Here is a brief recap of some of the intriguing or recurring themes that have cropped up in the blogs of groups 6-8.
One prevalent theme was Victor Frankenstein’s moral failing. He fails to take responsibility for his creation, and he’s afraid of it. The question of why is a bit more difficult to get at, and it should be a focus of some of our class discussions.
Another theme to develop on the blog, especially in the first round of posts, was how different the Frankenstein story was from the popular culture versions we’re more familiar with. Readers were expecting “a lot more lightning bolts” as desertfox0613 put it. Sean treats the differences even more seriously, looking at how the wide geographic range represented in the novel contrasts with the tight, claustrophobic spaces depicted in the movies. And even more importantly, Sean argues, the vast geography encompassed in the novel contributes to the theme in the novel of slow, “studied decline” of rationality.
Finally, Matt’s post on the naturalistic imagery—rivers, mountains, skies—in Frankenstein is worth considering, as this imagery intensifies in Volume II.