Romanticism in Frankenstein: Themes, Symbols, and Movement

Introduction: Frankenstein and the Romantic Period

In less than six years of this writing, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein will be 200 years old. This novel, deeply indicative of the Romantic period, is a compelling narrative with numerous themes and vivid imagery to consider. In the context of Romanticism, Frankenstein is a worthwhile piece of literature to examine. Literature and art of the Romantic period are characterized by an emphasis on intense emotional reactions — specifically emotions such as horror, terror, and awe — and these emotions are central to the narrative of Frankenstein. They act as catalysts in the story and serve to push it forward long after it has begun.

The Romantic movement is also characterized by a return to nature, the scientific, and the rational. Victor Frankenstein is, among other things, a devoted scientist, and his character embodies this tension between emotional intensity and rational inquiry that defines the period. Viewed together, the novel's characters, landscapes, and narrative arc form a remarkably coherent portrait of Romanticism as both a literary movement and a cultural moment.

Nicole Smith sees Mary Shelley as an author who retained a deep understanding of Romanticism and also as one who pushed the envelope within the movement. Smith describes Victor as the "ultimate dreamer, who is preoccupied by otherworldly concerns and unattainable ideals. In this sense, he is highly romantic" (Smith, "Elements of Romanticism in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley"). Victor is but a single example of Romanticism at work in the novel.

Smith considers nature an important symbol of the Romantic in Frankenstein. Several landscapes are described throughout the novel — including those of the Orkneys and of Switzerland — and the ways in which these landscapes are rendered is distinctly Romantic, above and beyond the inherent Romantic quality of nature itself. Smith further points out the Romantic dimension of Victor's quest to design and create the perfect human being. Victor pursues the Romantic, scientific ideal that there is such a thing as a perfect human and that he can make that person.

Smith contends that what makes Shelley's work an exemplar of Romanticism is how nearly every character harbors and expresses deeply Romantic desires — desires both possible and impossible — alongside a concern for and engagement with the fantastical rather than the real. The characters fight against the roles they perceive society has outlined for them. Their Romantic struggle is against preconception, in pursuit of emotional truth, and toward pushing themselves beyond what they are to what they wish to be.

Victor Frankenstein as the Romantic Ideal

Paul H. Fry writes to clearly define and explain the parameters of Romanticism, arguing that the term is too often used without clear definition or regard for its true meaning. One of his key points responds directly to the character of the creature. Fry notes that a trait of Romantic writers was to incorporate prelinguistic sounds — utterances that come off to the modern ear as rude — as a poetic metaphor. The absence of language symbolizes, for Fry, the Romantic urge to express what cannot be expressed, and suggests that what is Romantic may be misunderstood or not understood at all by those untouched by the movement.

The creature in Frankenstein notably has no language. Like an infant, he is unable to articulate his emotions or desires with words and faces profound challenges when attempting to connect with other beings — both animals and people. This condition crafted by Shelley functions as more than a plot device; it is a sustained Romantic metaphor for the limits of rational communication when confronted with deep feeling.

"…Romanticism's relationship with colonialism has been relatively little studied, although a wealth of critical writing has been devoted to the connection between both early modern and nineteenth-century literature and the histories of colonialism and imperialism." (pp. 1–2)

"The other is always the 'uncanny Other' and othering is a process of alienation and of epistemic violence (often a prelude to material force) whereby an exclusionary distinction is made between the white westerner and the colonized subject [who in this case is Frankenstein]. The essays demonstrate how the many and various peoples subject to Western colonial and imperial processes [symbolized by the townspeople who force Frankenstein away] in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century underwent a process of estrangement, frequently being homogenized and often demonized [Victor and Frankenstein]. Imaginary borderlines were constructed on the bases of imputed savagery, cannibalism, and so on." (pp. 6–7)

These quotes help contextualize the themes and symbols of the novel within the greater movement of Romanticism and connect Romanticism as a reflection of world events in art.

Nature, Language, and Romantic Symbolism

"Things are not much different now, although a half-century of psychoanalytically inspired literary analysis has piqued scholarly interest in Mesmerism and other Romantic-era anticipations of depth psychology. Most work on the Romantic mind continues to be informed by a disembodied version of associationism, by psychoanalysis, or by epistemological issues that link Romantic literary figures to a philosophical tradition running from German idealism to phenomenology and its deconstruction. The Romantic brain, however, has been left almost wholly out of account." (p. 1)

"If the Romantic period can indeed be seen as an age of revolution, its iconoclastic brain science played a major role in the ideological ferment of the time. Students of Romantic literature and culture have much to gain by looking to the era's revolutionary science of the mind, however underappreciated it has been to date. To begin with, no account of Romantic subjectivity can be complete without noting how contemporary understandings of psychology were either grounded in, deeply marked by, or tacitly (when not explicitly) opposed to the brain-based models of mind being developed concurrently in the medical sciences. Moreover, a whole range of topics and concerns typically associated with Romanticism — the relation of the mind to body, the relation of human beings to the natural world, the new emphases on human difference and individuality, the environmental role in shaping mind and behavior, the status of various materialist ideologies, even such staples as sensibility and the creative imagination — reveal unsuspected facets and interconnections when placed in the context of contemporary work on the brain and nerves." (p. 2)

Regarding the first quote: though nearly 200 years have passed since Shelley composed the novel, the author contends that not much has changed in the analysis of its figures, themes, and symbols. This speaks to the enduring quality of the work, as well as to the shifts — or lack of shifts — in thinking within Western culture.