Frankenstein

Chapter 11

Mary Shelley · Mountaineers 10th–12th

Teaching Companion Print Adapt for your student

Copywork

Here, then, I retreated and lay down happy to have found a shelter, however miserable, from the inclemency of the season, and still more from the barbarity of man.

Nothing could exceed in beauty the contrast between these two excellent creatures. One was old, with silver hairs and a countenance beaming with benevolence and love; the younger was slight and graceful in his figure, and his features were moulded with the finest symmetry, yet his eyes and attitude expressed the utmost sadness and despondency.

Read the second passage aloud. It praises the two men, one after the other. Then it ends on “sadness and despondency”. What does that ending do to the beauty?

For the educator Two passages, three sentences. The first is the night he reaches the hovel: a sentence that saves its sharpest point for last. It pauses on “however miserable”, then ranks two hardships, the weather and people, with “and still more”. The second is the cottagers seen from outside. A short claim (“Nothing could exceed in beauty the contrast”) is followed by a long sentence in two halves split by a semicolon: the old man in one, the young man in the other, and a turn on “yet” that ends on sadness. Both vocabulary words from the copywork, “inclemency” and “benevolence”, come from these sentences. For the talk prompt, listen for a student who hears the sentence build the young man up before it lands on his eyes. The chapter does not say why he is sad, and the talk should not guess.

Discussion

Narration Tell the chapter back from his first confused days in the forest near Ingolstadt to the moment the cottagers put out their lights.

Joy sends his hand into the fire, and he pulls it out “with a cry of pain.” Two sentences later, his joy is back. What happens to the pain in between? Inference
The shepherd shrieks and runs from him. The creature is only “somewhat surprised”, and soon he is eating the man’s breakfast. Why does the shriek trouble him so little? Character
At the chink he says he had “never beheld aught beautiful before.” But in the wood he had gazed at the moon with wonder. What makes this sight the first? Inference

Make a Connection Think of a story, or a time you know of, when someone came to know a group of people only by watching them from outside. What can a watcher learn that way, and what might a watcher get wrong?

Vocabulary

assuage: Food, however, became scarce, and I often spent the whole day searching in vain for a few acorns to assuage the pangs of hunger. To ease a pain or a want and make it less sharp. Hunger is what he tries to assuage here; later, at the window, he feels something that he says no hunger or food had ever given him.
inclemency: Here, then, I retreated and lay down happy to have found a shelter, however miserable, from the inclemency of the season, and still more from the barbarity of man. Harshness, said of weather. At root it means a lack of mercy (“clemency” is mercy). He sets the merciless winter beside “the barbarity of man” and calls the second worse.
benevolence: One was old, with silver hairs and a countenance beaming with benevolence and love; the younger was slight and graceful in his figure, and his features were moulded with the finest symmetry, yet his eyes and attitude expressed the utmost sadness and despondency. Goodwill; the wish to do good to others (from Latin for “wishing well”). He reads it in the old man’s face before he knows a single word of their language, and he sets it beside the young man’s sadness.

Critical thinking

Looking back, he compares the shepherd’s hut to Pandæmonium, as it looked to “the dæmons of hell” after the lake of fire. He is telling this to Victor. Why does he choose that picture?
The village drives him off with stones. Safe in his hovel, he calls it “the barbarity of man.” How fair is that name?
Watching the old man smile at the weeping girl, the creature feels “a mixture of pain and pleasure”. Where does the pain come from?