Frankenstein 2

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Frankenstein 2
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Outline

• Frankenstein a subversive novel?
• Subversion and containment
• Realism and nineteenth-century fiction
• The afterlives of Frankenstein
• Gothic times

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A subversive novel?

• Fs subversiveness articulated in terms of a
  re-turn of the repressed of the repressed
  under-side of bourgeois consciousness (Lovell)
• This subversiveness arguably an element of
  several reviewers hostility towards the novel
• . . . another Raw-head-and-bloody-bones
  (Lit-erary Magnet) the monstrousness of MSs
  novel a threat to bourgeois order (i.e. realism)
• See Marilyn Butlers Introduction to Oxford World
  Classics ed. of F (1994), p. xlv . . .

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A subversive novel?

• MB The novels first reviews tended to be
  critical. . . . Though published anonymous-ly, it
  had a dedicatee, whose name app-eared before the
  title-page, William God-win. The association with
  the old radical was probably enough to secure the
  dis-approval of conservative journals such as the
  Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Magazine and
  Literary Miscellany

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A subversive novel?

• The novels dedication
• TO
• WILLIAM GODWIN
• Author of Political Justice, Caleb
  Williams, c.
• THESE VOLUMES
• Are respectfully inscribed
• BY
• THE AUTHOR

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A subversive novel?

• William Godwin Marys father radical author
  from the 1790s Political Justice an anarchist
  treatise Caleb Williams a Jaco-bin novel
• Mary Wollstonecraft Marys mother (died 1797)
  radical feminist author of A Vindi-cation of the
  Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the
  Rights of Woman (1792)

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A subversive novel?

• Percy Bysshe Shelley Marys husband (married
  1816 after having eloped to the Continent
  to-gether in 1814) republican atheist poet
  author of The Necessity of Atheism (1811), Queen
  Mab (1813)
• Lord Byron close personal friend of the
  Shel-leys author of politically radical poetry
  scourge of the establishment instigator of the
  ghost story competition that gave rise to
  Frankenstein in the summer of 1816 at Lake
  Geneva

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A subversive novel?

• MSs connections to Godwin, Wollstone-craft,
  Percy Shelley, and Byron signal that the author
  of Frankenstein is likely to be a politically
  radical figure
• MSs connections plus the Gothic mon-strosity
  that is her novel called F are what, together,
  guarantee the critical hostility evident in the
  conservative press

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A subversive novel?

• But just how subversive is F, notwithstand-ing
  its basic message about the uncon-scious
  deathliness of modern scientific practices?
• Similarly, just how subversive is F as a re-turn
  of the bourgeois repressed?

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Subversion and containment

• Opinions differ as to whether or not F is a
  gen-uinely or a superficially subversive text
• See Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy the Literature of
  Subversion (1981) and Mary Poovey, The Proper
  Lady and the Woman Writer (1984), respectively
• Perhaps it is appropriate to speak of not just
  subversion but also containment where MSs threat
  to realist moderation, rationality, and
  pragmatism is concerned . . .

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Subversion and containment

• After all, what happens to the monster the
  focus of MSs subversiveness in the full
  working out of the F story?
• Answer he becomes absorbed into the text of
  Waltons letters
• Symbolically, Gothic subversiveness (the monster)
  becomes absorbed by neutral-ized by realist
  order (Waltons letters)

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Subversion and containment

• MSs novel designed in such a way as to ensure
  that the story of Frankenstein and his monster is
  contained by the frame narrative constructed in
  terms of Waltons letters to his sister Margaret
• The above epistolary part of the novel is
  generically realist Walton, through his account
  of Victor Frankenstein, is con-cerned simply to
  relate reality

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Subversion and containment

• Just as the realist epistolary frame nar-rative
  of F contains the whole fantastic story of
  Victors scientific experiments (to say nothing
  of this latters containment of the monsters
  story), so the subversive-ness of MSs Gothic
  fantasy about scien-tific monstrosity is
  contained by everything that is orderly and
  realistic about the Wal-ton letters to Margaret

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Subversion and containment

• MSs novel represents the struggle of the
  repressed Gothic against dominant real-ism
• But in the end, it reads as a narrative of
  subversion and containment Gothic
  sub-versiveness is contained by realist order

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Subversion and containment

• What finally secures F as a narrative of
  subversion and containment is precisely that
  small, connecting phrase which ap-pears in ch.
  XXIV Walton, in continu-ation.
• The phrase itself connects sutures the text
  of Victor Frankensteins journal to the frame
  narrative that is Robert Waltons own epistolary
  text

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Subversion and containment

• Walton, in continuation works in such a way as
  to facilitate the absorption of everything that
  Walton describes as strange and terrific
  about Frankensteins story into the more
  commonplace world of Waltons communications to
  his sister
• Walton is, precisely, that figure who could never
  have such strange and terrific adventures as
  Frankenstein, notwithstanding that the two men
  are both explorers

