Weather and literature: nature in turmoil

By RILEY WILSON

It may have only been named Frankenstorm as a comparison between its monstrously patched up elements and the monster of writer Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” but Hurricane Sandy holds another tie to the novel: its extreme conditions.

Extreme and violent weather is visible in many works of literature, particularly that of 19th century romantic writers including Shelley.

“It’s a way for romantic-era writers to give a kind of vivid and verbal representation of the interior sort of churning and emotionality that’s often associated with the romantic movement and era,” Trevor Dodman, an English professor at Hood College, said.

“The sense of wildness of the human experience is represented in the text not only by emotional displays on the part of the characters, but these electric moments of storm,” Dodman said.

Dodman said that Shelley’s “Frankenstein” deals with both extreme weather and extreme locals in the novel. Dodman said that these “present us with these images of danger and uncertainty…that are a way of conjuring up for us the dangers of difficulties and anxieties of the human experience.”

Within the novel, character Victor Frankenstein attempts to reanimate dead tissue through scientific experiments, essentially attempting to bring the dead back to life. “Those extreme weather conditions or the extremity of the geographic locals [are]…in the same way, the extremities of Frankenstein’s experimentation,” Dodman said.

“The state of nature is very important in Romantic literature, and normally, nature is a dynamic force,” Roser Caminals-Heath, a Spanish professor at Hood College, said. “It’s not a static backdrop as it is in the Renaissance, for example, but a dynamic force that plays a part in the action.”

Caminals-Heath said that the Germans described the romantic movement as Sturm und Drang, or storm and movement. “Weather…tends to parallel human emotions,” Caminals-Heath said. “If the weather is agitated, is violent in any way, the emotions tend to be violent and agitated.”

With the impassioned presidential elections approaching, perhaps Sandy came to act as a parallel to the country’s emotional state. It certainly left us in a restless state.