ShmoopTube

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We speak student!

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Your father was Frankenstein.

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But your mother was the lightning!

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Frankenstein a la Shmoop

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Who is the Monster?

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Are we supposed to sympathize with the monster?

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The Romantics were obsessed with a lot of things.

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They were obsessed with

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emotion, and nature, and the Sublime.

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And another thing they were obsessed with was Satan.

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[ ominous classical music ]

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They all reached back to Paradise Lost,

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which is this epic poem by John Milton

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which basically just recounts the story

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of Satan as a fallen angel.

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And, you know, kind of retells the Bible in some fashion.

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Shelley actually uses a line from Paradise Lost

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as the epigraph to her book,

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which we'll talk about a little bit later.

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But Romantic thinkers thought of Satan as a kind of hero.

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You know, this Romantic hero

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or Byronic hero, also called a Satanic hero.

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Satan in Paradise Lost

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is a hero of some sort.

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Satan is a figure who is rebelling against his overlord.

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In this case, God.

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We think of the same thing in Frankenstein.

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Is Frankenstein's monster a Satanic hero

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where he's just rebelling against his overlord?

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And if so, then he's Satan, but we also feel bad for him.

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- Right. - Because it's not his fault.

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So we can kind of have a devilish figure who we also

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sympathize with.

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And that ambiguity is definitely something that

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Shelley's trying to bring out.

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Is there an allegory there for the plight of women?

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Who were -- It wasn't their fault.

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They were controlled by men;

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they kind of had to rebel.

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But in, sort of, guilt that you would feel

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and a whole range of...

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Yeah, absolutely.

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I mean, again, reading onto Shelley's life,

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you know, this proto-feminism

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and being a woman among men

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is a huge part of it,

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so we can really read that onto almost every part

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of Frankenstein if we want.

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But this idea of

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you're born into a society that is one way

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and you need to change that.

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Can we really fault Frankenstein's monster

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for wanting to rebel? No.

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Can we fault Satan for wanting to rebel?

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Maybe not.

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Does the monster deserve our sympathy?

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How did the Romantics envision Satan?

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Is the monster similar to Satan?

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[ evil laugh ]

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