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Frankenstein : A virtual issue from Literature and Theology

Guest edited by jo carruthers and alana m.vincent.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was first published on 1 January 1818. It ought to be difficult to overstate its cultural influence over the past two hundred years as, arguably, the first novel which contains all the traits of modern science fiction, as an extended meditation on the nature of the human, of creation, and of creative responsibility – but there have been surprisingly few articles about Frankenstein published in Literature and Theology ’s 31 years, an oversight which we hope to see corrected in the near future. Instead, this virtual issue collects articles which the editors read as embodying the spirit or elaborating on the themes found within  Frankenstein .

Shelley’s novel is a deeply ethical, speculative and sensational novel, and has allured and fascinated readers for centuries. It addresses her generation’s adaptation to technological advances but also faces head on issues of spiritual, ethical and religious import. Into the novel is woven strands of the concerns of Shelley’s day, from the everyday politics of gender, difference, and scientific aspiration to issues of social justice that crowded political discussion at the time. The novel interrogates the boundaries, substances, and exceptionalism of humanity as monstrosity is identified in the created and creator, and as much in individual choices as in society’s conventions. Frankenstein takes on the mantle of Faust as he reaches to the heavens and confronts the consequences of defying divine sanction. The division between life and death, and all that matters about it to us, is pulled apart in the novel. It tells of the impulsivity of desperation in the face of grief as well as the despair of mortality in the creature’s separation from humanity. The novel looks at what human beings do when confronted with difference in ways that exposes the difficulty of intimacy for the outsider and the stranger. Each of the articles in this special edition draws on the threads of Frankenstein’s narrative in order to explore issues of: biotechnological progress and the human and what has become known as the post-human and transhuman; historical notions of the monstrous as conceptualized before Shelley’s time; the monstrous as a theme in post-colonial critique; and explorations of response to despair and violence. Whilst not explicitly inspired or drawing on Shelley’s Frankenstein , these articles are nonetheless indebted to its technological, monstrous, ethical, spiritual and political legacy.

Tiffany Tsao’s ‘The Tyranny of Purpose: Religion and Biotechnology in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’ ( Literature & Theology  26.2 (2012), 214-232) picks up on critical comparisons between Frankenstein and Ishiguro’s novel, demonstrating close parallels between the way that each novel treats the fraught relationship between creator and created creature. Tsao then traces the influence of Milton’s Paradise Lost , which is overt in Shelley and more subtle but, she argues, still present in Ishiguro, in order to argue that ‘the seemingly unrelated theological issues raised by Paradise Lost concerning the ethics governing creator–creation relations may provide surprising insight into what Ishiguro’s novel has to say about the problematic assumptions that underlie conceptualizations of religion and biotechnology in our own world’ (215). By showing the way that both Frankenstein and Never Let Me Go point back to Milton’s epic treatise on free will, Tsao is able to use the creature-narratives from Shelley and Ishiguro to interrogate Paradise Lost , showing the subtle ways in which Milton undermines his case for free will by presenting a cosmology structured by divine purpose. Reading Ishiguro against Milton, Tsao concludes that “Any succour that religion may be capable of providing will lie not in its ability to provide a sense of purpose, but rather, its ability to provide freedom from purpose, and the limitations that purpose can set on how we value and cherish life” (226).

Milton is also a key text in Michael Noschka’s article ‘Extended Cognition, Heidegger, and Pauline Post/Humanism’ ( Literature and Theology 28.3 (2014) 334-347). Noschka presents Satan as a cognitive materialist, citing his speech in Paradise Lost 1.254-44 [The mind is its own place, and in itself  Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n], but arguing that ‘By placing this Satanic rationalization within the larger scope of Paradise Lost as a whole, particularly insofar as the poem might function metonymically for literature itself, we are able to recognize the value of literature as a medium which challenges us to see beyond literal fact, beyond ourselves as the creators of such facts, and thereby acknowledge the value of metaphor and exegesis in our hyper-factual age’ (335). Noschka’s article makes a case for the continued value of literature and theology to direct thinkers of post-humanism towards the 'proper intersection between man [sic] and technology', a ‘humble humanism built on an ethics of responsibility’ (336).

It is precisely the absence of an ethics of responsibility from the philosophies that comprise transhumanism which is the major concern of Elaine Graham’s article, ‘“Nietzsche Gets a Modem”: Transhumanism and the Technological Sublime’ ( Literature & Thelogy 16.1 (2002) 65-80). Graham is deeply sceptical of the liberative promises of transhumanism, which she sees as conflating transcendence with disembodiment (72), and therefore failing to adequately engage with ethical questions concerning access to the resources which necessarily enable the technological revolution. Rather than a Heideggerian turn which stresses the revelatory potential of technology, Graham argues for a reconfiguration of ‘the religious symbolic in order to dismantle the equation of religion and “transcendence”’, while also attending to ‘the co-existence of the urged-for transcendence–a surrender of materialism the better to attain quasi-divinity–with the constant stimulation of consumer desires’ (77). It is in the lived, the material, and above all the economic realms that Graham sees both the promise and perils of the biotechnological revolution heralded by Frankenstein .

Andrea Schutz, Daniel Juan Gil and Michael Edward Moore all explore premodern theologies of human identity in order to interrogate meanings of the monstrous or the ‘Other’. Schutz’s article, ‘The Monster at the Centre of the Universe: Christ as Spectacle in Mass and English Civic Drama’ ( Literature & Theology  31.3 (2017), 269-284) argues for a distinction between the distance of audience and monster in modernity and the proximity encouraged in the medieval passion drama in which the world is understood to be ‘held together by paradox and monstrosity’ (272). The medieval world understood sensuous receptivity as a reciprocal process so that what was seen was also experienced and touched (273), softening boundaries between self and other. Christological theologies also work to blur and complicate human identity with a Christ-body that is redemptive, substitutionary and incarnational, and Schutz presents the eucharist and crucifixion as dramatized moments that draw self into other, human into the monstrous, and the monstrous as divinely epiphanic. Schutz returns to theological etymological tracings of ‘monster’ to monstrar , ‘to show’, to argue ‘the function of the monster is to be in the world and disclose truths larger than itself’ (271) so that Christ is a ‘sacred “category crisis”’ (272).

In ‘‘What does Milton’s God Want?–Human Nature, Radical Conscience, and the Sovereign Power of the Nation-State’ ( Literature & Theology , 28.4 (2014), 389-410), Gil reveals in Milton’s reworking of the creation narrative precisely the freedom from purpose or teleology that Tsao had hoped to find. Gil argues for a reading of Milton’s construction of humanity as one of potentiality. Drawing on theories of sovereignty from Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, Gil considers Milton to be presenting human life as dependent upon a sovereign definition of human nature but one that is necessarily historical and contingent. God or the transcendent may be invoked to secure a specific version of human identity, but because of its standpoint outside of that history, God or the transcendent is also a site of potential disruption. The ‘transcendent warrant’ becomes an ethical principle against which human activity can be measured. As such, Gil can come to the conclusion that for Milton, ‘being free means having the resources to transcend the particular definition of human nature enshrined in a particular political order’ (402).

The relation between human identity, creation and the creator is the focus of Moore’s article, ‘Meditations on the Face in the Middle Ages (with Levinas and Picard)’ ( Literature & Theology , 24.1 (2010), 19-37). Moore turns to fundamental questions provoked by the assertion that human identity has its theological anchor in God as creator. He attends to ancient and medieval conceptions of identity and the face in an imagined ‘dialogue in heaven’ (22) between Levinas and medieval theologians in order to consider Levinas’s placing of the other at the very core of identity: ‘According to Levinas, appreciation of “the holiness in the other than myself” at the same time requires an acceptance of godlike responsibility for all of creation and other people.’ (21) In Levinasian terms, the face provokes responsibility. To be found in the image of God is for Levinas ‘to find oneself in his trace’ (25, fn. 54); to be identified in and through a trace is to be the ‘vestige of something absent’ (26). For Levinas, all are strangers so that ‘the only possible humanism is “of the other”’ (26). Moore’s article offers a wealth of theological understandings of humanity conceived as ‘the image of God’, a set of theological debates that – for our purposes in this virtual issue of Literature and Theology – creates a further ‘heavenly dialogue’ between a Levinasian insistence on responsibility to the other and Shelley’s depiction of an irresponsible creator and a neglected creature.

Articles by Sarah Juliet Lauro and James H. Thrall both address the imaginative legacy of Frankenstein –the development of science fiction as a distinctive genre–but also position the tropes of science fiction as uniquely suited for addressing issues of subalternity and post-coloniality. In ‘The Zombie Saints: The Contagious Spirit of Christian Conversion Narratives: A Zombie Martyr’ ( Literature & Theology 26.2 (2012) 160-178), Lauro, inspired by Léon Bonnat's painting ‘Martyr de Saint-Denis’, reads the saint’s legend in parallel to zombie fiction of the sort which has dominated popular television and cinema in recent years. She argues that ‘the tendency of both zombie and martyr narratives to involve seemingly contradictory characterisations of a figure as simultaneously master and slave, or contaminated and cured, illustrates the ambulant dialectic of the living-dead and the saint’ (163). Lauro is attentive to the origin point of zombie tales, in ‘the Jesuit-dominated colonial Caribbean’ (173), and to the role the zombie plays as a figure of colonial resistance.

