Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, is often regarded as one of the very first and greatest science fiction novels in history. First published in 1818, it is a deeply tragic story about the relationship between God and humanity, and what happens when humans try to cross the boundary of natural limitations. During the time that Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein, the Romantic movement was in full swing, replacing the innovative, scientific uber-logic of the Enlightenment period with the emotional, passionate reflections of the of poets like William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, etcetera. Many of these authors Mary Shelley would have known personally, and so in turn she would have been well acquainted with many different sides of the movement: she knew it both for its beautiful, emotional art and poetry, just as well as for its for its moody, self-absorbed and emotionally isolated creators.

 

Mary Shelley used much of what she saw in the romantic movement to use in her horror novel Frankenstein, and in doing so, created many of the foundational tropes that we today attribute to the later Gothic genre. Today, I will be exploring the three most prominent ones: the theme of gender as a means of oppression and injustice; the theme of nature, in the context of what is natural and unnatural, and what can and cannot be touched by humans; and then the concept of overt individualism and isolation, as it relates to deteriorating mental health and emotional wellness.

 

To begin, gender: a theme very prevalent in Frankenstein, it was also at the time of the novels release becoming an increasingly source of fear. During the 1800s, roles of public and private life for upper-classes began to shift and separate, leaving the home and house to be separated and isolated from the public world of money and jobs. For the upper classes, this came in the form of beautiful, but isolated country houses, far away from guests and relatives and filled only with the immediate family and staff. This lead to an encouraged emphasis on gender roles, and while popular culture accepted this change happily, the Gothic Literature movement often drew its horror from the subtle forms of oppression it created.

 

Men, for instance, are often cast as tyrants in gothic stories. In the cultural context, the men of upper-class society were regarded as rulers and lords of their estates. They were in charge of going out into public sphere of commerce and earning money to support his family, as well as laying down the law for all of the people in his household: property, servants and family alike. The women, their wives, on the other hand, were tasked with running the domestic sphere. They were in charge of the servants, arranging the house, planning the meals and the bouquets, designing the gardens, and raising the children. While this family structure was considered normal, it was unbalanced. The man held absolute legal and financial power over everything in his isolated country estate, and any power the women had was isolated to the home itself, and relied entirely on support from the men.

 

This is why, in gothic literature, the politics of gender and power are very starkly present to the plot, the horror often being drawn from the underlying fear of that absolute power being misused and abused. Men are tyrannical, prideful and overbearing, and the power they hold over their households and communities are often used in abusive and neglectful ways. Conversely, women are victimized, made vulnerable and powerless by their circumstances. Any power they have in a situation is reliant on the men of the story, and any help and sanctuary they receive from their abusers must come from other, kinder men. Children are also victimized as inhabitants of the household, as even boys are desexed, and not treated as men until they are of age.

 

Victor Frankenstein is a perfect example of this. As the eldest son of his father’s estate, he is awarded all the same privileges that come with being the man of the house with the hope that eventually he will take on the responsibilities of owning the estate as well one day. While he takes great advantage of his father’s wealth to get an education, he is self-centered during his years of study, neglecting to send his family a single letter for nearly his entire stay at college. While he loves his fiancée, Elizabeth, he treats a future with her as something of a guarantee, something that will be his in the same way that his father property and estate will

also be his someday.

 

All this gives Victor a sense of entitlement and arrogance, which draws him to his attempt at creating new life, regardless of any moral, biblical, or natural laws he might transgress. Most important to the creation of the monster, though, is the idea that Victor is attempting to create life as a man, all on his own, without the help of a woman. By taking flesh that has already been created and disposed of, and then sewing it back to life again, Victor is attempting to become both mother and father to the creature, disposing of the needed position of women in the creation of life. but in doing so, he forgets all the things that are necessary for raising a child, most importantly, that it is a child that needs to be raised. In a fashion rather typical for men of this era, Victor takes all the pleasure in the glory of creation, the scientific landmark of the ability to create life, but has no interest in actually creating a living being that can live in society.

