Special Topics in English: Frankenstein

• Module 5B
• Reading Prompts:
• Sensibility, reason, and education: Consider Werther's intense emotional responsiveness. When does his sensibility allow him to perceive beauty, suffering, or injustice? When does feeling become disconnected from judgment, proportion, self-command, or responsibility to others? The lecture uses Wollstonecraft to ask whether feeling becomes "a habit of care--or a closed circuit of self-intensification."
• Romantic individualism: Notice how Werther understands himself as an exceptional, authentic, and misunderstood individual. How does the novel give emotional authority to the outsider? At what point does the belief in one’s exceptional suffering begin to subordinate the needs and claims of other people?
• Love and romantic absolutism: Track the ways Werther makes his attachment to Charlotte the organizing principle of his identity. What happens when one relationship is asked to provide the meaning of an entire life? How does this model of love help us understand the risks that Werther introduces into the Creature’s sentimental education?
• Reading and the vulnerable reader: Consider how the novel imagines the relationship among literature, imitation, feeling, and action. Does reading merely reflect an existing emotional condition, or can literary narratives provide scripts through which readers organize their identities and choices?
• Werther and the Creature: Identify similarities in their longing for affection, use of nature as an emotional mirror, sense of exceptional suffering, and movement toward self-destruction. At the same time, attend carefully to their different social circumstances: Werther possesses family, literacy, education, mobility, and social recognition, while the Creature is denied a name, kinship, institutional access, and membership in a human community.
• Education without community: Think about what Werther gives the Creature: a vocabulary for inward feeling, a model of domestic affection, and permission to understand himself as a subject with a story. What can the novel not provide in the absence of a teacher, dialogue, companionship, or a community willing to recognize him?
• Gender and women's education: How might Werther’s emotional intensity be judged differently when similar feelings are expressed by women? Consider the distinction between possessing access to books and receiving an education that develops independence, authority, judgment, and opportunities for meaningful action.
• Mary, A Fiction as an alternative: Recall how Wollstonecraft's Mary, like Werther and the Creature, is undereducated, melancholy, and searching for an object of affection. What is significant about her partial redirection of grief toward benevolence, care, and the education of others? Does this offer genuine agency, or does it also reflect gendered expectations that women transform their suffering into service?
• Self-destruction and responsibility: As Werther approaches the conclusion of his story, consider how he presents death—as escape, sacrifice, final communication, or the inevitable fulfillment of his emotional identity. What obligations to Charlotte, Albert, his family, and the wider social world disappear when one feeling comes to dominate every other claim?
• Complete The Sorrows of Young Werther.
• Lecture: Educated by Werther, Pt. 2
• Frankenstein, Romantic Individualism, and the Creature's Sentimental Education
• William Godwin
• I am tormented about the opinions others may entertain of me; fearful of intruding myself and of cooperating to my own humiliation.--For this reason I have been in a certain sense unfortunate though life; making few acquaintances, losing them in line, and by my fear producing the thing I fear. I am bold and adventurous in opinions, not in life: it is impossible a man with my diffidence and embarrassment should be. This, and perhaps only this, renders me often cold, uninviting, unconciliating in society. Past doubt, if I were less solicitous for the kindness of others, I should have oftener obtained it.
• Wollstonecraftian test: sensibility, reason, education
• Sensibility: quickness of feeling, perception, sympathy
• Reason: reflection, judgment, proportion, self-command
• Education: habits, independence, virtue, social usefulness
• "sensibility is not reason"
• "Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it"
• The Test: Does feeling become a habit of care--or a closed circuit of self-intensification?
• Mary, A Fiction: a parallel sentimental education
• Mary
• receives little systemic education and largely forms herself through observation, reading, and attachment
• searches for an object of love because familial affection is absent or unreliable
• develops benevolence and moral resistance, but also habitual melancholy and emotional absolutism
• eventually redirects grief into care: visiting the sick, supporting the old, and educating the young
• Wollstonecraft's tension
• "Her sensibility prompted her to search for an object to love."
• "made her almost realize the fictitious distress"
• Reading and feeling can enlarge sympathy--but also cause fictional scripts to become lived emotional realities.
• The Creature
• is also self-educated through watching, language acquisition, nature, and books
• learns the meaning of family and reciprocal bonds before he can participate in them
• develops compassion and moral ascription, but has not stable relationship through which to practice them
• turns rejection into revenge rather than redirecting grief toward sustained social usefulness
• Question: what kind of education can transform sensibility into an ethic rather than a private drama?
