Letter 2

His desires for a companion

"I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavour to regulate my mind."

Summary

- In second letter from Walton to his sister is written 3 months later. Now in Archangel, Walton has hired a ship and began to collect his crew. the weather is too severe for him to sail - Walton expresses his deep need for a sympathetic friend, someone to participate in his joys and sustain him in his sorrows - he applauds the courage of his lieutenant who, like Walton himself, is ambitious and speaks of his ship's master, a gentle man but silent and wholly uneducated - Walton quotes from Coleridge's poem, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' in describing his forthcoming voyage to 'the land of mist and snow'

Alienation

- plays a key role in the text - Walton's ambitions have isolated him from his family and friends and we will find that Victor Frankenstein's ambitions have a similar effect - Alienation is further emphasised by intertextual reference to Coleridge's 'The rime of the Ancient Mariner' (1798) - the Mariner's act of shooting the albatross is a crime against nature, separating man from nature so that the mariner remains forever alienated, shunned by his community an outsider

Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)

- the Mariner tells of his experineces on a ship locked in ice in the Antarctic - the sailors were visited by an albatross, a great sea bird that seemed to befriend the men - their luck improved: the ice broke up and a breeze from the south pushed them through the fog. Suddenly and inexplicably, the mariner shot the bird, bringing a curse upon himself and his ship

educational background

He regrets, "Now I am twenty-eight and am in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen."

eco-critic Jonathan Bate in the song of the Earth (2000)

argues that Walton's voyage through the Artic is part of a longer colonial project at the time. Walton, he suggests, wants to break through the northern passage in order to encourage British colonisation and trade with the Orient.

intertextuality

term used to describe the way a text borrows from and transforms other texts. Frankenstein demonstrates its reliance on intertextuality from the very smart in both its subtitle's reference to a modern prometheus and its epigraph quoting from Milton's paradise lost. Angela Carter's the bloody chamber (1979) offers a striking example of intertextuality in the 20th century. shelley quotes from 'the rime of the ancient mariner' to illuminate her individual characters and their situations but the postmodernist carter completely reworks and changes 'little red riding hood' to comment on society and ideologies

weather slows

the weather slows the beginning of the trip, but Walton reassures his sister that he will use caution and prudence. He alludes to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This one poem helped launch the Romantic period and gives us a story of a man banished for killing an albatross while at sea. The poem is an extended allegory symbolising the death of imagination in man and an embarkment on a quest for spiritual and intellectual knowledge. Coleridge, a Romantic writer, was a friend of Mary's father.

sympathise

'i desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me; whose eyes would reply to mine' walton tells his sister: 'i bitterly feel the want of a friend' Possible interpretations: - connects Walton to the monster who himself longs for love and companionship - the monster will echo Walton when he demands a mate with whom he can live 'in the interchange of those sympathise necessary for my being'

hired ship

'i have hired a vessel, and am occupied in collecting my sailors'

lonely

'i have no friend'