When Mary Shelley set herself to the task of writing Frankenstein she consciously wanted to create a story “which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awake the thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.” The novel itself is a monstrous patchwork of text opening into more text, allowing a great and terrible license for the reader to denote their own sense of morality using these valence levels of perspective. Like Mary Shelley, James Baldwin in his essay “The Creative Process” recognizes the indispensable need to understand the vast internal topography of the human in order to legitimize the living continuation of human experience. More importantly, he recognizes the need to create a world that is itself more human. Mary Shelley disturbs the ignorant peace of her reader to force them into discovering that the inhuman themes that are so prevalent within the novel exist within themselves. What the novel consummately accomplishes with the organic convergence of the literal and metaphorical is the final actualization of the reader of his or her own ghastly nature. It is a tale of unchecked Prometheanism, only more terrifying because it lacks the complicity to humanity that even Prometheanism would entail.
[...] Frakenstein Shelly's novel expresses some of the major points seen in James Baldwin's essay, Creative Process.” For example, Shelly might be the kind of “disturber of the peace” that Baldwin discussed. Explain how and for what reason, Shelley can disturb her readers. When Mary Shelley set herself to the task of writing Frankenstein she consciously wanted to create a story “which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awake the thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.” The novel itself is a monstrous patchwork of text opening into more text, allowing a great and terrible license for the reader to denote their own sense of morality using these valence levels of perspective. [...]
[...] Slowly Frankenstein and the monster become closer to passing into one entity, as they both share in an interminable rage and desire for revenge. It is the ingenuity of Mary Shelley to have this set in a desolate land of ice, as it is a transcendental and romantic idea that the external surrounding mirror both characters internal state. Nature, as it had before to both characters been a transcendent source of renewal and happiness is now only a bleak emblem of their own hopelessness. [...]
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