Nella Letteratura Inglese abbiamo molti esempi di affronti al potere di Dio ed ai fondamenti di egualitarismo Cristiano, fra questi vi è:
OVERREACHER is defined like a person who wants to go beyond the human limits challenging god’s power. Example in literature of overreacher are Ulysse, Dorian Gray, Prometheus but the most representative figure against religious convention of God’s creation power is Mary Shelley’s Doct. Frankestein.
Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus
by Mary Shelley
About Mary Shelley
(Mary Shelley)
She was the daughter of the radical philosopher William Godwin and of Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Right of Woman. In 1814 he met Shelley who was an ardent admirer of her father and often visited their London House. Mary and Shelley fell in love and met secretly; when she found she was pregnant they run off to Europe, wandering to France, Switzerland and Germany. Then they settled in Geneva, where Byron soon joined them. Byron proposed: «We will each write a ghost story». that Mary’s first work of fiction was written: Frankenstein, the first example of science fiction published anonymously in 1818. The last six years of Mary’s life with Shelley were filled with family disasters, culminating in her husband’s drowning during a sailing trip from Leghorn to Spezia. At twenty-four, Mary found herself a widow, with three of the four children she had had from Shelley already dead, and little money to support their only surviving son, Percy Florence. Mary devoted the rest of her life to editing and publicising her husband’s literary works and to writing herself in order to support her son.
Frankenstein (1818)
In the introduction to her best known work, Mary Shelley gives her own account of Frankenstein’s origin.
It seems that a number of things, like the reading of ghost stories, speculation about the reanimation of corpses or the creation of life, her anxieties about her role as a mother, and the memories of her of guilt and loss at the death of her own mother carne together at that point in her life, creating the waking dream or nightmare that so terrified her.
PLOT:
The plot of the novel is very simple: Frankenstein, a Swiss scientist, manages to create a human being, who despite careful preparation for the experiment, turns out to be ugly and revolting; the Monster becomes a murderer and in the end he destroys his creator. The story is not told chronologically and is introduced to us by a series of letters written by Walton, an explorer, to his sister.
Main themes:
▪ The misure of science;
▪ Social injustice;
▪ the overreacher, in the characters of Walton and Doctor Frankenstein, since they both try to overcome human limits;
▪ Man is originally good (Rousseau): at first he shows love and generosity, then he comes into contact with man (society). He is rejected for his look: this fact caused hatred and violence. The monster is the “noble savage”.
▪ penetrating Nature's secrets, which is related to the theme of the overreacher;
▪ usurping the female role, since the creation of human beings becomes possible without the participation of women;
▪ Tragic ending: Victor must die for his ambition, like Faust
Influences:
· Darwin: the evolutionary principles;
· Gothic Traditions: particular sense of horror;
· Locke: the description of both the monster's self-awareness and his education.
· Coleridge: the poem is a story of a physical and psychological journey but also a tale of a crime against nature.
Victor is a forerunner of the hunt of the monster:
E.A. Poe in The Fall of The House of Husher and in William Wilson;
R.L. Stevenson in The Strange Chase of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde;
O. Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray;
Conrad in The Secret Sharer;
James in The Turn of the Srew;
Dostoevski in The Gambler.
Characters:
Victor Frankenstein is an isolated individual: this isolation is self-imposed. The alienation of Victor is for a mad pursuit of self-satisfaction. Frankenstein may be considered a Faustian overreacher, since he looks for forbidden knowledge and he wishes to usurp the role of woman by producing a human being, "like himself, without female cooperation”. He starts to show the signs of punishment even before the end of his experiment.
Also the monster is isolated but his isolation is imposed by the society because it had a prejudice against the alien: social injustice. So monster feels hatred and wants violence and death because they have what he is denied: love. The monster represent for Victor:
▪ His aggressive instincts;
▪ His fear of the family;
▪ His fear for the women;
▪ His horror of normal sexuality.
Elisabeth is a gift of God, she seems an ideal woman. She is also highly spiritualised.
NARRATIVE STRUCTURE:
This novel is told by different narrators;
1. at first, Walton informs his sister, whose initials are the same as those of Mary Shelley, MS, that is Margaret SaviIIe;
2. then Frankenstein informs Walton, who informs his sister;
3. finally the monster informs Frankenstein, who informs Walton, who informs his sister.
The form of this novel is epistolary; perhaps the writer wanted to disguise her own voice as a woman by hiding behind three male narrators.
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