Use of Storm Imagery in Villette and Frankenstein Essays -- comparison

The Romantic and victorian periods saw a florescence of imagery for the Romantics, because it often proved the best way to express their isolated philosophical yearnings and ideas for the Victorians, because societal taboos all too often prevented discussion of topics unless they were coded in acceptable images. Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and Charlotte Brontks Villette, despite springing from these two different periods of literature, share a type of symbol. In each bildingsroman, draws provide a dominant textual metaphor for violent and confusing turning points in the main characters development. For Lucy Snowe, storms usher her along in her development from shy, frigid nursemaid to more open, self-sufficing school-mistress though fearful and traumatic, the storms, and experiences, tend to mold and enhance her personality. But for Victor Frankenstein, storms punctuate his relationship with his horrid creation, and show his steady dissolution towards calamity and attempted re venge. Villette practically opens with a storm after the initial exposition, Lucy tells of how it was a wet night the rain lashed the panes, and the wind sounded angry and respireless on the evening when Polly Home first arrived. This admittedly minor change in her liveliness still presages, in its stormy accompaniment, the larger turning-points in her life that storms are to indicate. Indeed, Lucys stay with Polly and the Brettons is immediately followed by her famous and unexplained ruin image that begins Chapter IV. Whether it represents forced incest or merely financial reversals and deaths in the family, it is this storm which produces much of the cool reserve and surfeit of reason that troubles Lucy through the rest of the novel.... ...xiles at Home A Story of Literature in 19th Century America. Lanham University Press of America, Inc., 1984. Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley. Her Life, her Fiction, her Monsters. Methuen. New York, London, 1988. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein New American program library edition, 1983.Patterson, Arthur Paul A. Frankenstein Study. http//www.watershed.winnipeg.mb.ca/Frankenstein.html You may wish to place the following quotes at the arising of the paper for a stronger impact. These strange accents in the storm -- this restless, hopeless let loose -- denote a coming state of the atmosphere unpropitious to life. (Bront, p. 46) This virtually miraculous change of inclination and will was... the last effort do by the spirit of preservation to avert the storm that was even indeed hanging in the stars and ready to envelop me. (Shelley, p. 41)