How does the passage provided from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein reflect concerns of the Romantic era and features of gothic literature?
The passage is a descriptive piece that focuses on a sublime all-encompassing environment. It illustrates how the Romantic authors believed that the only authentic source of beauty is nature. The passage is also marked by an interest in adventure that is characteristic of the Romantic era and shows how adventure is diffused through normal life in the form of mountain climbing and treks. It has a number of gothic features that are present, including numerous references to nature as well as lengthy sentences that are broken into a number of clauses.
The passage highlights the idea that nature is sublime and can inspire emotion in people. The Romantics believed that nature was a medium though which people could find ore and it created a connection between man and emotion. Vivid images of the environment throughout the passage highlight its reoccurring importance to the characters and their emotion state. Nature was also seen as a way out of the real world, an escape in which your emotions are free. “In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts over which it had brooded for the last month.” This shows how nature is an escape for the people. These allusions to escape and the imagination is a feature of the Romantic era with many references by Romantics made to imagination and the state of mind that allows for subjectivity to be present. The vivid and continual images of nature being sublime are a feature of both gothic literature, with the idea of nature being all-encompassing, and that of the Romantic era that used the sublime quality of nature to object to the Age of Reason and ideas such as objectivity that it held dear.
The highly subjectivity nature of the text is present in most Romantic texts. It creates a sense of bewilderment and confusion that is a feature of both gothic and Romantic ideas. It has...