Frankenstein Questions

Please read through Volumes I and II by Tuesday. Below are a list of questions to help inspire you. Feel free to draw from them or to develop and attempt to answer your own. Remember that blogs are due by 9:30 am on Tuesday.

I also want to remind you that you can write on the essay we discussed last class, "Transgendering and _The Monk," if you wish. Remember, that this is a ONE TIME ONLY deal. If you wish to write on this essay, it will also be due by Tuesday at 9:30 am.

Here are the questions:

• We will be discussing this issue much more in depth on Tuesday, but for now consider what this novel might be saying about education. One of the biggest debates during the time in which Frankenstein was written was how to go about educating the populace, and specifically examining the different educational "needs" for both men and women. Rousseau claimed that the state of nature was the “ideal” of man and that we have traded our naturally free state for a condition of social slavery. He argued for a form of education in which the individual would develop without the oppression of authority, in natural surroundings which allowed close links with man’s originally “innocent” state. For women’s education, however, he offers very little insight, and seems to claim that women’s “natural sensibility” should not be “tainted” through any sort of instruction.
Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist philosopher and incidentally Mary Shelley’s mother, had much to say about Rousseau and his claims of the inherent irrationality of women:
“What nonsense! when will a great man arise with sufficient strength of mind to puff away the fumes which pride and sensuality have thus spread over the subject! If women are by nature inferior to men, their virtues must be the same in quality, if not in degree, or virtue is a relative idea; consequently, their conduct should be founded on the same principles, and have the same aim.” (From A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792)
To what extent can we see Frankenstein’s monster as the logical extension of these faulty educational practices? To what extent are women, like the monster, constructed by men, and yet struggling for their own self-identity?

• How does the presence of Robert Walton in this book affect the text's treatment of science? What is his scientific motivation and goal? How does it differ from the scientific quest that Victor Frankenstein relates?

• To what extent is the romantic conception of "imagination" involved in Victor's actions as a creator? How might his creation of the Being be a parody of the poetic or creative process -- i.e. a misuse of imagination?

• Why did Victor create the creature? What responsibilities did Victor, as the creator, have toward his creature? Why did Victor abandon the creature?

• What powers does the text attribute to nature with regard to human happiness? Follow out the fluctuations in Victor's relationship to and interpretations of his natural environment.
• Why can't ordinary humans accept the Being's appearance? What does this inability imply about the basis of human community? In other words, why so much emphasis on physical similarity or dissimilarity?

• In Book 2, the Being tells the story of his initial moments of consciousness. Describe some of his first impressions about himself and nature and comment on what you find significant about them.