Creation and responsibility — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Creation and responsibility
Themes
What you need to know
How Shelley explores creation, playing God, and a creator's duty to what he makes, with Victor as a father who abandons his child across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter', 'No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs', 'one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me', 'How dare you sport thus with life?', 'Do your duty towards me', 'I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were', 'No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses', 'my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance', 'Unfeeling, heartless creator!', 'I felt that there was some justice in his argument', 'In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature', 'This was my duty; but there was another still paramount to that'.
Context: playing God, Milton's God and Adam as a model of creator and created, and Mary Shelley's own motherless childhood.
Edexcel's novel question has two parts, and neither marks context: part (a) on the printed extract marks language, form and structure (AO2); part (b) on the novel elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1), not language analysis. Use context only where it explains a reading, and say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
