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Frankenstein: Who was Mary Shelley? 697 Views
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Description:
No HBO! Well then, how does a horror short story writing contest sound? And the winner is *drum roll* Mary Shelley! You go girl! And that is how Frankenstein came into fruition. Want to know more about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein? Click on the video to learn more!
Transcript
- 00:00
Edited at https://subtitletools.com
- 00:01
We speak student!
- 00:04
Frankenstein
- 00:05
A la Shmoop
- 00:06
An Introduction
Full Transcript
- 00:09
So this is Frankenstein a la Shmoop, the course. [ Narrator David introduces Deb]
- 00:12
And we're here with Deb Tennen,
- 00:13
who runs our creative, and bunch of editorial stuff,
- 00:16
and like 87 other things at Shmoop.
- 00:18
So we're gonna talk to Deb about Frankenstein.
- 00:21
She's a PHD in literature and knows this stuff cold. [Frankenstein appears on screen]
- 00:24
Who was Mary Shelley?
- 00:27
Mary Shelley was 18 [Photos of Mary Shelley appears]
- 00:29
when this all happened.
- 00:30
So we think of her as kind of like a young kid,
- 00:32
but in reality, she was engaging with [Frankenstein movie plays]
- 00:36
some of the biggest intellectuals of the time.
- 00:38
We're talking early 1800s here.
- 00:40
Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, [Photos of Wollstonecraft displayed]
- 00:43
who you probably know from having written
- 00:45
the first feminist treatise in the English language,
- 00:49
or proto-feminist, I guess -
- 00:50
A Vindication of the Rights of Women.
- 00:53
And then her father was William Godwin... [Photos of William Godwin appears]
- 00:56
Everyone was named William back then,
- 00:58
so I'm just gonna assume that was his name, too.
- 00:59
And he was just a super famous anarchist atheist, [Symbols of anarchist atheist pop up]
- 01:04
kind of like crazy intellectual.
- 01:05
So she was brought up in a family of intellectuals,
- 01:08
and that's what was going on in her life when she wrote Frankenstein.
- 01:13
It's alive! It's alive! [Frankenstein resurrects]
- 01:15
The origin story of Frankenstein is actually really awesome.
- 01:18
She married Percy Shelley,
- 01:20
who was a super famous Romantic poet, [Percy Shelly ponders]
- 01:22
became Mary Shelley.
- 01:23
And she and Percy and a bunch of other Romantics,
- 01:26
like John Polidori and Lord Byron, [John Polidori and Lord Byron names pop up]
- 01:28
were hanging out in Switzerland. [Arrow points to Switzerland on map]
- 01:31
They were on a lake when it was terrible weather,
- 01:33
and Lord Byron was like, "Oh, hey,
- 01:35
you know what we should do? We're super bored.
- 01:36
Let's have a ghost story contest."
- 01:38
So they all wrote ghost stories [Lord Byron talks to John Polidori]
- 01:40
trying to take the crown of who could write -
- 01:42
of all these amazing Romantic authors -
- 01:44
who could write the best ghost story.
- 01:47
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. [Mary Shelley decides to write Frankenstein]
- 01:49
[ horror theme ]
- 01:51
It started as a short story.
- 01:52
Needless to say, she won the ghost story contest.
- 01:55
She turned the story into a novel. [Mary Shelley with her novel]
- 01:58
In 1818,
- 02:00
it was first published.
- 02:01
Critics did not like it.
- 02:03
And then in 1831, it was republished [Critics smash tomatoes at Mary Shelley]
- 02:06
with the help of her husband, Percy,
- 02:08
who kind of fluffed up the language a bit [Mary Shelley and Percy discuss about Frankenstein novel]
- 02:10
and changed a few things.
- 02:12
For the purposes of this course,
- 02:13
and kind of just generally
- 02:14
when we're talking about Frankenstein,
- 02:16
most people are referring to that later version. [Both novel and comics of Frankenstein displayed on screen]
- 02:18
Wow, that's fascinating.
