Setting – Frankinstein

SETTING

Swiss Alps:

  1. “The pines are not tall or luxuriant, but they are sombre and add an air of severity to the scene. I looked on the valley beneath; vast mists were rising from the rivers which ran through it and curling in thick wreaths around the opposite mountains, whose summits were hid in the uniform clouds, while rain poured from the dark sky and added to the melancholy impression I received from the objects around me.” 
  2. “It was nearly noon when I arrived at the top of the ascent. For some time I sat upon the rock that overlooks the sea of ice. A mist covered both that and the surrounding mountains. Presently a breeze dissipated the cloud, and I descended upon the glacier. The surface is very uneven, rising like the waves of a troubled sea, descending low, and interspersed by rifts that sink deep. The field of ice is almost a league in width, but I spent nearly two hours in crossing it. The opposite mountain is a bare perpendicular rock”
  • The words used to describe the mountains which Victor has climbed. The descriptions are from Victor’s point of view. Such as “melancholy impression” was Victor’s emotions which influenced the way he saw the Alps.
  • The “sea of ice” could be a foreshadowing of further into the book where Victor goes after his own creature and ends in the Arctic.

Geneva:

“; and in the majestic and wondrous scenes which surrounded our Swiss home—the sublime shapes of the mountains, the changes of the seasons, tempest and calm, the silence of winter, and the life and turbulence of our Alpine summers—she found ample scope for admiration and delight. While my companion contemplated with a serious and satisfied spirit the magnificent appearances of things, I delighted in investigating their causes. The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine. Curiosity, earnest research to learn the hidden laws of nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they were unfolded to me, are among the earliest sensations I can remember.”

  • A lot of contrasting descriptive words, Majestic, Wondrous and Sublime, calm, tempest; all indicate an “out of this world” beauty or attraction.

Ingolstadt:

  1. “In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation;”
  2. “The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials;”
  • Not very descriptive of what the ‘room’ actually looks like. I feel like the author (Mary Shelly), wanted to make the reader imagine this room for themselves. By hinting that it was dark and gloomy by stating “solitary chamber or rather cell” and “dissecting room and the slaughter-house” as well as “workshop of filthy creation”
  • The “separated from all other apartments” helps illustrate that is was maybe unused, or that no ones ever goes near or around this room.

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