The Role Of Galvanism In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Man’s creation brought several great things to society as our world evolved. Things like tools made of stone, the wheel, and even more complicated things like electricity helped shape the world we know today. But as Mary Shelley portrays in Frankenstein, the common man's inventions are sometimes not good enough for a mid 19th century mad-scientist cooked up in a castle with dead corpses and plenty of surgical equipment. As we all know from reading the novel, the monster didn’t have the best experience of his new life he was given by Victor Frankenstein. We noticed how he was shunned by society for his undead appearance, his values and morals, and for the sheer fact that everyone who knew of the monster's existence did not want him running loose

` Galvanism is the contraction of a muscle that is stimulated by an electric current. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor used a very high voltage of electricity to bring the monster to life. “During the 1800s, people were fascinated with death, the afterlife, and if it could be possible to cheat our ultimate demise entirely. Additionally, we were just harnessing the true power of electricity. Shelley was very well-educated and well-traveled, so she would have been witness to the scientific developments in both of these fields. And her regular consorts (Lord Byron and Percy Shelley) love of macabre horror no doubt attracted them to the material as well. At the time of the novel’s creation, galvanism was a practice amongst many of Europe’s more eccentric alchemists

“Consider the essential elements. Each is certainly drawn from Mary's life: the motherless child; the father rejecting the child; a grieving mother mourning for a dead child; a university student conducting wild experiments. Certainly each element found its way into the novel, but reducing the novel to autobiography is too simple. While in many respects Victor Frankenstein is modeled on Percy Shelley, there is no evidence that Percy resented such a portrayal. And, Mary never repudiated her father or her father's treatment of her, even during William Godwin's dreadful conduct following Mary's elopement with Percy, before their marriage. While Mary made quite a statement with Frankenstein about the problems arising from lack of family relationships and parental abdication of responsibility, it is doubtful whether she consciously meant to indict her own father for his treatment of her in childhood. Nevertheless noticing that reading Frankenstein and Mary's other work within the context of her life allows us to understand her more clearly. It is my contention that this understanding will be affected most clearly by reading Mary's life and work with the framework of psychosocial theory.” (Ginn, 2003) Shelley’s interest in