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Frankenstein Challenging Extreme Romantic and Enlightenment Ideologies

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Frankenstein Challenging Extreme Romantic and Enlightenment Ideologies
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein like all texts is far from neutral, acting as a site to challenge and/or endorse certain ideologies. Published in the 19th century, it follows the journey of three characters amidst the influence and conflict of extreme Romantic and Enlightenment ideologies. Mary Shelley experienced much heartbreak, suicide and sorrow with the intense Romantic lifestyle she had chosen to adopt with Percy Shelley and it can be argued that Frankenstein is a critique of radicalism as revealed by her comment ‘I earnestly desire the good and enlightenment of my fellow creatures... but I am not for going to violent extremes, which duly bring injurious reaction…I have no wish to ally myself with Radicals - they are full of repulsion to me - violent without any sense of justice - selfish in the extreme - talking without knowledge’ (Frankenstein, Penguin Edition, pg 12). Through various literary devices, Frankenstein acts as a site to challenge the extremes of the two conflicting ideologies of Romanticism and Enlightenment, which result in natural boundaries being broken and a multitude of consequences.

Frankenstein firstly criticises the visionary or idealistic lack of reality that Romanticism promoted, an ideology connoting fantasy and fiction that is often not possible and leads to failure, destruction and ruin upon an individual and the wider society. The novel opens with Robert Walton’s letters to his sister making use of strong visual imagery to describe his journey to discover the arctic. His words have strong Romantic influences as he describes his wild and almost childlike fantasy to travel to an unexplored land and discover great secrets. His opening letter reads ‘Inspirited by this wind of promise my daydreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.’ (Pg 1). Here his emotion becomes somewhat of a
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