Special Topics in English: Frankenstein

• Module 44
• Reading Prompts:
1. What do relationships reveal about a character?
   Consider how Mary's relationships with Ann, Henry, and her family reveal her desires, values, and conflicts. How might these relationships help you interpret a character in Frankenstein? For example, what becomes more visible about Victor when you examine his relationships with Clerval, Elizabeth, or the Creature alongside Mary's attachments?
2. How does the desire for companionship shape a person's choices?
   Notice moments when Mary seeks understanding, affection, or a sense of belonging. How do these moments compare with the Creature's longing for acceptance, his attachment to the De Laceys, or Walton's desire for a friend? What differences emerge between the companionship these characters imagine and the relationships available to them?
3. How do gender and social expectations shape characters' possibilities?
   As you finish Mary, A Fiction, consider the relationship between Mary's personal desires and the obligations imposed upon her. How might her experiences help us understand Elizabeth or Justine? What opportunities do these characters have to express their wishes, make choices, or influence how others understand them?
4. What is the relationship between feeling for someone and caring for them?
   Pay attention to moments when sympathy becomes action, as well as moments when strong feelings fail to produce meaningful care. How might Wollstonecraft's portrayal of Mary help you evaluate the actions of Victor, Clerval, the De Laceys, or another Frankenstein character? What tensions emerge between a character's feelings, intentions, and treatment of others?
5. How do loss and disappointment change a character?
   Consider how the final sections of Mary, A Fiction shape your understanding of Mary's emotional life and future. How do her responses to suffering compare with those of Victor or the Creature? What do the characters' different responses reveal about their attachments, values, and sense of responsibility?
6. What can a comparison help us see that we might otherwise overlook?
   Choose a Frankenstein character whose behavior you find especially intriguing, troubling, sympathetic, or difficult to understand. How does completing Mary, A Fiction complicate your initial judgment of that character? Look for a revealing difference, not just a similarity, between the two works.
• Finish Mary, A Fiction, pages 103-148.
• Discussion:
• For this discussion, consider how completing Mary Wollstonecraft's Mary, A Fiction might change the way we understand the characters and relationships in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Both works are deeply interested in people whose identities are shaped through their relationships with others--and through experiences of love, friendship, family, isolation, loss, sympathy, obligation, and social expectation.
• Rather than beginning with a broad theme, this week you will begin with a character from Frankenstein. Use Mary, A Fiction as an interpretive lens for thinking more carefully about that character's desires, relationships, choices, or place within the social world of the novel.
• Develop a 250-400 word post centered on a character (or closely connected group of characters) from Frankenstein. You might focus on Victor Frankenstein, the Creature, Elizabeth Lavenza, Henry Clerval, Robert Walton, Justine Moritz, or the De Lacey family.
• Choose one of the following questions as the starting point for your discussion:
• Victor Frankenstein: How does Mary, A Fiction help us understand Victor's emotional life and relationships? Consider his responses to family, friendship, love, grief, ambition, solitude, or responsibility. What becomes more visible about Victor when we compare him with Wollstonecraft's Mary?
• The Creature: Compare the Creature's experiences of isolation, longing, sympathy, rejection, and attachment with Mary's experiences in Mary, A Fiction. How do relationships—or their absence—shape each character? What might Wollstonecraft’s novella help us understand about the Creature's desire to belong?
• Elizabeth Lavenza: How does reading Mary, A Fiction affect our understanding of Elizabeth? Consider the expectations placed upon her as a daughter, sister, companion, and prospective wife. How might Mary's experiences illuminate the possibilities and limitations available to Elizabeth?
• Henry Clerval: What does Clerval contribute to Victor's life, and how might Mary, A Fiction help us interpret the importance of friendship, companionship, sympathy, and care in Frankenstein? What does Victor's relationship with Clerval reveal about Victor himself?
• The De Laceys: How does Wollstonecraft's treatment of family, affection, dependence, and social relationships help us understand the De Lacey family and the Creature's fascination with them? What does the Creature learn by observing their relationships, and what does his response to the family reveal about his own needs?
• Justine and Elizabeth: Consider the experiences of women within the Frankenstein family and its surrounding social world. How does Mary, A Fiction help us understand the roles occupied by Elizabeth, Justine, or both? What do their experiences reveal about gender, dependence, virtue, duty, or power?
• Walton and Victor: Both Walton and Victor are ambitious men whose pursuits separate them from ordinary social relationships. How might Mary, A Fiction help us think about solitude, ambition, friendship, and emotional connection in their stories? What does Wollstonecraft's novella suggest about the importance--or limitations--of human companionship?
• Character and sensibility: Choose any character from Frankenstein and examine how that character feels and responds to the feelings of others. How does Mary, A Fiction help us evaluate that character’s capacity for sympathy, sensibility, or emotional connection? What happens when intense feeling leads--or fails to lead--to care for another person?
• Relationships and responsibility: Choose a relationship in Frankenstein--such as Victor and the Creature, Victor and Elizabeth, Victor and Clerval, the Creature and the De Laceys, or Walton and Victor. How does comparing this relationship with one or more relationships in Mary, A Fiction deepen our understanding of what people owe to one another?
• A question of your own: Choose another Frankenstein character and use Mary, A Fiction to develop your own interpretation of that character. Your comparison might focus on gender, family, friendship, love, isolation, sensibility, sympathy, social expectations, power, or responsibility.
• As you develop your response, refer to at least one specific passage from Mary, A Fiction and one specific passage or moment from Frankenstein. Quote or closely describe the language that you find most significant.
