English Literature – Frankenstein, Chapter 5 Essay
Look at the significance of Chapter 5 as a whole. Focus on the relevance and effect of the writer’s use of language to describe the setting and characters. Remember to include what it shows us about the social and historical influences of the time Mary Shelley was writing.
Frankenstein is a novel written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The title of the novel refers to a scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who learns how to create life and creates a being in the likeness of man, but larger than average and more powerful. Frankenstein is infused with some elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement, and is also considered to be one of the earliest examples of science fiction. It was also a warning against the expansion of modern man in the Industrial Revolution, alluded to in the novel's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus; Prometheus being a wily Titan from Greek mythology that stole fire from Zeus to gift it to the humans. In his case, his punishment was merely being bound to a rock whilst an eagle ate his liver every day. Frankenstein was not so lucky.
Shelley was not a typical writer, considering she was a female writing in the eighteenth-century. Daughter of a feminist writer and liberal atheist, she was brought up in a period that saw a certain decline in religion with a correlating ascension of scientific advances and beliefs. Throughout her life, she was somewhat dogged by death, having had two close relatives commit suicide and a premature still-born child after marrying Percy Shelley and before writing the novel. It was when the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron and other writers near Geneva, Switzerland, where Shelley conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelley’s left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Mary Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence.
Shelley felt she was a monster in herself, created... [continues]

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