The potentials of science fiction as a literature of resistance is the main focus of Thrall’s article, ‘Postcolonial Science Fiction? Science, Religion and the Transformation of Genre in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome’ (Literature & Theology , 23.3 (2009), 289-302). Thrall makes explicit the ways in which ‘science fiction's re-enactments of imperial encounters permitted at least some authors to contemplate their own colonial complicity’ (291), focussing on a novel by Amitav Gosh set in a future in which many of the promises of a techno-future explored by Noschka and Graham have come to pass. Gosh’s techno-future is, however, a de-colonised future, in which ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ cosmology have equal weight, where the master’s tools have been consciously put to work to not dismantle, but extensively renovate, the master’s house, so that ‘the religious trope of reincarnation meets the science fiction trope of uploaded consciousness’ and ‘[g]host stories, religious narratives of reincarnation, scientific imaginings of DNA-borne identities, and cyber-constellations of uploaded personalities all draw on overlapping conceptions of the self as transferrable entity’ (300).

Where Frankenstein’s grief leads him to an irresponsible creation of life, and the creature’s wounds lead him to a more obvious violence, articles by Brandi Estey-Burtt and Joel Westerholm offer more positive reactions to precarity. Instead of producing a spiral of violence that wreaks such devastating effects, wounding becomes for these two authors a promissory expansion of humanity, first in Coetzee’s Disgrace and then in the ‘wounded speech’ of Rossetti’s poetry.

Estey-Burtt’s ‘Bidding the Animal Adieu: Grace in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and Disgrace’ (Literature & Theology , 31.2 (2017), 231-245) identifies imagination as a vital component of redemption and the working of grace. Grace here is for Estey-Burtt, through reference to theologian Serene Jones’s definition, ‘the incredible insistence on love amid fragmented, unravelled human lives’ (234) and enables a limited and tentative response to both specific traumatic events and the ongoing trauma of South African apartheid. What is significant about the animals in Coetzee’s essay and novel is their ability to express vulnerability. What religious language offers Coetzee’s understanding of human empathy with animals is a recognition of the limitation of the self that ‘acknowledges an unmanageable strangeness in ‘‘the self’’, ‘‘the soul’’’ (238). Drawing on Levinas and Derrida’s concept of the ‘ adieu ’ as the giving to God of the dying and dead, Estey-Burtt recognises in Lurie’s care for dying animals evidence that he is undone and wounded, but also compassionate.

Westerholm, in ‘Christina Rossetti’s “Wounded Speech”’ ( Literature & Theology 24.4 (2010), 345-359) invokes Jean-Louis Chrétien’s theology of prayer as ‘wounded speech’ so that ‘whoever addresses God always does so de profundis , from the depths of his distress whether manifest or hidden, from the depths of his sin’ (351) and that such wounds are not mitigated by prayer but the speaker remains ‘still wounded, even more so’ (345). As with Coetzee’s character, Lurie, so with the speaker of Rossetti’s poem-prayers (as Westerholm names them), we find that wounds produce and articulate a human vulnerability that leads not to the escalation of pain or violence but instead to what Westerholm and Estey-Burtt call ‘grace’. For Westerholm this grace is found in recognition of the creator’s responsibility, a theme repeatedly returned to in this special edition’s selection of articles. This invocation of God’s necessary responsibility is exemplified for Westerholm in Rossetti’s poem ‘Good Friday’, in which the speaker demands of God: ‘seek thy sheep’.

Section 1: Cyborgs and the Post-Human

‘The Tyranny of Purpose: Religion and Biotechnology in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’ by Tiffany Tsao Literature & Theology 26.2 (2012), 214-232.

‘Extended Cognition, Heidegger, and Pauline Post/Humanism’ by Michael Noschka Literature & Theology  28.3 (2014) 334-347.

“Nietzsche Gets a Modem”: Transhumanism and the Technological Sublime’ by Elaine Graham Literature & Theology 16.1 (2002) 65-80.

Section 2: Pre-modern Post-humanism

‘The Monster at the Centre of the Universe Christ as Spectacle in Mass and English Civic Drama’ by  Andrea Schutz Literature & Theology 31.3 (2017), 269-284.

‘What does Milton’s God Want? -- Human Nature, Radical Conscience, and the Sovereign Power of the Nation-State’ by Daniel Juan Gil Literature & Theology 28.4 (2014), 389-410.

‘Meditations on the Face in the Middle Ages (with Levinas and Picard) by Michael Edward Moore Literature & Theology 24.1 (2010), 19-37.

Section 3: Post-colonial Post-humanism

‘The Zombie Saints: The Contagious Spirit of Christian Conversion Narratives: A Zombie Martyr’ by Sarah Juliet Lauro Literature & Theology 26.2 (2012), 160-178.

‘Postcolonial Science Fiction? Science, Religion and the Transformation of Genre in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome’ By James H. Thrall Literature & Theology , 23.3 (2009), 289-302.

Section 4: Wounded Humanity

‘Biddding the Animal Adieu: Grace in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and Disgrace’ by Brandi Estey-Burtt Literature & Theology, 31.2 (2017), 231-245.

‘Christina Rossetti’s “Wounded Speech”’ by Joel Westerholm Literature & Theology, 24.4 (2010), 345-359.

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Research essay: a ‘monster’ and its humanity.

Professor of English Susan J. Wolfson is the editor of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Longman Cultural Edition and co-editor, with Ronald Levao, of The Annotated Frankenstein.  

Published in January 1818, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus has never been out of print or out of cultural reference. “Facebook’s Frankenstein Moment: A Creature That Defies Technology’s Safeguards” was the headline on a New York Times business story Sept. 22 — 200 years on. The trope needed no footnote, although Kevin Roose’s gloss — “the scientist Victor Frankenstein realizes that his cobbled-together creature has gone rogue” — could use some adjustment: The Creature “goes rogue” only after having been abandoned and then abused by almost everyone, first and foremost that undergraduate scientist. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg and CEO Sheryl Sandberg, attending to profits, did not anticipate the rogue consequences: a Frankenberg making. 

The original Frankenstein told a terrific tale, tapping the idealism in the new sciences of its own age, while registering the throb of misgivings and terrors. The 1818 novel appeared anonymously by a down-market press (Princeton owns one of only 500 copies). It was a 19-year-old’s debut in print. The novelist proudly signed herself “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley” when it was reissued in 1823, in sync with a stage concoction at London’s Royal Opera House in August. That debut ran for nearly 40 nights; it was staged by the Princeton University Players in May 2017. 

In a seminar that I taught on Frankenstein in various contexts at Princeton in the fall of 2016 — just weeks after the 200th anniversary of its conception in a nightmare visited on (then) Mary Godwin in June 1816 — we had much to consider. One subject was the rogue uses and consequences of genomic science of the 21st century. Another was the election season — in which “Frankenstein” was a touchstone in the media opinions and parodies. Students from sciences, computer technology, literature, arts, and humanities made our seminar seem like a mini-university. Learning from each other, we pondered complexities and perplexities: literary, social, scientific, aesthetic, and ethical. If you haven’t read Frankenstein (many, myself included, found the tale first on film), it’s worth your time. 

READ MORE  PAW Goes to the Movies: ‘Victor Frankenstein,’ with Professor Susan Wolfson

Scarcely a month goes by without some development earning the prefix Franken-, a near default for anxieties about or satires of new events. The dark brilliance of Frankenstein is both to expose “monstrosity” in the normal and, conversely, to humanize what might seem monstrously “other.” When Shelley conceived Frankenstein, Europe was scarred by a long war, concluding on Waterloo fields in May 1815. “Monster” was a ready label for any enemy. Young Frankenstein begins his university studies in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. In 1790, Edmund Burke’s international best-selling Reflections on the French Revolution recoiled at the new government as a “monster of a state,” with a “monster of a constitution” and “monstrous democratic assemblies.” Within a few months, another international best-seller, Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man, excoriated “the monster Aristocracy” and cheered the American Revolution for overthrowing a “monster” of tyranny.

Following suit, Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, called the ancien régime a “ferocious monster”; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was on the same page: Any aristocracy was an “artificial monster,” the monarchy a “luxurious monster,” and Europe’s despots a “race of monsters in human shape.” Frankenstein makes no direct reference to the Revolution, but its first readers would have felt the force of its setting in the 1790s, a decade that also saw polemics for (and against) the rights of men, women, and slaves. 

England would abolish its slave trade in 1807, but Colonial slavery was legal until 1833. Abolitionists saw the capitalists, investors, and masters as the moral monsters of the global economy. Apologists regarded the Africans as subhuman, improvable perhaps by Christianity and a work ethic, but alarming if released, especially the men. “In dealing with the Negro,” ultra-conservative Foreign Secretary George Canning lectured Parliament in 1824, “we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength ... would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance.” He meant Frankenstein. 

