L: With apologies to , Mary Shelley, Lit students, and our devoted audience who has doubtless been waiting breathlessly for the latest instalment of our awesome, spectacular, edifying, adjectival... thingy. L was too lazy and traumatised to do this herself, so we ended up using the art of copy-and-paste on a section from our guest speaker's blog. Share and enjoy.

F is for

FRANKENSTEIN -(pronounced as "OH GOD I HATE LIT")

*ripping off starts here*

LIT SUMMARY!spastic

Frankenstein is subtitled ‘The Modern Prometheus’. There are quite a few parallels and ideas taken from the promethean myth, most notably the bit about the fire. Prometheus brought fire to the people, and thus giving them civilization and culture and raising them up near the level of gods, but was banished from the god realm instead, chained to a rock where an eagle pecked his liver every day which is very torturous due to the fact that Promy is immortal. The fire is paralleled in many instances in the novel, mainly in the form of lighting as the spark that ignites the fire. This can be seen in MANY MANY MANY ‘blasted’ this and that, like ‘blasted stump’, ‘the day I was blasted’ etc. Franky is like Promy, because he wanted to bring this great gift originally privileged only to the gods down to people, which is the ability to create/restore life. He also gets banished from humanity, suffering from isolation and losing his entire family and essentially suffers a lot, his entire life till he died.

Letters 1-4:

Walton talks at length to his sister about his expedition to the north pole and all the preparations and crew he enlists. He is extremely boring, by the way. He also fusses over minor details like the romantic back story of a silent, strong but brave and loyal and kind Russian guy, which characterizes him as kind, feeling, romantic, and a general INFP like me. He also emos about his solitude, and not having a friend. It’s his ambition that drove him into solitude, because he wants to discover and explore the north pole, which is really a rather far fetched idea in the setting of the novel. This is supposed to have lots of literary nuances and reflection later.

He sees this being with the shape of the human, but far larger, going across the ice in a sledge drawn by dogs. There is half a mile of distance, which is symbolic of the distance the monster is from humanity. The icy and forbidding climate is a gothic convention, which is used to create horror and forbidding. Soon after seeing the monster he dredges up this emaciated half dead person called Victor Frankenstein (who incidentally is just beside the boat, contrasting with the monster), who apparently has lustrous eyes, and is a fine spirit, and with lots of dignity. Think along those lines, and spam nice dignified adjectives. Even as destroyed as he is he still radiated an aura of benevolence and sweetness. The nice kind treatment of Frankenstein contrasts with the skeptic distance which the crew members view the monster.

Although the reason that Walton is bound for the North Pole is why Frankenstein boarded the ship, he warns Walton about his ambition, and begins to tell his story (At long last.) as a warning to Walton that he should be aware of where ambition can take him (which is the main theme of the story) Victor at one point called ambition ‘the intoxicating draught’ which describes how once you have an ambition, it generally sucks you in and you’re blind to everything else, which is what happened to him. He also talks about how friends are there to ensure you don’t step past the limit, which reflects how he didn’t have anyone to tell him about limits later on.

Chapter 1: (sidenote: this is 1 of the only 2 or 3 happy chapters in a book with 28 of them.)

Victor describes his family a lot. Basically the whole point of the chapter is to emphasize importance of family, which is also a semi main theme in the whole book. This is because Mary Shelley the author had a very lacking childhood, with an evil stepmother, so she feels a need to emo about her lack of family and love, blahblah. It also introduces Elizabeth’s history. Elizabeth is his ‘sister’ but not by blood, and was adopted. He treated Elizabeth as ‘Mine to cherish and protect’ since the day he saw her, and it’s almost like a marriage. His entire life consisted of a couple of people: his mum, dad, 2 brothers Ernest and William, Lizzie and his best friend, a romantic and adorable guy with a name malfunction, called Henry Clerval, and, as a spoiler, all of which will die, except for Ernest who quietly disappears from the story. Ernest appears so little his can be considered a cameo appearance. Basically because his social world is super confined, and because he was DAMN spoilt and he could do whatever he wanted, he didn’t understand boundaries and limits which led him to his downfall.

