Assignment:
Both gothic and romantic aesthetics pay a great deal of attention to the environment in which particular scense play out. Wheter it is the sublime mountain tops reaching into the sky inspiring thoughts of higher powers, or the beautiful flower beds that exist alongside peaceful brooks or streams in the countryside the setting is given a great deal of attention. This holds true with Mary Shelley's treatment of Frankenstein.
Here is your assignment - you are to consider one of the following passages and analyze the impact that the setting has in creating a mood, tone, motif, or theme that the author is attempting to create. In doing this, you should take into account any imagery, similies, or metaphors that are being used to accomplish a task. Moreover, make sure that you specifically discuss what exactly the piece that you are focusing on is doing in the text. Make the small text citation, and then explain what it is doing, and how it is accomplished. The final assignment should be no more than 1-2 pages in length.
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Paragraph:
I spent the following day roaming through the valley. I stood beside the sources of the Arveiron, which take their rise in a glacier, that with slow pace is advancing down from the summit of the hills to barricade the valley. The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; the icy wall of the glacier overhung me; a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial nature was broken only by the brawling waves or the fall of some vast fragment, the thunder sound of the avalanche or the cracking, reverberated along the mountains, of the accumulated ice, which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands. These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling, and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillized it. In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts over which it had brooded for the last month. I retired to rest at night; my slumbers, as it were, waited on and ministered to by the assemblance of grand shapes which I had contemplated during the day. They congregated round me; the unstained snowy mountaintop, the glittering pinnacle, the pine woods, and ragged bare ravine, the eagle, soaring amidst the clouds they all gathered round me and bade me be at peace.