April 12th
Document Actions
- Why does Victor decide to terminate the creation of a bride for the Monster? What are the ramifications of this decision and the grounds on which it is made? In the aftermath of this decision, is Victor portrayed as a champion of his own fate, or as a victim of fate?
- What are some possible readings of the meaning of Victor’s inability to see the consequences of his choices regarding his Monster? What could Victor’s moral blindness and the Monster’s immoral rampage symbolize? In particular, think of the Monster’s claim, “You are my creator, but I am your master,—obey!” How can political, scientific/technological, and psychological readings of Victor’s relationship to his Monster illuminate the significance of this line?
- Politically, how does the “story within the story” of the murder of Henry Clerval parallel the “story within the story” of William and Justine or the “story within the story” of Safie and Felix? Why does Shelley so deeply embed the most explicitly political stories of her novel within the concentric circles of its overall narrative structure? What uniting political themes do you see expressed across the three stories? How do these political stories link Shelley to the Enlightenment political thought and the 1790s political novels (Caleb Williams, The Wrongs of Woman) of her parents, Wollstonecraft and Godwin?
- Unpack the gendered and sexual psychology of the Elizabeth-Victor relationship, especially in their correspondence prior to their wedding. What is Shelley saying about marriage and sexuality through the story of the unusual origins and duration of their engagement and the foreboding threat from the Monster that shadows their “wedding night”?
- How does Barbara Taylor’s work on Mary Wollstonecraft’s religiosity help you to understand the Wollstonecraftian-Shelleyan concern with the human longing to connect the self with the divine as well as other forces (natural, social, and political) greater than oneself? How does the story of Frankenstein engage this theme?
Copyright 2012,
by the Contributing Authors.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License
Cite/attribute Resource.
Botting, E. H. (2007, November 07). April 12th. Retrieved February 12, 2012, from Notre Dame OpenCourseWare Web site: http://ocw.nd.edu/political-science/mary-wollstonecraft-and-mary-shelley/discussion-questions/april-12th.
