Frankenstein as a Non-Epistolary Film Essay

Frankenstein was a scientist who thought that the world was a secret, which he desired to discover in the scientific field. He worked to find out the relationship between humans and animals. He was attracted by the structure of the human body, any animal related with life, and the cause of life. One day, Victor Frankenstein made an experiment where he included many different human parts from different dead people. This resulted in a human being and a strange creature never seen before in life, which made Frankenstein very scared. This creature or monster was tall enough to scare people by his height and with muscles that were well proportioned.

Several fields have studied the relationship between creator and creation. The most significant aspect of this research considers the difference between nature and nurture. Sociologists, psychologists, scientists, and other professionals have tried to pin down the exact distinctions between these two types of upbringings. In literature, the same questions have been asked and studied using fictional characters, most famously in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, in 1667, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in 1818. The complexity of the characters in these texts creates the theme of nature versus nurture before they diverge and arrive at differing conclusions.

Frankenstein, a novel first published in the year 1818, stands as the most talked about work of Mary Shelley’s literary career. She was just nineteen years old when she penned this novel, and throughout her lifetime she could not produce any other work that surpasses this novel in terms of creativity and vision. In this novel, Shelley found an outlet for her own intense sense of victimization, and her desperate struggle for love. Traumatized by her failed childbirth incidents, troubled childhood, and scandalous courtship, many of Shelley’s life experiences can be seen reflected in the novel. When discussing the character and development of the monster, Shelley launches an extensive discussion on the

Victor Frankenstein created life, a monster that was born into this world with no purpose, and no one to love. He did not even have a name, he was called a monster from the start. Just like a normal human baby, he came to life not knowing anything, and had to learn from his surroundings. Just like a person, he watched and learned from others, and tried to understand the world and the people in it. From that, the monster understood that he just wants to find a life for himself, and not be viewed as an evil monster, but there are many things that are preventing that. In the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the author portrays Frankenstein’s monster as a friend through details in his character and his outlook on life.

Walton’s Letters in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ‘Frankenstein’ is a gothic, science fiction novel written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. It was written in Switzerland in 1816 and London in 1816-1817. The novel begins with a series of letters from the explorer Robert Walton to his sister, Margaret Saville. The entirety of ‘Frankenstein’ is contained within Robert Walton’s letters, which record the narratives of both Frankenstein and the monster.

Mary Shelley introduces the story of Frankenstein with an exchange of one-way letters from Walton to his sister. In these letters, Shelley introduces the main themes of the novel via the character of Walton and his letters, in that he presents many of the themes later explored in ‘Frankenstein’ such as thirst for knowledge and power, isolation and nature, in his own story. These opening letters thus have an impact on the reader as they will influence their view of the rest of the novel in ways that will bring them to ask themselves important questions valid for any are ad society, and bring them some understanding of what is to come next in the novel.

Victor Frankenstein is a scientist whose ambition will be fatal. His story is central to Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein. Nevertheless, Shelley gave a frame to Victor 's tale as Frankenstein begins and ends with Captain Walton 's letters. In this analysis, I will show that Shelley did not insert the letters by chance, but that they add a deeper dimension to the novel.

Critic Northrop Frye once commented that "Tragic heroes are so much the highest points in their human landscapes" (Frye 1). Few characters illustrate this characteristic of a tragic hero better than that of Victors Frankenstein, the protagonist of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. His story is one of a brilliant man whose revolutionary ideas brought suffering to himself, his family and friends, and his creation. Victor is an instrument as well as a victim to this suffering throughout his story.

(Favert 1) We must begin to read Frankenstein more as a well-wrought "baggy monster" of correspondences, and less as a singular, alien phenomenon. If we read it as an interactive combination of tales, rather than one linear narrative, we can refrain from casting the novelist into the narrow role of a "young girl" with "so very hideous an idea." Frankenstein is Mary Shelley's novel; it is no more her story than Walton's, Victor's or the monster's. Within the text, the various narrators slide from their own stories into the histories of others, and with each movement, we are asked to extend our "willing suspension of disbelief." As the novel multiplies its story-tellers and listeners, it renews the problem of narrative authority. Whose story do we believe? -- the novel defuses such a question. The fantastic nature of the stories preclude rational explanation or judgment, and we do not,

Walton’s remark in the third letter to his sister that the “very stars themselves bears witness… of [his] triumph” establishes a god complex unlike Victor Frankenstein’s, forming the concept that Frankenstein is a reflection of Walton’s life if he strays too far into the depths of ambition. The setting of the Arctic’s weather as being “dreadfully severe” conveys the Romantic aspect of her writing, exploring the way in which nature is a key element of life that is strong and not to be toyed with. From this, Shelley expresses the way in which nature and life can overcome and consume the destructive force of modern science and industrialism, as whilst science is created and somewhat controllable, nature is an unpredictable and untameable force that is not to be toyed with: this serves as one of the novel’s underlying messages. Furthermore, this notion serves as the impetus behind Frankenstein’s fall from grace, allowing the novelist to express her awe of both nature’s beauty and its uncontrollable power. Similarly, the setting of Walton being momentarily stranded in the arctic symbolically suggests the way in which ambition leaves an individual stranded from society and left in the cold, alluding to the novel’s motif of “light” and “dark”.

The above quote by Bloom is an explanation of the view that all the gothic novels are interpretation of psychological and social factors and this is especially true in the case of Mary Shelley. Shelley began her novel at the age of 18 when the most prominent materials in the consciousness and unconsciousness of Shelley were concerned with the conflicts stemming from the death of her mother. Frankenstein is the outcome of Shelley’s unresolved grief for the death of her mother which was the crisis she needed to work through to forget her own adult identity.

A Comparison of Film and Novel Versions of Frankenstein The nature of horror stories gives the reader/audience a feeling of intense fear, shock or disgust. It creates an atmosphere of tension for the reader/audience. Horror stories are designed to entertain people by causing enjoyable feelings of horror.

Kenneth Branagh has re-told this story from Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein. Branagh has been very careful when creating this movie, and because of it, the movie has said to be a movie that

Frankenstein as a gothic novel The gothic tradition highlights the grotesque, relies on mysterious and remote settings, and is intended to evoke fear. All of these are evident in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, especially in chapter five. The settings in the novel are striking and distinctively gothic.

Authors tend to receive a lot of their imagination from things they’ve personally experienced, even when writing fictional novels. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein consists of many literary elements, undertones, and themes which help mold it into the beautiful psych novel readers love. The novel contains many elements that provide a thrill,  but, an interesting element of the novel is that it is essentially an autobiography. Many of aspects of the novel can be traced to Mary Shelley’s personal experiences; it’s as if when she writes it, she writes her life. Even more so than the thrilling nature of the novel, the fact that the author writes this fictional story in a way that portrays her personal life is even more electrifying. In the novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley not only provides readers with a grasping exposition of their surroundings, but also with an inside look into her personal life.