Monsters within a Young Girl’s Mind: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The interpretation of the young girl’s ghastly nightmare, fashioned by her own imagination derived the novel “Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus.” Mary Shelley began, putting pen to paper reveling her cautionary tale, a moral lesson hidden within a horrifying story that would awaken thrill and terror in her audience. Mary felt that if this was not accomplished, the novel would not live up to its title “The Modern Prometheus.” She relates to geographic elements that are subsequent the French Revolutionary era, with a strong connection to Greek mythology. In metaphor she illustrates how creature and creator are one in the same and with the symbolic use of sickness and nature creating the foreshadowing for events to come. Mary Shelley divulges though this novel her personal approach on humanity and life’s lessons; formulating the idea that ignorance is bliss and human injustice is wrong by taking in to account the sexiest views of the later eighteenth-century.

The most apparent theme divulged throughout the novel is the idea that ignorance is bliss. On Eric McMillan’s website, The Greatest Literature of All Time: the commentary on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein shows criticism. Though Eric states at the beginning, “that the novel only had three things going for it and that it was very poorly written” (McMillan). Furthermore, that it is, “unfortunately, the moral that readers and critics have taken from the story—and which Shelley clearly intends—is that expressed by Frankenstein: Knowledge is dangerous; ignorance is bliss” (McMillan). In the later eighteenth-century when humans began to challenge many traditional precept about the world, human creation, and man's relationship with his creator, through science and technology. In the ...

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...is grasp the knowledge will condemn him for that—ignorance is bliss.

Works Cited

McMillan, Eric. “Monstrously bad novel strikes a chord.” Greatest Literature of All Time: The Works. Editor Eric. 1999-2013. Web. 6 March 2014.

Moretti, Franco. Atlas of European Novel 1800-1900. Theoretical Interlude II. Geography of Plot. New York/London. Verso. 1998. 70. Print. 6 March 2014.

Randel, Fred V. "The Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." ELH 70.2 (2003): 465. ProQuest. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. 1818. Introd. Maurice Hindel. London: Penguin Books. 1992. Print. 6 March 2014.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Shelley's 1821-1822 Huntington Notebook: A Facsimile of the Huntington MS. HM 2111s (Vol. 7).” Garland Publishing, New York / London. 1996. Print. 6 March 2014.