Mary Shelley heard about this reference, and knew, moreover, that women (though with gilding) were a slave class, too, insofar as they were valued for bodies rather than minds, were denied participatory citizenship and most legal rights, and were systemically subjugated as “other” by the masculine world. This was the argument of her mother’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which she was rereading when she was writing Frankenstein. Unorthodox Wollstonecraft — an advocate of female intellectual education, a critic of the institution of marriage, and the mother of two daughters conceived outside of wedlock — was herself branded an “unnatural” woman, a monstrosity. 

Shelley had her own personal ordeal, which surely imprints her novel. Her parents were so ready for a son in 1797 that they had already chosen the name “William.” Even worse: When her mother died from childbirth, an awful effect was to make little Mary seem a catastrophe to her grieving father. No wonder she would write a novel about a “being” rejected from its first breath. The iconic “other” in Frankenstein is of course this horrifying Creature (he’s never a “human being”). But the deepest force of the novel is not this unique situation but its reverberation of routine judgments of beings that seem “other” to any possibility of social sympathy. In the 1823 play, the “others” (though played for comedy) are the tinker-gypsies, clad in goatskins and body paint (one is even named “Tanskin” — a racialized differential).

Victor Frankenstein greets his awakening creature as a “catastrophe,” a “wretch,” and soon a “monster.” The Creature has no name, just these epithets of contempt. The only person to address him with sympathy is blind, spared the shock of the “countenance.” Readers are blind this way, too, finding the Creature only on the page and speaking a common language. This continuity, rather than antithesis, to the human is reflected in the first illustrations: 

In the cover for the 1823 play, above, the Creature looks quite human, dishy even — alarming only in size and that gaze of expectation. The 1831 Creature, shown on page 29, is not a patent “monster”: It’s full-grown, remarkably ripped, human-looking, understandably dazed. The real “monster,” we could think, is the reckless student fleeing the results of an unsupervised undergraduate experiment gone rogue. 

In Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein pleads sympathy for the “human nature” in his revulsion. “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health ... but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room.” Repelled by this betrayal of “beauty,” Frankenstein never feels responsible, let alone parental. Shelley’s genius is to understand this ethical monstrosity as a nightmare extreme of common anxiety for expectant parents: What if I can’t love a child whose physical formation is appalling (deformed, deficient, or even, as at her own birth, just female)? 

The Creature’s advent in the novel is not in this famous scene of awakening, however. It comes in the narrative that frames Frankenstein’s story: a polar expedition that has become icebound. Far on the ice plain, the ship’s crew beholds “the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature,” driving a dogsled. Three paragraphs on, another man-shape arrives off the side of the ship on a fragment of ice, alone but for one sled dog. “His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering,” the captain records; “I never saw a man in so wretched a condition.” This dreadful man focuses the first scene of “animation” in Frankenstein: “We restored him to animation by rubbing him with brandy, and forcing him to swallow a small quantity. As soon as he shewed signs of life, we wrapped him up in blankets, and placed him near the chimney of the kitchen-stove. By slow degrees he recovered ... .” 

The re-animation (well before his name is given in the novel) turns out to be Victor Frankenstein. A crazed wretch of a “creature” (so he’s described) could have seemed a fearful “other,” but is cared for as a fellow human being. His subsequent tale of his despicably “monstrous” Creature is scored with this tremendous irony. The most disturbing aspect of this Creature is his “humanity”: this pathos of his hope for family and social acceptance, his intuitive benevolence, bitterness about abuse, and skill with language (which a Princeton valedictorian might envy) that solicits fellow-human attention — all denied by misfortune of physical formation. The deepest power of Frankenstein, still in force 200 years on, is not its so-called monster, but its exposure of “monster” as a contingency of human sympathy.  

Essays About Frankenstein: Top 5 Examples Plus Prompts

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the greatest works of literature; if you are writing essays about Frankenstein, you can start by reading some essay examples. 

When we think of Frankenstein, we often picture a hulking monster. However, “Frankenstein” refers to one of two things: The novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, or Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the scientist who created the great beast. The monster is Frankenstein’s monster, not Frankenstein himself.

Dr. Frankenstein defies nature in the novel and creates sentient body-stitched body parts. Unfortunately, his creation turns on him, and the scientist eventually dies. The novel is a good reminder of our very nature as human beings and our place in the world. 

If you want to write a good essay about Frankenstein, read these essay examples and prompts for inspiration. 

1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: Critical Essay by Andrew Eliot Binder

2. suspense in frankenstein by sophie tyler, 3. dr. frankenstein’s three big mistakes by charlotte gordon, 4. frankenstein is a tragedy, not a romantic novel by jennifer n. adams, 5. frankenstein & gender roles by frederick hopkins, 1. why can readers empathize with the monster , 2. is franknstein “the modern prometheus”, 3. the true monster of the story, 4. lessons we can learn from frankenstein, 5. does frankenstein deserve its fame, 6. the influence of frankenstein.

“Shelley immediately likens Frankenstein to his own creation through the word “wretched,” and, in doing so, present an irony. Frankenstein deserts his “wretched” creation, who then becomes hungry and harassed by society. But when the roles are reversed, and Frankenstein is described as “wretched,” he is given “soup,” shelter, and protection from being “tormented.”

Binder’s essay compares the characters of Walton and Frankenstein, showing the importance of human relationships. Despite their similar upbringing and personality, Walton craves companionship while Frankenstein isolates himself; the former survives while the latter perishes. Binder believes that Shelley intends to show the importance of being part of society, for we will not survive without it.  

“The message of the novel is that scientists should have self-control in their work to avoid becoming obsessed, otherwise this will lead to their ‘destruction’ as was the case with Frankenstein. In the novel Captain Walton learned from Frankenstein and decided to put an end to his obsession of reaching the north..”

In her essay, Tyler discusses how Shelley creates suspense in Frankenstein through word choice, the symbolism of darkness, pacing, and short sentence structure. Put together, Shelley evokes a dark, foreboding tone, showing the scientist’s terror as the novel progresses and, consequently, the message that scientists must not overstep their bounds and have restraint in their work.

“Artificial intelligence isn’t likely to kill us all—but the more people work on the problem, the more the odds go down. Frankenstein’s creature did not have to be a blight on society. He devolved into a monster of revenge because he was abandoned by his creator.”

Gordon writes about the rise of artificial intelligence and its similarity to Shelley’s Frankenstein . He describes Dr. Frankenstein’s mistakes, unwillingness to share his research with others, neglecting his creation until it was too late to stop it, and poor design due to inadequate resources. A.I. researchers can learn from these mistakes to ensure that their creations do not prove detrimental to others’ lives, as in Frankenstein or society. 

“What Mary Shelley had written, was a tragedy. Both characters, Frankenstein and the monster suffered great tragedies in their life; Frankenstein suffered from the continuous loss of family and friends from his own mistake and the monster suffered a life of solitude and not having known love, kindness, or friendship.”

Adams poses a theory that Frankenstein is a tragic work of literature rather than a romantic novel. Frankenstein and the monster suffer greatly, and conflict is demonstrated against each other and in their heads. Their actions throughout the novel are a result of their tragedies. Adams does an excellent job of conveying her beliefs and presenting evidence to support her claim. 

“Jane Austen once wrote ‘hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be calm waters all our lives’. This helps to sum up the possible mention of the need for the emancipation for women throughout Shelley’s book. We are introduced to varying female roles throughout the book, from Elizabeth to Safie, the ‘gender roles’ have varied in empowering one character while leaving the other to be the representation of the ‘times’.”

Hopkins’s essay discusses how Frankenstein reflects Shelley’s views on gender roles. For example, the character Justine is a “passive, submissive” woman of the time; she meets an unfortunate end. Safie, on the other hand, is more independent and brings joy to everyone when she is present. These examples, among others, reflect Shelley’s desire for society to change its attitude towards women. 

Prompts on Essays about Frankenstein

A significant aspect of the story is the monster’s “humanity.” Readers can identify with his character and relationship with society. It is interesting to discuss why this could be the case. Delve into the question, “how do we relate to the monster?” Write about the different ways the monster appears more human and “worthy of empathy,” so to speak.

Interestingly, Frankenstein is suggested to be a modern version of the Greek god. Look into who Prometheus was in mythology and consider the similarities between him and Dr. Frankenstein. How is he a “modern Prometheus?” Use sources to support your findings, and create a compelling argumentative essay.

On a surface level, Frankenstein’s creation is the “monster” in the novel. However, some argue that the true monster is Frankenstein, for tampering with the creation of organic life. So who is the monster to you? There is abundant evidence to support either character; for an engaging essay, get quotes from the novel and online sources. 

Behind Frankenstein lies a set of truths about humanity and some values and lessons we can learn from. What do the story and characters reveal about our inherent nature, and what lessons can we apply to our own lives? You can write about one or more, but be sure to explain them in detail.

Frankenstein is regarded as one of the most famous works of literature, on par with Romeo and Juliet, Moby Dick, and other classics. Should it be considered “one of the greats?” Based on readings and research, decide on your response and defend your position.

Particularly in the world of horror, Frankenstein has had a tremendous impact. Your essay can discuss the novel’s lasting legacy and its effects on pop culture, the science-fiction and horror genres, and literature. In addition, you should include examples of works that exhibit noticeable influence from the novel and its characters. 

