Dr. Morillo, English 453

Composite Figures in Frankenstein

/means resemblance but not equality

Volume I (Oxford edition, by volume and page )

Walton as failed poet of nature facing major choice and daring experiment, at 28 / Wordsworth (7)

Allusion to Coleridge's Ancient Mariner

W alton/Wordsworth " Victor Frankenstein/Coleridge --both FV and C are very eloquent and frequently depressed) (15)

Victor/Byron and Wordsworth via relationship to a "more than sister" (20, 66)

Victor / Milton' s version of Satan in Paradise Lost ( 68)

Volume II

Victor/Byron and/or Manfred --a hell of remorse and guilt (75)

Victor's father / William Godwin --similar ideas about duty and refraining from grief (69)

Creature / Milton's Eve gazing a self in reflecting pool

Creature / Prometheus as a fire-bringer, but a destructive one. Victor is also like another myth ofPrometheus as a creator artist figure, since he makes the creature (113)

Volume III

Victor quotes Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey and quotes William Hazlitt's remarks on Wordsworth (130)

Victor / Coleridge-both are taking laudanum, an opiate to which Coleridge became addicted (155) ,

Victor / Ancient Mariner-tales of misery and marriage (160)

Bodies / texts-Victor calls his story of the monster 'my hideous narration" (167)

Creature weeping over Victor / Caroline Beaufort, Victor's mother, weeping over her dead father (III. 187 and I. 19)

Consequently, the literal composite body of the creature is only one in quite a series of composite figures and allusions that often blur the border between ideas about bodies and ideas about texts.