magic, haunting charnel-houses and lonely islands for his unseemly purpose. He is not presented as an enlightened scientific pioneer but rather as one practising unholy arts, challenging nature itself, which, the novel strongly suggests, it is not right for human beings to do.  In this respect he appears more in the mould of the legendary magician Faust who sold his soul to the devil for knowledge, rather than as a modern scientist. And of course his wretched creature - his offspring, as one might call it - despite its acquisition of intelligence and even eloquence, is generally regarded as a 'monster', an unnatural thing.

There are many different elements of the Gothic novel seen in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

First, the setting of the Gothic novel is always important. The setting is meant to evoke both horror and fear in the reader. For Frankenstein, the novel does both. The setting, while it changes many times, evokes fear in the fact that parts of it take place in the frozen seas and wildernesses. The unknown of what is to come for both Victor and the monster, in regards to the setting, typically evokes fear for the engaged reader. The second element of the novel's setting which evokes fear is Victor's gathering of body parts and the labs he works in. Both settings are morbid and frightening.

Victor, the Gothic hero (to some), isolates himself from the rest of society. The monster (the other Gothic hero) has fallen from grace (Victor's love) and is forced to become the epitome of the Gothic "Wanderer."

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein not only exists as an example of a Romantic novel, the text also contains Gothic characteristics. The elements of terror and horror are necessary in any Gothic text. That said, the inclusion of horror and terror is necessary to qualify Frankenstein as a Gothic text.

The true horror of the novel does not begin until chapter five. It is in this chapter that Victor first comes face to face with his creation. Deemed an abomination by Victor, the Creature is hideous to look at. Its yellow eye, tautly pulled skin, and exposed, through translucent skin, muscles and arteries prove to illuminate the Creature as a horror of nature.

As readers transverse the novel, Victor is stalked by the Creature. While at times Victor actually sees the Creature illuminated by lightning, there are other times where Victor only thinks he sees the Creature. The following two quotes illustrate both concepts, the actual visualization of the Creature and Victor's thinking he sees the Creature.

I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. (Chapter Five)

I thought I saw the dreaded spectre glide into the room. (Chapter Five)

As stated before, Victor is essentially stalked by the Creature. After hearing the Creature's story, and agreeing to make the Creature a mate, Victor is left with a promise, or threat, made by the Creature: "Depart to your home, and commence your labours: I shall watch their progress with unutterable anxiety; and fear not but that when you are ready I shall appear.”

It is through this promise that readers are left with their own feelings of anxiety, given they know the Creature could appear at any time. Knowing that the Creature is capable of murder, readers have no clue as to when the Creature will appear and continue upon his murderous rampage. This alone speaks to the horror and terror found in the novel.

Outside of this, some readers may find it horrific that Victor brought back to life a being in the first place. Not only has he been successful at reanimating life, he has done so using a patchwork of different body parts. Played upon by media since it origination, readers have been "programed" to fear Victor's creation. Unfortunately for many, the miscommunication between the novel and the media has proven to be damaging. Many who have never read Frankenstein believe Frankenstein to be the Creature and not the creator. That said, some may find the change of identification to be horrific (especially those who appreciate the novel).

Mary Shelley’s 1818 science fiction novel Frankenstein is “gothic” in every sense of the word. Defined as literature (at least, within the context of literature) characterized by the confluence of horrific images and romantic elements, the story of Victor Frankenstein’s efforts at, first, creating and, later, seeking the destruction of the hideous creature that would bear his name for all eternity qualifies as gothic for those images and for the main protagonist, Victor’s, love for his family and for his fiancé and, briefly, bride. In fact, the theme of companionship is present throughout Frankenstein, beginning with Robert Walpole’s affectionate correspondence with his sister, extending to Victor’s relationship to Elizabeth, and concluding with the creature’s determination to have a female mate for himself.

The horrific imagery in Shelley’s novel begins with Walpole’s recitation of a mysterious sighting he and his crew aboard the vessel stranded among ice flows in the frigid Arctic observed:

“. . .strange sight suddenly attracted our attention and diverted our solicitude from our own situation. We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a mile; a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge and guided the dogs.”