Check out our guide packed full of transition words for essays .

If you’re still stuck, check out our general resource of essay writing topics .

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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The Strange and Twisted Life of “Frankenstein”

By Jill Lepore

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Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley began writing “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus” when she was eighteen years old, two years after she’d become pregnant with her first child, a baby she did not name. “Nurse the baby, read,” she had written in her diary, day after day, until the eleventh day: “I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it,” and then, in the morning, “Find my baby dead.” With grief at that loss came a fear of “a fever from the milk.” Her breasts were swollen, inflamed, unsucked; her sleep, too, grew fevered. “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,” she wrote in her diary. “Awake and find no baby.”

Pregnant again only weeks later, she was likely still nursing her second baby when she started writing “Frankenstein,” and pregnant with her third by the time she finished. She didn’t put her name on her book—she published “Frankenstein” anonymously, in 1818, not least out of a concern that she might lose custody of her children—and she didn’t give her monster a name, either. “This anonymous androdaemon,” one reviewer called it. For the first theatrical production of “Frankenstein,” staged in London in 1823 (by which time the author had given birth to four children, buried three, and lost another unnamed baby to a miscarriage so severe that she nearly died of bleeding that stopped only when her husband had her sit on ice), the monster was listed on the playbill as “––––––.”

“This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good,” Shelley remarked about the creature’s theatrical billing. She herself had no name of her own. Like the creature pieced together from cadavers collected by Victor Frankenstein, her name was an assemblage of parts: the name of her mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, stitched to that of her father, the philosopher William Godwin, grafted onto that of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, as if Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley were the sum of her relations, bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, if not the milk of her mother’s milk, since her mother had died eleven days after giving birth to her, mainly too sick to give suck— Awoke and found no mother .

“It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils,” Victor Frankenstein, a university student, says, pouring out his tale. The rain patters on the windowpane; a bleak light flickers from a dying candle. He looks at the “lifeless thing” at his feet, come to life: “I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.” Having labored so long to bring the creature to life, he finds himself disgusted and horrified—“unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created”—and flees, abandoning his creation, unnamed. “I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion,” the creature says, before, in the book’s final scene, he disappears on a raft of ice.

“Frankenstein” is four stories in one: an allegory, a fable, an epistolary novel, and an autobiography, a chaos of literary fertility that left its very young author at pains to explain her “hideous progeny.” In the introduction she wrote for a revised edition in 1831, she took up the humiliating question “How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea” and made up a story in which she virtually erased herself as an author, insisting that the story had come to her in a dream (“I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together”) and that writing it consisted of “making only a transcript” of that dream. A century later, when a lurching, grunting Boris Karloff played the creature in Universal Pictures’s brilliant 1931 production of “Frankenstein,” directed by James Whale, the monster—prodigiously eloquent, learned, and persuasive in the novel—was no longer merely nameless but all but speechless, too, as if what Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley had to say was too radical to be heard, an agony unutterable.

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Every book is a baby, born, but “Frankenstein” is often supposed to have been more assembled than written, an unnatural birth, as though all that the author had done were to piece together the writings of others, especially those of her father and her husband. “If Godwin’s daughter could not help philosophising,” one mid-twentieth-century critic wrote, “Shelley’s wife knew also the eerie charms of the morbid, the occult, the scientifically bizarre.” This enduring condescension, the idea of the author as a vessel for the ideas of other people—a fiction in which the author participated, so as to avoid the scandal of her own brain—goes some way to explaining why “Frankenstein” has accreted so many wildly different and irreconcilable readings and restagings in the two centuries since its publication. For its bicentennial, the original, 1818 edition has been reissued, as a trim little paperback (Penguin Classics), with an introduction by the distinguished biographer Charlotte Gordon, and as a beautifully illustrated hardcover keepsake, “The New Annotated Frankenstein” (Liveright), edited and annotated by Leslie S. Klinger. Universal is developing a new “Bride of Frankenstein” as part of a series of remakes from its backlist of horror movies. Filmography recapitulating politico-chicanery, the age of the superhero is about to yield to the age of the monster. But what about the baby?

“Frankenstein,” the story of a creature who has no name, has for two hundred years been made to mean just about anything. Most lately, it has been taken as a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley technologists, an interpretation that derives less from the 1818 novel than from later stage and film versions, especially the 1931 film, and that took its modern form in the aftermath of Hiroshima. In that spirit, M.I.T. Press has just published an edition of the original text “annotated for scientists, engineers, and creators of all kinds,” and prepared by the leaders of the Frankenstein Bicentennial Project, at Arizona State University, with funding from the National Science Foundation; they offer the book as a catechism for designers of robots and inventors of artificial intelligences. “Remorse extinguished every hope,” Victor says, in Volume II, Chapter 1, by which time the creature has begun murdering everyone Victor loves. “I had been the author of unalterable evils; and I lived in daily fear, lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness.” The M.I.T. edition appends, here, a footnote: “The remorse Victor expresses is reminiscent of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s sentiments when he witnessed the unspeakable power of the atomic bomb. . . . Scientists’ responsibility must be engaged before their creations are unleashed.”

This is a way to make use of the novel, but it involves stripping out nearly all the sex and birth, everything female—material first mined by Muriel Spark, in a biography of Shelley published in 1951, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of her death. Spark, working closely with Shelley’s diaries and paying careful attention to the author’s eight years of near-constant pregnancy and loss, argued that “Frankenstein” was no minor piece of genre fiction but a literary work of striking originality. In the nineteen-seventies, that interpretation was taken up by feminist literary critics who wrote about “Frankenstein” as establishing the origins of science fiction by way of the “female gothic.” What made Mary Shelley’s work so original, Ellen Moers argued at the time, was that she was a writer who was a mother. Tolstoy had thirteen children, born at home, Moers pointed out, but the major female eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, the Austens and Dickinsons, tended to be “spinsters and virgins.” Shelley was an exception.

So was Mary Wollstonecraft, a woman Shelley knew not as a mother but as a writer who wrote about, among other things, how to raise a baby. “I conceive it to be the duty of every rational creature to attend to its offspring,” Wollstonecraft wrote in “Thoughts on the Education of Daughters,” in 1787, ten years before giving birth to the author of “Frankenstein.” As Charlotte Gordon notes in her dual biography “Romantic Outlaws,” Wollstonecraft first met her fellow political radical William Godwin in 1791, at a London dinner party hosted by the publisher of Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man.” Wollstonecraft and Godwin were “mutually displeased with each other,” Godwin later wrote; they were the smartest people in the room, and they couldn’t help arguing all evening. Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Woman” appeared in 1792, and, the next year, Godwin published “Political Justice.” In 1793, during an affair with the American speculator and diplomat Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft became pregnant. (“I am nourishing a creature,” she wrote Imlay.) Not long after Wollstonecraft gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Fanny, Imlay abandoned her. She and Godwin became lovers in 1796, and when she became pregnant they married, for the sake of the baby, even though neither of them believed in marriage. In 1797, Wollstonecraft died of an infection contracted from the fingers of a physician who reached into her uterus to remove the afterbirth. Godwin’s daughter bore the name of his dead wife, as if she could be brought back to life, another afterbirth.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was fifteen years old when she met Percy Bysshe Shelley, in 1812. He was twenty, and married, with a pregnant wife. Having been thrown out of Oxford for his atheism and disowned by his father, Shelley had sought out William Godwin, his intellectual hero, as a surrogate father. Shelley and Godwin fille spent their illicit courtship, as much Romanticism as romance, passionately reading the works of her parents while reclining on Wollstonecraft’s grave, in the St. Pancras churchyard. “Go to the tomb and read,” she wrote in her diary. “Go with Shelley to the churchyard.” Plainly, they were doing more than reading, because she was pregnant when she ran away with him, fleeing her father’s house in the half-light of night, along with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who wanted to be ruined, too.

If any man served as an inspiration for Victor Frankenstein, it was Lord Byron, who followed his imagination, indulged his passions, and abandoned his children. He was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” as one of his lovers pronounced, mainly because of his many affairs, which likely included sleeping with his half sister, Augusta Leigh. Byron married in January, 1815, and a daughter, Ada, was born in December. But, when his wife left him, a year into their marriage, Byron was forced never to see his wife or daughter again, lest his wife reveal the scandal of his affair with Leigh. (Ada was about the age Mary Godwin’s first baby would have been, had she lived. Ada’s mother, fearing that the girl might grow up to become a poet, as mad and bad as her father, raised her, instead, to be a mathematician. Ada Lovelace, a scientist as imaginative as Victor Frankenstein, would in 1843 provide an influential theoretical description of a general-purpose computer, a century before one was built.)

In the spring of 1816, Byron, fleeing scandal, left England for Geneva, and it was there that he met up with Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, and Claire Clairmont. Moralizers called them the League of Incest. By summer, Clairmont was pregnant by Byron. Byron was bored. One evening, he announced, “We will each write a ghost story.” Godwin began the story that would become “Frankenstein.” Byron later wrote, “Methinks it is a wonderful book for a girl of nineteen— not nineteen, indeed, at that time.”

