Frankenstein AO3 + AO5

Question 1

Jacobus

Answer 1

‘At best, all women are the bearers of a traditional love, nurturance and domesticity; at worst, passive victims’

Question 2

2011 National Theatre version

Answer 2

• alludes to creature sexually assaulting Elizabeth
• Cumberbatch + co-star swap roles every night to show Victor and creature interchangeable
• Victor shouts ‘I am God!’ after creation

Question 3

Mellor’s ‘Usurping the Female’

Answer 3

• ‘a feminist critique of science’
• ‘one of the deepest horrors of the novel is Frankenstein’s implicit goal of creating a society for men only’
• the notion that science should manipulate and control rather than describe, understand and revere nature’

Question 4

Gilbert and Gubar

Answer 4

‘creature is as nameless as a woman in patriarchal society’

Question 5

O’Shea’s ‘The Fear of Femaleness’

Answer 5

• Elizabeth: ‘primary role is to expose the treatment of women’
• ‘Shelley views matrimony as a literal death wish’
• Safie: ‘epitome of what she considers to be an ideal woman… nothing more than a figment of imagination’

Question 6

Seymour

Answer 6

‘Shelley’s creature warns of the dangers inherent in scientific experiment without due thought for the results’

Question 7

McWhir

Answer 7

creature ‘suffers fate of an educated young woman in an oppressive society’

Question 8

Bathard-Smith

Answer 8

creature is ‘only monstrous in desperation’

Question 9

Marsh

Answer 9

• creature’s crimes can be seen as an ‘enactment of Mary Shelley’s sublimated rage’
• ‘exploration of pathological narcissism’

Question 10

Botting

Answer 10

‘the monster is something to be shown […] demonstrate and warn […] serves an increasingly moral function’

Question 11

Shelley’s 1831 introduction

Answer 11

Shelley writes she wanted to ‘curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart’

Question 12

Cluely

Answer 12

‘Victor embodies the Romantic rebelliousness towards accepted modes of thought in his pursuit of forbidden knowledge’

Question 13

1818 Quarterly Review

Answer 13

‘a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity’

Question 14

1931 Karloff film

Answer 14

• Victor has small audience for creation
• shouts ‘it’s alive!’ repeatedly and ‘I know what it feels like to be God’

Question 15

Freud’s latent theory

Answer 15

unconscious fears, desires

Question 16

Shelley’s nickname for her novel

Answer 16

‘hideous progeny’

Question 17

Prejudice in Regency era

Answer 17

aesthetic prejudice

Question 18

Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft and father, William Godwin

Answer 18

Wollstonecraft:
- some suggest Mary felt responsible for her death as she died during childbirth
- wrote ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’
- strong, independent mother mirroring Safie’s mother

Godwin:
- wrote ‘An Essay Concerning Political Justice’ (1793)
- argued we are not free, morally or rationally, to make whatever choices we like
- focused on education

Question 19

Frankenstein in relation to Gothic genre

Answer 19

first Gothic novel to focus on internal evil

Question 20

Paradise Lost

Answer 20

reflects creature
Satan: ‘the happier Eden shall enjoy their fill of bliss on bliss; while I to Hell am thrust’

Question 21

John Locke

Answer 21

‘Tabula Rasa’ (blank slate) theory

Question 22

Rosseau

Answer 22

theory of human natural goodness
- ‘one man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they’

Question 23

Shelley’s relationship with children

Answer 23

• many miscarriages
• struggles to conceive
• of the four children she bore, only one survived

Question 24

The Modern Prometheus

Answer 24

• punished for overreaching, like Victor
• Victor encapsulates Promethean figure as he defies Gods and creates life himself
• like Prometheus, creature didn’t ask to be created

Question 25

Electricity

Answer 25

- Galvanism - Origin of Life theory: lightning bolts triggered life

Question 26

Michelangelo's 'The Creation of Adam'

Answer 26

God giving life to the first man, paralleling Victor and creature

Question 27

Latin for monster

Answer 27

'monstare' meaning to demonstrate

Question 28

Science in Regency Era

Answer 28

- Enlightenment period - body snatchers

Question 29

Percy Shelley

Answer 29

- takes preface of novel - Romantic poet: focus on natural world

Question 30

Women in Regency Era

Answer 30

Angels of the House: pure, passive, powerless

Question 31

Painting similar to Elizabeth's death

Answer 31

Fuseli's 'The Nightmare'

Question 32

Moers

Answer 32

- 'in Gothic writing fantasy predominates over reality' - 'poor grotesque patchwork... challenges and undermines the purity of idealism'

Question 33

Rossington

Answer 33

‘analysis of the dangers attendant on an exclusively intellectual approach to society’

Question 34

Shelley and death

Answer 34

- Mary and Percy courted in a graveyard - Harriet Shelley drowned herself in the Serpentine

Question 35

Origin and publication of Frankenstein

Answer 35

- written in ghost writing competition - idea came to her in a dream - initially published anonymously

Question 36

John Lavater

Answer 36

pseudoscientific theory of physiognomy

Question 37

Darwin

Answer 37

theory of evolution

Question 38

1994 Branagh film

Answer 38

- Justine does not receive a trial and is publicly executed - use of lightning

Question 39

Smith

Answer 39

- Clerval as a 'model of conjoined feminine and masculine traits' - 'embodies, like Elizabeth, patience, clarity and self control'

Question 40

Turlev

Answer 40

'Justine and Elizabeth seem to primarily exist as victims of male violence'

Question 41

Modern Prometheus and Paradise Lost epigraph

Answer 41

creature didn't ask to be created

Question 42

Bloom

Answer 42

'the monster is the true hero of the novel, more human than his creator'