• Your goal is not simply to show that a character in Frankenstein resembles Mary or another character in Wollstonecraft's novella. Instead, use the comparison to develop an interpretation of your chosen Frankenstein character. What does Mary, A Fiction allow us to notice about this character that we might otherwise overlook?
• Pay particular attention to the character's relationships, choices, emotions, language, and position within the social world of the novel.
• Write a 100-150 word reply to one of your classmates. Extend the conversation by developing, questioning, or complicating their character analysis.
• You might:
• point to another moment in Frankenstein that supports or complicates their interpretation of the character;
• compare the character with a different character or relationship in Mary, A Fiction;
• consider how another Frankenstein character might see or understand the person your classmate has analyzed; or
• explain how the comparison with Wollstonecraft changes the way you understand the character's motivations, relationships, responsibilities, or choices.
• Try to move beyond agreement or disagreement. Use your reply to help your classmate--and the class as a whole--develop a more complex understanding of how Wollstonecraft's representations of character and relationships can illuminate Shelley's Frankenstein.
• Notes for Discussion Post
• Frankenstein, p.72: She joined the hands of Elizabeth and myself: "My children," she said, "my firmest hopes of future happiness were placed on the prospect of your union. This expectation will now be the consolation of your father.
• Mary, p.118: She had to much strength of mind to waver in her determination; but to determine wrung her very heart, opened all her old wounds, and made them bleed afresh. What was she to do? where go? Could she set a seal to a hasty vow, and tell a deliberate lie; promise to love one man, when the image of another was ever present to her -- her soul revolted. "I might gain the applause of the world by such mock heroism; but should I not forfeit my own? forfeit thine, my father!"
• Frankenstein, p.176: "The hour of my weakness is past, and the period of your power has arrived. Your threats cannot move me to do an act of wickedness; but they confirm me in a resolution of not creating you a companion in vice.
• Discussion Post
• How can Mary's resolve help us understand Victor? After Ann's death, Henry opens up to Mary and proposes some sort of intimate friendship. And at this moment, Mary's life seems like everything is falling apart. Her friend has died, which is understandably upsetting, but the real reason this seems catastrophic for Mary is that she has now lost her excuse for fleeing her husband who was thrusted upon her. At this point, Mary must reconcile her ambition and responsibility:
• "She had too much strength of mind to waver in her determination; but to determine wrung her very heart, opened all her old wounds, and made them bleed afresh. What was she to do? where go? Could she set a seal to a hasty vow, and tell a deliberate lie; promise to love one man, when the image of another was ever present to her -- her soul revolted. 'I might gain the applause of the world by such mock heroism; but should I not forfeit my own? forfeit thine, my father!'" (118)
• It is very similar that both Mary and Victor end up in these marriages or engagements as a dying request from a parent, but that is not the moment that I want to consider. Instead, I think the moment that we should think about is when Victor faces his toughest choice, when he must also consider his own desires versus what he feels is his responsibility. Victor is working to construct the Creature's companion, but he has second thoughts when he realizes they might propagate "a race of devils" (174). He tears up his work and when the Creature confronts him, Victor is resolute:
• "The hour of my weakness is past, and the period of your power has arrived. Your threats cannot move me to do an act of wickedness; but they confirm me in a resolution of not creating you a companion in vice. Shall I, in cold blood, set loose upon the earth a daemon, whose delight is in death and wretchedness. Begone! I am firm, and your words will only exasperate my rage." (176)
• Here, Victor views himself as the hero. He calls himself weak, because he was constructing the Creature's companion out of fear, for himself and his family, but views this race of devils that he might unleash to be an existential danger to the world.
• While Mary and Victor seem to make opposite choices here, I do think there are two important ideas we can take from Mary's quote to help us understand Victor here. First, Mary views sealing the vow with her husband as mock heroism. It is not really doing anything great besides continuing this wrong that was done unto her on her mother's death bed. Victor, on the other hand, is not doing mock heroism: he is doing the real thing and is ready to accept the consequences of being heroic. Second, Mary cites that what she would gain from the mock heroism is the applause of the world. Certainly there is an unfairness in how a woman would be viewed and treated by society, as opposed to a man, for leaving a marriage for a new relationship. She is definitely speaking metaphorically with the applause of the world--more so the lack of condemnation from the world--but the point is her decision would be judged by society. The choice Victor is making here is not going to be judged by society. He would not gain the applause, or condemnation, of the world, no matter how he proceeds. He will face the consequences for sure, but no social stigma.
• As an omniscient reader, I do think we believe it would have worked out better if Victor finished his work, but Mary's quote in particular I think gives us even more room to respect the choice, and appreciate the resolve, of Victor.
• Discussion Response
• Greyson - You point out Victor has a weak connection with his father. I would add that Victor himself sort of lays the blame for everything that happens at the feet of his weak connection with his father. At the very beginning, Victor recounts his father saying, after observing what he was reading, "My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash." Victor goes on to explain if his father had went on with a further explanation instead of this empty condemnation, "that the train of my ideas would never have received that fatal impulse that led to my ruin" (68). Instead, Victor ignores his father and proceeds down this path "with the greatest avidity."
• And if we are going to be talking about characters with weak connections to their fathers, we should also mention Walton, who shares many similarities with Victor in any case. With the case of Walton, his father died at a young age, but had made this "dying injunction" that forbade Walton from "embark[ing] in a sea-faring life" (52). Just another example of a father being able to steer their child away from their potential downfall if a stronger connection were present.