Gcse Prose essay

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Andrew Cockroft GCSE coursework - Frankenstein

GCSE Prose Assignment: “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley

Intro

The book Frankenstein was written by Mary Shelley. Mary finished writing the book in 1817 when she was just 19 years of age, but the book was not published till the start of 1818.

Mary conceived the idea of Frankenstein in 1816 “the year without a summer”. In that year Mary and her lover at the time, Percy Shelley took a trip to Lake Geneva to see Lord Bryon but all outdoor events they planned were cancelled due to the weather. This meant their whole summer was spent indoors talking only ever about science and the supernatural. After reading a supernatural story they came up with the idea that they each write a supernatural story and the best story would win. Mary thought of an idea which produced Frankenstein.

Mary’s inspiration to write Frankenstein came from a number of things, for example: James Lind, the mentor of Percy Shelley while he was at Eton. He was well known because of his interest in “animal electricity”. At Eton he was probably one of the first people in England to demonstrate Electro-medical experiments in which he “made dead frogs jump like living ones”.

The Genre of Frankenstein is a Gothic genre. Gothic genre usually tells a story of horror and romance. As in the case of Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein creates the monster which establishes the horror, the other side of the story is the romance with Victor and Elizabeth. In the end these two differences meet where the monster kills Elizabeth, the combination of these two ideas produces a gothic but wonderful storyline.

1st Para

The basic plot of Chapter 23 is that the monster is on the loose and kills Elizabeth. A search takes place with no success. Mary Shelley has used this chapter to express the feelings of the characters, mainly Victor. At the start it explains the thoughts of Victor and the monster through Pathetic Fallacy, using the weather to describe how the tension is building up and that it would be released soon. Further on it describes Victor’s thoughts and feeling after he hears, and then finds, that the monster has killed Elizabeth. Mary Shelley moves the reader to feel empathy with the narrator in the scene where Victor expresses his love for his dead wife. To him she almost appears to be sleeping: “as she lay, her head upon her arm and a handkerchief thrown across her face and neck, I might have supposed her asleep”. This contrasts sharply with the horror of what has happened, and the reader is reminded of this in the same paragraph: “The murderous mark of the fiend’s grasp was on her neck”. Mary Shelley then introduces another emotion, that of anger. In his anger Victor goes on the search for the monster, he then starts questioning himself about why did he make the creature and could he live with this. After the unsuccessful hunt he goes back to the room where Elizabeth is dead and lays with her. He is still questioning himself and feeling immense amount of guilt for what he has done. However at the end of the chapter he thinks to himself: Why should I be like this? Why should I feel all this guilt? After all my life has been a “tale of horrors”. In this chapter Mary Shelley uses Victor as a tool to express a rollercoaster of emotions, thoughts and feelings.

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2nd Para

The 1st and 2nd paragraphs of Chapter 23 show greatly, the atmosphere surrounding the story. The chapter begins with calmness: “transitory light…lovely scene of waters, woods” and swiftly changes building into a horrific storm. “The Wind…now rose with great violence”. Here Mary Shelley has used personification to show Frankenstein’s mood which rapidly increases in violence just like the wind’s ferocity. This creates a certain foreboding atmosphere to the story.  It links how stormy the weather is to the moods of the characters. Most of the sentences and phrases used in this paragraph use pathetic fallacy, which is ...

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