Course: M.A.
English (sem-2)
Paper no.:
5, the Romantic Literature
Topic:
Frankenstein: As a Romantic Novel
Roll no.: 23
Year: 2015 –
2017
Submitted
to: S.B. Gardi, Department of English
M.K. Bhavnagar
University
FRANKENSTEIN: As a Romantic Novel
v Brief Introduction of The Age:
The first half of 19th
century is recorded as the ‘Romantic Age’.
The Romantic Age is believed to have started as a movement, which began to 1789
with publication of Lyrical Ballads. However it was not a sudden outburst but
the result of long and gradual growth and development.
Imagination, emotion and freedom
are certainly the focal paints of Romantic Age, and also include subjectively,
spontaneity, freedom from rules, solitary life rather than life in society.
Common
people had begun to read and also understand
the values of individualism. The declaration of independence and the
English reform bill. So, it is also known as “The
Age of Revolution”.
The age is measured by the two
great event; that were…… (i) The First Revolution
(ii) The Publication of
the Lyrical Ballads.
Romantic
ideas that….
“Imagination never gives the
Originality”.
“Imagination and Emotions are more important than reason
and formal rules”.
Romantic Age’s most important features are it’s
celebration of nature, it’s juxtaposition of the beautiful and struggle of the
individual against society.
vIntroduction of the Writer:
Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on 30th August, 1797 and died on 1st
February, 1851.
She
was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer
and travel writer, best known for her gothic novel- Frankenstein; or The Modern
Prometheus (1818). In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron,
John William Polidori, and Claire Claremont near Geneva, Switzerland, where
Mary conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein.
She
also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and
philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher
William Godwin and mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
In
1970s, Mary Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish P.B. Shelley’s
works and for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has
inspired many theatrical and film adaptation. Recent scholarship has yielded a
more comprehensive view of Mary Shelley’s achievements. Scholars have shown
increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which
include the historical novels Valperga (1823).
Mary
Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Mary Shelley’s works
often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practiced by women
in family, were the ways to reform civil society.
This
view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantics ethos promoted by
P.B. Shelley and the enlightenment political theories articulated by her
father, William Godwin. Here, many of the main ideas behind the literary
movement of romanticism can be seen in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Mary
Shelley was deeply influenced by the romantics, and the reader of Frankenstein
can certainly identify a number of characteristics of romanticism in this
novel.
vFrankenstein as a Romantic Novel:
Mary Shelley’s 1818 masterpiece, Frankenstein, is a
classic romantic era novel. Learn about a few of the most prominent features of
the Romantic Movement and see how Shelley used these features to construct her
classic horror tale.
The novel is failed attempt at artificial life, by the
scientist Frankenstein, which produced a monster. The work is considered to be
a mixture of science fiction, gothic novel and having elements from the
Romantic Movement. Frankenstein is infused with elements of the gothic novel
and the Romantic Movement and is also considered to be one of the earliest
examples of science fiction.
Frankenstein is the story of a named scientist Victor
Frankenstein, who creates an odd but sentient creature in an unorthodox
scientific experiment. This is the book about the morality, belonging and the
vital importance of human connecting in making us human. The creation of myth
within the book has served as inspiration for modern films graphics novels
songs and even horror-themed episodes of numerous television shows.
The term ‘Romance’ and the related adjective,
‘Romantic’, have varied meanings and contexts. Now-a-days, if we say a story is
romantic we generally mean that it’s a love story, but in a historical sense,
the term has a wider meaning when applied to literature.
Romantic literature, with a capital “R”, refers to
writing from towards the end of the 18th century into the opening
decades of the 19th. As historical literary terms, ‘romantic’ refer
to novels and poetry of stirring adventure, high drama, inflated emotions and
passions, strange, faraway places, and very often supernatural power.
Frankenstein includes practically all the elements
listed above. As the poet and writer is free to write on any theme and any form
he or she likes and as a result we have a wide variety of romantic literature
as the poets and writer is driven by powerful passion and imagination, he does
not care for the perfection of form.
Frankenstein is romantic because it shows a love of
nature and the natural world. The fact that Victor was born into a high family
is also romantic. The focus on animal and the natural order of things. The
beauty of the world and the emphasis on strong emotion and family. In the
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley portrayed some love of the beauty of the nature and
unsigned power of the nature. As a poets and writers, they were always interested
in the beauty and unsigned power of nature. For them imaginative world was more
real than the real world.
For example – we noticed in these below quotation love
of the beauty of the nature.
“I may there discover the wondrous power which
attracts the needle; and may regulate a thousand celestial observation that
require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities constant
forever.”
“I have often attributed my attachment to, my
passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysterious of the ocean to that production
of the most imaginative of modern poets.”
It is Mary Shelley’s imaginative world and for her it is
more real than the real. Because she gave the shape of the male as they are in
reality. Misery, gloom and despair- these are romantic conventionalities,
feelings indulged in rather than as impetus to action. The characters, Victor
Frankenstein and the creature both exemplify these romantic conventionalities.
Mary Shelley’s novel as representative of the romantic era because it typifies
the most important ideas of the era.
On a more symbolic level, Frankenstein is clearly a
novel about romantic striving against the customary boundaries or limitations
placed on our existence. First, there is the obvious example of Victor
Frankenstein pushing against his limitation as a human being by striving to
play a God- like role by making the creature. For Victor, it is not satisfying
enough to simply study philosophy and science and proceed on to a respectable
profession. He must perfect the role of the scientist by attempting to
accomplish the impossible, a process which is inevitably frustrated, as it must
be, by the fact that oversleeping human boundaries has significant consequence.
Shelley’s Frankenstein is not a mad scientist, as his character has been
reduced to over the years, but a scientist who is passionate about the primary
questions of his time.
In his romantic quest for a scientific ideal – the
perfect human – he creates a monster, which then must be held in check by other
system and institutions that humans have also created. This novel helps the
reader understand that there is no such state as perfection, there is no social
experiment, whether based on reality in fantasy that will result in an ideal
solution.
In a twist on the typical romantic text, this, if it
does end happily, ends on a thoughtful, meditative note; this novel ends with
the characters having effect no significant resolution amongst themselves. They
have all realized the impossibility of striving against the roles to which they
do not seem to be able to identify any other options for themselves.
Mary Shelley treat nature in different way, she treats
nature v/s nature. Here Frankenstein wants to create Monster and it is against
of the rule of the nature. And maybe that is why at the end of the novel he got
nothing accepts tragic fact because too much exaggeration is always destroying.
Through the description of nature we find romantic spirit in Frankenstein. So,
we find that romantic spirit in Frankenstein is everywhere. People free to
think, free to imagination and they are individual.
vCONCLUSION:
Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein” examines many social
issues present during the romantic period. So, as a discussion of whole things
with various aspects in details, we may conclude that the novel is written in
Romantic age because through the novel has different feathers of romantic
spirit includes the whole characteristics of romantic age.
The novel has imagination, freedom of expression,
individualism, quest for knowledge, awareness about literature and all that
things are already there.
An analysis of its context reveals just how much it
draws upon the romantic dogma of the 1800s and how Shelley attempts to warns us
the consequences of our fixation with omnipotence and our ventures into
unrestrained scientific progress.
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