Relate fire and ice to the novel frankenstein

As heat and cold are among our most primitive bodily sensations, so fire and ice form a part of the primitive language of the mind. In The Psychoanalysis of Fire Gaston Bachelard even suggests that thought itself arose in reveries before the fire, taking as its first object fire itself, "the first phenomenon."1 Fire has served man for centuries (doubtless for many millennia) not just to warm his house and cook his food but to explain his world as well, and in particular those aspects of his world that live and change. To the prescientific and poetic mind that Bachelard analyzes, fire is life and change, "the ultra-living element," and as such has been confidently located in the sky, deep in the earth, in everything that moves, grows, alters its shape, reproduces itself. Fire is thus "one of the principles of universal explanation," both good and bad. "It shines in Paradise. It burns in Hell."2 But nowhere is it more confidently located, or more necessary to thought and discourse, than in the very seat of life, the inner world of human feeling. For all the intimate sensations we experience directly and daily -- intestinal, libidinal, but most of all emotional -- there seems to exist no language but metaphor and no metaphor so apt as this of vital fire or fiery life, glowing or smoldering, flaring up or blazing out, as we love and hate.

Ice has yet to find its phenomenologist. The Eskimo language may have more than forty words for ice, but to most of us ice seems, in contrast to fire, essentially fixed and dead. It is precisely in contrast to fire, however -- in its essential fixity and uniformity -- that ice finds its imaginative meaning. For unlike water (which, {50} though it puts fire out, rather resembles fire in its fluidity and formlessness and is, like fire, often used to represent the "life" of the feelings) ice opposes or negates fire, cooling what is hot, solidifying what is fluid, arresting motion, silencing sound. Ice opposes and suppresses life and change; it is repression and death. In the inner world of the emotions, it blights and kills what was warm and blooming, seals up and freezes over even the most volcanic passions. Its killing numbness may, of course, be welcome, bringing relief from all feelings except (in Keats's phrase about the solaces of December) "the feel of not to feel it."