Narrated by Victor Frankenstein – his weakened but still living person having been brought aboard Walpole’s vessel, following which he relates his story to his would-be savior – the young student’s determination to study and understand the human body leads him down the most macabre of paths. As he describes this transition in Chapter Four of the novel, his single-minded determination begins his journey down the road that will end with the destruction of all he holds dear:

“To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death. I became acquainted with the science of anatomy, but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body. In my education my father had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors. I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy, and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses.”

The result of these efforts, of course, is the creation of the creature that will haunt him for the remainder of his days. At one point in this chapter, Victor, in an aside that presaged Poe’s demented narrators’ affirmations of their true mental states, declares, “Remember, I am not recording the vision of a madman.” He has, though, crossed the rubicon. As he notes in the following passage, “After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.”

As Shelley’s novel progresses, gothic imagery dominates throughout, from the mysterious death of Victor’s younger brother – a death later attributed to the creature – to Victor’s repeated sightings of his murderous creation, including the protracted story related by the creature in an encounter in the cold, wind-swept peaks of the Alps, to the murder of Victor’s closest friend, Henry Clerval, to the absolutely horrific sight of the creature gloating over the corpse of Elizabeth, described in the following passage from Chapter 23:

“While I still hung over her in the agony of despair, I happened to look up. The windows of the room had before been darkened, and I felt a kind of panic on seeing the pale yellow light of the moon illuminate the chamber. The shutters had been thrown back, and with a sensation of horror not to be described, I saw at the open window a figure the most hideous and abhorred. A grin was on the face of the monster; he seemed to jeer, as with his fiendish finger he pointed towards the corpse of my wife.”

Victor’s description of his creation’s appearance at the window of the bedroom in which he had only recently lied next to his beloved Elizabeth, and the following passage, which precedes the above description in this chapter, capture the essence of gothic literature in the most profound sense. Having sent Elizabeth alone to bed while he assured himself of their safety from the monster’s grasp, he discovers to his horror that his decision to leave his bride alone has been fatal:

“I rushed towards her and embraced her with ardour, but the deadly languor and coldness of the limbs told me that what I now held in my arms had ceased to be the Elizabeth whom I had loved and cherished. The murderous mark of the fiend’s grasp was on her neck, and the breath had ceased to issue from her lips.”

Frankenstein is replete with gothic imagery. It is a tragedy that incorporates elements of horror and romance, and fuses the two in a manner that leaves the reader emotionally drained.

The settings in Frankenstein can be considered Gothic because they are wild and immense and often create a sense of imprisonment. The story opens and closes in the North Pole—a wild, untamed landscape of ice, where Walton's ship becomes trapped. Later in the story, Frankenstein and his creation encounter one another in the wild mountains, which, as highlighted by the quotation below, provide a suitably dramatic backdrop for their meeting.

The immense mountains and precipices . . . overhung me on every side, the sound of the river raging among the rocks, and the dashing of the waterfalls around. (97)

A second element of Gothic fiction present in Frankenstein is the theme of madness. Victor Frankenstein becomes so obsessed with his creature, and then so ridden with guilt for the destruction that his creation has caused, that he understandably descends into madness, or something like it. When we, the readers, first meet Frankenstein, he is described by Walton as having "an expression of wildness, and even madness" (27).

Gothic fiction also tends to be full of death and the macabre. Frankenstein's obsession to create new life stems in part from the grief he endures as a result of his mother's death. Most of Frankenstein's family dies during the story, including his father, his brother, and Elizabeth, his cousin and bride. The creature, who is the direct cause of so much of this death, is himself created out of dead body parts stolen from graves. This rather macabre image is captured well when Frankenstein asks himself,

Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? (55)

A fourth element of Gothic fiction is a protagonist who plays God by trespassing on God's ability to create life. Frankenstein is guilty of this, and arguably the tragedy which befalls him in the story is a punishment for this blasphemous transgression. In chapter 15, the creature accuses Frankenstein of being a negligent God:

Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?