During the months when Godwin was turning her ghost story into a novel, and nourishing yet another creature in her belly, Shelley’s wife, pregnant now with what would have been their third child, killed herself; Clairmont gave birth to a girl—Byron’s, though most people assumed it was Shelley’s—and Shelley and Godwin got married. For a time, they attempted to adopt the girl, though Byron later took her, having noticed that nearly all of Godwin and Shelley’s children had died. “I so totally disapprove of the mode of Children’s treatment in their family—that I should look upon the Child as going into a hospital,” he wrote, cruelly, about the Shelleys. “Have they reared one?” (Byron, by no means interested in rearing a child himself, placed the girl in a convent, where she died at the age of five.)

When “Frankenstein,” begun in the summer of 1816, was published eighteen months later, it bore an unsigned preface by Percy Shelley and a dedication to William Godwin. The book became an immediate sensation. “It seems to be universally known and read,” a friend wrote to Percy Shelley. Sir Walter Scott wrote, in an early review, “The author seems to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination.” Scott, like many readers, assumed that the author was Percy Shelley. Reviewers less enamored of the Romantic poet damned the book’s Godwinian radicalism and its Byronic impieties. John Croker, a conservative member of Parliament, called “Frankenstein” a “tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity”—radical, unhinged, and immoral.

But the politics of “Frankenstein” are as intricate as its structure of stories nested like Russian dolls. The outermost doll is a set of letters from an English adventurer to his sister, recounting his Arctic expedition and his meeting with the strange, emaciated, haunted Victor Frankenstein. Within the adventurer’s account, Frankenstein tells the story of his fateful experiment, which has led him to pursue his creature to the ends of the earth. And within Frankenstein’s story lies the tale told by the creature himself, the littlest, innermost Russian doll: the baby.

The novel’s structure meant that those opposed to political radicalism often found themselves baffled and bewildered by “Frankenstein,” as literary critics such as Chris Baldick and Adriana Craciun have pointed out. The novel appears to be heretical and revolutionary; it also appears to be counter-revolutionary. It depends on which doll is doing the talking.

If “Frankenstein” is a referendum on the French Revolution, as some critics have read it, Victor Frankenstein’s politics align nicely with those of Edmund Burke, who described violent revolution as “a species of political monster, which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it.” The creature’s own politics, though, align not with Burke’s but with those of two of Burke’s keenest adversaries, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Victor Frankenstein has made use of other men’s bodies, like a lord over the peasantry or a king over his subjects, in just the way that Godwin denounced when he described feudalism as a “ferocious monster.” (“How dare you sport thus with life?” the creature asks his maker.) The creature, born innocent, has been treated so terribly that he has become a villain, in just the way that Wollstonecraft predicted. “People are rendered ferocious by misery,” she wrote, “and misanthropy is ever the offspring of discontent.” (“Make me happy,” the creature begs Frankenstein, to no avail.)

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley took pains that readers’ sympathies would lie not only with Frankenstein, whose suffering is dreadful, but also with the creature, whose suffering is worse. The art of the book lies in the way Shelley nudges readers’ sympathy, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, even line by line, from Frankenstein to the creature, even when it comes to the creature’s vicious murders, first of Frankenstein’s little brother, then of his best friend, and, finally, of his bride. Much evidence suggests that she succeeded. “The justice is indisputably on his side,” one critic wrote in 1824, “and his sufferings are, to me, touching to the last degree.”

“Hear my tale,” the creature insists, when he at last confronts his creator. What follows is the autobiography of an infant. He awoke, and all was confusion. “I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing.” He was cold and naked and hungry and bereft of company, and yet, having no language, was unable even to name these sensations. “But, feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept.” He learned to walk, and began to wander, still unable to speak—“the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again.” Eventually, he found shelter in a lean-to adjacent to a cottage alongside a wood, where, observing the cottagers talk, he learned of the existence of language: “I discovered the names that were given to some of the most familiar objects of discourse: I learned and applied the words fire , milk , bread , and wood .” Watching the cottagers read a book, “Ruins of Empires,” by the eighteenth-century French revolutionary the Comte de Volney, he both learned how to read and acquired “a cursory knowledge of history”—a litany of injustice. “I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; of rank, descent, and noble blood.” He learned that the weak are everywhere abused by the powerful, and the poor despised.

Shelley kept careful records of the books she read and translated, naming title after title and compiling a list each year—Milton, Goethe, Rousseau, Ovid, Spenser, Coleridge, Gibbon, and hundreds more, from history to chemistry. “Babe is not well,” she noted in her diary while writing “Frankenstein.” “Write, draw and walk; read Locke.” Or, “Walk; write; read the ‘Rights of Women.’ ” The creature keeps track of his reading, too, and, unsurprisingly, he reads the books that Shelley read and reread most often. One day, wandering in the woods, he stumbles upon a leather trunk, lying on the ground, that contains three books: Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Plutarch’s “Lives,” and Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther”—the library that, along with Volney’s “Ruins,” determines his political philosophy, as reviewers readily understood. “His code of ethics is formed on this extraordinary stock of poetical theology, pagan biography, adulterous sentimentality, and atheistical jacobinism,” according to the review of “Frankenstein” most widely read in the United States, “yet, in spite of all his enormities, we think the monster, a very pitiable and ill-used monster.”

Sir Walter Scott found this the most preposterous part of “Frankenstein”: “That he should have not only learned to speak, but to read, and, for aught we know, to write—that he should have become acquainted with Werter, with Plutarch’s Lives, and with Paradise Lost, by listening through a hole in a wall, seems as unlikely as that he should have acquired, in the same way, the problems of Euclid, or the art of book-keeping by single and double entry.” But the creature’s account of his education very closely follows the conventions of a genre of writing far distant from Scott’s own: the slave narrative.

Frederick Douglass, born into slavery the year “Frankenstein” was published, was following those same conventions when, in his autobiography, he described learning to read by trading with white boys for lessons. Douglass realized his political condition at the age of twelve, while reading the “Dialogue Between a Master and Slave,” reprinted in “The Columbian Orator” (a book for which he paid fifty cents, and which was one of the only things he brought with him when he escaped from slavery). It was his coming of age. “The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers,” Douglass wrote, in a line that the creature himself might have written.

Likewise, the creature comes of age when he finds Frankenstein’s notebook, recounting his experiment, and learns how he was created, and with what injustice he has been treated. It’s at this moment that the creature’s tale is transformed from the autobiography of an infant to the autobiography of a slave. “I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing,” Douglass wrote. “It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy.” So, too, the creature: “Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was.” Douglass: “I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead.” The creature: “Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live?” Douglass seeks his escape; the creature seeks his revenge.

Among the many moral and political ambiguities of Shelley’s novel is the question of whether Victor Frankenstein is to be blamed for creating the monster—usurping the power of God, and of women—or for failing to love, care for, and educate him. The Frankenstein-is-Oppenheimer model considers only the former, which makes for a weak reading of the novel. Much of “Frankenstein” participates in the debate over abolition, as several critics have astutely observed, and the revolution on which the novel most plainly turns is not the one in France but the one in Haiti. For abolitionists in England, the Haitian revolution, along with continued slave rebellions in Jamaica and other West Indian sugar islands, raised deeper and harder questions about liberty and equality than the revolution in France had, since they involved an inquiry into the idea of racial difference. Godwin and Wollstonecraft had been abolitionists, as were both Percy and Mary Shelley, who, for instance, refused to eat sugar because of how it was produced. Although Britain and the United States enacted laws abolishing the importation of slaves in 1807, the debate over slavery in Britain’s territories continued through the decision in favor of emancipation, in 1833. Both Shelleys closely followed this debate, and in the years before and during the composition of “Frankenstein” they together read several books about Africa and the West Indies. Percy Shelley was among those abolitionists who urged not immediate but gradual emancipation, fearing that the enslaved, so long and so violently oppressed, and denied education, would, if unconditionally freed, seek a vengeance of blood. He asked, “Can he who the day before was a trampled slave suddenly become liberal-minded, forbearing, and independent?”

Given Mary Shelley’s reading of books that stressed the physical distinctiveness of Africans, her depiction of the creature is explicitly racial, figuring him as African, as opposed to European. “I was more agile than they, and could subsist upon coarser diet,” the creature says. “I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs.” This characterization became, onstage, a caricature. Beginning with the 1823 stage production of “Frankenstein,” the actor playing “–––––– ” wore blue face paint, a color that identified him less as dead than as colored. It was this production that George Canning, abolitionist, Foreign Secretary, and leader of the House of Commons, invoked in 1824, during a parliamentary debate about emancipation. Tellingly, Canning’s remarks brought together the novel’s depiction of the creature as a baby and the culture’s figuring of Africans as children. “In dealing with the negro, Sir, we must remember that we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child,” Canning told Parliament. “To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength, in the maturity of his physical passions, but in the infancy of his uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance.” In later nineteenth-century stage productions, the creature was explicitly dressed as an African. Even the 1931 James Whale film, in which Karloff wore green face paint, furthers this figuring of the creature as black: he is, in the film’s climactic scene, lynched.

