Copy of Frankenstein 12/13 (6/23/2025)
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13 questions
Who Was Prometheus?
Prometheus
1 PROMETHEUS WAS A YOUNG Titan, no great admirer of Zeus. Although he knew the great lord of the sky hated explicit questions, he did not hesitate to beard him when there was something he wanted to know.
2 One morning he came to Zeus, and said, “O Thunderer, I do not understand your design. You have caused the race of man to appear on earth, but you keep him in ignorance and darkness.”
3 “Perhaps you had better leave the race of man to me,” said Zeus. “What you call ignorance is innocence. What you call darkness is the shadow of my decree. Man is happy now. And he is so framed that he will remain happy unless someone persuades him that he is unhappy. Let us not speak of this again.”
4 But Prometheus said, “Look at him. Look below. He crouches in caves. He is at the mercy of beast and weather. He eats his meat raw. If you mean something by this, enlighten me with your wisdom. Tell me why you refuse to give man the gift of fire.”
5 Zeus answered, “Do you not know, Prometheus, that every gift brings a penalty? This is the way the Fates weave destiny—by which gods also must abide. Man does not have fire, true, nor the crafts which fire teaches. On the other hand, he does not know disease, warfare, old age, or that inward pest called worry. He is happy, I say, happy without fire. And so he shall remain.”
6 “Happy as beasts are happy,” said Prometheus. “Of what use to make a separate race called man and endow him with little fur, some wit, and a curious charm of unpredictability? If he must live like this, why separate him from the beasts at all?”
7 “He has another quality,” said Zeus, “the capacity for worship. An aptitude for admiring our power, being puzzled by our riddles and amazed by our caprice. That is why he was made.”
8 “Would not fire, and the graces he can put on with fire, make him more interesting?”
9 “More interesting, perhaps, but infinitely more dangerous. For there is this in man too: a vaunting pride that needs little sustenance to make it swell to giant size. Improve his lot, and he will forget that which makes him pleasing—his sense of worship, his humility. He will grow big and poisoned with pride and fancy himself a god, and before we know it, we shall see him storming Olympus. Enough, Prometheus! I have been patient with you, but do not try me too far. Go now and trouble me no more with your speculations.”
10 Prometheus was not satisfied. All that night he lay awake making plans. Then he left his couch at dawn, and standing tiptoe on Olympus, stretched his arm to the eastern horizon where the first faint flames of the sun were flickering. In his hand he held a reed filled with a dry fiber; he thrust it into the sunrise until a spark smoldered. Then he put the reed in his tunic and came down from the mountain.
11 At first men were frightened by the gift. It was so hot, so quick; it bit sharply when you touched it, and for pure spite, made the shadows dance. They thanked Prometheus and asked him to take it away. But he took the haunch of a newly killed deer and held it over the fire. And when the meat began to sear and sputter, filling the cave with its rich smells, the people felt themselves melting with hunger and flung themselves on the meat and devoured it greedily, burning their tongues.
12 “This that I have brought you is called ‘fire,’” Prometheus said. “It is an ill-natured spirit, a little brother of the sun, but if you handle it carefully, it can change your whole life. It is very greedy; you must feed it twigs, but only until it becomes a proper size. Then you must stop, or it will eat everything in sight—and you too. If it escapes, use this magic: water. It fears the water spirit, and if you touch it with water, it will fly away until you need it again.”
13 He left the fire burning in the first cave, with children staring at it wide-eyed, and then went to every cave in the land.
14 Then one day Zeus looked down from the mountain and was amazed. Everything had changed. Man had come out of his cave. Zeus saw woodmen’s huts, farm houses, villages, walled towns, even a castle or two. He saw men cooking their food, carrying torches to light their way at night. He saw forges blazing, men beating out ploughs, keels, swords, spears. They were making ships and raising white wings of sails and daring to use the fury of the winds for their journeys. They were wearing helmets, riding out in chariots to do battle, like the gods themselves.
15 Zeus was full of rage. He seized his largest thunderbolt. “So they want fire,” he said to himself. “I’ll give them fire—more than they can use. I’ll turn their miserable little ball of earth into a cinder.” But then another thought came to him, and he lowered his arm. “No,” he said to himself, “I shall have vengeance—and entertainment too. Let them destroy themselves with their new skills. This will make a long twisted game, interesting to watch. I’ll attend to them later. My first business is with Prometheus.”
16 He called his giant guards and had them seize Prometheus, drag him off to the Caucasus, and there bind him to a mountain peak with great chains specially forged by Hephaestus—chains which even a Titan in agony could not break. And when the friend of man was bound to the mountain, Zeus sent two vultures to hover about him forever, tearing at his belly and eating his liver.
