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Wednesday December 9th Due in class: You should have read through chapter 18 by now in Frankenstein. You have TYPED answers to the questions due from last class. In-Class: We will go over the questions from Monday's class. Be prepared to share your answers with the class as part of a discussion. Assignments: Please TYPE one page explaining how Victor goes about making his female monster. Where and how does he do it? Finally, what is the end result with his female? Bring this with you next class. Read through chapter 21 of Frankenstein. Test next Monday. Links: Information on Mary Shelley Background Information: "In March, 1815, Mary Shelley dreamed of her dead infant daughter held before a fire, rubbed vigorously, and restored to life. At the time, scientists would not have wholly dismissed such a possibility. Could the dead be brought back to life? Could life arise spontaneously from inorganic matter? Physicians of the day treated such questions seriously--as the treatises they wrote, the methods they employed, and the contrivances they built all testify. During the 1790s, Italian physician Luigi Galvani demonstrated what we now understand to be the electrical basis of nerve impulses when he made frog muscles twitch by jolting them with a spark from an electrostatic machine. When Frankenstein was published, however, the word galvanism implied the release, through electricity, of mysterious life forces. "Perhaps," Mary Shelley recalled of her talks with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, "a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things." To make his creature, Victor Frankenstein "dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave" and frequented dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses. In Mary Shelley's day, as in our own, the healthy human form delighted and intrigued artists, physicians, and anatomists. But corpses, decaying tissue, and body parts stirred almost universal disgust. Alive or dead, whole or in pieces, human bodies arouse strong emotion--and account for part of Frankenstein's enduring hold on us." At this point in the novel, Victor makes his first gruesome discovery that the Monster may have attacked and killed little William, the Frankenstein family's youngest child. The blame is placed on Justine Moritz, a good friend of Elizabeth's, and she in turn is executed. Despite the fact that Victor knows she is innocent, he cannot state this to anyone as he fears no one would believe him and call him a madman. Victor then blames himself for his youngest brother's death, as well as Justine's execution. What point is the monster trying to make in the killing of these innocent people? Remember, a few years have passed now since Victor has seen his creation, so maybe his monster has suffered bad consequences and wishes to take his anger out on Victor. Why?
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