Frankenstein — Paper 2 Section A (19th-century novel)

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) sits at the intersection of Romanticism, Enlightenment science and Gothic horror. On Edexcel 1ET0/02 Section A you have 40 marks (24 AO1+AO2, 8 AO3, 8 AO4) and you respond to a printed extract plus the novel as a whole.

Form and structure

A frame narrative built in three concentric voices: Captain Walton's letters to his sister enclose Victor Frankenstein's autobiographical narrative, which in turn encloses the Creature's first-person account in the central chapters. Shelley uses the Russian-doll structure to stage moral judgement: by the time we reach the Creature's voice, we have already heard Victor's. The framing controls our sympathy.

The novel is structured around a series of doublings: Walton and Victor (both ambitious explorers); Victor and the Creature (creator and creation); the Creature's reading of Paradise Lost (Adam, Satan, the rejected child). Shelley's structure is its argument.

Themes that score

• Ambition and the limits of knowledge — Victor's "more, far more, will I achieve" maps onto Walton's polar expedition and Satan's fall in Paradise Lost. Shelley critiques the Promethean overreach of Enlightenment science.
• Parental responsibility — Victor abandons the Creature at birth. The novel's ethical centre is Shelley's argument that creation entails care; abandonment is the original sin.
• Isolation — every major character is alone: Walton at sea, Victor in his lab, the Creature at the De Lacey hovel, Elizabeth in Victor's absence. Shelley diagnoses the Romantic solitary as broken.
• Romantic vs Enlightenment ideas — Enlightenment confidence in science (Erasmus Darwin, Galvani) collides with Romantic suspicion of progress. The novel sits in the collision.
• Nature and the sublime — the Alpine and Arctic landscapes are not decoration. Shelley uses Romantic sublimity to scale the moral stakes.

Characters worth knowing

• Victor Frankenstein — the ambitious natural philosopher. Read him as Shelley's critique, not Shelley's hero.
• The Creature — eight feet tall, intelligent, articulate. Reads Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, The Sorrows of Werter. His Chapter 11–16 narrative is the novel's moral centre.
• Walton — frame narrator. His final choice (turning back from the pole) is the novel's lone moment of restraint.
• Elizabeth, Henry Clerval, the De Laceys — collateral damage. Each becomes a moral cost of Victor's choices.

AO3 context

• 1818 publication, written in 1816 — the "year without a summer" caused by the Tambora eruption. Shelley wrote it in Geneva at Byron's challenge to compose a ghost story.
• Mary Shelley's mother Mary Wollstonecraft died from complications giving birth to her. The abandoned-creator theme is biographical and political.
• Galvani's experiments on animal electricity (1780s–90s) and Erasmus Darwin's poetic speculations about reanimation. Shelley's "spark of being" is grounded in contemporary science.
• The 1818 first edition was published anonymously; reviewers assumed a male author. The 1831 revised edition added Shelley's name and a softer framing of Victor.
• Romanticism (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Percy Shelley) — Shelley's husband and circle. The novel is in dialogue with Romantic poetic ambition.
• The French Revolution and its aftermath — fears that scientific or political "creations" might turn on their makers.

Common essay traps

• Calling the Creature "Frankenstein". The Creature has no name; that is itself part of Shelley's point.
• Treating the Creature as the villain. Top responses read him as a tragic figure shaped by abandonment.
• Forgetting the frame. Walton's letters are not throat-clearing — they are the novel's structural argument about restraint.
• Forgetting AO4 (8 marks). Spell Frankenstein, Wollstonecraft, Galvani, Promethean, sublime correctly.