A Wise Man Once Said....

Wisdom. Many people often associate wisdom with age. And from my initial research, it seems that the word itself has a very long lifespan, first appearing in, ironically, Beowulf in 725. It will be interesting to explore not only the origins of Wisdom due to the old history of it but also to find out how the word got the connotations of old age and someone of established knowledge or experience.

Percy Shelley and His Review of Frankenstein

Yes, the title is correct; Mary Shelley's own husband wrote a "critical" essay of her novel Frankenstein, and of course was highly favorable. Due to the length of the essay, I divided his comments on how the book excels into three main points:

1. How Frankenstein is a source of powerful emotion to the reader.
In his essay Percy says, "We are led breathless with suspense and sympathy, witnessing the heaping up of incident on incident, and the working of passion upon passion."Percy's overall point here is the emotional buildup of Frankenstein, and how despite the reader being able to predict what will happen we are still taken aback and incredibly sad and sympathetic to the victims, either the Creature or Victor.

2. The Importance of Sympathy.
As we touched upon in our class discussion with Mr. Phillips, the concept of sympathy and empathy plays a huge role in Frankenstein. Percy describes Mary's story as being able to draw on both "logical and natural minds", meaning that no matter if you see things through a logical point of view, or a purely emotional and naturalistic view, you will either sympathize with Victor, the Creature, or both.

3. The Concept of Morality.
Percy in his conclusion brings up the concept of how Frankenstein depicts the consequences of excluding someone from society, and how that forces that being, the Creature in this case, to take on evil qualities, such as selfishness and malevolence.