It’s true for any writer that there will be influence occurring from the world around them in their work. This is especially true for Mary Shelley when she wrote her novel, Frankenstien. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner can easily be paralleled to much of the work of Shelley’s novel. This parallel could possibly be attributed to Mary Shelley’s love for the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge during her time.
One of these mentioned parallels is man’s constant fight with nature. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the old sailor relays the story of himself shooting, and killing, an Albatross and being doomed for all of eternity as punishment. The same sort of internal struggle is present in Frankenstien when Robert Walton finds Victor Frankenstien on the ice trying to chase down his creation, one that he regrets bringing to life for all the trouble that has ensued because to it.
Another similarity, much like the first, is that in both cases the dead were purposely reanimated. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner shows this in the fifth part of the epic, the ship’s crew was brought back to life in order to help the remaining mariner return to shore. As well as in Frankenstien, many parts of dead people were taken and put together in order to bring life back into these parts and form a new creation. In both of these cases, the reanimation was performed inorder to escape some kind of death, in the former to stop the ancient mariners death on the sea, and in the latter for all of humanity to save people from an inevitable death.
And the third similarity between the two are the structure of the stories. Both Shelley and Coleridge use frame devices to recount to the reader the main plot line of their respective stories. The beginning starts with a man in “present day” running into someone who turns the tide of the story, where the second plot line begins to be told.
When analyzing stories, it is important to understand the mindset of the author as it relates to the text that has been written. In doing this, connections and parallels will be found to help the reader in comprehending all aspects of the story. In this case especially, Mary Shelley is attributed with the creation of the sci-fi genre. In having no other author’s to get inspiration from, she had to look to what she did know and that was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Due to this, the story Frankenstien was created.