Because the creature reads as a slave, “Frankenstein” holds a unique place in American culture, as the literary scholar Elizabeth Young argued, a few years ago, in “Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor.” “What is the use of living, when in fact I am dead,” the black abolitionist David Walker asked from Boston in 1829, in his “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World,” anticipating Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice” by a century and a half. “Slavery is everywhere the pet monster of the American people,” Frederick Douglass declared in New York, on the eve of the American Civil War. Nat Turner was called a monster; so was John Brown. By the eighteen-fifties, Frankenstein’s monster regularly appeared in American political cartoons as a nearly naked black man, signifying slavery itself, seeking his vengeance upon the nation that created him.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was dead by then, her own chaotic origins already forgotten. Nearly everyone she loved died before she did, most of them when she was still very young. Her half sister, Fanny Imlay, took her own life in 1816. Percy Shelley drowned in 1822. Lord Byron fell ill and died in Greece in 1824, leaving Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, as she put it, “the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.”

She chose that as the theme behind the novel she wrote eight years after “Frankenstein.” Published in 1826, when the author was twenty-eight, “The Last Man” is set in the twenty-first century, when only one man endures, the lone survivor of a terrible plague, having failed—for all his imagination, for all his knowledge—to save the life of a single person. Nurse the baby, read. Find my baby dead.  ♦

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By Adam Kirsch

By Joan Acocella

By Benjamin Kunkel

The Novel “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley: Critical Analysis Essay

Introduction, walter scotts critique, naomi hetherington’s critique, works cited.

Frankenstein’s work has been criticized by many scholars who have tried to come up with other ideas concerning the Novel. Her book contains critical information which cannot be underestimated in the current contemporary society. Her use of hypothetical questions and fiction in the setup of her ideas can be utilized in recent literary works. This essay discusses two critiques by Professor Naomi Hetherington’s and Walter Scott’s analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Walter Scott, who was a British national, wrote the Romantic Circle Critiques. He was born in Edinburg and attended Edinburgh High School. He further went to Edinburgh University to study arts and law (Romantic Circles). He was involved in the Romantic Movement and participated in various occupational Walter was conducted, including poetry, historical novelist, clerk session, and advocate. His first poem was entitled Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Additionally, he published novels like Waverley, Guy Mannering, and Tales of My Land.

Mary’s novel is featured in the romantic fiction of nature which depicts family values and fundamental laws of nature. The author aims to explain the romantic nature by explaining unusual settings and nature components (Romantic Circles). The perceptions which drove Frankenstein, such as the change of species Belle Assemblee are explained. Furthermore, the difficulties and challenges Frankenstein and encounters with demons are illustrated. The changes that occur from life to death and death to stamina are explained. Themes of creation and revenge run across the novel in the urge of Frankenstein to avenge his originator for all the miseries.

Scoots’ analysis goes in hand with the settings and perceptions of Mary’s fiction. The element of imaginary setting and magical narration is the primary focus of the author’s critique. They bring about a better understanding of this novel in a relevant manner. The author supports Mary’s work and critically analysis the novel with matching arguments in a necessary way. He uses romance fiction and the element of vengeance and anger due to demons’ control which generally gives a good narration based on historical events. I agree with the critique since it uses Frankenstein’s ideas and themes which support his arguments. The similarity in the content and the settings are valid and authentic.

Another critique is from Professor Naomi Hetherington, who has a Ph.D. from Southampton University. She has been a teacher in Birkbeck for almost five years at the University of London, where she earned a teaching and scholarship award for her incredible contribution to literature. Naomi’s thesis illustrates that Mary wanted to use myths through fiction, the meaning of being a human being in a universe full of troubles (Hetherington 42). Additionally, she suggests that Mary revised her work to deviate from Lawrence and compare it with Christian Orthodox etiology.

Naomi’s thesis statement is relevant since it illustrates a step-by-step analysis of the novel. The first section of her research relates Frankenstein to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Prometheus legend. On the other hand, the last section describes the book to the religious nature of Mary after her husband dies (Ozherelyev 63). The Miltonic illustrations seen throughout the novel are used to emphasize the origin of evil in the world. The presence of a deity who creates human beings is seen. I agree with Naomi’s Critique since it relates outside resources such as Frankenstein to Milton Paradise Lost and Prometheus legend to support her arguments. She further identifies other themes related to the main content making these resources valid.

In summary, the two critiques by Naomi and Scoot give a better review of the novel provide literature and comprehension of the past event. Factors that contribute to environmental changes are discussed. The themes of creation and vengeance are illustrated to give a clear perspective of Mary’s main aim in writing her book. After the death of her husband, Mary becomes religious and seeks Christian Orthodox etiology ideas. The existence of a deity who creates human beings indicates the origin of life, and its end is seen by death.

Hetherington, Naomi. “Creator And Created in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .”Taylor & Francis , vol, 12, no. 5, 2022, pp. 32-85

Ozherelyev, Konstantin A. “Philosophical Contexts in Mary Shelley’S Novel «Frankenstein.» Herald Of Omsk University , vol 25, no. 3, 2020, pp. 61-66. Dostoevsky Omsk State University ,

Romantic Circles. “Belle Assemblee Review of Frankenstein. March 1818, Romantic Circles”. Romantic-Circles.Org , 2022, Web.

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The Analysis of Frankenstein

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Exclusively raising opposition to commonplace phenomena can only go as far as just that: talk of a new contrary, and usually unwanted, opinion. The crucial ingredient in making a significant impact with a foreign idea is to make [...]

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"Shifting the Rules": Thomas Cooper Exhibits Spotlights the Role of Women in Science Fiction

“Science Fiction,” says University of South Carolina Assistant Professor of English Alyssa Collins, “asks us to take things seriously and ask questions as to what the future may look like, or how life should be.”

Historically, when we think of the voices asking those questions, they are male: Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, H.G. Wells and Ray Bradbury, just to name a few. But in fact, women have been writing Science Fiction since the genre’s earliest days – and, from Frankenstein to The Handmaid’s Tale, they have contributed some of its most foundational texts.

“Women in Science Fiction: From Frankenstein to Dungeons and Dragons,” an exhibit at Thomas Cooper Library curated by Rare Books Librarian David Shay, explores the rich history of female Science Fiction writers through University Libraries’ collections of works spanning from the 1600s through the present. Among the writers featured in the exhibit is renowned Science Fiction author Octavia E. Butler, whose work is especially notable for the attention it is currently attracting because of the way that novels Butler wrote decades ago reflect some of the predominant issues and concerns of our time.

During her life, Butler received the MacArthur “Genius” Grant and PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award for her work. She authored several award-winning novels tackling themes like gender, sexuality, race and the inequalities that stem from all of these. Her work ranges from more “classic” Science Fiction dystopian novels like her Earthseed duology, to more speculative and experimental fiction which can be found in the likes of Fledgling, the last of Butler’s novels published during her lifetime, which focuses on a semi-utopian vampiric society.

Like her exhibit case counterpart The Handmaid’s Tale, there has been a noticeable resurgence in popularity of Butler’s works in recent years. Several of her books have been made into television series, like Atwood’s novel. Butler was asking questions and having conversations during her lifetime that still strongly resonate with the younger generations of today, according to Collins, who is the inaugural Octavia E. Butler Fellow at the Huntington Library, where Butler’s papers are housed.

“She’s very great at extrapolating from her present day, and I think people are really drawn to it because her stories feel either prescient or like they are addressing contemporary things,” Collins says. “Especially during the COVID pandemic, people were really into the Earthseed duology.” The Earthseed duology includes Parable of the Sower and its sequel Parable of the Talents.

This is especially true when readers consider that Parable of the Sower’s story begins in 2024. Reading Parable in 2024 feels immediately eerie, as if Butler is speaking to the present day in a dystopian, semi-apocalyptic novel. Butler was incredibly good at “reading the world” according to Collins. “She called herself a ‘news junkie’ and she was very invested in research of all sorts and knowing what things were going on around her.”

The current generation of twenty-somethings is engulfed in current events, and are also having similar conversations surrounding race, gender and sexuality. Younger readers can find a kindred spirit, and recognizable voice in Butler, even though she was writing nearly thirty years ago, and died before many of them were born. “A generation who has gone on to have those kinds of conversations is finding someone who’s also having those conversations just with a time difference. Everyone caught up to Butler,” Collins says.

But Butler doesn’t tell her readers how to feel about her work, or her characters’ actions. Instead, she points readers to questions they may have about her writing and encourages them to ask these questions of their own society.

According to Collins, this is how women have been able to “shift the rules” of Science Fiction. The genre is wrought with expectations of its authors, and women writers like Butler, N. K. Jemisin and Margaret Atwood ask their readers to “look at things that are important” according to Collins. “They ask us to look at life and start to ask our own questions about it.” This, according to Collins, is the most exciting part of reading women in Science Fiction.

“A lot of Butler’s work is so powerful, but she also doesn’t tell you how you are supposed to feel about character’s actions. It’s a little ambiguous and I think she really uses those conventions.” Female Science Fiction authors like Butler take the unconventional medium, whether it be dystopian society, vampires or aliens, and gives them to readers in a way that they might have never been paid much attention to before or that they were never expecting.

