Frankenstein

Frankenstein, a novel by Mary Shelley, 1818

• also called The Modern Prometheus

Mary Shelley

• her mother was the famed writer and women's rights thinker, '''Mary Wollenstonecraft'''
  • Wollenstonecraft is considered the "first feminist"
• her father, '''William Godwin''', was a famous political philosopher and novelist
  • Godwin was considered a political radical for his attacks on institutions, "aristocratic privilege", and religion
    • he argued
  • he was an early promoter of "utilitarianism," a philosophy that sought to create the "greatest good" or "happiness" for the "greatest number of people"
  • Godwin wrote a novel that drew from John Milton's "Paradise Lost"
    • Mary Shelley also drew inspiration from ''Paradise Lost''
• Shelley had an affair with the poet Percy Shelley, who was married, and married him in 1816

Writing of Frankenstein

• it was on a trip to Switzerland in 1816 w/ Shelley, the poet Lord Byron, and William Polidor that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein

The Summer with no Sun

• Mary wrote of her time in Switzerland,

"It proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house"

Galvanism

• Benjamin Franklin's discoveries in the mid-1700s of the nature of lightning as electricity spurred research into electricity
• in the late 1700s, Luigi Galvani realized that muscle tissue reacted to electricity
  • his assistant accidently touched a dead frog's leg with a charged scalpel, which made its leg move
  • Galvani later realized that electricity produced the same effect
  • he proposed that electricity animated living things
  • he called it "animal electricity"
    • became known as "Galvanism"

Cartoon of a galvanized corpse (1836)

• • • became a cultural phenomenon (meme)
    • cartoons and stories of corpses raised from the dead with electricity
  • the term "Galvanism" was actually coined by Alessandro Volta, who built the first chemical electric battery
    • for Volta, "Galvanism" referred to generation of electricity via chemical reactions