Frankenstein and Romanticism

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is a very romantic book from the romantic period. Though the book is a love story its romanticism has really nothing to do with romance. Romantic in this era was more about an international artistic and philosophical movement that changed the ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and their world. Romantics beleived science was wicked and nature was gratifying. Mary Shelley was a romantic, though with her book Frankenstein could be made into an argument because of all the science in it, but there is much more proving that romanticism is in her nature.

For example, In Frankenstein when Victor, or anyone in the novel, choose science over romanticism usually a horrible tragedy occurs.

The leaves that year had withered before my work drew near to close, and now every day showed me more plainly how well I had succeeded. But my entusiasm was checked by my anxiety, and I appeared rather like one doomed by slavery to toil in the mines, or any other unwholesome trade than an artist occupied by his favourite employment. Every night i was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most painful degree; the fall of a leaf startled me, and I shunned my fellow creatures as if i had been guilty of a crime Sometimes I grew alarmed at the wreck I percieved that I had become; the energy of my purpose alone sunstained me: my labours would soon end, and I believed that exercise and amusement would then drive away incipient disease; and I promised myself both of these when my creation should be complete.

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