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Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein embodies many of the values associated with Romanticism, an intellectual and artistic movement that began in Western Europe during the late 18th century and was popular through the mid-19th century. At the core of Romanticism was the belief that reliance solely on reason was insufficient to guide us through life. This stance was a rebuke of The Enlightenment, a movement that focused on pure reason that had dominated European intellectual thought throughout the 18th century. Romanticism can also be seen as a more general rejection of the rapid modernization and its displacing of traditional ways occurring at the time as represented by the Industrial Revolution. Followers of Romanticism advocated spiritual strength through the embrace of individual emotions, enthusiasm over the untamed power and awesome grandeur of the natural world, and a celebration of creativity as well as of the figure of the artist.
Ideals of Romanticism Evident in Frankenstein
Many of the core beliefs of Romanticism are reflected in Shelley’s 1818 novel. Robert Walton and Victor Frankenstein are both ambitious individualists who are determined to live up to what they see as their destinies. While neither is an artist, both push limits (in geography and of physiology, respectively) to engage in work that is marked by originality and individuality requiring intense creativity. Another way that the novel adheres to the tenets of Romanticism is that the beauty and unharnessed power of the natural world plays an important role in creating an appropriate setting for the novel’s dramatic events. Also, the monster’s experience of coming into the world without any knowledge of social norms and behavioral expectations reflects Romanticism’s curiosity about how innate human nature is gradually shaped by society and culture.
Romanticism and the Origins of Shelley’s Frankenstein
Also worth noting is that the context of Romanticism influenced not just the content of Frankenstein, but its origin. In the summer of 1816, Mary Shelley and her soon-to-be husband Percy Bysshe Shelley were traveling in Europe and spent time visiting Lord Byron at his house in Switzerland. According to Mary Shelley’s Introduction to the 1831 edition of the novel, the three writers—all of whom were destined to be remembered as leading literary figures of Romanticism—embraced the spirit of creativity by devising a game to see who could invent the most terrifying ghost story. Shelley writes that she had a shocking dream about an inventor assembling a monster that night and then began writing the story that she would eventually expand into Frankenstein, the novel that stands over 200 years later an enduring symbol of Romanticism.
