'The moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places.'
Step 1) Experience this exhibition in detail
Step 2) Read the article below.
Step 3) Plan a response. Find quotes (AO2), critical quotes (AO3) and contextual links like Romantic conventions (AO4)
Step 4) Write for one hour.
Shelley uses nature as a restorative agent for Victor Frankenstein. While he seems to be overcome with grief by the murders of his friends and family, he repeatedly shuns humanity and seeks nature for health, relaxation and to strengthen his spirits.
Even in the early chapters of Frankenstein, Shelley uses natural metaphors to describe Victor’s childhood:
I feel pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self . . . I find it arise, like a mountain river, from ignoble and almost forgotten sources; but swelling as it proceeded, it became the torrent which, in its course, has swept away all my hopes and joys. (Shelley, 21)
The use of a mountain river to describe Victor’s feelings is the beginning of a theme that is continued throughout the story. The introduction of an association of nature and human feeling, even in this early chapter, shows how Shelley prefers to use metaphor of a natural setting rather than other descriptions. Instead of relating Victor’s feelings and experience in rational discourse, intellectual description or by dialogue with other characters, she chooses the more "romantic" image of a swelling mountain stream.
As Frankenstein progresses, Victor takes sustenance from nature, and it becomes his personal therapy when he undergoes torment or stress. By chapter five of the first volume, Shelley creates a connection between Victor and nature. Instead of describing his moods with metaphor, as in earlier images, she describes his recovery from grave illness through his affinity with nature. Although nursed by his closest friends, it is the breathing of the air that finally gives him strength:
We passed a fortnight in these perambulations: my health and spirits had long been restored, and they gained additional strength from the salubrious air I breathed, the natural incidents of our progress . . . (Shelley, 43)
The air is not simply necessary for life; Victor is so taken with it that he actually gains strength from it that he had not had before. The use of the word salubrious, meaning "to bring health," reinforces an intention to promote air, and through corollary, nature, as a restorative agent. Throughout Frankenstein, it is nature, not other people which keep Victor healthy enough to continue living a relatively sane life.
The concept of nature as therapy was most likely not new to Shelley, having probably read the writings of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and of course, her husband, Percy. Wordsworth uses a device quite similar to Mary Shelley’s in Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, where he uses language that may have influenced her. In Tintern Abbey, nature is also used as a restorative agent for the speaker of the poem:
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. (Abrams, 136)
Where Wordsworth reflects on the effect of a particular natural setting on his life, Shelley uses nature in general as Victor’s personal physician. She may have been influenced by the theme in Tintern Abbey of nature as a restorative, or she may have been influenced by other romantic poetry that she had read, since nature itself was a major theme of the romantic period. It may also be a simple parallel feeling that she discovered for herself, but it is likely that she has some outside influence. The similarity in theme of Tintern Abbey is an example that Shelley was not unique in her use of nature for the purpose of restoring her character’s health and sanity, but she does over-use the device, since it is not the major theme of the story. What follow are only a few examples of nature’s role in Frankenstein, and by the end of the story, Victor’s obsession with nature seems inappropriate.
Step 1) Experience this exhibition in detail
Step 2) Read the article below.
Step 3) Plan a response. Find quotes (AO2), critical quotes (AO3) and contextual links like Romantic conventions (AO4)
Step 4) Write for one hour.
Shelley uses nature as a restorative agent for Victor Frankenstein. While he seems to be overcome with grief by the murders of his friends and family, he repeatedly shuns humanity and seeks nature for health, relaxation and to strengthen his spirits.
Even in the early chapters of Frankenstein, Shelley uses natural metaphors to describe Victor’s childhood:
I feel pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self . . . I find it arise, like a mountain river, from ignoble and almost forgotten sources; but swelling as it proceeded, it became the torrent which, in its course, has swept away all my hopes and joys. (Shelley, 21)
The use of a mountain river to describe Victor’s feelings is the beginning of a theme that is continued throughout the story. The introduction of an association of nature and human feeling, even in this early chapter, shows how Shelley prefers to use metaphor of a natural setting rather than other descriptions. Instead of relating Victor’s feelings and experience in rational discourse, intellectual description or by dialogue with other characters, she chooses the more "romantic" image of a swelling mountain stream.
As Frankenstein progresses, Victor takes sustenance from nature, and it becomes his personal therapy when he undergoes torment or stress. By chapter five of the first volume, Shelley creates a connection between Victor and nature. Instead of describing his moods with metaphor, as in earlier images, she describes his recovery from grave illness through his affinity with nature. Although nursed by his closest friends, it is the breathing of the air that finally gives him strength:
We passed a fortnight in these perambulations: my health and spirits had long been restored, and they gained additional strength from the salubrious air I breathed, the natural incidents of our progress . . . (Shelley, 43)
The air is not simply necessary for life; Victor is so taken with it that he actually gains strength from it that he had not had before. The use of the word salubrious, meaning "to bring health," reinforces an intention to promote air, and through corollary, nature, as a restorative agent. Throughout Frankenstein, it is nature, not other people which keep Victor healthy enough to continue living a relatively sane life.
The concept of nature as therapy was most likely not new to Shelley, having probably read the writings of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and of course, her husband, Percy. Wordsworth uses a device quite similar to Mary Shelley’s in Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, where he uses language that may have influenced her. In Tintern Abbey, nature is also used as a restorative agent for the speaker of the poem:
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. (Abrams, 136)
Where Wordsworth reflects on the effect of a particular natural setting on his life, Shelley uses nature in general as Victor’s personal physician. She may have been influenced by the theme in Tintern Abbey of nature as a restorative, or she may have been influenced by other romantic poetry that she had read, since nature itself was a major theme of the romantic period. It may also be a simple parallel feeling that she discovered for herself, but it is likely that she has some outside influence. The similarity in theme of Tintern Abbey is an example that Shelley was not unique in her use of nature for the purpose of restoring her character’s health and sanity, but she does over-use the device, since it is not the major theme of the story. What follow are only a few examples of nature’s role in Frankenstein, and by the end of the story, Victor’s obsession with nature seems inappropriate.
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