ShmoopTube

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We speak student!

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Oh, dear. Nothing left. What shall we throw in now?

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Frankenstein a la Shmoop

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Enlightenment versus Romanticism

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The Smackdown

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These are big concepts.

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You can take an entire year-long course on one of these words,

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- but we'll try and boil it down. - But don't.

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Yeah. Please don't.

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The Enlightenment was a period between

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1660 and the beginning of the 19th century. [flags popping up on golden globe]

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So it was for all of the 1700s, a little bit before, a little bit after.

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And it's also known as the Age of Reason.

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During the Enlightenment, thinkers like -

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let's see how many names I can pull out -

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Hobbes, Locke, et cetera, [portraits of Hobbes, Locke etc]

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were basically saying that reason was the driving force in humanity,

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always to look to reason.

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There was a lot of metaphors with light. [hand holding sunset]

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- That's why it's called "the Enlightenment." - Hegel, Dialectics. Yeah.

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Thank you, yes. Dialectics. Yeah, look it up.

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So the Enlightenment was the Age of Reason,

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this period when everyone said,

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"Okay, we need to focus on reason."

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And more suppressing the emotional side of things

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and looking toward like,

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"Okay, use your brain and be reasonable. Rational." [old painting of people talking over papers]

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Then along came Romanticism,

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which was basically a reaction to the Enlightenment.

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The Romantics were like,

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"Why the focus on reason?

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We wanna focus on imagination and emotion." [romantic paintings]

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And so the Romantics --

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This is Romantic with a capital "R,"

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not with a lowercase "r."

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And it's this idea that

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emotion and imagination is what we should be focusing on.

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And they also, going along with this,

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the Romantics loved Nature.

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Again, capital "N" Nature.

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Yes, they loved nature like sticks and stones,

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but the idea was that when you went out into Nature,

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you became kind of fully immersed [woman swinging off tree]

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and you could kind of feel these emotions

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and these sensations that the Enlightenment thinkers

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had just completely forgotten about [man looking through microscope]

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because they were focusing too much on the rational

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and the reason.

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And, from a timeline perspective,

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were these linear? Or what preceded Romanticism?

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What was that a movement away from?

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So Romanticism was specifically a movement

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- away from the Enlightenment. - Got it.

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And so late 1600s, 1700s, was Enlightenment,

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and then kind of as the Enlightment

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came to an end, we had

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Romanticism kind of build out of that.

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And it was a direct reaction to it,

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because it was like,

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"You wanna use your brains. We wanna use our hearts."

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That's a very simplified way of thinking about it.

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In Frankenstein, you can see this tension playing out,

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because this is a book about scientific advancement.

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Which is, if nothing else, reason, right?

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We have Victor Frankenstein [Frankenstein bringing monster to life]

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using science to create life.

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We have this figure focusing on reason and Enlightenment.

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But then we also see

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the kind of Romantic ideal

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in both Victor Frankenstein and the monster.

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Of these characters who are just

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torn up inside and they're lonely [clips of Frankenstein film]

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and they feel all these emotions

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that get so overwhelming.

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The monster goes into nature and hides.

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And they're both really inspired by the nature around them

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and kind of feel this sensation of the sublime Nature around them.

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So we kind of have both of these ideals.

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And - spoiler alert - but we know how, you know,

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things don't work out very well for anyone in the book.

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And so we kind of think,

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"Well, then Shelley must have been saying,

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'Enlightenment bad, Romanticism good.'"

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But not quite, because these characters are Romantic ideals

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and they still don't succeed.

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So there is definitely still a tension going on

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between the two within Frankenstein.

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What was the Enlightenment?

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What is Romanticism?

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How are both movements represented in Frankenstein?

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