Frankenstein

3 Pages 868 Words

The novel Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley is an excellent example of the Romantic Movement. The movement took place in the period from the late 1700’s to the mid-1800; it emphasized passion rather than reason and imagination and intuition rather than logic. One of the key concepts most Romantic writers used was, nature is a source of inspiration. They believed that people who lived in an industrialized area were unhappy because the environment around them was not full of the beautiful gifts of nature. While people who lived in the countryside all their lives were full of happiness as a result of their surroundings. This concept is beautifully brought out in Frankenstein. Having this concept in the novel makes the narrative more powerful, this is because the impact of the narrative is heightened when the environment of what is going on corresponds with the emotions of characters in it. It also makes it more powerful by making the reader feel more emotions over the reading. The following are a few examples of the ways Shelley expresses this concept in the novel. One way Shelley shows nature as an inspiration is through the geography of the settings. In the beginning of the novel when Victor lives in Geneva it is described, as isolated and dwarfed by massive snow capped mountain ranged and hunted be the emptiness of the lake. Later on in the novel and in the letters in the beginning Shelly puts the characters in the wildest, most isolated areas in Europe: The Swiss and French Alps, the Rhine Valley, the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, Northern Ireland, Russia and the Arctic. When the reader reads about these various places they get a feeling of isolation and that of loneliness, exactly what Shelly wants them to be feeling. When Victor was 15 years-old nature inspired him as to what field of study to get into. His inspiration came when at his house in Geneva he witnessed “ a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which stood about...