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The keynote speaker for the section of the symposium that was on Friday was Dr. Donald Olson. He explained how he used astronomy to figure out the date in which Mary Shelley had the “waking dream” that inspired Frankenstein. This was my favorite event that I attended because it shows how science and the arts can be blended. Dr. Olson showed me and everybody else present that there is room for scientific discovery even within the realm of the arts. I am encouraged to see if there are any historical claims that can be tested using the scientific method that people have never bothered to test.

In the second panel of the symposium, there were three speakers, but Rich Cooper’s argument for Frankenstein not being limited to science fiction is what stuck out to me the most. He drew from passages in the story that are left ambiguous to the reader in order to suggest that there are elements of fantasy within Frankenstein. I had never even considered what genre the story fell under, but I appreciate that Rich feels the need to challenge ideas that are widely accepted by his peers. I feel that he made a great argument, and he has inspired me to pay more attention to the literature that I partake in in order to see if there are elements of different genres within the same text.

These panels illustrate how the past can persist in our lives despite our best efforts. The Bride was Josephine’s greatest creation up until Akai. Frankenstein’s creature was the basis for the methods that she used to create Akai. Both things represented the life that she tried to escape for Akai’s sake. Ultimately, her husband was killed because he became The Bride, and she was killed by the creature. Even though her consciousness continued on through Akai, all of the loss that she experienced was a direct result of her past choices.

In these panels, we see the contrast between the goodness that is left in the creature and his inability to do good. He takes pity on the pigs that are being kept in captivity and tries to free them but instead ends up killing all of them. This predicament is the same one that the creature has been dealing with since the original Frankenstein. Despite his best efforts, he is unable to do good. He is doomed to be the monster that the humans have always viewed him as. In both Frankenstein and Destroyer, this results in the creature ultimately submitting to his role as a monster.

At the beginning of Destroyer, Frankenstein’s creature is settled in Antarctica, isolated from humans. The setting is a representation of the creature’s regard towards humans as much as it is where he happens to reside. His heart is cold and unforgiving towards mankind because of how they treated him originally, and he no longer places value in human lives. This is played out in his first interaction with humans in the story.

Nature sheltered the creature from the negative influence of humanity for over one hundred years, but when he encounters humans for the first time in all of that time they kill the whales that he is swimming with. Immediately, his response is to kill all of the crew on board the whaling ship. This clearly shows that he valued the lives of the whales over the crew and that he has a general disregard for human life.

The drugs that the monster takes in Celebrity Frankenstein to keep him alive are reflective of our society’s pursuit of happiness. We stave off the darker elements of life that would otherwise overwhelm us by pursuing individual purpose. The drugs that sustain the creature physically even keep him stable mentally. He conveyed that “I still needed my medication … More and more I needed those boosts from the needle to keep me level, or make me think I was keeping level” (Volk 533). Just as the creature falls apart when his medication turns his body against him, so can people if they lose their sense of purpose.

The manufactured happiness that Sylvia feels in Kurt Vonnegut’s Fortitude is reflective of how Victor Frankenstein was trying to create happiness for himself in the original work. He was trying to get past the loss of his mother by overcoming death, but instead caused himself more pain than he ever could have imagined.

This is true for Sylvia as well. She is not actually happy in the condition that Dr. Frankenstein keeps her in. Dr. Little questions the state of her emotions when he asks, “Little: Is she-uh-generally cheerful most of the time? / Frankenstein: If she isn’t, that’s our fault down here. If she gets unhappy, that means something down here isn’t working right” (Vonnegut 43). Just as the attempt at artificial happiness fails for Victor in Frankenstein, attempted artificial happiness in Fortitude leads to an eternal nightmare for both Dr. Frankenstein.

Al-Monsour, Haifaa, director. Mary Shelley. IFC Films, 2018.

The movie Mary Shelley presented the life of the famous author of Frankenstein in a modern take that brought a new perspective to the analysis of her life. When I watched this film, the representation of Lord Byron stood out to me. When we had discussed his qualities in class I had created an idea of what he was like for myself, but this movie truly illuminated Byron’s eccentricity.

Before I watched Mary Shelley, I had judged Byron on his various actions, but the continuous portrayal provided by the ongoing plot of this film gives me an idea of what his personality could have been like. He is very bipolar and seems to be incredibly cynical. He does not seem to care about anyone but instead tries to create meaning in his life out of the cerativity that comes from the depravity that he sees in the world.

I believe this illustrates why he takes a liking to Percy Shelley. Percy is able to see the world in the same broken way that Lord Byron does. Ultimately, the rest of the group breaks away from Lord Byron because the behavior that comes as a result of his cold heart is unbearable to be around.

It is here where Mary loses faith in the idealistic future that she always dreamed she could have with Percy. All of the tragedy that followed behind her and Percy finally caught up to her. She realizes that “suddenly my life with Shelley/feels like terrible motion/never finding home/only running/endlessly running” (Judge 280).

Although Mary’s involvement with Percy resulted in a large portion of the inspiration for Frankenstein, she did not need him to create it. She now understands that she does not need him to attain the future that she always desired. She has all of the potential to achieve her goals within herself. The only thing holding her back is her grief and Percy.

This is a turning point for Mary. Previously, she had been motivated to win the competition because she wanted to prove herself, but that changes when she starts writing. Once she had the nightmare that was the inspiration for her story and started creating the story, she realized that the writing was not just about the competition. She described writing as “at first ... like falling … But then the dark presence of another begins to whisper … Together, we take one step toward finding a word … until the struggle drops away/and the only thing that is left/is everything that matters” (Judge 228). She experiences a catharsis through writing that she has never had before. She is able to express the difficulties of her life through her characters, and it brings a satisfaction that she could only receive from a creative expression of her innermost self.

