The contextual circumstances in which a literary work is composed have a profound effect on the ideas and opinions that composers express within them. This is most notable when examining Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1817). Both texts allude to the theme of religion and the role of women in society. However due to the 40 year gap between their respective compositions their views on the movement are quite apparently different. These polarisations are largely the result of the differing social contexts of the composers, and are illustrated by their uses of literary techniques.
Firstly, we see these two composers discuss their opinions of religion and its place in their contemporary worlds. In Frankenstein, we see Shelley convey her Romantic religious view that man can never overcome the divine and sublime power of nature. This means that Shelley characterises mother-nature to be omnipotent throughout her novel. We see this omnipotence when Victor describes the act of catching the monster as "impossible; one might as well try to overtake the winds, or confine a mountain stream with a straw". Here we see Shelley use two analogies to which she defines impossibility, each depicting the act of a person attempting to restrain nature's sublimity. We also see this expression of nature's sublimity when Victor observes the power of the lightning bolt that strikes the tree. Remarking upon the destruction of the tree, he states that the oak "was not shocked by the blast, but completely reduced to thin ribbons of wood. I had never seen anything so utterly destroyed." Here Shelley uses the word "ribbons" in her description of the destroyed oak to not only describe the power of nature, but also to depict its beauty. The effect of this is that Shelley is able to express her opinion that the theist's natural world is sublime, and so therefore religion and God must be of similarly great power and importance by extension.
