By Manan, Grade 10
Hello, everyone!
Last time, I wrote about how we can use AI to our advantage in school… now, after multiple requests from my friends at my own school, I’ve decided to publish a comprehensive guide on how to analyze a quote that your annoying English teacher keeps trying to “analyze”!
Especially in high school English, analysis of long texts like Shakespeare and especially British literature is a very deep and complex process despite how good you are at annotating. This time, we will be taking the example of Frankenstein, a VERY deep book that I didn’t even begin to understand the deeper meaning of until I participated in the class-driven discussion.
I encourage you to read Frankernstein by Mary Shelley, a timeless classic. In case you don’t now, here’s a synopsis from the Morgan Library and Museum:
Captain Robert Walton, on an Arctic expedition, writes to his sister about a mysterious stranger he has rescued from the ice. Victor Frankenstein tells Walton his story—a happy childhood, an unhealthy obsession with alchemy, and his engagement to his cousin Elizabeth. Victor enrolls at the University of Ingolstadt, where he discovers the secret of life and builds a creature from dead bodies . When the creature comes to life, Victor is horrified. He runs away and falls ill. During a slow recovery under the care of his friend, Henry Clerval, Victor hears from his father: his little brother William has been murdered. Victor returns to Geneva where a beloved servant is hanged for William’s murder. Victor suspects the creature, but has no proof until they meet on an Alpine glacier. There the creature describes his first experiences, explains how he learned to speak and read, and convinces Victor to build him a mate. In the remote Orkneys, Victor builds a female creature but destroys it in disgust. His creature appears and warns him: “I will be with you on your wedding night.” Soon after, the creature kills Henry Clerval.Back in Geneva, Victor and Elizabeth marry. The creature kills Elizabeth on their wedding night. At her grave, Victor swears vengeance. The creature is there and the chase begins, extending to the Arctic where Victor is rescued by Walton.
Let’s pick a quote from Victor’s time in England, where he must build the Creature a mate. Our overarching aim for this post and the next one will be to write an informative paragraph to make an argument about a particular vignette, aka short scene, and what it reveals about broader society. I encourage you to follow along if you are in the essay writing process for school and have some quotes/scenes in mind but are stuck.
Vignette: While he is traveling, he visits Oxfordshire, the tomb of John Hampden. Although it seems like a fleeting detail, let’s see how we can decompose this quote.
”We passed a considerable period at Oxford, rambling among its environs and endeavoring to identify every spot which might relate to the most animating epoch of English history. Our little voyages of discovery were often prolonged by the successive objects that presented themselves. We visited the tomb of the illustrious Hampden and the field on which that patriot fell. For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to contemplate the divine ideas of liberty and self-sacrifice of which these sights were the monuments and the remembrancers. For an instant, I dared to shake off my chains and look around me with a free and lofty spirit, but the iron had eaten into my flesh, and I sank again, trembling and hopeless, into my miserable self” (115).
Read the quote again. Like, actually. I guarantee you forgot 60% of what was written. You should be able to recite the first two lines by heart.
Done?
Now it’s time to create questions FOR OURSELVES to force us to contextualize and frame this quote in how we want to use it: aka, at higher levels of school, each vignette and quote isn’t going to be so explicit as to have an obvious connection. We need to be able to dig deep into the meaning and make BOLD extrapolations with clear logic. In fact, you may want to use AI to help you generate such questions and answer them yourself (See my blog post titled “How to become The AI Grandmaster” in school).
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Who is ”the illustrious Hampden”? We’ll use the internet and explain why Mary Shelley would specifically write about that geographical location in the context of this moment in the plot and also thematically.
- John Hampden (1594-1643) was an English parliamentarian during the reign of Charles I and was famous for his fights for rights, equality, and liberty against the oppressive regime. He became a symbol of liberty and freedom in a time of oppression. Shelley references Hampden to represent the Creature’s rebellion against Frankenstein. Just as Hampden rebelled against the oppressive monarchy, the Creature rebels against his oppressive creator, Frankenstein, who has denied him basic rights. Thematically, Shelley uses the Hampden memorial to reveal the fundamental power dynamics between Frankenstein and the Creature, revealing how oppression is a cyclical issue that affects its participants. The quote demonstrates the reversal of power, where Frankenstein, who was once the absolute creator, now experiences the same powerlessness he had originally imposed on the Creature. By invoking Hampden, Shelley presents a cruel irony in Frankenstein’s plight of being subordinate to the Creature: roles can shift, but the underlying structure of domination remains constant. The moment Frankenstein feels elevated by ideas of liberty is exactly when he realizes his own confinement, as he is trapped by the very system of control he originally abused against the Creature. In a perfect world, this cycle would be broken by mutual understanding and recognition of individual rights, but Shelley suggests that such liberation is ultimately impossible within existing power structures in which both parties aim to continue the cycle in each of their futile desires to take advantage of it.
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What is the purpose of this description of his trip? What values are revealed here? To what other Romantic poems (Mont Blanc, Mutability, Prometheus, etc) can we relate it to? Let’s quote and explain.
- By invoking Hampden, Shelley transforms Frankenstein from an authoritarian creator into a victim of the very systemic oppression he originally imposed, foreshadowing a turning point and the reversal of power dynamics. Hampden’s manifesto as a fighter for rights and equality mirror greater Romantic ideals like idealism, imagination, and individuality, of which the Creature has been longing for, and now, that Frankenstein desires. In his viewing of the tomb, he feels and attempts to harness such ideals as “for a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to contemplate the divine ideas of liberty and self-sacrifice…” (M.W. Shelley 115). However, after remembering his plight and his task of creating a female Creature, his emotions crash down. Indeed, Frankenstein feels the weight of being oppressed as he tries to ”look around [himself] with a free and lofty spirit, but the iron had eaten into [his] flesh, and [he] sank again, trembling and hopeless…” (115). These ideals are mirrored in external poems, such as Shelley’s Mutability. The poem starts with the line ”We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon / How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver / Streaking the darkness radiantly! yet soon / Night closes round, and they are lost for ever” (P.B. Shelley 1-4). This simile alludes to the ever changing nature of the sky, with the eternal battle between clouds, the shining moon, and the omnipresent night representing the changing role of the oppressor and the oppressed which both Frankenstein and the Creature experience. The poem hints at the solution of finding meaning within that darkness and helping one another in the challenges to overcome together, such as respecting the Creature’s wishes of having a healthy master-creation relationship in which both Frankenstein and the Creature can succeed and flourish
Observe the questions, and my answers. The questions seem messy, with each part asking a lot of stuff, but the answer melding and welding ideas into one. The key thing here is to have all of your ideas on paper in some shape or form. What writing and encasing your work on paper does is that it sometimes provides an invisible hand that guides your ideas: for example, I may have gone into the first questions knowing that Hampden would relate somehow to Victor’s struggles, but it soon evolved into the discussion of power struggles that emerged spontaneously.
Now, get out of your English gloom and get back out there, to write that daunting book review or get started on that boring essay! Look out for next week’s post about hope to actually concert our findings into a body paragraph!
Sayonara,
Manan
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