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General Introduction to Frankenstein 24722 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, please...Mary Shelley. You go, girl. And that is how Frankenstein came into fruition. ...Okay, maybe HBO wasn’t part of it. But you won’t know for sure until you check out this video.


Transcript

00:04

Frankenstein a la shmoop an introduction so this is Frankenstein

00:10

a la shmoop the course and we're here with Deb Tannen who runs our creative [Man and Deb discussing Frankenstein]

00:14

and pajetta tutorial stuff and like 87 other things that shmoop so we're gonna

00:18

talk to Deb about Frankenstein she's a PhD in literature knows this stuff cold

00:23

who was Mary Shelley Mary Shelley I was 18 when this all happened so we think of [Portrait of Mary Shelley]

00:31

it as kind of like a young kid but in reality she was engaging with some of

00:36

the biggest intellectuals at the time we're talking the early 1800s here her

00:41

mother was Mary Wollstonecraft who you probably know from having written the

00:45

first feminist treatise in the English language our proto-feminist I guess the

00:51

vindication of the Rights of Woman and then her father was William Godwin [Deb discussing books with man]

00:56

everyone was named William back then so I'm just gonna assume that was his name

00:59

too and he was just a super famous anarchist atheist kind of like crazy

01:04

intellectual so she was brought up in a family of intellectuals and that's what

01:09

was going on in her life which she wrote Frankenstein the origin story a [Frankenstein novel appears]

01:17

Frankenstein is actually really awesome she married Percy Shelley who was a

01:20

super famous Romantic poet became Mary Shelley and she and Percy and a bunch of

01:25

other romantics like John Polidori and Lord Byron were hanging out in [Lord Byron and John Polidori hanging by a fire place]

01:29

Switzerland they were like on a lake but it was terrible weather and Lord Byron

01:34

was like oh hey you know we should do we're super bored let's have a ghost [Byron discussing ghost story with John]

01:37

story contest so they all wrote ghost stories trying to take the crown of who

01:42

could write of all these amazing romantic authors who could write the

01:46

best ghost story Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein

01:50

started as a short story needless to say she won the ghost story contest she

01:55

turned the story into a novel in 1818 I was first published critics didn't not [Mary Shelley holding novel]

02:02

like it and then in 1831 it was republished for the purposes of this [Tomato hits Mary on her face]

02:07

course and kind of just generally when we're talking about Frankenstein most

02:10

people are referring to that later wow that's fascinating so mary was 18 years

02:14

old when she wrote this now they were typically grandmothers by age 18 yeah

02:18

she had actually given birth twice by that point yeah we'll talk about that in

02:23

in respect to a few other things for sure

02:26

contemporaneous environment they were in Switzerland in 1800 was what politically [Switzerland on a map]

02:33

a melting pot for intellectuals because this sounds like the all-star team yeah

02:38

you know of writers and creative people of that era yeah they this is kind of [Writers all star team appear]

02:42

again showing how Mary Shelley was really part of the core group of [Boy eating apple and Mary appears at the core]

02:46

romantics and we'll talk a little bit more about Romanticism but she was the

02:50

woman and as you heard the names I was saying John she was the woman among this

02:55

group of men and that actually is incredibly important when analyzing

02:58

Frankenstein to think about you know how does that change it the fact that this [Girl looking at monster]

03:04

is written from a woman's voice and not a man's voice like almost everything

03:09

else at the time was being written what type of literary work is [Frankenstein's monster strikes a mirror]

03:14

Frankenstein Frankenstein is an interesting melting pot of kind of

03:21

enlightenment thought romanticism gothicism and will define all these

03:27

terms but whereas you know Percy Shelley and Lord Byron are really thought of as

03:32

like like definite Romantic poets when you think of like who are the big six [Big six poet portraits appear]

03:37

you get Lord Byron Shelley some other that I'm not remembering Blake and then

03:42

a bunch of other people named William then you have Mary Shelley's work which [Woman reading a book]

03:47

is really just like pulls from all different angles so it is it's very

03:53

different to analyze a poem by Percy Shelley and Frankenstein although

03:57

personally did have a lot of input in to Frankenstein and that's kind of a little

04:01

bit of controversy around the book is like how much of this did Mary

04:04

actually write maybe she wrote the short story and Percy actually turned it into [Candle burning]

04:09

you know the full novel interesting so the idea of a bunch of people sitting

04:14

around telling ghost stories as entertainment for an evening a little

04:17

different from society today but that was probably normalcy in in those days [Man and woman discussing ghost stories]

04:21

yeah they would entertain yeah I mean they had nothing else to do so they

04:25

would just write stories exactly this is how this is why we have you know

04:29

hundreds of hundreds of you know poems and stories from bad times better

04:33

who was Mary Shelley why does it help to know Shelley's background what was the

04:39

origin of Frankenstein [Questions appear]

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