17 Men knew a terrible thing was happening on the mountain, but they did not know what. But the wind shrieked like a giant in torment and sometimes like fierce birds.
18 Many centuries he lay there—until another hero was born brave enough to defy the gods. He climbed to the peak in the Caucasus and struck the shackles from Prometheus and killed the vultures. His name was Heracles.
1
Compare Victor and Prometheus.
Victor ______________________ ______________________ ______________________
Prometheus ______________________ ______________________ ______________________
Other Answer Choices:
lost his family and friends one by one
stole knowledge from the gods and gave it to humans
chained to a rock and tortured for years
seemed to have a mostly positive impact
Tried to unlock secrets of life and death
seemed to have a mostly negative impact
1
Prometheus wants to __________ humans, while Zeus wants to __________ humans.
1
Summarize the arguments that Zeus and Prometheus make.
Summarize the arguments that Zeus and Prometheus make.
1
Which argument do you think is stronger? Why?
Which argument do you think is stronger? Why?
Compare Texts
Volume I, Chapter 1, Pages 20–23
1 I feel pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self. But, in drawing the picture of my early days, I must not omit to record those events which led, by insensible steps to my after tale of misery.
2 When I was thirteen years of age, I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa. I opened it with apathy; the theory which he attempts to demonstrate, and the wonderful facts which he relates, soon changed this feeling into enthusiasm. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind; and, bounding with joy, I communicated my discovery to my father.
3 “Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash.”
4 If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded, and that a modern system of science had been introduced, I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside, but the cursory glance my father had taken of my volume by no means assured me that he was acquainted with its contents; and I continued to read with the greatest avidity.
5 My first care was to procure the whole works of this author, and afterwards of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. I read and studied the wild fancies of these writers with delight; they appeared to me treasures known to few beside myself.
6 It may appear very strange, that a disciple of Albertus Magnus should arise in the eighteenth century; but our family was not scientifical, and I had not attended any of the lectures given at the schools of Geneva. My dreams were therefore undisturbed by reality; and I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. But the latter obtained my undivided attention: wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!
7 Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favourite authors, the fulfilment of which I most eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake, than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors.
8 When I was about fifteen years old, we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. It advanced from behind the mountains of Jura; and the thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak, which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed.
9 The catastrophe of this tree excited my extreme astonishment; and I eagerly inquired of my father the nature and origin of thunder and lightning.
10 “Electricity.”
1
Reread Volume I, pg 22
What do you think motivates Victor to learn the secrets of life and death?
Reread Volume I, pg 22
What do you think motivates Victor to learn the secrets of life and death?
1
Read Volume II, pages 109–114 of Gris Grimly's Frankenstein.
What do you think motivates the creature to commit murder?
Read Volume II, pages 109–114 of Gris Grimly's Frankenstein.
What do you think motivates the creature to commit murder?
Write: The Modern Prometheus
Required
7
Answer the following question by writing for the next 10 minutes (100 words). Make sure to use text evidence (APE).
Why do you think Mary Shelley subtitled her story The Modern Prometheus?
Answer the following question by writing for the next 10 minutes (100 words). Make sure to use text evidence (APE).
Why do you think Mary Shelley subtitled her story The Modern Prometheus?
Homework
Prometheus
1 PROMETHEUS WAS A YOUNG Titan, no great admirer of Zeus. Although he knew the great lord of the sky hated explicit questions, he did not hesitate to beard him when there was something he wanted to know.
2 One morning he came to Zeus, and said, “O Thunderer, I do not understand your design. You have caused the race of man to appear on earth, but you keep him in ignorance and darkness.”
3 “Perhaps you had better leave the race of man to me,” said Zeus. “What you call ignorance is innocence. What you call darkness is the shadow of my decree. Man is happy now. And he is so framed that he will remain happy unless someone persuades him that he is unhappy. Let us not speak of this again.”
4 But Prometheus said, “Look at him. Look below. He crouches in caves. He is at the mercy of beast and weather. He eats his meat raw. If you mean something by this, enlighten me with your wisdom. Tell me why you refuse to give man the gift of fire.”
5 Zeus answered, “Do you not know, Prometheus, that every gift brings a penalty? This is the way the Fates weave destiny—by which gods also must abide. Man does not have fire, true, nor the crafts which fire teaches. On the other hand, he does not know disease, warfare, old age, or that inward pest called worry. He is happy, I say, happy without fire. And so he shall remain.”
