Sublime

paroxysm

You, my creator, would tear me to pieces, and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? You would not call it murder, if you could precipitate me into one of those ice-rifts, and destroy my frame, the work of your own hands. Shall I respect man, when he contemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of

By the time Mary began writing Frankenstein, she had already become a mother and lost a child. Little Clara arrived two months early in February 1815, only to die two weeks later, to Mary’s harrowing sorrow. Mary wrote later of a “waking dream” that inspired Frankenstein in which she managed to revive baby Clara by moving her closer to the fire and

Never having read Frankenstein, he did not realize that this plan actually duplicated Mary’s depiction of the monster’s wishes for his own funeral: to be burned, with his ashes “swept into the seas by the winds.”

presentiments

By her subtitle The Modern Prometheus, Mary is asking her reader to recall the Promethean myth, in which the Titan Prometheus steals fire (representing knowledge) from the Olympian Zeus to give to primal and prerational man, only to suffer the consequences of his actions. Zeus chains Prometheus, the creator of rational man, to a rock, where he is

I had an obscure feeling that all was not over, and that he would still commit some signal crime, which by its enormity should almost efface the recollection of the past. There was always scope for fear, so long as any thing I loved remained behind. My abhorrence of this fiend cannot be conceived. When I thought of him, I gnashed my teeth, my eyes