Summary of Mary shelley's Frankenstein?

Question

what was it all about? i only need summaries coming from you guys... don't need chapter summaries...

Answer 1

It was written in 1818, at the dawn of modern science and the industrial revolution.

Dr Frankenstein built a human from the parts of dead bodies. He asked his not very intelligent/illiterate assistant to find a brain by breaking into a lab, but instead of getting a good one, he got one from an executed psycho criminal.

Dr Frankenstein hauled the creature up on to the roof and let lightning zap the spark of life into his creation. The creature now having this brain went on the rampage, killing villagers. However, the creature was tender towards a little girl and the reader or viewer of a movie is left wondering what the creature is thinking, such as 'What am I, who am I, why was I created?', similar to questions we all ask. Is the creature any less human than us? Do he have a right to live or is he an abomination before God?

He's killed eventually by a rampaging mob.

The book is a bit different to most movies. Read this article. A lot of movies skip the opening scenes about a ship in the arctic circle.

People confuse the name of the monster with its creator and call the monster 'Frankenstein'. They should say 'Frankenstein's Monster'.

2nd link = pictures.

The story was very popular when it was written, as everyone was worked up about grave-robbers stealng bodies from church-yards for anatomy disections to learn how the body works and teach medical students. Also, the affect that the new 19th century science was having on religious belief. Was man playing God, etc? This has some modern-day parallels with 'Is man playing God, doing stem-cell reseach, etc?'.

Its a very imaginative novel, but then the author Mary Shelley and her poet friends and husband the British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, were off their faces on the slightly hallucinogenic drug laudanum, an opium derivative.

Answer 2

There's a pretty simple way of figuring this out yourself...