6 “Happy as beasts are happy,” said Prometheus. “Of what use to make a separate race called man and endow him with little fur, some wit, and a curious charm of unpredictability? If he must live like this, why separate him from the beasts at all?”
7 “He has another quality,” said Zeus, “the capacity for worship. An aptitude for admiring our power, being puzzled by our riddles and amazed by our caprice. That is why he was made.”
8 “Would not fire, and the graces he can put on with fire, make him more interesting?”
9 “More interesting, perhaps, but infinitely more dangerous. For there is this in man too: a vaunting pride that needs little sustenance to make it swell to giant size. Improve his lot, and he will forget that which makes him pleasing—his sense of worship, his humility. He will grow big and poisoned with pride and fancy himself a god, and before we know it, we shall see him storming Olympus. Enough, Prometheus! I have been patient with you, but do not try me too far. Go now and trouble me no more with your speculations.”
10 Prometheus was not satisfied. All that night he lay awake making plans. Then he left his couch at dawn, and standing tiptoe on Olympus, stretched his arm to the eastern horizon where the first faint flames of the sun were flickering. In his hand he held a reed filled with a dry fiber; he thrust it into the sunrise until a spark smoldered. Then he put the reed in his tunic and came down from the mountain.
11 At first men were frightened by the gift. It was so hot, so quick; it bit sharply when you touched it, and for pure spite, made the shadows dance. They thanked Prometheus and asked him to take it away. But he took the haunch of a newly killed deer and held it over the fire. And when the meat began to sear and sputter, filling the cave with its rich smells, the people felt themselves melting with hunger and flung themselves on the meat and devoured it greedily, burning their tongues.
12 “This that I have brought you is called ‘fire,’” Prometheus said. “It is an ill-natured spirit, a little brother of the sun, but if you handle it carefully, it can change your whole life. It is very greedy; you must feed it twigs, but only until it becomes a proper size. Then you must stop, or it will eat everything in sight—and you too. If it escapes, use this magic: water. It fears the water spirit, and if you touch it with water, it will fly away until you need it again.”
13 He left the fire burning in the first cave, with children staring at it wide-eyed, and then went to every cave in the land.
14 Then one day Zeus looked down from the mountain and was amazed. Everything had changed. Man had come out of his cave. Zeus saw woodmen’s huts, farm houses, villages, walled towns, even a castle or two. He saw men cooking their food, carrying torches to light their way at night. He saw forges blazing, men beating out ploughs, keels, swords, spears. They were making ships and raising white wings of sails and daring to use the fury of the winds for their journeys. They were wearing helmets, riding out in chariots to do battle, like the gods themselves.
15 Zeus was full of rage. He seized his largest thunderbolt. “So they want fire,” he said to himself. “I’ll give them fire—more than they can use. I’ll turn their miserable little ball of earth into a cinder.” But then another thought came to him, and he lowered his arm. “No,” he said to himself, “I shall have vengeance—and entertainment too. Let them destroy themselves with their new skills. This will make a long twisted game, interesting to watch. I’ll attend to them later. My first business is with Prometheus.”
16 He called his giant guards and had them seize Prometheus, drag him off to the Caucasus, and there bind him to a mountain peak with great chains specially forged by Hephaestus—chains which even a Titan in agony could not break. And when the friend of man was bound to the mountain, Zeus sent two vultures to hover about him forever, tearing at his belly and eating his liver.
17 Men knew a terrible thing was happening on the mountain, but they did not know what. But the wind shrieked like a giant in torment and sometimes like fierce birds.
18 Many centuries he lay there—until another hero was born brave enough to defy the gods. He climbed to the peak in the Caucasus and struck the shackles from Prometheus and killed the vultures. His name was Heracles.
Required
1
In what way are Victor and Prometheus most similar?
In what way are Victor and Prometheus most similar?
Required
2
In what ways do you think Mary Shelley updated the Prometheus character and made him "modern"?
In what ways do you think Mary Shelley updated the Prometheus character and made him "modern"?
Frankenstein (1931) A Man-Made Monster in Grand Guignol Film Story By MORDAUNT HALL. Published: December 5, 1931 New York Times
1 Out of John L. Balderston’s stage conception of the Mary Shelley classic, “Frankenstein,” James Whale, producer of “Journey’s End” as a play and as a film, has wrought a stirring grand-guignol type of picture, one that aroused so much excitement at the Mayfair yesterday that many in the audience laughed to cover their true feelings.
