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Summary Frankenstein - the creature
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Notes on chapter 11 and contexts relating to the creature
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The creatureChapter 11
- Creature does not understand innate understandings of children – has to learn quickly and with
difficulty
- Exposed to pain and pleasure and then language – society is thrown at him and it has nothing to lead
it
- Exposure to society – cruel
Initially thinks the de Lacey’s are positive
- Then develops morals – good/evil and from books
- Wants to be Satan and not Adam – an outsider in society
- Does not have capacities of life – knowledge learnt through experience
Stages of development
- Physical sentience
- Physical self-awareness
- Consciousness
- Acquisition of language
- Knowledge of good and evil
- Social and political awareness
- Critical understanding of self and society
Similar to Godwin and Wollstonecraft
John Locke and Frankenstein
- Empiricism – no innate ideas, all knowledge derived from experience and sense data
Counter/opposite to rationalism
- At time of writing Frankenstein Shelley was reading his essay ‘essay concerning human understanding’
Applies theories in description of education of monster
- Creature arrives in world with no set predisposition towards good or bad
- Creature as Locke’s blank slate – will be shaped by empirical experience of social and physical
environments
- Primary ways of knowledge acquisition – through sense experience
- Basic view of human nature – formed by attraction to the pleasurable and avoidance of the painful
- Driven by curiosity – learn knowledge about the world through experience
- Language – set of abstract signs that allow things in the world to correspond to ideas in the mind
- Huge influence on educational theories of Rousseau – Shelley also reading during composition of
Frankenstein
William Godwin and Frankenstein
- Enquiry into political justice – central tenets were that moral and political science needs to be geared
towards producing human happiness
Inequality is the prime source of injustice
- Caleb Williams – based upon ideas about injustice expounded in fictional form
- Creature’s mental development through sense experience is depicted as ‘Lockean’ while his social
awareness is depicted as ‘Godwinian’
- Both theories carried radical possibilities
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