April 10th

To what extent do you agree with Percy Shelley’s interpretation of the “moral” of Frankenstein in his 1817 essay on the novel: “Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked.”?
To what extent do you agree with Christopher Small’s argument that Victor Frankenstein is Percy Shelley, and that ultimately the novel is a venue for Mary Shelley’s critical engagement of the life and thought of her husband?
After the Monster is rejected by his “friends,” the DeLacey family, what does his angry, violent reaction say about his “nature” as a creature? Is his “nature” or his miseducation and lack of family life primarily responsible for the eruption of his enraged, even sociopathic, misanthropy?
To what extent does the story of the Monster’s rampage against the DeLacey family and his vengeful, murderous hunt for his creator satirize the stories about human nature and society told by Rousseau’s First Discourse and Second Discourse? How does it build upon Wollstonecraft’s critique of Rousseau and her theories of education and family life?
Mary Wollstonecraft critiqued the self-destructive and self-corroding qualities of the patriarchal family in the aristocratic class system of the late eighteenth century. She called for a “revolution” that would transform the family into a more egalitarian, affectionate locale for the first stages of human moral, social, and civic education. More conservative thinkers, such as Rousseau and Burke, feared that if the family was thus transformed it would lead to a dangerous breakdown of traditional moral values in society and politics at large. Mary Shelley’s family and friends—of both her parents’ generation and her own—were notorious for their radical, Romantic experiments in love, marriage, and family life. How might we read the story of the destruction of Victor Frankenstein’s family—in particular, the story of the murder of his baby brother William and the capital punishment of the Frankensteins’ innocent servant Justine—as critically engaging Enlightenment and Romantic hopes and fears about the destruction and transformation of the patriarchal, class-based family?
What is the significance of the Monster’s demand that Victor create him a female monster as his companion? How does the story of the Monster’s desire for a bride bring the novel’s underlying anxieties concerning hetero/homosexuality, sex, and gender to the surface? In other words, how does the story of the Monster’s quest for a bride—and its striking contrast with the story of Victor’s delayed marriage to Elizabeth, his horrified rejection of the male monster he created, and his close friendship and pre-marital travels with Henry Clerval—render the subtexts of the novel its ultimate “text”?
How do the films “Bride of Frankenstein” (1935) and “Young Frankenstein” (1974) adeptly engage, and create new iterations of, the sex, sexuality, and gender themes of Frankenstein?

Citation: Botting, E. H. (2007, November 07). April 10th. Retrieved February 12, 2012, from Notre Dame OpenCourseWare Web site: http://ocw.nd.edu/political-science/mary-wollstonecraft-and-mary-shelley/discussion-questions/april-10th.