2 It is an artistically conceived work in which Colin Clive, the Captain Stanhope of the London stage production of the R. C. Sherriff play, was brought from England to act the rôle of Frankenstein, the man who fashions a monster that walks and thinks. It is naturally a morbid, gruesome affair, but it is something to keep the spectator awake, for during its most spine-chilling periods it exacts attention. It was Carl Laemmle, head of Universal, the firm responsible for this current picture, who presented Lon Chaney in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” and while, as everybody knows, Quasimodo was a repellent sight, he was a creature for sympathy compared to the hideous monster in this “Frankenstein.” Boris Karloff undertakes the Frankenstein creature and his make-up can be said to suit anybody’s demands. He does not portray a robot but a monster made out of human bodies, and the reason given here for his murderous onslaughts is that Frankenstein’s Man Friday stole an abnormal brain after he had broken the glass bowl containing the normal one. This Frankenstein does not know.
3 No matter what one may say about the melodramatic ideas here, there is no denying that it is far and away the most effective thing of its kind. Beside it “Dracula” is tame and, incidentally, “Dracula” was produced by the same firm, which is also to issue in film form Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
4 There are scenes in Frankenstein’s laboratory in an old windmill, somewhere in Germany, where, during a severe electric storm, the young scientist finally perceives life showing in the object on an operating table. It is not long after that the monster walks, uttering a sound like the mooing of a cow. And then ensues the idea that while Frankenstein is proud of the creature he has made and boasts loudly about his achievement, he soon has reason to fear the brute, and in course of time it attacks Frankenstein’s faithful servant, a bowed and bent little man, and kills him.
5 The scenes swing here and there to the Baron, Frankenstein’s father, efficiently acted by Frederick Kerr, to those of a friend named Victor, played by John Boles, and to Elizabeth, Frankenstein’s fiancée, portrayed by Mae Clarke. This is a relief, but they are all anxious about what Frankenstein is doing. They learn at the psychological moment, and have then still greater anxiety for Frankenstein.
6 Imagine the monster, with black eyes, heavy eyelids, a square head, huge feet that are covered with matting, long arms protruding from the sleeves of a coat, walking like an automaton, and then think of the fear in a village, and especially of the scientist, when it is learned that the monster has escaped from the windmill. It is beheld parading through the woods, sitting down playing with a little girl, and finally being pursued by a mob with flaming torches, for apparently fire is the only thing that causes the monster to hesitate.
7 The sounds of the cries of the pursuers and the strange noises made by the monster add to the disturbing nature of the scenes, and in a penultimate episode there is the struggle between the monster and Frankenstein. As a concession to the motion picture audience, Frankenstein is not killed, but he is badly injured. Two endings were made for this production, and at the eleventh hour it was decided to put in the one in which Frankenstein lives, because it was explained that sympathy is elicited for the young scientist and that the spectators would leave disappointed if the author’s last chapter was adhered to. 8 As for the monster, he is burned when the villagers set fire to the windmill. From the screen comes the sound of the crackling of the blazing woodwork, the hue and cry of the frightened populace and the queer sounds of the dying monster.
9 Mr. Clive adds another fine performance to his list. He succeeds in impressing upon one the earnestness and also the sanity of the scientist, in spite of Frankenstein’s gruesome exploits. Lionel Belmore gives an easy performance as the town burgomaster. Miss Clarke, Edward Van Sloan and Dwight Frye also serve well.
10 FRANKENSTEIN, based on Mary Wollstonecroft Shelley’s book and adapted from John L. Balderston’s play; directed by James Whale; a Universal production. At the Mayfair.
11 Frankenstein. . . . . Colin Clive
12 Elizabeth. . . . . Mae Clarke
13 Victor. . . . . John Boles
14 The Monster. . . . . Boris Karloff
15 Dr. Waldman. . . . . Edward Van Sloan
16 The Dwarf. . . . . Dwight Frye
17 The Baron. . . . . Frederick Kerr
18 The Burgomaster. . . . . Lionel Belmore
19 Peasant Father. . . . . Michael Mark
20 Mary the Child. . . . . Marilyn Harris
Required
1
The film review was published in__________
Required
1
The author says that, as the audience watched the Frankenstein film, they "laughed to cover their true feelings" (1). What does he most likely mean by that?
The author says that, as the audience watched the Frankenstein film, they "laughed to cover their true feelings" (1). What does he most likely mean by that?
Required
1
According to the article, the 1931 version of Frankenstein is most similar to which of the following?
According to the article, the 1931 version of Frankenstein is most similar to which of the following?
Required
1
Which horror film does the reviewer compare Frankenstein to?
Which horror film does the reviewer compare Frankenstein to?