Frankenstein is a narrative generated by the grotesque, supernatural, and horrifying that evolve after an eight-foot creature originally designed to be "beautiful" rampages the countryside and haunts his creator. Truly, there are almost all the listed elements of the Gothic in Mary Shelley's novel.

• a castle that is haunted or ruined

Although there is no castle that is occupied, in Chapter 18 there is the vision of the "black woods, high and inaccessible." and as Victor and Clerval traverse the Rhine River, they view "rugged hills, ruined castles, overlooking tremendous precipices."

Certainly, the ominous laboratory in which Victor Frankenstein forms his creature, his "hideous phantom" of a man, as Shelley herself wrote, fits the Gothic image of a threatening environment that the dark castle usually presents.

• shadows, a beam of moonlight....

The stroke of lightning which generates the energy for the creations of Victor's monster connotes the Gothic characteristics of the passionate and irrational. In Chapter 5, Victor first beholds his creature by the "glimmer of half-extinguished light" of a candle nearly burnt out".

• extreme landscapes

The narrator Walton undertakes an extremely dangerous voyage to the Artic, and Victor chases his creature across the frozen terrain. Further, when Victor sets out to create a female for the creature he chooses a barren island, away from his family as he becomes "restless and nervous" in the "solitude where nothing could for an instant call my attention from the actual scene in which I was engaged.”

While Victor and Clerval travel the Rhine, they marvel at the beauty of the highest point of the Alps, the "spreme and magnificent Mount Blanc. Later, when Victor encounters his creature in Chapter 10, he tells Victor that he has wander many days through the "desert mountains and dreary glaciers," which have been his refuge.

• omens

In Chapter 3, the death of Victor's mother serves as an omen. On her deathbed, she joins the hand of Elizabeth and Victor in the hope that they will marry. Victor, who feels that her "existence appears a part of our own" violates her memory later and suffers the consequence of his prideful acts.

In Chapter 22, Elizabeth's letter to Victor asking if they will ever be married also serves as an omen to her fate.

• supernatural, magical

The formation of a living being from the parts of cadavers, aided by the energy of the lightning, generates a preternatural being, one formed as by magic.

In a supernatural experience, Chapter 10 as Victor seeks solace in the beautiful area of Chamounix, he is filled with a "sublime ecstasy" as he contemplates nature, believing that human contemplation of natural wonders "gives wings to the soul and allows it to soar from the obscure world to light and joy" in a supernatural experience. 

• a passion-driven, willful villain-hero

Despite the warnings of Clerval's "distastes for natural science" Victor, as he relates his tale to Walton, urging the sea captain to learn from him, pursues scientific knowledge irrationally:

...how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.

Later, despite his realization that his brother William has probably been killed by the creature and the fact that Justine will be a sacrificial victim, Victor remains silent in his willful self-interest.

• a curious heroine with a tendency to faint and a need to be rescued often

Justine is an odd heroine as she passively accepts her fate, admitting to a crime she has not committed despite some strange facts such as her having in her possession something that belonged to William, hoping that she will thereby earn salvation. A heroine, she perishes "through the cowardice of her pretended friends."

Elizabeth, too, is a Victorian heroine, submissive and in need of rescuing. She writes to Victor, but always acquiesces to his will. She represents an ideal of womanhood from Victorian days. In Chapter 23 Victor finds her the victim of the vengeance of the creature: 

...the deadly languor and coldness of the limbs told me that what I now held in my arms had ceased to be the Elizabeth whom I had loved...The murderous mark of the fiend's grasp was on her neck....

• a hero revealed at the end of the novel

After listening to the tragic tale of Victor Frankenstein, Walton decides to abandon his expedition and heroically is able to save the men from disaster.

• horrifying events

Of course, the creature commits several horrific acts: his murders William and Elizabeth--show[ing] unparalleled malignity and selfishness, in evil"--and he threatens Victor, stalking him after Victor refuses to create a female for him. Victor, too, is horrified by the darkness of his own soul in being the cause of Justine and Elizabeth's deaths, and in his prideful act of attempting to master nature. 

