Frankenstein context

Learning:

Locke found the term tabula rasa meaning blank slate which argued, through the behaviourist approach, that we learnt behaviour through experience

Learning:

Baudrillard's idea of Simulacra (human experience is just a simulation of reality), culture and media is just a perceived reality

Learning:

Werter’s effect, young men would kill themselves in the way Werter did, for the value of love

Ambition:

The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog

Ambition + science:

Galvanism

Life + death:

Shelley lost her virginity on her mother’s grave

Women:

Mary Wollstonecraft was a famous radical feminist who believed in the importance of education

Life + death + women:

Not only was Mary Shelley pregnant during much of the period that she was writing Frankenstein, but she had already suffered the birth and death of an infant. Moreover, her mother died in childbirth. Anxieties around maternity and birth manifest in the text.

Ambition + art:

The Romantic movement emphasised nature and feeling as a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution

Women:

Freud’s oedipus complex in Victor’s dream, Shelley claimed she felt romantic feelings for her father (elektra complex)

Rejection:

The creature begins as Romantic hero, through the rejection of those around him, he urges other to see the beauty inside (blind man). However, he becomes violent and bitter, he no longer sees the beauty in nature.