"’Everything’s too crazy.’ ‘And what? You think it’s going to get sane? It’s never been sane. You just have to go ahead and live, no matter what.’”  (Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower)

This is the crux of why Butler resonates with the generation of young people entering adulthood. They ask themselves these questions every day, and in Butler they find a confidant and guiding voice.

“Women in Science Fiction: From Frankenstein to Dungeons and Dragons” is on display in the exhibit space by the front entrance to Thomas Cooper Library through the end of the Spring 2024 semester.

Challenge the conventional. Create the exceptional. No Limits.

Screen Rant

Lisa frankenstein cast & character guide.

Directed by Zelda Williams and written by Diablo Cody, the horror romance comedy Lisa Frankenstein features an exciting cast of young actors.

• Lisa Frankenstein, directed by Zelda Williams, offers a modern twist on the classic Frankenstein story with a talented young cast.
• The film follows Lisa, a high school outcast who revives a Victorian gentleman named Frank, leading to charming misadventures.
• Despite mixed reviews, Lisa Frankenstein brings a fun and entertaining take on the classic monster movie formula.

Directed by Zelda Williams, the horror comedy Lisa Frankenstein features an exciting cast of young actors. Set in 1989, the film follows the misadventures of Lisa, a high school outcast who has suffered a grave loss and accidentally revives a handsome corpse of a Victorian gentleman. The revived corpse, dubbed Frank, is bewildered by the modern technology and social norms of the late 20th century. Despite his initial confusion, Frank's inherent charm and gentlemanly manners quickly endear him to Lisa, who sees an opportunity to mold him into the perfect companion.

As Lisa sets out to shape Frank into her ideal partner, their journey is marked by a string of mishaps, as they encounter a diverse array of characters, including Lisa's quirky friends, doubtful peers, and a rival scientist determined to uncover the mysteries surrounding Frank's revival. Lisa Frankenstein is written by Diablo Cody, who also wrote the cult classic Jennifer's Body (now confirmed to share a universe with Lisa Frankenstein ) . Released to mixed reviews, Lisa Frankenstein nonetheless brings a fun, modern spin on the classic Frankenstein movie formula thanks to its talented cast.

Lisa Frankenstein Ending Explained: What Happens To Lisa & The Creature

Kathryn newton as lisa swallows, kathryn newton is 27 years old.

Actor: Born in Orlando, Florida, Kathryn Newton first got famous for playing Louise Brooks in the CBS comedy series Gary Unmarried . She is most known for her roles as Cassie Lang in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), Abigail Carlson in the HBO mystery drama series Big Little Lie s, and Allie Pressman in Netflix's teen drama series The Society . Newton has also starred in the comedy Bad Teacher , the supernatural horror Paranormal Activity 4 , the crime drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and the sci-fi rom-com The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (2021).

Notable Movies & TV Shows:

Character: Lisa Swallows is a solitary teenager haunted by the tragic loss of her mother, who fell victim to an axe murderer two years prior. Lisa finds solace in frequent visits to the nearby Bachelor's Grove Cemetery, much to the displeasure of her relatives. Her friends at school are mean to her and call her weird. Lisa then finds herself falling for the corpse of a fellow teenager, despite never having met the boy. For some inexplicable reason, she feels a strong connection with him and feels more understood by him than anyone else.

Cole Sprouse as The Creature

Cole sprouse is 31 years old.

Actor: Cole Sprouse was born in Arezzo, Italy, and first got famous playing Cody Martin in the Disney Channel series The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and its subsequent spin-off, The Suite Life on Deck . Initially, he collaborated with his twin brother Dylan Sprouse across several projects. As a child, he also played the role of Ben Geller in the iconic sitcom Friends. Now, he is most known for playing Jughead Jones in The CW teen series Riverdale and recently starred in the romance drama Five Feet Apart and the sci-fi rom-com Moonshot.

Character: The Creature is a Victorian-era man who is resurrected from his grave by lightning. His exact origins remain a mystery, but his youthful appearance suggests a premature death. Whether by fate or mere chance, The Creature gravitates towards Lisa, who unwittingly becomes his guide on an extraordinary (and potentially dangerous) journey. As The Creature spends more time in Lisa's company, he gradually rekindles the humanity that he'd lost. The challenge now lies in preserving that newfound humanity. As a Victorian man, he also struggles to understand the social norms and technology of the late 1980s.

Liza Soberano as Taffy Swallows

Liza soberano is 26 years old.

Actor: Liza Soberano was born in Santa Clara, California, and is Filipino-American. She rose to prominence with her breakout role in the series Forevermore , and gained further fame for starring in hit films like Just The Way You Are , Everyday I Love You , My Ex and Whys , and Alone/Together . Soberano is also known for her lead roles in the series Dolce Amore , Bagani , Make It With You , and Trese.

Notable Movies & TV Shows

Character: Taffy is Lisa's bright, effortlessly popular stepsister, who remains slightly oblivious to the larger dynamics and Lisa's challenges. While the other girls at school are mean to Lisa, Taffy remains a close friend and confidante who enjoys hanging out with Lisa. Taffy is still always honest about finding Lisa occasionally odd, especially when Lisa drops the bomb that she is infatuated by a dead body.

Lisa Frankenstein Supporting Cast & Characters

These include all the people in lisa's life.

Henry Eikenberry as Michael: Henry Eikenberry is known for playing Derek in HBO's series Euphoria and Doug in the miniseries The Crowded Room. In Lisa Frankenstein , he plays Michael, Lisa's crush at school.

Joe Chrest as Dale: Joe Chrest plays Dale, Lisa's father and Taffy's stepfather. Throughout the film, he remains completely clueless about what his daughter is up to, despite his best intentions and interest in her life. Joe Chrest is perhaps best known for playing Ted Wheeler in the Netflix series Stranger Things , and has also acted in films like 21 Jump Street , 22 Jump Street , Oldboy , The Butler , and The Perfect Date.

Carla Gugino as Janet: Carla Gugino became famous following her lead roles in films like the Spy Kids trilogy, Sin City , Night at the Museum , American Gangster (2007), and Righteous Kill (2008). Recently, she has also starred in many shows, like the crime drama series Jett, the supernatural horror miniseries The Haunting of Hill House , The Haunting of Bly Manor, and The Fall of the House of Usher . In Lisa Frankenstein , Gugino plays Lisa's stepmother who doesn't particularly like Lisa and finds her to be strange and a burden.

Jenna Davis as Lori: Jenna Davis essays the role of Taffy's best friend. Davis is most known for voicing the main character of the horror film M3GAN and was previously a child actress, with a prominent role in the Disney Channel series Raven's Home (2018–2019).

Bryce Romero as Doug: Bryce Romero first broke big playing the role of Jack in The Maze Runner trilogy and has also featured in films like Maggie and played the role of Grayson on Scream: The TV Series . In Lisa Frankenstein, he plays Lisa's lab partner at school.

Where To Watch Lisa Frankenstein: Showtimes & Streaming Status

Lisa frankenstein.

Lisa Frankenstein is a comedic fantasy-horror film by first-time director Zelda Williams and is a twist on the classic Frankenstein formula. Set in 1989, a high school outcast named Lisa accidentally revives a handsome corpse from the Victorian era and resolves to rebuild him into the perfect man. 

Suggestions

• A Streetcar Named Desire
• Crime and Punishment
• Great Expectations
• Heart of Darkness
• Julius Caesar

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Historical Context Essay: Frankenstein & the Scientific Revolution

In Frankenstein , the reckless pursuit of scientific discovery leads to chaos, tragedy, and despair for all of the novel’s characters. Because so many characters suffer as a result of scientific advances, many critics read the book as a critical response to the Scientific Revolution . Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century with Copernicus’s argument for the sun being located at the center of the universe, the Scientific Revolution ushered in an era where assumptions about the natural world were challenged and revised. Other significant scientific discoveries, such as Galileo’s contributions to astronomy and physics and Isaac Newton’s discoveries about gravity and the laws of motion, meant that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw huge changes to the level of knowledge available about the world and how it worked. These scientific discoveries also led to shifts in how people related to knowledge: rather than relying on accepted wisdom from authoritative sources, people favored tests, observation, and evidence to support what was considered to be “true.”

Advances in our understanding of the laws of science led to many positive changes. However, some critics saw the progress of science as limitless, raising fears about how far was too far. Christian theology explains creation as an act of God; therefore, to tamper with this process, as Victor Frankenstein does in creating his monster, was to position oneself as on the same level as God. The idea of mutilating and dissecting corpses for the sake of experimentation became an increasingly real fear as medical study required better knowledge of anatomy and the possibility of experimental procedures. Shelley’s novel is not necessarily opposed to scientific progress or discovery, but focuses on what happens when science is not paired with individual moral responsibility. Victor Frankenstein is fixated on the glory of achievement, without considering what it will mean to have a new species be dependent on him.

