[Music] Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was 19 years old when she wrote to Frankenstein the idea came during a friendly writing contest among her her husband Percy Shelley and their friends Lord Byron and John Polidori one night after the four discussed galvanism or the animation of life by electricity Mary had a dream in which a young student looked upon a creation he had animated after awakening frightened she realized she had found the perfect idea for her story the next day she began writing what would become Frankenstein Frankenstein fits in the tradition of Gothic literature containing mystery horror
and the supernatural the era was launched in the mid to late 18th century by the Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole and popularized in the 1790s by the novels of Ann Radcliffe it is known that Mary's husband Percy read two of radness gothic novels typically set in Eyrie isolated places gothic stories usually include violence suspense and mystery an ideal setting for the heroes and monsters often at the center of these novels Frankenstein is also a work in the tradition of the Romantic movement romantic writers based their stories around a deep connection with nature the depth
of human emotion and the conflict between the individual and society characteristics of Romanticism in Frankenstein include humans emotional ties to nature an attraction to the sublime additionally a characteristic of romanticism is attraction to a heroic figure interested in breaking the boundaries of traditional society and achieving a lofty ideal some romantics initially view Napoleon as such a figure until his conquests made him seem more tyrant than hero the romantics rejected schools of thought that emerged from the Scientific Revolution and enlightenment romantics rejected rationality and reason in the arts and instead valued individual experience and the idea
that some things were unknowable Frankenstein both counters the Scientific Revolution and offers a view on the state of nature contradictory to Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke you
