Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) https://www. youtube. com/watch “my hideous progeny”

Prometheus: A Romantic Over-Reacher Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) PB Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1820) Image:Heinrich Von Füger, Prometheus Brings Fire To Mankind (1817)

Victor Frankenstein: Promethean over-reacher: The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine (13) You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been. (9) They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows. (20) I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation. (20) What had been the study and desire of the wisest men since the creation of the world was now within my grasp (25) How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow (27) ‘like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell’

“no other Gothic work by a woman writer, perhaps no literary work of any kind by a woman, better repays examination in the light of the sex of its author. For Frankenstein is a birth myth, and one that was lodged in the novelist's imagination, I am convinced, by the fact that she was herself a mother. … Frankenstein seems to be distinctly a woman's mythmaking on the subject of birth precisely because its emphasis is not upon what precedes birth, not upon birth itself, but upon what follows birth: the trauma of the afterbirth It reveals the revulsion against newborn life and drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences” Ellen Moers, “Female Gothic” In Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York: Doubleday, 1976; rpt. Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 90-98. http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/moers.html

“the question, so very frequently asked me -- How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?” (Preface, 1831 edition)

William Frith, THE LOVER'S SEAT: SHELLEY AND MARY GODWIN IN OLD ST PANCRAS CHURCHYARD (1877)

Mary Shelley, diary, 6 March 1815: ‘Find my baby dead. A miserable day’. Mary’s diary, 19 March 1815: ‘Dream that my little baby came to life again, that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day. Not in good spirits’. Victor Frankenstein: ‘I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption’.

“I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva “I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation.” (Preface to 1818 edition)

Luigi Galvani (1737-1798): Galvanism “Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and enbued with vital warmth” (Shelley, “Preface” to Frankenstein)

“On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion” (Andrew Knapp and William Baldwin, The Newgate Calendar, 4 vols. (London: J. Robbins and Co, 1825), iii, 317-318)

“By the skill of the physician he was once reanimated after the process of death had actually commenced, and he lived four days after that time” Percy Bysshe Shelley, “I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” … “I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation up on lifeless matter.”  (Shelley 34).

“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was ready one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”

“How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips….

“I SHALL BE WITH YOU ON YOUR WEDDING NIGHT!” “I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel.”

 I was now about to form another being, of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighbourhood of man, and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation. …. Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?

“The more I saw of them, the greater became my desire to claim their protection and their kindness; my heart yearned to be known and loved by these amiable creatures: to see their sweet looks turned towards me with affection, was the utmost limit of my ambition.” Volume II, Chapter VII

I sickened as I read. 'Hateful day when I received life I sickened as I read. 'Hateful day when I received life!' I exclaimed in agony. 'Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred.’ (Chapter 15)

‘I, the miserable and the abandoned … I am an abortion to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on ... I have murdered the lovely and the helpless ... I have devoted my creator to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin.’

Selected Suggested reading: Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing (OUP, 1987) Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) George Lewis Levine, U. C. Knoepflmacher, eds. The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel (1986) Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia UP, 1982) Anne K Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (2012) Ellen Moers, “Female Gothic” Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York: Doubleday, 1976; rpt. Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 90-98. Martin Priestman, The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times (2016) David Punter, ed. A New Companion to the Gothic (2015) William Veeder, Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: The Fate of Androgyny (1986) A huge amount of scholarly articles on Frankenstein are collated here: http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/index.html