Certainly, Walton has been horrified by the chronicle of Victor, who confesses, "Evil thenceforth became my good....The completion of my demoniacal design became an insatiable passion." Moreover, Victor confesses that he is horrified by himself. He tells Walton,

"You hate me, but you abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself."

Later, the appearance of the creature after Victor dies, horrifies Walton when he first sees him 

Frankenstein reveals the following Gothic themes and imagery:

• Originated as ghost story
• Portrays human beings as woefully imperfect
• Humans mercy of nature and death.
• Doppelganger (ghostly twin) haunts his creator
• Monster made at night, from dead bodies robbed from graveyard
• Imagery focuses on light, fire, darkness, and night (all symbolic of good and evil, knowledge and ignorance)
• Haunted laboratory
• Dr. Frankenstein and Monster: characters isolated by extreme passion (for knowledge, revenge)
• Lots of gothic monologues (by Victor), an anti-hero tormented by past sins
• The use of technology: a modern story with a gothic setting
• The Natural World versus the City
• The use of animals (Monster sleeps with them)
• Religion: God, the Devil and Christianity
• Myth, legend and gossip

So says Enotes:

Gothicism
Horace Walpole introduced the first Gothic novel in 1764 with The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Gothic novels were usually mysteries in which sinister and sometimes supernatural events occurred and were ultimately caused by some evil human action. The language was frequently overly dramatic and inflated. Following this movement was the Romantic movement's fascination with the macabre and the superstitious aspects of life, allowing them the freedom to explore the darkest depths of the human mind. Most critics agree that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein reflected her deepest psychological fears and insecurities, such as her inability to prevent her children's deaths, her distressed marriage to a man who showed no remorse for his daughters' deaths, and her feelings of inadequacy as a writer. The Gothic novel usually expresses, often in subtle and indirect ways, our repressed anxieties. The settings usually take place far away from reality or realistic portrayals of everyday life. Shelley's setting, of course, is the exception to most Gothic novels. The fact that the creature wanders the breathtaking Alps instead of a dark, craggy mansion in the middle of nowhere either compounds the reader's fear or makes the creature more human.

In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, terror arises in horrific states, be they a state of mind or a state of nature or a situation.

• State of Mind

The character of Victor Frankenstein generates terror as he entertains horrific ideas. Certainly, he deviates from the natural as he contemplates the creation of a human being over whom he can exert complete control; in other words, he "aspires to become greater than his nature will allow." He admits that he "became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated."

With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being...

When Victor succeeds in infusing life with the electricity generated by a storm, he is horrified by his creation and his irresponsible science, and he flees in terror and afterwards starts from his sleep "in horror." Victor describes the terrifying creature in this way,

His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!--Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

In Chapter 23, in yet another example of mental terror, Victor holds in his arms the slain Elizabeth; he turns to the window, and feels a sense of panic.

The shutters had been thrown back; and, with a sensation of horror not to be described, I saw at the open window a figure the most hideous and abhorred. 

In the end, the creature admits that "Evil thenceforth became my good," an inversion of moral values--certainly a state that effects horror in the reader at the creat.

• State of Nature

In Frankenstein, nature often appears in the extreme, as it threatens human life, and, thus, generates terror. The most apparent of these horrific states of nature is the "dreary night of November" on which Victor imbues life with electricity during a horrific storm.  Another example is the brutal and threatening nature in the Artic where Walton has ventured.  As Victor recounts his pursuit of the creature to Walton, he describes "mountains of ice" with its imminent danger of curshing him and the monster.  The cold is "excessive," but the "feverish fire still glimmers in his [the creature's] eyes...."

• Situations

The deaths of Victor's little brother and Henry Clerval certainly evoke a sense of horror on the part of the reader at the bizarre twists of plot. What happens to poor Justine who is condemned to die based solely upon circumstantial evidence is also disturbing. Even more terrorizing is the death of Victor's fiancee, Elizabeth, when all along he has felt that the creature has threatened his life, not hers, since the creature has promised that he will be with Victor on his wedding night.