Gothic Themes

1. "It was a dreary night in November"; "Morning, dismal and wet" - VF
2. "I saw, with surprise and grief, the leaves decay and fall" - VF

1. Of the use of the sublime, Fred Botting says “the immense scale offered a glimpse of infinity and awful power, intimations of metaphysical force beyond rational knowledge and human comprehension."

Annotations:

• Unnatural

1. "Flowers grown by invisible gardeners in the Beast's hothouses" - TCoML

1. Unreliable narrator
   1. Judy Simmons suggests that Gothic novels “undermine any sense of narrative stability and replace it with an experience of incoherence and uncertainty”

1. The Beast and Mr Lyon in that they are "other" from humans
   1. "She found his bewildering difference from herself almost intolerable;" TCoML

1. "I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition... the bitter gall of envy rose within me" The Creature
   1. "Frankenstein is both a father and a god that has failed to love his marred creation" Harold Bloom
2. "as if to tell me the eye of God--his eye--was upon me" TBC
3. "The tiger-man... could take a glass of ale in his hand like a good Christian and drink it down." TTB
4. "It is Christmas Day; the werewolves' birthday" TCoW

1. "the metal shell of the Iron Maiden emitted a ghostly twang; my feverish imagination might have guess its occupant was trying to clamber out" TBC

1. The Count "thrust[s] his virile member into the dead girl" as his wife looks on. TSC
   1. Marquis De Sade: “The strong abuse, exploit and meatify the weak… it is eat or be eaten.”
2. "I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss upon her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change and I thought I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms." - VF

1. Elizabeth Goldhammer: "Victor hides from his double as an act of rejection of his sexual identity"
   1. Byron, a member of Shelley's friendship circle, was known for his numerous relationships with men and women, so homosexuality wouldn't have been as shocking to Shelley, given the "libertine" tendencies of her friends.
2. “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!" - VF