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