• Romantic Heroism--and Shelley's critique
• Werther: sensitive outsider, authenticity, inward rebellion
• Victor: solitary genius, transgressive ambition, mastery
• Creature: sublime outsider, injured claim, eloquent rebel
• Great feeling ≠ Moral greatness
• The decisive question is what intense feeling does to responsibility, care, and the claims of others.
• Three routes toward self-destruction
• Werther
• Turns suffering inward and stages death as a final communication to Charlotte. Private feeling claims the authority of fate.
• self-sacrifice claimed
• "I am resolved to die."
• Victor
• Destroys health, family, and future through obsessive creation and revenge. The heroic quest consumes the life it claims to justify.
• ambition becomes attrition
• The Creature
• Directs misery outward through violence then imagines self-erasure as punishment, release, and the end of reproduction.
• revenge turns to remorse
• Wollstonecraft question: what duties disappear when one feeling swallows every other claim?
• Curriculum of the self
• The Sorrows of Young Werther: inward feeling, domestic intimacy, melancholy, love and suicide
• Plutarch's Lives: public virtue, republican heroism, political action
• Paradise Lost: creation and obedience, Adam and Satan, cosmic identity
• De Lacey Household & Victor's Journal: language, affection, family bonds, origin as rejected object
• Canonical - but teacherless: no one helps him distinguish genre from history, consolation from judgment, or feeling from action
• What does Werther give the Creature
• Provides
• a vocabulary for inward feeling
• a model of sympathy and domestic affection
• a sense that love can orient an entire life
• permission to understand himself as a subject with a story
• recognition that social suffering can become psychologically real
• Risks
• romantic absolutism: without the beloved, nothing
• identification without interpretive distance
• death as a thinkable narrative conclusion
• comparison that sharpens awareness of exclusion
• the exceptional sufferer as the center of every moral claim
• Crucial distinction: Books do not cause the Creature's violence. They help him interpret abandonment and rejection that already structure his life.
• Reading changes the Creature's character
• Observes, Learns, Reads, Compares, Expects, Seeks, Reacts
• "Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was."
• Education humanizes
• Literacy creates standards
• Self-knowledge Deepens
• Wollstonecraftian problem: knowledge can enlarge the mind, but education remains incomplete without reciprocal social practice.
• Werther and Creature ethically and socially unlike
• Both
• acute feeling
• longing for a singular bond
• nature as emotional mirror
• exceptional self-image
• melancholy and self-destruction
• Werther's Position
• has kin, friends, education, status
• is socially legible
• can work, travel, write, and withdraw
• experiences limits within society
• turns refusal into total loss
• Creature's Position
• has no name, kin, status, or species-community
• is denied social legibility
• cannot enter ordinary institutions
• experiences exclusion from society
• turns rejection into retaliatory violence
• Reader Werther humanizes the Creature -- but the comparison also shows how much more radically he is deprived.
• Discussion and Writing
• Thesis stem: By educating the Creature through The Sorrow of Young Werther, Shelley reveals that ______
• Discussion
• In this discussion, bring Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther into conversation with the Creature's education in Frankenstein and with the gendered conditions shaping women’s reading, education, independence, and social authority in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The lecture asks us to view sensibility not simply as the opposite of reason, but as a capacity that must be educated toward judgment, independence, responsibility, and care. It also emphasizes that the Creature receives a powerful literary education without a teacher, dialogue, or interpretive community.
• As you make these connections, avoid treating Werther, the Creature, and nineteenth-century women as socially equivalent. Werther remains socially recognized and possesses family, education, status, and mobility; the Creature has no name, kinship network, institutional access, or recognized place within humanity. The differences among these positions are as important as their shared experiences of feeling, reading, longing, and exclusion.
• Write a 250-400-word post developing an original interpretation that makes a meaningful connection among Werther, the Creature, and the cultural position of nineteenth-century women. Choose one or two of the following questions as a starting point; you do not need to answer all of them.
1. Sensibility and gender: Werther's intense feeling helps establish him as a recognizable Romantic outsider. How might similar emotional intensity be interpreted differently when expressed by women? When does sensibility appear noble, morally perceptive, irrational, dangerous, or self-absorbed-and how might gender affect those judgments?
2. Education and self-formation: The Creature's education is intellectually powerful but "teacherless." How might his experience illuminate the problems faced by women expected to educate themselves while denied systematic instruction, intellectual independence, or public authority? What is the difference between having access to books and receiving a genuinely liberating education?
