Question

What is the effect of the choice of frozen landscapes such as the North Pole and the Swiss Alps as settings in Frankenstein?

Answer 1

I believe the correct answer is: It reminds readers of the loneliness and absolute desolation of the characters.

 

     The novel “Frankenstein” (also known as “The Modern Prometheus”), written by English author Mary Shelley, may serve as an accurate example of (Dark) Romanticism, and therefore displays the most common characteristics. One of this characteristics is the nature mirroring the internal state of characters, which is why the choice of frozen landscapes such as the North Pole and the Swiss Alps as settings in Frankenstein have an effect that reminds people of the loneliness and absolute desolation of characters.

     While reading the novel, you’ll notice that Victor always goes to cold and desolated places when he feels troubled and lonely. It is also a place where he isolates himself from his friends and family to prevent them from becoming the victims of his creation. This is the state in which he feels most desolated and according to that, the nature he surrounds himself with mirrors that.

Answer 2

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on 30 August 1797 and died on 1 February 1851. She was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. When Mary was four, her father married a neighbour, with whom, as her stepmother, Mary came to have an uneasy relationship.

Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a gruesome, creature in an unconventional scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition of the novel was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared on the second edition, published in 1823.

The effect of the choice of frozen landscapes such as the North Pole and the Swiss Alps as settings in Frankenstein is that :

It reminds readers of the loneliness and absolute desolation of the characters.