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We speak student!

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Frankenstein

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A la Shmoop

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An Introduction

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So this is Frankenstein a la Shmoop, the course. [ Narrator David introduces Deb]

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And we're here with Deb Tennen,

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who runs our creative, and bunch of editorial stuff,

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and like 87 other things at Shmoop.

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So we're gonna talk to Deb about Frankenstein.

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She's a PHD in literature and knows this stuff cold. [Frankenstein appears on screen]

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Who was Mary Shelley?

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Mary Shelley was 18 [Photos of Mary Shelley appears]

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when this all happened.

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So we think of her as kind of like a young kid,

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but in reality, she was engaging with [Frankenstein movie plays]

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some of the biggest intellectuals of the time.

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We're talking early 1800s here.

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Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, [Photos of Wollstonecraft displayed]

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who you probably know from having written

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the first feminist treatise in the English language,

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or proto-feminist, I guess -

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A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

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And then her father was William Godwin... [Photos of William Godwin appears]

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Everyone was named William back then,

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so I'm just gonna assume that was his name, too.

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And he was just a super famous anarchist atheist, [Symbols of anarchist atheist pop up]

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kind of like crazy intellectual.

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So she was brought up in a family of intellectuals,

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and that's what was going on in her life when she wrote Frankenstein.

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It's alive! It's alive! [Frankenstein resurrects]

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The origin story of Frankenstein is actually really awesome.

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She married Percy Shelley,

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who was a super famous Romantic poet, [Percy Shelly ponders]

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became Mary Shelley.

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And she and Percy and a bunch of other Romantics,

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like John Polidori and Lord Byron, [John Polidori and Lord Byron names pop up]

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were hanging out in Switzerland. [Arrow points to Switzerland on map]

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They were on a lake when it was terrible weather,

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and Lord Byron was like, "Oh, hey,

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you know what we should do? We're super bored.

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Let's have a ghost story contest."

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So they all wrote ghost stories [Lord Byron talks to John Polidori]

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trying to take the crown of who could write -

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of all these amazing Romantic authors -

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who could write the best ghost story.

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Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. [Mary Shelley decides to write Frankenstein]

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[ horror theme ]

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It started as a short story.

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Needless to say, she won the ghost story contest.

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She turned the story into a novel. [Mary Shelley with her novel]

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In 1818,

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it was first published.

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Critics did not like it.

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And then in 1831, it was republished [Critics smash tomatoes at Mary Shelley]

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with the help of her husband, Percy,

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who kind of fluffed up the language a bit [Mary Shelley and Percy discuss about Frankenstein novel]

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and changed a few things.

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For the purposes of this course,

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and kind of just generally

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when we're talking about Frankenstein,

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most people are referring to that later version. [Both novel and comics of Frankenstein displayed on screen]

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Wow, that's fascinating.

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So, Mary was 18 years old when she wrote this.

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Now, they were typically grandmothers by age 18?

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- Yeah, she had actually given birth twice by that point. - Oh, my God.

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Yeah, we'll talk about that in respect to a few other things, for sure.

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Contemporaneous environment --

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They were in Switzerland in 1800. [Map of Lake Geneva in Switzerland appears on the screen]

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It was what, politically? [Map of Switzerland where Mary stayed]

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A melting pot for intellectuals?

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- Because this sounds like the all-star team, - Yeah.

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you know, of writers and creative people of that era.

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Yeah, this is kind of again showing how Mary Shelley [All the famous writers pop up on the screen]

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was really part of the core group of Romantics.

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And we'll talk a little bit more about Romanticism. [A boy eating an apple and Mary Shelley pops up from the apple]

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But she was the woman in -- As you heard,

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the names I was saying - John, Percy, et cetera. [Mary Shelley shows her bicep]

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She was the woman among this group of men,

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and that actually is incredibly important when analyzing Frankenstein -

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to think about, you know,

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how does that change it? [A girls talks to Frankenstein by the lake]

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The fact that this is written from a woman's voice

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and not a man's voice like almost everything else [Frankenstein gazes himself in the mirror]

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at the time was being written.

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[ glass breaks ] [Frankenstein hits the mirror and breaks it]

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What type of literary work is Frankenstein?

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Frankenstein is an interesting melting pot of [Characteristics of Frankenstein displayed on the screen]

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kind of Enlightenment thought,

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Romanticism, Gothicism.

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And we'll define all these terms.

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Whereas, you know, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron [Percy Shelley and Lord Byron stands besides each other]

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are really thought of as

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definite Romantic poets.

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When you think of, "Who are the big six?", [Photos of the great six contemporary writers appears]

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you get Lord Byron, Shelley,

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some others that I'm not remembering blank.

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[ laughs ] And then a bunch of other people named William.

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Then you have Mary Shelley's work,

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which is really just like

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pulls from all different angles. [Hands stretches from Frankenstein novel]

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So it is very different to analyze a poem by Percy Shelley

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and Frankenstein.

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Although, Percy Shelley did have a lot of input into Frankenstein. [Image of Percy Shelley is displayed on screen]

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And that's kind of a little bit of the controversy

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around the book, is like,

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how much of this did Mary actually write?

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Maybe she wrote the short story and Percy

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actually turned it into,

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you know, the full novel. [Pen with some notes appear in candle light]

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Oh, interesting.

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So the idea of a bunch of people sitting around

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telling ghost stories as entertainment

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for an evening - a little different [Mary Shelley reciting ghost story with hand gestures]

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from society today.

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- But that was probably normalcy in those days, right? - Yeah.

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They would entertain...

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Yeah, I mean, they had nothing else to do,

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so they would just write stories. [John and George talks about technical issues while Mary Shelley and Percy listens]

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- Yeah, HBO wasn't... - Exactly, this is why we have,

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you know, hundreds and hundreds of poems and stories

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from that time, yeah. [Board shows Frankenstein introduction]

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Who was Mary Shelley?

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Why does it help to know Shelley's background?

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What was the origin of Frankenstein?

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