Imagining Victor wandering the streets of Ingolstadt or the Orkney Islands after dark on a search for body parts adds to the sense of revulsion purposefully designed to evoke from the reader a feeling of dread for the characters involved in the story. The thought of raising the dead would have made the average reader wince in disbelief and terror.
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Shelley takes full advantage of this literary device to enhance the strange feelings that Frankenstein generates in its readers. Just the thought of raising the dead is gruesome enough. Laboratories and scientific experiments were not known to the average reader, thus this was an added element of mystery and gloom. Victor's laboratory is the perfect place to create a new type of human being. Likewise, Dracula is set in Transylvania, a region in Romania near the Hungarian border. Further, the incorporation of the chase scenes through the Arctic regions takes us even further from England into regions unexplored by most readers.
Frankenstein is set in continental Europe, specifically Switzerland and Germany, where many of Shelley's readers had not been. Also, far away places that seem mysterious to the readers function as part of the Gothic novel's setting. A familiar type of Gothic story is, of course, the ghost story. Gothic novels also take place in gloomy places like old buildings (particularly castles or rooms with secret passageways), dungeons, or towers that serve as a backdrop for the mysterious circumstances. Upon hearing the story for the first time, Lord Byron is said to have run screaming from the room, so the desired effect was achieved by Mary Shelley. She also causes us to question our views on Victor's use of the dead for scientific experimentation. Shelley employs the supernatural elements of raising the dead and macabre research into unexplored fields of science unknown by most readers. In Frankenstein, Shelley uses rather mysterious circumstances to have Victor Frankenstein create the monster: the cloudy circumstances under which Victor gathers body parts for his experiments and the use of little known modern technologies for unnatural purposes. Gothic novels focus on the mysterious and supernatural. Lewis, and Melmouth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin. In between 17, several other novels appeared using the Gothic horror story as a central story telling device, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1794) by Ann Radcliffe, The Monk (1796) by Matthew G. Perhaps the last type of novel in this mode was Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, published in 1847. The first Gothic horror novel was The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, published in 1754. The Gothic novel is unique because by the time Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, several novels had appeared using Gothic themes, but the genre had only been around since 1754. Instead, this novel is a compilation of Romantic and Gothic elements combined into a singular work with an unforgettable story. Frankenstein is by no means the first Gothic novel.
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