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Frankenstein a la shmoop an introduction so this is Frankenstein

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a la shmoop the course and we're here with Deb Tannen who runs our creative [Man and Deb discussing Frankenstein]

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and pajetta tutorial stuff and like 87 other things that shmoop so we're gonna

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talk to Deb about Frankenstein she's a PhD in literature knows this stuff cold

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who was Mary Shelley Mary Shelley I was 18 when this all happened so we think of [Portrait of Mary Shelley]

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it as kind of like a young kid but in reality she was engaging with some of

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the biggest intellectuals at the time we're talking the early 1800s here her

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mother was Mary Wollstonecraft who you probably know from having written the

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first feminist treatise in the English language our proto-feminist I guess the

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vindication of the Rights of Woman and then her father was William Godwin [Deb discussing books with man]

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everyone was named William back then so I'm just gonna assume that was his name

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too and he was just a super famous anarchist atheist kind of like crazy

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intellectual so she was brought up in a family of intellectuals and that's what

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was going on in her life which she wrote Frankenstein the origin story a [Frankenstein novel appears]

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Frankenstein is actually really awesome she married Percy Shelley who was a

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super famous Romantic poet became Mary Shelley and she and Percy and a bunch of

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other romantics like John Polidori and Lord Byron were hanging out in [Lord Byron and John Polidori hanging by a fire place]

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Switzerland they were like on a lake but it was terrible weather and Lord Byron

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was like oh hey you know we should do we're super bored let's have a ghost [Byron discussing ghost story with John]

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story contest so they all wrote ghost stories trying to take the crown of who

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could write of all these amazing romantic authors who could write the

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best ghost story Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein

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started as a short story needless to say she won the ghost story contest she

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turned the story into a novel in 1818 I was first published critics didn't not [Mary Shelley holding novel]

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like it and then in 1831 it was republished for the purposes of this [Tomato hits Mary on her face]

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course and kind of just generally when we're talking about Frankenstein most

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people are referring to that later wow that's fascinating so mary was 18 years

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old when she wrote this now they were typically grandmothers by age 18 yeah

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she had actually given birth twice by that point yeah we'll talk about that in

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in respect to a few other things for sure

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contemporaneous environment they were in Switzerland in 1800 was what politically [Switzerland on a map]

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a melting pot for intellectuals because this sounds like the all-star team yeah

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you know of writers and creative people of that era yeah they this is kind of [Writers all star team appear]

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again showing how Mary Shelley was really part of the core group of [Boy eating apple and Mary appears at the core]

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romantics and we'll talk a little bit more about Romanticism but she was the

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woman and as you heard the names I was saying John she was the woman among this

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group of men and that actually is incredibly important when analyzing

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Frankenstein to think about you know how does that change it the fact that this [Girl looking at monster]

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is written from a woman's voice and not a man's voice like almost everything

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else at the time was being written what type of literary work is [Frankenstein's monster strikes a mirror]

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Frankenstein Frankenstein is an interesting melting pot of kind of

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enlightenment thought romanticism gothicism and will define all these

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terms but whereas you know Percy Shelley and Lord Byron are really thought of as

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like like definite Romantic poets when you think of like who are the big six [Big six poet portraits appear]

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you get Lord Byron Shelley some other that I'm not remembering Blake and then

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a bunch of other people named William then you have Mary Shelley's work which [Woman reading a book]

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is really just like pulls from all different angles so it is it's very

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different to analyze a poem by Percy Shelley and Frankenstein although

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personally did have a lot of input in to Frankenstein and that's kind of a little

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bit of controversy around the book is like how much of this did Mary

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actually write maybe she wrote the short story and Percy actually turned it into [Candle burning]

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you know the full novel interesting so the idea of a bunch of people sitting

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around telling ghost stories as entertainment for an evening a little

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different from society today but that was probably normalcy in in those days [Man and woman discussing ghost stories]

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yeah they would entertain yeah I mean they had nothing else to do so they

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would just write stories exactly this is how this is why we have you know

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hundreds of hundreds of you know poems and stories from bad times better

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who was Mary Shelley why does it help to know Shelley's background what was the

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origin of Frankenstein [Questions appear]

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