Since the publication of Frankenstein , many other writers have grappled with questions of what might happen when people ignore the potential consequences of scientific discovery. In 1896, H.G Wells published The Island of Dr. Moreau , in which a Victor Frankenstein-like scientist creates human-animal hybrids. The novel was a direct response to contemporary debates about vivisection (experimental procedures performed on living animals). More recent developments in science and technology have also provoked reflection about a need for caution when testing the limits of innovation. Margaret Atwood's 2003 novel Oryx and Crake explores similar themes of bioengineering and the creation of a new type of humanoid, responding to scientific progress around genetic engineering and assisted reproduction, as well as environmental destruction. As technology, artificial intelligence, and the digital realm come to the forefront of scientific and ethical debates, television series like Black Mirror have also tackled the way in which carelessness and a lack of foresight can lead to unintended consequences.

Read more about grappling with scientific discovery in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World .

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Like My Book Title? Thanks, I Borrowed It.

Literary allusions are everywhere. What are they good for?

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By A.O. Scott

You see it everywhere, even if you don’t always recognize it: the literary allusion. Quick! Which two big novels of the past two years borrowed their titles from “Macbeth”? Nailing the answer — “ Birnam Wood ” and “ Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow ” — might make you feel a little smug.

Perhaps the frisson of cleverness ( I know where that’s from!), or the flip-side cringe of ignorance ( I should know where that’s from! ), is enough to spur you to buy a book, the way a search-optimized headline compels you to click a link. After all, titles are especially fertile ground for allusion-mongering. The name of a book becomes more memorable when it echoes something you might have heard — or think you should have heard — before.

This kind of appropriation seems to be a relatively modern phenomenon. Before the turn of the 20th century, titles were more descriptive than allusive. The books themselves may have been stuffed with learning, but the words on the covers were largely content to give the prospective reader the who (“Pamela,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “Frankenstein”), where (“Wuthering Heights,” “The Mill on the Floss,” “Treasure Island”) or what (“The Scarlet Letter,” “War and Peace,” “The Way We Live Now”) of the book.

Somehow, by the middle of the 20th century, literature had become an echo chamber. Look homeward, angel! Ask not for whom the sound and the fury slouches toward Bethlehem in dubious battle. When Marcel Proust was first translated into English, he was made to quote Shakespeare, and “In Search of Lost Time” (the literal, plainly descriptive French title) became “Remembrance of Things Past,” a line from Sonnet 30 .

Recent Proust translators have erased the Shakespearean reference in fidelity to the original, but the habit of dressing up new books in secondhand clothing persists, in fiction and nonfiction alike. Last year, in addition to “Birnam Wood,” there were Jonathan Rosen’s “ The Best Minds ,” with its whisper of Allen Ginsberg’s “ Howl ,” Paul Harding’s “ This Other Eden ” (“ Richard II ”), and William Egginton’s “ The Rigor of Angels ” (Borges). The best-seller lists and publishers’ catalogs contain multitudes ( Walt Whitman ). Here comes everybody! (James Joyce).

If you must write prose and poems, the words you use should be your own. I didn’t say that: Morrissey did, in a deepish Smiths cut (“ Cemetry Gates , ” from 1986), which misquotes Shakespeare and name-checks John Keats, William Butler Yeats and Oscar Wilde — possibly the most reliably recycled writers (along with John Milton and the authors of the King James Bible) in the English language.

Not that any of them would have minded. When Keats wrote that “ a thing of beauty is a joy forever ,” he surely hoped that at least that much of “ Endymion ” would outlive him. It’s a beautiful sentiment! And he may have been right. Does anyone read his four-part, 4,000-line elegy for Thomas Chatterton outside a college English class, or even for that matter inside one? Nonetheless, that opening line may ring a bell if you remember it from the movies “ Mary Poppins ,” “Yellow Submarine” or “ White Men Can’t Jump .”

Wilde’s witticism and bons mots have survived even as some of his longer works have languished. If it’s true (as he said) that only superficial people do not judge by appearances, maybe it follows that shallow gleaning is the deepest kind of reading. Or maybe, to paraphrase Yeats, devoted readers of poetry lack all conviction , while reckless quoters are full of passionate intensity .

Like everything else, this is the fault of the internet, which has cannibalized our reading time while offering facile, often spurious, pseudo-erudition to anyone with the wit to conduct a search. As Mark Twain once said to Winston Churchill, if you Google, you don’t have to remember anything.

Seriously though: I come not to bury the practice of allusion, but to praise it. (“ Julius Caesar ”) And also to ask, in all earnestness and with due credit to Edwin Starr , “ Seinfeld” and Leo Tolstoy : What is it good for?

The language centers of our brains are dynamos of originality. A competent speaker of any language is capable of generating intelligible, coherent sentences that nobody has uttered before. That central insight of modern linguistics, advanced by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s and ’60s, is wonderfully democratic. Every one of us is a poet in our daily speech, an inglorious Milton ( Thomas Gray ), a Shakespeare minting new coins of eloquence.

Of course, actual poets are congenital thieves (as T.S. Eliot or someone like him may have said), plucking words and phrases from the pages of their peers and precursors. The rest of us are poets in that sense, too. If our brains are foundries, they are also warehouses, crammed full of clichés, advertising slogans, movie catchphrases, song lyrics, garbled proverbs and jokes we heard on the playground at recess in third grade. Also great works of literature.

There are those who sift through this profusion with the fanatical care of mushroom hunters, collecting only the most palatable and succulent specimens. Others crash through the thickets, words latching onto us like burrs on a sweater. If we tried to remove them, the whole garment — our consciousness, in this unruly metaphor — might come unraveled.

That may also be true collectively. If we were somehow able to purge our language of its hand-me-down elements, we might lose language itself. What happens if nobody reads anymore, or if everyone reads different things? Does the practice of literary quotation depend on a stable set of common references? Or does it function as a kind of substitute for a shared body of knowledge that may never have existed at all?

The old literary canon — that dead white men’s club of star-bellied sneetches ( Dr. Seuss ) — may have lost some of its luster in recent decades, but it has shown impressive staying power as a cornucopia of quotes. Not the only one, by any means (or memes). Television, popular music, advertising and social media all provide abundant fodder, and the way we read now (or don’t) has a way of rendering it all equivalent. The soul selects her own society ( Emily Dickinson ).

When I was young, my parents had a fat anthology of mid-20th-century New Yorker cartoons , a book I pored over with obsessive zeal. One drawing that baffled me enough to stick in my head featured a caption with the following words: “It’s quips and cranks and wanton wiles, nods and becks and wreathed smiles.” What on earth was that? It wasn’t until I was in graduate school, cramming for an oral exam in Renaissance literature, that I found the answer in “ L’Allegro, ” an early poem by Milton, more often quoted as the author of “Paradise Lost.”

Not that having the citation necessarily helps. The cartoon, by George Booth, depicts a woman in her living room, addressing members of a multigenerational, multispecies household. There are cats, codgers, a child with a yo-yo, a bird in a cage and a dog chained to the sofa. Through the front window, the family patriarch can be seen coming up the walk, a fedora on his head and a briefcase in his right hand. His arrival — “Here comes Poppa” — is the occasion for the woman’s Miltonic pep talk.

Who is she? Why is she quoting “L’Allegro”? Part of the charm, I now suspect, lies in the absurdity of those questions. But I also find myself wondering: Were New Yorker readers in the early 1970s, when the cartoon was first published, expected to get the allusion right off the bat? They couldn’t Google it. Or would they have laughed at the incongruous eruption of an old piece of poetry they couldn’t quite place?

Maybe what’s funny is that most people wouldn’t know what that lady was talking about. And maybe the same comic conceit animates an earlier James Thurber drawing reprinted in the same book. In this one, a wild-eyed woman bursts into a room, wearing a floppy hat and wielding a basket of meadow flowers. “I come from haunts of coot and hern!” she exclaims to the baffled company, disturbing their cocktail party.

That’s it. That’s the gag.

Were readers also baffled? It turns out that Thurber’s would-be nature goddess is quoting “ The Brook ,” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. (I’ve never read it either.) Is it necessary to get the reference to get the joke? If you chuckle in recognition, and complete the stanza without missing a beat — “I make a sudden sally/And sparkle out among the fern,/To bicker down a valley” — is the joke on you?

It’s possible, from the standpoint of the present, to assimilate these old pictures to the familiar story about the decline of a civilization based in part on common cultural knowledge. Sure. Whatever. Things fall apart ( Yeats ). In the cartoons’ own terms, though, spouting snippets of poetry is an unmistakable sign of eccentricity — the pastime of kooky women and the male illustrators who commit them to paper. This is less a civilization than a sodality of weirdos, a visionary company ( Hart Crane ) of misfits. But don’t quote me on that.

A.O. Scott is a critic at large for The Times’s Book Review, writing about literature and ideas. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023. More about A.O. Scott

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The Frankenstein Formula, Part III Dispatches from Reality - Narrated

Scipio discusses the Frankenstein Formula and its disastrously effective deployment against the American homeland & patriot movement, before narrating his April 18th, 2023 essay: The Frankenstein Formula, Part III (https://dfreality.substack.com/p/the-frankenstein-formula-part-iii) Buy Scipio’s first book, Anatomy of a Revolution, today! Support the show and grab your FirmFam merch! Subscribe to Dispatches From Reality to receive Scipio’s free weekly articles: dfreality.substack.com Get full access to Dispatches from Reality at dfreality.substack.com/subscribe

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