3. Reading and the "vulnerable" reader: Both Werther and Frankenstein raise questions about readers who identify intensely with literature. Does Shelley suggest that books themselves are dangerous, or that danger arises when readers encounter powerful narratives without guidance, social recognition, or opportunities to act constructively? How might this question connect to historical anxieties about women readers?
4. Romantic individualism: Werther, Victor, and the Creature all possess qualities associated with Romantic heroism: intense feeling, alienation, exceptionalism, rebellion, and inwardness. How does Mary Shelley, writing as a nineteenth-century woman, appropriate and critique this largely masculine model of the exceptional individual? Who is permitted to treat private feeling as heroic or authoritative?
5. Social recognition and exclusion: Werther suffers within society, while the Creature is excluded from society almost completely. How might the position of nineteenth-century women complicate this contrast? In what ways could women be socially recognized as daughters, wives, or mothers while still being denied independence, credibility, or meaningful choice?
6. Feeling, responsibility, and care: Wollstonecraft's Mary, A Fiction offers a partial alternative to both Werther and the Creature: Mary’s grief and melancholy are eventually redirected toward benevolence, education, and care for others. What does this comparison suggest about the different moral expectations placed upon male and female sufferers? Does the expectation that women transform suffering into care offer genuine ethical agency, or impose another restrictive gender role?
• As you develop your interpretation:
• Do not summarize the plots. Assume that your classmates have completed the assigned readings.
• Analyze at least one specific passage from Werther and one from Frankenstein.
• Make the connection to nineteenth-century women central to your argument rather than adding it only at the end.
• Attend to important words, images, contradictions, narrative choices, or patterns of comparison.
• Avoid flattening important differences among Werther, the Creature, and women’s historical or fictional experiences.
• Explain not only what the texts suggest, but how their language and literary form produce that meaning.
• Write a 100-200-word reply to one classmate. Do more than agree or disagree. Extend, complicate, or challenge the post by introducing another passage, questioning one of its comparisons, drawing attention to an important difference among the figures being discussed, or considering how gender changes the meaning of sensibility, education, exclusion, or Romantic individualism.
• Discussion Post
• Prompt: Social recognition and exclusion: Werther suffers within society, while the Creature is excluded from society almost completely. How might the position of nineteenth-century women complicate this contrast? In what ways could women be socially recognized as daughters, wives, or mothers while still being denied independence, credibility, or meaningful choice?
• When we think about social recognition and inclusion, we get three clear examples of the position of nineteenth-century women in Werther's letter from December 24th. Consider all three.
• First, we get a nameless woman who Werther uses as an example of society's "greed for rank," who "tells everyone who will listen about her family and estate" (75). The punchline for Werther is she is the daughter of a clerk from the neighborhood, which makes her claims of being high rank laughable. Werther is embarrassed--on her behalf.
• Second, we have a young woman who interests Werther, Miss von B. She is "an amiable creature who has retained a very natural manner amidst this inflexible life" (76).
• Finally, we have Miss von B.'s aunt, who "has no presentable fortune or wits, no source of strength other than her pedigree, no protection but the sense of class in which she has barricaded herself, and no pleasure apart from looking down on middle-class citizens from the heights of an upper-storey window" (76).
• Werther, for his part, is seemingly our woke hero when it comes to class. He bemoans the "fateful bourgeois distinction of rank" and acknowledges his own rank "work[s] greatly to [his] own advantage" (76), but he seems to lack the same perspective when it comes to gender. Out of the three women mentioned in the letter, he only praises the woman who is amiable despite living an inflexible life, presumably quite more inflexible for a woman. The other two women, who undoubtedly possess nowhere near the amount of privilege as himself, try to advance their lives based on their family status. Werther wonders why these other women aren't amiable like Miss von B.
• If we look for an analogous situation in Frankenstein, perhaps we should look to the Creature's conversation with De Lacey. In De Lacey, the Creature has found the person who should be completely sympathetic to his struggles. De Lacey explains, "I also am unfortunate; I and my family have been condemned, although innocent" (148). But ultimately, De Lacey is incapable of being the Creature's savior. While De Lacey can understand injustice, the challenges faced by a monster species is completely outside the comprehension of this well-meaning, and blind, old man.
• The Creature, not unlike nineteenth-century women, is reduced to no access to society apart from relying a familial connection that is unfortunately non-existent with Victor. And if we want to make one more connection, we might consider Mary Shelley herself, who made this amazing contribution as a nineteenth-century woman, but who has no doubt been able to achieve this great work in part based on her family connections. Women on the nineteenth-century, like the Creature, or the women Werther encounters, are forced by society to rely on their family.