Shelley, Blake and Wordsworth

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley was born in 1797. Her house was attended by many intellectual men, as

Percy Bysshe Shelley, who would become her husband. She died in 1851.

Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus

Literary influences

• Rousseau’s noble savage, that is a man not influenced by civilization;
• Locke for the description of the monster and his education by experience;
• The myth of Prometheus, who is the giant who stole fire from Gods in order to give it to men;

Themes

• Attempt to overcome human limits;
• The quest for forbidden knowledge;
• The penetration of Nature’s secret;
• The double identity, because Dr. Frankenstein and the monster are two aspects of the same being;
• The usurpation of the female role;
• Social prejudices that lead the monster to be an outcast;
• The role of education and experience.

Plot

The story is not told chronologically and is introduced by a series of letters written by Walton, a young explorer on a voyage of expedition to the North Pole. Frankenstein, a Swiss scientist, manages to create a human being by joining parts selected from corpses. In order to do this he neglects his family, in particular his wife Elizabeth. The result of his work is ugly and revolting: He creates a Monster. It was abandoned by its creator, so it had to know the world alone, but it was rejected by all, so it became an outcast and began to hate people; so the Monster became a murderer and in the end destroys his creator.

William Blake

William Blake was born in 1757 in London and he died there in 1827. Painters were expected to conform to standards of realistic representation, to respect perspective and proportions. Blake broke with these conventions and created a new kind of art which emphasized the power of imagination.

Regarding the poetry he rejected neoclassical literary style and themes. He stressed the importance of imagination over reason. He wrote short lyrical verses that are included into two collections: the first is Songs of Innocence and in these the narrator is a shepherd who receives inspiration from a child: childhood is the symbol of innocence. The second is Songs of Experience, because Blake creates the contrary of the first collection in the form of the bard who questions the themes of the previous collection: in these verses emerges a more pessimistic view of life. Experience, identified with adulthood, coexists with and completes Innocence, thus providing another point of view on reality.

Blake considered the Church as responsible for the fragmentation of consciousness and the dualism characterising man’s life. To this dualistic view he substituted his vision of “complementary opposites”. The possibility of progress, of achieving the knowledge of what we are, lies in the tension between opposite states of mind. In Blake’s opinion, imagination is the means through which man could know the world: God, the child and the poet share this power of vision.

Also in his poems he sympathized with the victims of industrial society as children and prostitutes, as well as with the victims of oppression by institutions such as orphans and soldiers.

The Chimney Sweeper 1

In Songs of Innocence, Blake features in "The Chimney Sweeper" innocence represented by the speaker (the slightly older chimney sweep), Tom, and all the other sweeps. This innocence is exploited and oppressed, and those who are being exploited are unaware of the oppression. The narrator is a chimney sweep whose mother died and was sold by his father at a very young age, as implied by the lines "And my father sold me while my tongue / could scarcely cry 'weep weep weep weep!'" (2-3). The phrase "in soot I sleep" (4), refers to the living conditions of the sweeps.

The poem goes on to talk about Tom Dacre and his dream, an important part of the poem. He dreams of the other chimney sweepers being locked in black coffins, symbolic of the lives that the sweeps lived, being poor outcasts in society and having stained unwashed skin and often disfigured bodies.

The angel opening the coffins and freeing the sweeps shows the freeing of Tom and other sweeps from the oppressive lifestyle. The reference to being white and the bags being left behind represents a complete escape from this oppression including the soot stained skin and the bags of tools and soot which they carried by day and on which they slept at night.

One may also interpret this dream as the coffins representing their literal deaths, and the chimney sweeps are not free from the oppression until the afterlife. When the angel tells Tom that "if he'd be a good boy, / He'd have God for his father and never want joy" (19-20), he gives Tom hope that if he is good and does his job, God will be his father and bless him in the next life.

The poem concludes with the narrator and his firm belief that if they are obedient and do their duty, all will be well. This last idea expressed emphasizes that he is in the state of innocence and is unaware that he is a victim.

The Chimney Sweeper 2

Cosino tutto nero fra la neve,

Strilla in tono dolente “'zacamino”.

“Dimmi, il babbo e la mamma dove sono?”.

“Sono andati alla chiesa per pregare.

Poiché stavo contento in quella plaga,

Ed in mezzo alla neve sorridevo,

Mi hanno vestito in abiti di lutto,

Ed insegnato i canti del dolore.

E siccome in lietezza ballo e canto,

Ignoran che m’han fatto tanto male,

E stanno a pregar Dio, i Preti e il Re,