Mary Shelley Essays

12th Grade

Frankenstein

Good intentions with horrible consequences is a thread which ties the classical story of Prometheus, the Greek Titan, to Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, a 19th century Romantic novel by Mary Shelley. The ancient story of Prometheus goes as...

Frankenstein

Both Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein tell cautionary tales of scientists abusing their creative powers to exist in another sphere where they cannot be directly blamed for their actions. Though...

Frankenstein

Victor Frankenstein, like many Romantics, relies upon his unusual capacity for sensitivity and creativity to aid him in his ambitions. In contrast to Robert Walton, who ventures to the North Pole to find "beauty and delight" (Shelley 15) amidst...

Frankenstein

Genesis states, "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him". Humans, therefore, were created as a likeness to God. <I>Frankenstein</i> describes a similar act of creation in that in the novel, too, the...

Frankenstein

In Mary Shelley's <I>Frankenstein</I>, the paradoxical quality of the concept of "discovery" echoes that found in Milton's <I>Paradise Lost</I>: initial discovery is joyful and innocent, but ends in misery and corruption....

Frankenstein

Setting plays a pivotal role throughout Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Nature is presented as possessing an immense curative power: the beauty of the natural world heals Victor when he is too miserable to find solace anywhere else. The Arve Ravine...

Frankenstein

In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley warns that with the advent of science, natural philosophical questioning is not only futile, but dangerous. In attempting to discover the mysteries of life, Frankenstein assumes that he can act as God. He disrupts the...

Frankenstein

Question:

In what ways and for what ends does Mary Shelley utilise the myth of Prometheus in her novel, Frankenstein?

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as a modern day version of the legend of Prometheus. Prometheus created men out of clay and taught...

Frankenstein

Frankenstein might have been written as a horror story, but the ideas and themes prevalent in the novel are ones men have grappled with for ages. From ancient Greek myths to the Bible, the tale Shelley tells is an old one - one rife with the...

Frankenstein

The question of how to interpret dreams within a novel is one of the most contentious in all of literary criticism. The natural tendency may be to analyze them as though they were real dreams, which includes the implicit assumption that authors...

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein curdles readers' blood not merely with dreary nights and gruesome murders, but through a tale of man's most morbid undertakings. While the monster itself constitutes the most concretely catastrophic effect of...

Frankenstein

Too much exercise destroys strength as much as too little, and in the same way too much or too little food or drink destroys the health, while the proportionate amount increases and preserves it. The same is true of temperance and courage and the...

Frankenstein

How does the subtitle "The Modern Prometheus" assist Shelley in pointing out the underlying significance of her story?

Mary Shelley's work Frankenstein is a symbolic representation of the doubts and fears she, and her contemporaries, shared...

Frankenstein

Frankenstein, recognized as one of the most famous literary works of horror ever written, was the direct result of three brilliant authors challenging themselves to create a story that would incite fear and horror in the reader. Mary Shelley and...

Frankenstein

The idea of voluntary creation, of giving birth to something utterly original from some established foundation, instantly attracts unanswerable inquiries of morality and the nature of novelty and life. However, when invention is attempted on a...

Frankenstein

After ten weeks of intently studying a wide range of some of literature's greatest authors and their representative works, one is hard pressed to single out only four of these transcendiary pieces from such a distinguished list. However, four of...

Frankenstein

"Paradise has been lost." Frank Henenlotter's 1990 film, a campy retooling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein by the name of Frankenhooker (Wolf 344), tells the tale of a mad scientist who, in order to bring his wife back to life, decapitates,...

Frankenstein

The issue of the gender of the writer playing a crucial part in her or his writing has been much discussed in contemporary critical debate. Feminist critics argue that the patriarchal ideology of society makes it imperative for male writers to...