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Frankenstein
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel written by English author Mary Shelley that tells the story of Victor Frankenstein,
a young scientist who creates a grotesque, but sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story
when she was 18, and the first edition of the novel was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20.
Her name first appeared on the second edition, published in France in 1823. Shelley travelled through Europe in 1814,
journeying along the river Rhine in Germany with a stop in Gernsheim which is 17 km away from Frankenstein Castle, where, two centuries before,
an alchemist was engaged in experiments. Later,
she travelled in the region of Geneva —where much of the story takes place—and the topic of galvanism
and other similar occult ideas were themes of conversation among her companions, particularly her lover and future husband, Percy Shelley. Mary,
Percy, Lord Byron and John Polidori decided to have a competition to see who could write the best horror story. After thinking for days,
Shelley dreamt about a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he had made; her dream later evolved into the novel's story.
Frankenstein is infused with elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement. At the same time, it is an early example of science fiction.
Brian Aldiss has argued that it should be considered the first true science fiction story because, in contrast to previous stories
with fantastical elements resembling those of later science fiction, the central character "makes a deliberate decision" and "turns
to modern experiments in the laboratory" to achieve fantastic results. It has had a considerable influence in literature and popular culture
and spawned a complete genre of horror stories, films and plays. Since the novel's publication, the name "Frankenstein" has often been used
to refer to the monster itself. This usage is sometimes considered erroneous, but usage commentators regard it as well-established and acceptable.
In the novel, the monster is identified by words such as "creature", "monster", "demon", "wretch", "abortion", "fiend" and "it". Speaking
to Victor Frankenstein, the wretch refers to himself as "the Adam of your labours", and elsewhere as someone who "would have [been] your Adam",
but is instead "your fallen angel".
Summary
 [^]  Frankenstein is written in the form of a frame story that starts with Captain Robert Walton writing letters to his sister. It takes place
at an unspecified time in the 18th century, as the letters' dates are given as "17—".
Captain Walton's Introductory Frame Narrative
The novel Frankenstein is written in epistolary form, documenting a fictional correspondence between Captain Robert Walton and his sister,
Margaret Walton Saville. Walton is a failed writer and captain who sets out to explore the North Pole
and expand his scientific knowledge in hopes of achieving fame. During the voyage, the crew spots a dog sled driven by a gigantic figure.
A few hours later, the crew rescues a nearly frozen and emaciated man named Victor Frankenstein.
Frankenstein has been in pursuit of the gigantic man observed by Walton's crew. Frankenstein starts to recover from his exertion;
he sees in Walton the same obsession that has destroyed him, and recounts a story of his life's miseries to Walton as a warning.
The recounted story serves as the frame for Frankenstein's narrative.
Victor Frankenstein's Narrative
Victor begins by telling of his childhood. Born in Naples, into a wealthy Genevan family, Victor and his brothers, Ernest and William,
all three being sons of Alphonse Frankenstein by the former Caroline Beaufort, are encouraged
to seek a greater understanding of the world through chemistry. As a young boy, Victor is obsessed
with studying outdated theories that focus on simulating natural wonders. When Victor is five years old, his parents adopt Elizabeth Lavenza,
the orphaned daughter of an expropriated Italian nobleman, with whom Victor later falls in love. During this period, Victor's parents, Alphonse
and Caroline, take in yet another orphan, Justine Moritz, who becomes William's nanny. Weeks before he leaves
for the University of Ingolstadt in Germany, his mother dies of scarlet fever; Victor buries himself in his experiments to deal with the grief.
At the university, he excels at chemistry and other sciences, soon developing a secret technique to impart life to non-living matter. Eventually,
he undertakes the creation of a humanoid, but due to the difficulty in replicating the minute parts of the human body,
Victor makes the Creature tall, about 8 ft in height and proportionally large. Despite his intentions,
the beautiful creation of his dreams is instead hideous, with yellow eyes and skin that barely conceals the muscle tissue
and blood vessels underneath. Repulsed by his work, Victor flees and dismisses him when it awakens. While wandering the streets,
he meets his childhood friend, Henry Clerval, and takes Henry back to his apartment, fearful of Henry's reaction if he sees the monster.
Victor does not have to deal with that issue, however, because the monster has escaped. Victor falls ill from the experience and is nursed back
to health by Henry. After a four-month recovery, he returns home when he learns of the murder of his brother William. Upon arriving in Geneva,
Victor sees the Creature near the crime scene and climbing a mountain, leading him to believe his creation is responsible. Justine Moritz,
William's nanny, is convicted of the crime after William's locket, which had contained a miniature portrait of Caroline, is found in her pocket.
Victor is helpless to stop her from being hanged, as he knows no one would believe his story. Ravaged by grief and guilt,
Victor retreats into the mountains. The Creature finds him and pleads for Victor to hear his tale.
 The Creature's Narrative 
Intelligent and articulate, the Creature relates his first days of life, living alone in the wilderness and finding that people were afraid of
and hated him due to his appearance, which led him to fear and hide from them. While living in an abandoned structure connected to a cottage,
he grew fond of the poor family living there, and discreetly collected firewood for them. Secretly living among the family for months,
the Creature learned to speak by listening to them and he taught himself to read after discovering a lost satchel of books in the woods.
When he saw his reflection in a pool, he realized his physical appearance was hideous, and it terrified him as it terrifies normal humans.
Nevertheless, he approached the family in hopes of becoming their friend. Initially he was able to befriend the blind father figure of the family,
but the rest of them were frightened and they all fled their home, resulting in the Creature burning the cottage in a fit of rage.