 

As for the women and children of the story, even though Victor doesn’t hurt them directly, he is responsible for the abuse they receive. As the creature’s creator, Victor is responsible for every murder the creature enacts on his family, and so the creature also symbolizes the harm of Victor’s neglect on his own household and the people he loves. Phillip’s death is a direct result of his negligence to care for or destroy his creation, and he fully admits it to himself. But Justine’s death is even more his fault, because he withholds information that could save her in order to keep his own reputation intact. Nothing she did warranted her being targeted besides being a member of Victor’s household, and her execution could have been prevented if Victor’s petty grievances and fears hadn’t been prioritized over her life. Instead, it was merely the whims of the men in the story that caused that tragedy.

 

The same can be said for Elizabeth. Her murder was a selfish act for revenge, but it was one that could just as easily have been prevented if Victor hadn’t been so absorbed in his personal, self-inflicted misery, so sure he would be the only one worth targeting that he didn’t even think to warn her of the danger. But even before she is killed, Victor puts her through a kind of death, by reducing her interesting, beautiful personality to an accessory to Victor’s future life and ignoring her for years. By not thinking of her or his family as his responsibility to protect and take care of, Victor unintentionally dooms all of them to death, and drives their entire estate into an heirless ruin. 

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Another major theme of Frankenstein is that of Nature, and what people consider natural and unnatural. The early 1800s were a time of changing views on the role of humans in the world. In the past Enlightenment era, the newest scientific discoveries were a novelty, as were their contributions. But as that novelty steadily wore off, the failings of the era became more present. The wonder of first seeing a live experiment was steadily replaced by wariness and horror. Many times the experiments were tested on living animals forced to suffer for the novel entertainment, or the studies involved the bodies of corpses freshly (and sometimes illegally) acquired. The new influx of cheap textiles and products brought on by the industrial revolution was great, until the low wages of lower classes and horrible factory conditions made life more and more horrible for the everyday city life.

 

The romantic movement was a step back from that. It examined the position of human society as one that was dirty and rotting, and idealized the perfection of god’s untainted creations in nature. The romantics invented the concept of the sublime, the feeling of humbling, spiritual awe that was invoked in a person on the sight of the beauty of nature, such as a tall, stunning mountain or a wide, beautiful valley. They used their art and poetry to try to capture this feeling, and as a result, as a result of the movement, many national sites

became popular with upper-class vacationers, bent on experiencing the sublime for themselves.

 

It is for a similar reason that Clerval and Victor go on their vacation to the Scottish Highlands. Clerval’s motivations are obviously for relaxation, cheering up Victor so he doesn’t fall ill again, but Victor’s experience is entirely sublime. Looking upon the mountains and appreciating the beauty resonates with him in just the way that the romantics intended, humbling him enough for him to appreciate the world around him, and, if he had been allowed to sit there on his own and reflect on himself, Victor might have even left the mountains a more responsible, considerate human being.

 

Instead, the monster reappears, and his hideous interruption instantly ruins any spiritual reflection Victor may have had and forces him to look at his own personal failings. In his attempt to create the monster as his own sublime creation, Victor chose every piece with utmost care. Every body part was the most ‘perfect,’ fitting with what was culturally ideal for a beautiful individual. But in doing this, Victor left no imperfections, and created a massive being that was too beautiful, too perfect, so inhumanly flawless that looking on it caused people to be more afraid than in awe.

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This feeling is usually referred to as the uncanny, where a thing or animal has traits that are like a human, but are off just enough that it triggers our fear instincts. Animal sounds that sound like screaming, children that are just a little too wise for their age. People with disabilities have unfortunately been feared and persecuted because of this, either by not moving right, or by acting at the maturity level of children well into adult age. The monster initially also acts like this, considering he is a newborn born into the body of an eight-foot tall, massive adult man. His behavior is childish, his coordination is unsteady, and it takes him months to be able to speak eloquently enough to communicate, and these differences make him suspicious and fearful to us.

