Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
How A Teenage Girl Became the Mother of Horror - Coggle Diagram
How A Teenage Girl Became the Mother of Horror
WEATHER
The 1815 eruption of the Mount Tambora volcano on the island of Sumbawa (Indonesia) released ash, rock, and sulfuric dust into the air, dramatically lowering temperatures across many areas of the globe the following year
Odd weather reports in 1816: summer frosts in North America, red snow in Italy, and eight weeks of nonstop rain in Ireland.
The bizarre weather in 1816 also left an indelible mark on culture and literature.
FRIENDS
A group of friends from England spend the summer together. The group included, the poet Lord Byron, his physician John Polidori, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shelley’s teenage lover, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.
advocates of Romanticism, a movement that originated in the late 18th century in response to the dispassionate reason of the Enlightenment. Romantics favored nature, passion, and the experience of the individual.
They were fascinated by the experiments with electricity carried out the century before by Luigi Galvani. They speculated on the possibility of bringing the dead matter back to life by using electrical impulses.
FRANKENSTEIN
Lord Byron suggested that each member of the party write a horror story. Out of this parlor game came a new kind of tale, Mary Shelley’s terrifying novel, Frankenstein.
The story of a Swiss scientist, Dr. Victor Frankenstein. He is fascinated to learn about the latest advances in science and resolves to “pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.” He studied anatomy and the processes whereby human tissue is generated and corrupted. One day he believes he has discovered “the cause of generation and life” and become “capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.”
In the first version, Dr. Frankenstein makes the creature in the spirit of free, scientific curiosity; his sin is that he then refuses to love and nurture him once he comes to life. The later edition portrays Dr. Frankenstein as a victim of fate.
Frankenstein reflect the concerns of an age conflicted over religion and science. The novel explores the boundary between life and death, and the potential dangers human arrogance might arouse when trying to “play God.”
Published anonymously at first in 1818, she titled the work Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. Her name appeared on the second edition in 1823. In 1831 she republished the work, changing some of its more radical passages
MARY SHELLEY
Despite her literary successes, personal tragedy overshadowed much of Mary Shelley’s life. She lost her husband who drowned in 1822 . She suffered several miscarriages, and only one of her children survived adulthood
Mary, then age 18, had little writing experience. In later years she would recall how, during that Swiss summer holiday, she experienced a nightmarish vision
. Mary was in her mid-teens, and Shelley was a married man and father of two children. The two fell in love.
In 1831 she republished the work, changing some of its more radical passages, and adding a preface containing a tribute to Shelley’s
A sensitive, highly cultured woman whose mother had died when she was a baby, her frequent bouts of depression fueled a morbid fascination with death.
They would marry in 1818, after the suicide of Shelley’s first wife.