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Subversion and containment

• See Waltons last letter to his sister I am
  return-ing to England. I have lost my hopes of
  utility and glory (ch. XXIV)
• In the end, Robert Walton seems more like an
  ordinary Edward Waverley than a strange or
  terrific Victor Frankenstein Walton another
  instance of the middle-of-the-road hero (or
  prosaic anti-hero!) made popular in Waverley
• In this light, Walton is of course a man who
  would never suppress his family ties and
  con-nections, hence his letters to his sister
  Margaret

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Subversion and containment

• Walton, in continuation, then, represents the
  mark of realist narrative containment of Gothic
  fictional subversion in MSs text (compare,
  brief-ly, the role of Lockwood as narrator in
  Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
  similarities and differences)
• F is a subversive novel but, in practical terms,
  only up to the above point of subversiveness
  itself being contained by realisms world of all
  things commonplace and ordinary

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Realism and nineteenth-century fiction

• The newly dominant realism of such early 19C
  works as MP and W is challenged but not
  overthrown by Gothic fiction (super-natural
  tales, the literature of terror, etc.)
• If anything, a hegemonic realism grows stronger
  as the 19C unfolds
• Jane Eyre (1847) realist autobiograph-ical
  account of Janes development (done with some
  secondary Gothic elements)

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Realism and nineteenth-century fiction

• Jane Eyre Janes realist approach to life is
  shown as winning out against the alter-native
  approach associated with Blanche Ingram as a
  typical heroine of romance
• Middlemarch (1871-2) Note the indebt-edness of
  George Eliots study of pro-vincial life to the
  contents of MP (. . . in-terest in the details of
  ordinary life, etc.)

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Realism and nineteenth-century fiction

• Middlemarch Note, too, GEs indebtedness to
  WSs historical novel in that M is a historical
  novel about the 1832 Reform Act
• Realism no more powerfully dominant in fiction
  than in the first three quarters of the 19C (note
  the return of Gothic fantasy in the late 19C
  Ste-venson, Gilman, Wilde, Stoker, etc.)
• Beyond this, a still ongoing tendency to dismiss
  the Gothic as non-serious reveals the existence
  of continuing tensions between the Gothic and
  realism into the early 21C

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The afterlives of Frankenstein

• The history of the afterlives of F one
  par-ticularly revealing place where the
  con-tinuing tensions between the Gothic and
  realism are exhibited
• The popularity of F today amongst readers of the
  novel and viewers of the film adapt-ations
  suggests the fragility of the sub-version and
  containment dimension of MSs novel

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The afterlives of Frankenstein

• Fragility? the monsters subversiveness is
  contained within the novel (Waltons last letter
  makes it clear that the monster is shortly to
  take his own life), but subversion itself is
  brought back to life through the af-terlives and
  sheer popularity of F
• The popularity of F today is a manifest-ation of
  the uncontained, live subver-siveness of the
  novel

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Gothic times

• F as a novel is popular all over again today
  be-cause, arguably, today we live in Gothic times
• See Christopher Frayling, We live in Gothic
  times . . ., in Martin Myrone, ed., The Gothic
  Reader (2006), pp. 11-20
• Compare the idea for Gothic Nightmares (2006) at
  Tate Britain the present day marks a return of
  Gothic times from the 1790s

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Gothic times

• CF as themes within the wider culture, the
  Gothic, horror and fantasy have never been so
  widespread and deep-rooted at least not since
  England in the 1790s. We are indeed, as Angela
  Carter put it in 1974, now living in Gothic
  times (p. 16)
• CF on the new, post-1970s Gothic times of
  modernity . . .

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Gothic times

• CF normality has itself become strange
  through postmodernism with its hall of mirrors,
  its fascination with simulacra, for-geries and
  the artificial, its suspicion of natural
  appearances and its emphasis on intertextuality
  rather than authorial in-tention the twilight of
  the real has proved spookily appropriate to the
  Gothic (pp. 17-18)

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Gothic times

• In other words, the age of virtual reality has
  become the setting for a shift from the margins
  to the mainstream on the part of the Gothic
• (To illustrate the mainstreaming of Gothic, CF
  cites Damien Hirst feeling like Dr Frankenstein
  at work in producing popular art in the shape of
  dead cows in formalde-hyde (p. 16))

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Gothic times

• In so-called Gothic times the old
  counter-positioning of realism, on the one hand,
  and Gothicism, on the other, still exists
• CF pointedly reminds us of an embattled kind of
  defiance of the literary establishment . . . with
  its . . . preference for the realist tradition
  (p.18)
• I.e. the literary establishment still decidedly
  anti-Gothic, as it was in the days of the
  Quarterly Re-view and the Edinburgh Magazine

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Gothic times

• A postmodern blurring of the distinction between
  forms of high and low culture (hall of
  mirrors, fascination with simul-acra, etc.)
  means however that the old cleavage between
  dominant realism and repressed Gothic is no
  longer recogniz-able
• A diffusion of a formerly repressed Gothic occurs
  into the early 21C

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Gothic times

• This Gothic turn in the culture now deter-mines
  that we live not in realist but in Gothic times
• . . . Gothic arguably loses its subversive edge
  the more mainstream it becomes
• See MS Gothic (!), as well as the way that
  Damien Hirst has become the new Victor
  Frankenstein