 

These are the flaws that Victor left him with, both in creating him and also in not being there to raise him and teach him how to act and live, and that ugliness is entirely reflective of Victor as a creator. Its thematic that the creature would reappear to Victor in that setting specifically, out in the isolated, most sublime peak of the mountains. In interrupting the sublime of nature, “god’s” creation, with the horror of the creature’s existence, Victor’s creation, the novel draws the attention to their stark contrast. Even with the most modern of sciences at his command, Victor’s work (and, metaphorically, the work of all humanity) is clumsy and flawed. His hubris in trying to surpass and replace god has failed spectacularly, and caused real people to be killed as collateral damage, and while new knowledge may have been gained, that glory didn’t outweigh the cost.

 

To continue with the theme of setting, one of the greatest and most important themes of Gothic literature is that of isolation. I talked earlier about how the isolation of the private life, both metaphorically and also physically, was a common theme in Gothic literature, but isolation can be important in different ways as well. An individual can be far, far away from a proper British country house, even entirely set free from the responsibilities, and still be trapped in isolation. In fact, if one is rich, handsome and male enough, it might even be fashionable.

 

One of the most influential romantic era poets was Lord Byron, author of the famous epic poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In it the main character, a young nobleman loosely based on Lord Byron himself, goes on self-exploratory vacation across Europe. Along the way he visits many cultural landmarks, including famous battlefields and monuments, all the while waxing poetic about how each historical event he learned about made him feel.

 

In this character, the Byronic Hero archetype was born. He was characterized as a young man of high or upper-middle class social status, with money, single marital status, and a poetic, melancholic disposition, usually brought on by a vague, non-major form of mental illness. The figure became a popular stock character, seeing as he was able to be fashionably tragic and pitiable without the loss of the more attractive status, money or handsomeness.

 

Mary Shelly, of course, had her own Byronic Hero in Victor, but seeing as she had the displeasure of knowing Lord Byron personally, her version of the character had a different flare to him. Victor is Byronic, but mostly in the sense that he is incredibly self-absorbed and anti-social. His isolation physically and mentally from his peers and family is poignant and affects him greatly, but it is also entirely self-inflicted. He only cares about his own emotions, how the consequences of his actions affect himself and his guilt. Justine’s death affects him greatly, but his thought process prioritizes his own feelings on the matter over, his and guilt about the monster, rather than his actual feelings about Justine as a member of his family, or Elizabeth’s grief over her friend’s death. Later on in the novel, when he knows the monster will come back to wreak havoc on his wedding night, his self-agonizing thoughts are so focused on himself, how the monster will hurt him, that he doesn’t even stop to think that the monster might hurt Elizabeth instead, not until it’s far too late. In isolating himself like this, prioritizing himself and his own emotions, Victor neglects everything outside of that sphere of self, and his friends, his family, his home, and his reputation all suffer for it.

 

Victor’s mental health is also important when applied to the context of gender. Victor’s emotions and grief about his creation and what he’s done are very present throughout the story. Even though he only has his own actions to blame, he still feels horrible about it, and the grief and stress of the situation drive him several times in the novel into a state of hysteria. While it was possible for men to be diagnosed with hysteria during this period, the illness, and general emotions as well, were still seen as a feminine weakness, something to be ashamed of.

 

Shelly dealt with similar mental health struggles in the time period before she began writing Frankenstein, after losing her young son to illness. Both she and her husband grieved tremendously over the loss, but when Percy shelly wrote to her father asking him to comfort her, he wrote back with little sympathy, telling her to stop letting her base, womanly emotions affect her and to move on. The same sentiments are shared by Victor’s own father, after Clerval’s death sends him into a fit of depression for nearly a month.

 

The novel plays into the cultural gendered connotations of Victor’s mental health, how both striving to be the Creature’s sole creator (both father and mother), and by having such intense emotions about the creation and his situation, feminizes him in a way. But in presenting Victor’s hysteria as it is in the novel, the narrative sympathizes with him deeply, acknowledging the humanity of his experiences, and registering his effort to be well and reign in his emotions as something genuinely difficult, almost herculean, for him to overcome.​​