Chapter 2:

More about his history. He also first encounters electricity in the form of lightning, which strikes a huge oak tree and causes it to become a ‘blasted stump’. The storm and the tree also reflects how his life was going to become after his discovery of electricity and the like. Also he talks quite a bit about destiny and guardian angels and spirits, contrary to his supposedly scientific nature.

Chapter 3: MISERABLE CHAPTER. Everything else from now on is.

First miserable thing in his life of happiness, when he’s 17. VERY GOOD, albeit somewhat late. His mum dies from scarlet fever because she caught it while tending Elizabeth. He emos a lot about life and death, which sort of foreshadows his later intentions to recreate and reanimate beings. He goes to a university of sorts, Ingolstadt, to get education. He meets professors, gets told that the stuff he had been studying (which are outdated unscientific myth-y things) are a waste of time and he promptly gets proper scientific education. It’s also thanks to one of them that he gets grand ideas and ambition, because he’s greatly inspired by the Prof’s mini speech. He still to talk about how his destiny was decided from that day.

Chapter 4:

Vicky somehow gets distanced from his family, and he doesn’t write back for two years, ungrateful little brat. He mugs chem like mad. He also robs graves to supply himself with body parts to experiment with how electricity can create life. He also in this chapter finds out how to bestow life upon inanimate objects eg dead bodies, which makes him something like a god. He has a lot of high hopes about his creations worshipping him as their creator, and being the creator and father of a whole new species. He also talks directly to Walton for a bit in this chapter, a short break from his long and boring narrative, which is basically just a warning to learn from him and not be too ambitious and whatever, and that knowledge is dangerous. He devotes himself to his work like mad, and hardly eats/sleeps, saying that he has almost lost his entire soul and sensation save for creating this creature. It was apparently a very beautiful season but he didn’t notice it cos guess what! He’s too busy chionging his creature. By approximation, it took 3 seasons to finish his monster, which is 9 months, which is symbolic of childbirth and creation, but is also juxtaposed against the fact that Vicky is male and is the only one involved in the creation of the creature.

Chapter 5: one of the climaxes of the story, where the monster is FINALLY brought to life

The setting is in the night, with the darkness as a gothic convention to increase the tension in the atmosphere and to create a sense of foreboding and horror. There is also rain, and a burnt out candle which pretty much makes the atmosphere really bleak. The creature convulses into life. The creature’s eye is described as yellow, giving the reader a reptilic image instead of some human one. Victor goes mad at how fugly the creature is. Breathless horror and disgust filled his heart, and he rushes out of the room, and tries to sleep (um, logic gap here much?) He dreamt of Elizabeth walking in the streets of Ingolstadt, and embraced and kissed her, but her features turned into the corpse of his dead mum, complete with grave worms crawling in her sleeves. This foreshadows his role as the destroyer of his family, by creating the creature. Also, it shows his affection to Elizabeth, but it’s like a kiss of death, like his affection killing her, which foreshadows the reasons for her death and such. He wakes up at this point and sees the creature reaching a hand towards him. His vulnerable position of lying on the bed creates a more monstrous image of the creature because supposedly everyone thinks he’s malicious because he’s ugly (another logic gap.) He calls the creature ‘wretch’ (which is his favourite word) and ‘miserable monster’, despite having grand dreams of creating a new species, and his ‘son’, and stuff. He spends more paragraphs irrelevantly describing the creature’s monstrous appearance. Now instead of his physical reaction of running away from the monster, he feels horror and disappointment. He goes out and walks around the streets, and I see a ‘senpai <3’>

Chapter 6:

Mostly crap, domestic matters from Lizzie. It talks about how William is this adorable, angelic child, and introduces Justine Moritz, who (surprise!) also dies. It has gossipy details which is supposed to reflect like the passiveness of the women compared to VF who is constantly mugging/being freaked. He finally returns home after like 2 more years.