- 02:18
So, Mary was 18 years old when she wrote this.
- 02:21
Now, they were typically grandmothers by age 18?
- 02:23
- Yeah, she had actually given birth twice by that point. - Oh, my God.
- 02:27
Yeah, we'll talk about that in respect to a few other things, for sure.
- 02:31
Contemporaneous environment --
- 02:34
They were in Switzerland in 1800. [Map of Lake Geneva in Switzerland appears on the screen]
- 02:37
It was what, politically? [Map of Switzerland where Mary stayed]
- 02:39
A melting pot for intellectuals?
- 02:40
- Because this sounds like the all-star team, - Yeah.
- 02:43
you know, of writers and creative people of that era.
- 02:46
Yeah, this is kind of again showing how Mary Shelley [All the famous writers pop up on the screen]
- 02:49
was really part of the core group of Romantics.
- 02:52
And we'll talk a little bit more about Romanticism. [A boy eating an apple and Mary Shelley pops up from the apple]
- 02:54
But she was the woman in -- As you heard,
- 02:57
the names I was saying - John, Percy, et cetera. [Mary Shelley shows her bicep]
- 02:59
She was the woman among this group of men,
- 03:01
and that actually is incredibly important when analyzing Frankenstein -
- 03:04
to think about, you know,
- 03:06
how does that change it? [A girls talks to Frankenstein by the lake]
- 03:08
The fact that this is written from a woman's voice
- 03:11
and not a man's voice like almost everything else [Frankenstein gazes himself in the mirror]
- 03:14
at the time was being written.
- 03:15
[ glass breaks ] [Frankenstein hits the mirror and breaks it]
- 03:18
What type of literary work is Frankenstein?
- 03:22
Frankenstein is an interesting melting pot of [Characteristics of Frankenstein displayed on the screen]
- 03:26
kind of Enlightenment thought,
- 03:28
Romanticism, Gothicism.
- 03:31
And we'll define all these terms.
- 03:33
Whereas, you know, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron [Percy Shelley and Lord Byron stands besides each other]
- 03:36
are really thought of as
- 03:38
definite Romantic poets.
- 03:40
When you think of, "Who are the big six?", [Photos of the great six contemporary writers appears]
- 03:42
you get Lord Byron, Shelley,
- 03:44
some others that I'm not remembering blank.
- 03:47
[ laughs ] And then a bunch of other people named William.
- 03:50
Then you have Mary Shelley's work,
- 03:53
which is really just like
- 03:54
pulls from all different angles. [Hands stretches from Frankenstein novel]
- 03:56
So it is very different to analyze a poem by Percy Shelley
- 04:01
and Frankenstein.
- 04:02
Although, Percy Shelley did have a lot of input into Frankenstein. [Image of Percy Shelley is displayed on screen]
- 04:06
And that's kind of a little bit of the controversy
- 04:07
around the book, is like,
- 04:09
how much of this did Mary actually write?
- 04:11
Maybe she wrote the short story and Percy
- 04:13
actually turned it into,
- 04:15
you know, the full novel. [Pen with some notes appear in candle light]
- 04:16
Oh, interesting.
- 04:17
So the idea of a bunch of people sitting around
- 04:19
telling ghost stories as entertainment
- 04:21
for an evening - a little different [Mary Shelley reciting ghost story with hand gestures]
- 04:23
from society today.
- 04:24
- But that was probably normalcy in those days, right? - Yeah.
- 04:27
They would entertain...
- 04:28
Yeah, I mean, they had nothing else to do,
- 04:30
so they would just write stories. [John and George talks about technical issues while Mary Shelley and Percy listens]
- 04:31
- Yeah, HBO wasn't... - Exactly, this is why we have,
- 04:34
you know, hundreds and hundreds of poems and stories
- 04:37
from that time, yeah. [Board shows Frankenstein introduction]
- 04:40
Who was Mary Shelley?
- 04:41
Why does it help to know Shelley's background?
- 04:43
What was the origin of Frankenstein?
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