Essay On Frankenstein And Romanticism

In Mary Shelley’s classic novel, Frankenstein, a young scientist gives life to a grotesque creature and soon regrets it. For centuries readers have tried to distinguish whether Frankenstein is a romantic or a gothic novel. To properly categorize this novel, we must first know what a romantic and a gothic novel is. Romanticism is literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form. Gothicism is literature focused on ruin, death, decay, terror, and chaos, and privileged irrationality and passion over reason. Although the novel has characteristics of both types of literature, I found Frankenstein to contain more of one than the other. Gothic novels mainly focus on the mysterious and supernatural, the creature possesses some of those elements. The story has a dark side to it. Victor obtains the body parts of different species, attaches them together, and forces electrical currents through the flesh. He raises something from the dead which is about as supernatural as it gets. The whole setting is gloomy, which is another characteristic of a gothic novel. As Victor moves from place to place either in attempt to flee his guilt of creating a monster or to achieve vengeance, there is always an unwelcoming feeling wherever he travels. Even those are all examples of gothic elements in Frankenstein, I have found
Writers sometimes experiment with the discontent that they feel against all that seems commercial, inhuman, and standardized. Shelley does that when she introduces the Creature to the cruel acts of mankind. He seeks some sort of approval is met with violence and disgust. Some romantics concern themselves with the rural and rustic life versus the modern life, they travel to faraway places and have an interest in legends. Mary Shelley was one of the practitioners of these