This is the first time in Mary’s life where she has reached a low enough point to begin formulating her creature. Although she has Percy, Claire, and is pregnant, she feels utterly alone. Their group was forced to return home after the conditions of their travels proved unbearable. The dreams that she made for Percy and herself now seem unrealistic. She has been rejected by her father. She recognizes that Claire is suffering alongside her but asks, “what does she know of true exile?” (Judge 145). These are the same feelings that she later harnesses to create such a tragic life for her monster. Although she has not yet hit the lowest point in her life, this is the foundation upon which all of the other tragedy that she experiences is based.

The fact that Mary and Percy make love by Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave is not just a coincidence. It symbolizes how Mary is living out what her mother believed through Percy. Mary even claims that “like my mother and father/who fought a revolution of ideas/Shelley and I will fight our own” (Judge 91). Although her father ends up rejecting this love, Mary believes that Percy will give to her the life that her mother and father fought for. More than that, she felt that they could share that life with others by way of the written word.

At this point in her life, Mary has been sent away to Scotland by her parents to correct her behavior. She is frustrated because her stepmother has taken control of her household and is slowly killing the father that she knew in her childhood. Once she arrives in Scotland, she is surprised to discover a home that fosters the ideals that she learned from her father and her mother when she was young. She expresses that “I read everything I can find/because they all promise/adventure/sacrifice/love/freedom/life/as my mother had wished/for me” (Judge 47).

This freedom that Mary has found in Scotland is contrasted with how she views her home and her father. When he writes to her, “occasionally he suggests I return home to help in the shop/but I no longer encourage him/I have found a home here” (Judge 46). She does not desire to go home any more because her home has become a vacuum that sucks the freedom and creativity out of her that she desires to cultivate. This makes her life all the more miserable for her when she is forced to return home after pursuing these things for three years.

At this point in her life, Mary has been challenged to write a ghost story by Lord Byron. She has a hard time coming up with an idea for a while. This scene is right before the reader starts to see specific images that are central themes to Frankenstein. I believe that Linda Bailey and Julia Sarda intended for this scene to be a metaphor for how Mary became inspired.

The violent storm seen outside is representative of her life at the time. By the age of eighteen, she had already experienced much more pain than a girl her age should have. She eventually used the “storm” of her life to fuel the ideas that are present throughout Frankenstein. Mary is seen looking out at the storm which represents her search for inspiration. The most important part of the image is the window. It represents the “storm” making its way from the outside of Mary’s mind to the inside. Not even three pages after this image, Mary’s “storm” manifests itself in the form of a nightmare. This nightmare is the spark that she uses to begin the story that would change history.

In the beginning of this passage of her book Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, Helen T. Buss quotes Betty T. Bennett claiming that “Biographies are fictions we contrive about lives we find meaningful. Facts are interpretable, and become available to the biographer with a certain randomness” (217). She is arguing that biographers use the facts that they notice in order to put together the narratives of those that they are writing the biographies for.

Towards the end of the passage, Buss quotes Anne K. Mellor stating that “I argued that we could best understand Shelley’s fiction … by placing it in the context of her specific historical and psychological experiences” (233). She then immediately questions the legitimacy of this method when she posits “I would like to ask whether it is ever possible to determine the “particular historical and psychological experiences” that constitute the actual life of the biographical subject” (233). This potential contradiction suggests that biographers may be documenting the lives of the people they are writing the biographies for unreliably.

This means that the responsibility falls on the reader. It is extremely unlikely that any biography is the objective truth of what occurred in someone’s life. Even autobiographies are biased. This means that we need to refer to multiple sources to gather consistent information and use our best judgement in order to figure out what we can confidently say is true about someone’s life.

“Lake Geneva as Shelley and Byron Knew It” is a New York Times article by Tony Perrottet that provides detailed descriptions of the lives of those in the Byron-Shelley circle and how they ended up at Lake Geneva together. For example, the reader is informed of the scandalous circumstances that compelled Lord Byron to retreat to Switzerland for a time. Perrottet describes how he was known for his “debauched behavior and operatic romances with men and women (including his half-sister, Augusta)” (Perrottet par. 2).

As for the Shelleys, Perrottet details the adventure that Percy and Mary embarked on together in order to pursue their love despite how Percy was married and Mary was only eighteen at the time. Additionally, they brought Mary’s “alluring stepsister, Claire Claremont ... she had been Byron’s lover back in England” (Perrottet par. 3). Claire’s relationship with Byron is what led to them going to Switzerland with him. This trip is ultimately what inspired Mary to create her masterpiece.

“The Volcano That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster” is an article by Gillen D’arcy Wood that explains what happened to Mount Tambora in April of 1815. It is a volcano located in the East Indies that had an eruption big enough to impact the weather across the globe. Wood claims that it’s “the most devastating, sustained period of extreme weather seen on our planet in perhaps thousands of years” (Wood 21). This weather, which lasted from 1815 to 1818, was what caused the Byron-Shelley circle to take shelter in the Villa Diodati.

The weather prevented the group from leaving for an extended period of time, and they eventually ran out of ways to pass the time. This led to Lord Byron reading ghost stories from an old book in the house and subsequently proposing a ghost story contest. This is the contest that birthed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Thus, Mary Shelley’s masterpiece would not have come to life without the help of “the greatest eruption in Earth’s recorded history” (Wood 21).

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