He then swore revenge on his creator for bringing him into a world that hated him. He traveled to Victor's family estate using details
from Victor's journal, murdered William, and framed Justine. The Creature demands that Victor create a female companion like himself.
He argues that as a living being, he has a right to happiness. The Creature promises that he
and his mate will vanish into the South American wilderness, never to reappear, if Victor grants his request. Should Victor refuse his request,
The Creature also threatens to kill Victor's remaining friends and loved ones and not stop until he completely ruins him. Fearing for his family,
Victor reluctantly agrees. The Creature says he will watch over Victor's progress.
 Victor Frankenstein's Narrative Resumes 
Clerval accompanies him to England, but they separate at Victor's insistence at Perth, Scotland.
Victor suspects that the Creature is following him. Working on the female creature on the Orkney Islands, he is plagued by premonitions of disaster,
such as the female hating the Creature or becoming more evil than him, but more particularly the two creatures might lead
to the breeding of a race that could plague mankind. He tears apart the unfinished female creature after he sees the Creature,
who had indeed followed Victor, watching through a window. The Creature later confronts and tries to threaten Victor into working again,
but Victor is convinced that the Creature is evil and that its mate would be evil as well, and the pair would threaten all humanity.
Victor destroys his work and the Creature vows that he will "be with [him] on [his] wedding night".
Victor interprets this as a threat upon his life, believing that the Creature will kill him after finally becoming happy.
When Victor lands in Ireland, he is soon imprisoned for Clerval's murder, as the Creature had strangled Clerval to death and left the corpse
to be found where his creator had arrived, causing the latter to suffer another mental breakdown in prison. After being acquitted,
Victor returns home with his father, who has restored to Elizabeth some of her father's fortune. In Geneva, Victor is about to marry Elizabeth
and prepares to fight the Creature to the death, arming himself with pistols and a dagger. The night following their wedding, Victor asks Elizabeth
to stay in her room while he looks for "the fiend". While Victor searches the house and grounds, the Creature strangles Elizabeth to death.
From the window, Victor sees the Creature, who tauntingly points at Elizabeth's corpse; Victor tries to shoot him, but the Creature escapes.
After getting back to Geneva, Victor's father, weakened by age and by the death of his precious Elizabeth, dies a few days later. Seeking revenge,
Victor pursues the Creature to the North Pole, but collapses from exhaustion and hypothermia before he can find his quarry.
Captain Walton's Concluding Frame Narrative
At the end of Victor's narrative, Captain Walton resumes the telling of the story, closing the frame around Victor's recounting.
A few days after the Creature vanished, the ship becomes trapped in pack ice and multiple crewmen die in the cold,
before the rest of Walton's crew insists on returning south once it is freed. Walton sees Victor's story as a warning, and decides
to turn the ship around. Victor dies shortly thereafter, but not before telling Walton to "avoid ambition".
Walton discovers the Creature on his ship, mourning over Victor's body. The Creature tells Walton that Victor's death has not brought him peace;
rather, his crimes have left him completely alone. The Creature vows to kill himself so that no others will ever know of his existence.
Walton watches as the Creature drifts away on an ice raft that is soon lost in darkness and distance, never to be seen again.
Composition
 [^]  During the rainy summer of 1816, the "Year Without a Summer", the world was locked in a long cold volcanic winter caused
by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. Mary Shelley, aged 18, and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati
by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The weather was consistently too cold and dreary that summer
to enjoy the outdoor holiday activities they had planned, so the group retired indoors until dawn. Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa,
the company amused themselves by reading German ghost stories translated into French from the book Fantasmagoriana, then Byron proposed that they
"each write a ghost story". Unable to think of a story, young Mary became anxious: "Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning,
and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative." During one evening in the middle of summer, the discussions turned
to the nature of the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated", Mary noted, "galvanism had given token of such things".
It was after midnight before they retired, and unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the grim terrors of her
"waking dream". In September 2011, astronomer Donald Olson, after a visit to the Lake Geneva villa the previous year,
and inspecting data about the motion of the moon and stars, concluded that her "waking dream" took place "between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m."
on 16 June 1816, several days after the initial idea by Lord Byron that they each write a ghost story.
She began writing what she assumed would be a short story. With Percy Shelley's encouragement, she expanded the tale into a full-fledged novel.
She later described that summer in Switzerland as the moment "when I first stepped out from childhood into life".
Shelley wrote the first four chapters in the weeks following the suicide of her half-sister Fanny.
This was one of many personal tragedies that impacted Shelley's work. Shelley's first child died in infancy, and
when she began composing Frankenstein in 1816, she was likely nursing her second child, who would also be dead at Frankensteins publication.
Byron managed to write just a fragment based on the vampire legends he heard while travelling the Balkans, and
from this John Polidori created The Vampyre, the progenitor of the romantic vampire literary genre. Thus two legendary horror tales originated
from the conclave. The group talked about Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment ideas as well.
Shelley believed the Enlightenment idea that society could progress and grow if political leaders used their powers responsibly; however,
she also believed the Romantic ideal that misused power could destroy society. Mary's and Percy Bysshe Shelley's manuscripts
for the first three-volume edition in 1818, as well as Mary Shelley's fair copy for her publisher, are now housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
The Bodleian acquired the papers in 2004, and they belong now to the Abinger Collection. In 2008,
the Bodleian published a new edition of Frankenstein, edited by Charles E. Robinson, that contains comparisons of Mary Shelley's original text
with Percy Shelley's additions and interventions alongside.
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