Frankenstein

[resaw]

You guys need to get Frankenstein in your system :thumbs_up

[mono]

Hello, resaw, welcome to the forums. :)
Observing this website's homepage, I found that this site does offer Frankenstein, but Mary Shelley wrote it, not her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. You can find it here:
http://www.online-literature.com/shelley_mary/frankenstein/

[kevt123]

y is frankenstein so popular and how do u think the audience in 1818 reacted

[Mary Sue]

In 1818 readers must have been shocked, stunned and horribly fascinated by this book. Mary Shelley's premise---stitching together body parts, playing God to reanimate dead matter---had never been done before, at least not like this. Today we have Frankenstein movies and Frankenstein-inspired fiction galore, but back then the whole concept was totally novel and strange.

It's still a popular theme today...why? Probably because we all would like to cheat death and/or play God somehow, even in defiance of traditional religious thought. So the reader faces a moral dilemma, recognizing the Frankenstein experiment itself as having great potential but intrinsically flawed and evil--- and doomed to end, appropriately enough, with the monster turning on its own creator. So on one level, the book serves as a warning to us, a twisted morality lesson.

But on another level the monster is also a metaphor for ALL OF US, for the entire human race. WE, like the monster, are seemingly abandoned by our own Creator, cast out and lost in a dark uncaring world, not even knowing why we exist. A chilling thought! And this dark theme, to which we can all relate, best explains the book's continuing popularity.