The Gothic Novel

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The Gothic Novel Frankenstein

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The Gothic Novel

• Frankenstein is by no means the first Gothic
  novel. Instead, this novel is a compilation of
  Romantic and Gothic elements combined into a
  singular work with an unforgettable story.
• The Gothic novel is unique because by the time
  Shelley wrote Frankenstein, several novels had
  appeared using Gothic themes, but the genre had
  only been around since 1754.

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The Gothic Novel

• The first Gothic horror novel was The Castle of
  Otranto by Horace Walpole, published in 1754.
• The Castle of Otranto - The basic plot created
  many other gothic staples, including a
  threatening mystery and an ancestral curse, as
  well as countless trappings such as hidden
  passages and oft-fainting heroines.
• Perhaps the last type of novel in this mode was
  Emily Brontes Wuthering Heights, published in
  1847. In between 1754 and 1847, several other
  novels appeared using the Gothic horror story as
  a central story telling device, The Mysteries of
  Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1794) by Ann
  Radcliffe, The Monk (1796) by Matthew G. Lewis,
  and Melmouth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles
  Maturin.

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The Gothic Novel

• The Gothic novel set in some exotic place like
  Italy and involving a heroine (or, less often,
  hero) in a struggle with the mysteriously evil
  and seemingly supernatural.
• A landscape of vast dark forest with vegetation
  that bordered on excessive, concealed ruins with
  horrific rooms, monasteries and a forlorn
  character who excels at the melancholy.

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The Gothic Novel

• It is the predecessor to modern horror and, above
  all, has led to the common definition of "gothic"
  as being connected to the dark and horrific.
• Prominent features of gothic novels included
  terror, mystery, the supernatural, ghosts,
  haunted buildings, castles, trapdoors, doom,
  death, decay, madness, hereditary curses, and so
  on.

6
Mary Shelley

• Mary Shelley was twenty when Frankenstein was
  published, twenty-four when her husband drowned
  although she wrote a good many other things, her
  fame clearly rests on her archetypal tale of the
  monster and his creator.

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Archetype

• Archetype is defined as the original pattern from
  which copies are made. The word Archetype is
  derived from the Latin noun archetypum, meaning a
  template, mold or copy.

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Gothic Traits in Frankenstein

• Frankenstein is set in continental Europe,
  specifically Switzerland and Germany, where many
  of Shelleys readers had not been. Further, the
  incorporation of the chase scenes through the
  Arctic regions takes us even further from England
  into regions unexplored by most readers.
• Victors laboratory is the perfect place to
  create a new type of human being. Laboratories
  and scientific experiments were not known to the
  average reader, thus this was an added element of
  mystery and gloom.

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Gothic Traits in Frankenstein

• The thought of raising the dead would have made
  the average reader wince in disbelief and terror.
  Imagining Victor wandering the streets of
  Ingolstadt after dark on a search for body parts
  adds to the sense of revulsion purposefully
  designed to evoke from the reader a feeling of
  dread for the characters involved in the story.

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Gothic Traits in Frankenstein

• In the Gothic novel, the characters seem to
  bridge the mortal world and the supernatural
  world.
• Frankensteins monster seems to have some sort of
  communication between himself and his creator,
  because the monster appears wherever Victor goes.
  
• The monster also moves with amazing superhuman
  speed with Victor matching him in the chase
  towards the North Pole.

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Mary Shelley

• Shelley had incorporated a number of different
  sources into her work, not the least of which was
  the Promethean myth from Ovid.
• The influence of John Miltons Paradise Lost, the
  book the 'creature' finds in the cabin, is also
  clearly evident within the novel.

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The Modern Prometheus"

• The novel's subtitle
• Prometheus, in some versions of Greek mythology,
  was the Titan who created mankind, and Victor's
  work by creating man by new means obviously
  reflects that creative work. More widely known
  is that Prometheus was the bringer of fire who
  took fire from the gods and gave it to man. Zeus
  then punished Prometheus by fixing him to a rock
  where each day a predatory bird came to devour
  his liver.
• Prometheus was also a myth told in Latin but was
  a very different story. In this version
  Prometheus makes man from clay and water, again a
  very relevant theme to Frankenstein as Victor
  rebels against the laws of nature and as a result
  is punished by his creation.

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The Modern Prometheus"

• Prometheus' relation to the novel can be
  interpreted in a number of ways.
• For Romance era artists in general, Prometheus'
  gift to man compared with the two great utopian
  promises of the 18th century the Industrial
  Revolution and the French Revolution, containing
  both great promise and potentially unknown
  horrors.
• Byron was particularly attached to the play
  Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, and Percy Shelley
  would soon write Prometheus Unbound.

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What else is going on in literature, besides
Romanticism and The Gothic Novel?

• Jane Austen, the first great nineteenth-century
  novelist, was, in some sense the last great
  eighteenth-century novelist ironic, comic,
  promoting the values of reason and restraint.
• 1818, a year after Austens death, saw the
  (anonymous) publication of Frankenstein, quite a
  different sort of novel.