight metaphor) must be a dangerous threat and even an abomination - especially if the concealed item is obviously or presumingly sexual in nature. Basically, the Uncanny is what unconsciously reminds us of our own , our forbidden and thus repressed impulses - especially when placed in a context of uncertainty that can remind one of infantile beliefs in the omnipotence of thought. Such uncanny elements are perceived as threatening by our ridden with oedipal guilt as it fears symbolic castration by punishment for deviating from societal norms. Thus, the items and individuals that we project our own repressed impulses upon become a most uncanny threat to us, uncanny monsters and freaks akin to fairy-tale folk-devils, and subsequently often become scapegoats we blame for all sorts of perceived miseries, calamities, and maladies.

What interests us most in this long extract is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word heimlich exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, unheimlich. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. [...] In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. Unheimlich is customarily used, we are told, as the contrary only of the first signification of heimlich, and not of the second. [...] On the other hand, we notice that Schelling says something which throws quite a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were certainly not prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.

[...]

A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one's eyes, the fear of going blind [as used as a central theme in "The Sandman"], is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. The self-blinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration - the only punishment that was adequate for him by the lex talionis. [...] All further doubts are removed when we learn the details of their 'castration complex' from the analysis of neurotic patients, and realize its immense importance in their mental life.

After Freud, Jacques Lacan, in his 1962-1963 seminar "L'angoisse" ("Anxiety"), used the Unheimlich "via regia" to enter into the territory of Angst. Lacan showed how the same image that seduces the subject, trapping him in the narcissistic impasse, may suddenly, by a contingency, show that it is dependent on something, some hidden object, and so the subject may grasp at the same time that he is not autonomous (5 December 1962). For example, and as a paradigm, Guy de Maupassant, in his story "Le Horla", describes a man who suddenly may see his own back in the mirror. His back is there, but it is deprived of the gaze of the subject. It appears as a strange object, until he feels it is his own. There is no cognitive dissonance here, we rather cross all possible cognition, to find ourselves in the field where we do not know how to distinguish bad and good, pleasure from displeasure. And this is the signal of anxiety: the signal of the real, as irreducible to any signifier.

This concept is closely related to Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection, where one reacts adversely to something forcefully cast out of the symbolic order. Abjection can be uncanny in that the observer can recognize something within the abject, possibly of what it was before it was 'cast out', yet be repulsed by what it is that caused it to be cast out to begin with. Kristeva lays special emphasis on the uncanny return of the past abject with relation to the 'uncanny stranger'.

Sadeq Rahimi has noted a common relationship between the uncanny and direct or metaphorical visual references, which he explains in terms of basic processes of ego development, specifically as developed by Lacan's theory of the mirror stage. Rahimi presents a wide range of evidence from various contexts to demonstrate how uncanny experiences are typically associated with themes and metaphors of vision, blindness, mirrors and other optical tropes. He also presents historical evidence showing strong presence of ocular and specular themes and associations in the literary and psychological tradition out of which the notion of 'the uncanny' emerged. According to Rahimi, instances of the uncanny like doppelgängers, ghosts, , alter egos, self-alienations and split personhoods, phantoms, twins, living dolls, etc. share two important features: that they are closely tied with visual tropes, and that they are variations on the theme of doubling of the ego.

Roboticist Masahiro Mori's essay on human reactions to humanlike entities, Bukimi no Tani Genshō (Valley of Eeriness Phenomenon), describes the gap between familiar living people and their also familiar inanimate representations, such as dolls, puppets, mannequins, prosthetic hands, and android robots. The entities in the valley are between these two poles of common phenomena. Mori has stated that he made the observation independently of Jentsch and Freud, though a link was forged by Reichardt and translators who rendered bukimi as uncanny.

Canny is from the Anglo-Saxon root ken: "knowledge, understanding, or cognizance; mental perception: an idea beyond one's ken." Thus the uncanny is something outside one's familiar knowledge or perceptions.

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The uncanny is the psychological experience of something as strangely familiar, rather than simply mysterious. It may describe incidents where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context. Ernst Jentsch set out the concept of the uncanny later elaborated on by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, which explores the eeriness of dolls and waxworks.

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Loss of Innocence in Frankenstein The End Dominique Richardson Hudgins 5th Period 9-September-14 Conclusion Ultimately, Victor's delve into dangerous knowledge led to the loss of both his own and the Monster's innocence. The Monster's Loss of Innocence The Monster loses his

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Mr Bruff

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Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein': Character Analysis of Dr Frankenstein

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Frankenstein Teaching Series Video Four: The Structure of Frankenstein