Frankenstein 1

1
Frankenstein 1
2
Outline

• Dominance of the new realism
• Repression of the Gothic
• The subversiveness of Frankenstein
• Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein

3
Dominance of the new realism

• WSs re-positioning of the novel through a
  re-gendering of the genre of fiction in W
• The triumph of realism over romance
• Emergence of Waverley as a new type of realist
  hero moderate, ordinary, pragmatic
• . . . the ardent, fiery, and impetuous character
  of the unfortunate Chief of Glennaquoich was
  finely contrasted with the contemplative,
  fanciful, and enthusiastic expression of his
  happier friend (W, vol. 3, ch. 24)

4
Dominance of the new realism

• WS a style of novel has arisen, within the last
  fifteen or twenty years, differing from the
  former in the points upon which the interest
  hinges neither alarming our cred-ulity nor
  amusing our imagination by wild variety of
  incident (Quarterly Review (1816))
• CRgtMPgtW ( the Waverley Novels) the new novel
  of realist consciousness

5
Dominance of the new realism

• Dominance of the new realism trans-formation of
  the field of fiction from its formerly wild
  state
• What becomes of the non-realist forms of fiction
  from this period?
• Dominance of realism subordination of other
  more popular fictional forms
• See the case of the Gothic . . .

6
Repression of the Gothic

• The origins of Gothic fiction Horace Walpole,
  The Castle of Otranto (1764 subtitled A Gothic
  Story in 1765)
• Popularity of Gothic fiction in the late 18C
  e.g. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udoplpho
  (1794) (as referenced on the opening page of W)
• Cf. JAs spoof Gothic novel, Northanger Abbey
  (written 1798-1803, published 1818)

7
Repression of the Gothic

• A decline in influence and authority of an 18C
  age of reason comes to be marked by the new
  popularity of the Gothic itself a wild
  amalgam of the supernatural, the uncanny, the
  irrational in the late 1700s
• The newly popular Gothic is then attacked in the
  name of realism through the early 19C (e.g.
  Gothic satire in WS and JA)

8
Repression of the Gothic

• At once popular but attacked and repress-ed the
  Gothic represents the repressed underside of
  bourgeois consciousness
• See Terry Lovell, Consuming Fiction (1987), p. 55
• See also David Punter, The Literature of Terror
  (1980)

9
Repression of the Gothic

• After the realist triumph symbolized by the
  success of MP and W in 1814 it is non-realist
  works of fiction such as Frank-enstein (1818) and
  The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a
  Justified Sinner (1824) that come to represent
  the repress-ed underside of realist or
  bourgeois con-sciousness

10
Repression of the Gothic

• The above a sketch of the dynamics of the
  Romantic novel a whole class struggle of
  fictional forms, or dominant realism vs.
  repressed Gothic

11
The subversiveness of Frankenstein

• F as a non-realist work of fiction a wild
  amal-gam of forms
• . . . an epistolary novel (Waltons letters) a
  fictional journal (Frankensteins account of his
  experiments) a Gothic fantasy (Frankensteins
  creation of his monster) a Bildungsroman (an
  account of the monsters growth and
  develop-ment), etc. finally, an epistolary
  novel again (Waltons letters)

12
The subversiveness of Frankenstein

• All in all, F appears a remarkably hybrid novel
  the very symbol of this hybridity is the monster
  itself as an assemblage of different body parts
• In this sense, Frankensteins monster emerges as
  the symbol of the wide di-versity of fictional
  forms (supernatural tales, romances, travel
  narratives) held under the sway of a hegemonic
  realism

13
The subversiveness of Frankenstein

• The symbolic diversity and hybridity of
  Frank-ensteins collectivized monster is what
  makes the monster truly monstrous in the eyes of
  bour-geois realist consciousness see F.
  Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), pp.
  83-108
• Consider the significance of the contemporary
  reception of MSs novel . . .
• F receives remarkably strong criticism in the
  reviews

14
The subversiveness of Frankenstein

• John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review (Jan.
  1818) a tissue of horrible and disgusting
  absurdity. . . . it Frankenstein inculcates no
  lesson of conduct, manners or morality it cannot
  mend and will not even amuse its readers un-less
  their taste has been deplorably vitiated
• See also Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley (2000) p.
  196 on the novels hostile reception . . .

15
The subversiveness of Frankenstein

• MS The Edinburgh Magazine (March) conceded
  moments of beauty and a certain fascination in
  the subject. . . . The Monthly Review (April)
  curtly dismissed an uncouth work, void of any
  moral or phil-osophical conclusion
• See further back-handed praise from Blackwoods
  Magazine when, in 1823, MSs identity as author
  is revealed . . .

16
The subversiveness of Frankenstein

• Blackwoods Magazine (1823) For a man it
  Frankenstein was excellent, but for a woman it
  was wonderful
• Finally, see the allusion to F in a review of
  MSs 1826 novel The Last Man, in The Literary
  Magnet (1826) . . . another Raw-head-and-bloody-
  bones i.e. the novel is as badly made as is
  Frankensteins monster
• (A useful summary available at http//www.
  english.upenn.edu/curran/250/frankrev.html.)

17
The subversiveness of Frankenstein

• The fact that F should be strongly criticized
  whilst being popular with the general reader
  suggests there may be something symptomatic about
  the novels reception
• In terms of the contemporary reviews
  (deplor-ably vitiated, etc.), the strong
  criticism seems a symptom of the monstrousness
  of F having thus been perceived as a subversive
  threat . . .

18
The subversiveness of Frankenstein

• . . . a subversive threat to everything that is
  res-pectable, rational and moderate about realism
  in its current position of dominance within the
  field of fiction
• . . . Frankensteins monster neither subject nor
  object but abject a fragmented body created
  from chaos . . .
• The very phrase deplorably vitiated (as well as
  others) suggests an anxiety about the threat-ened
  status of realism on the part of the critical
  establishment

19
The subversiveness of Frankenstein

• MS threatens a return of the repressed with her
  work of fiction about Bourgeois Man (Victor
  Frankenstein) inadvertently making a monster out
  of his use of science and reason
• No wonder the respectable, rational,
  moderate classes of realism should feel
  threatened by this monstrous novel!

20
Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein

• Victors account of his experiments a narrative
  of science, repression, and death
• The more heavily Victor becomes involved with his
  scientific experiments, so the more forcefully he
  is obliged to repress his family ties and
  connections, and this results in his creation
  of death rather than life (i.e. the monster as
  eventually a mur-derous figure)

21
Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein

• Victor points the moral to his own story Learn
  from me . . . how dangerous is the acquirement of
  knowledge, and how much happier that man is who
  believes his native town to be the world, than he
  who aspires to become greater than his nature
  will allow (ch. 4)
• Victors dream of Elizabeth (ch. 5) thus serves
  as MSs way of staging a return of the repressed
  in order to expose the deathly repressiveness of
  modern science

22
Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein

• Curiously, Victor has remarkably little to say
  about what happens when he gives life to his
  creation . . .
• He tells, rather, of the dream he has in his
  ex-hausted state immediately afterwards
• . . . I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of
  health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt.
  Del-ighted and surprised, I embraced her but as
  I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they
  became livid with the hue of death . . .

23
Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein

• . . . her features appeared to change, and I
  thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother
  in my arms a shroud enveloped her form, and I
  saw the graveworms crawling in the folds of the
  flannel (ch.5)
• (Incidentally, MSs description of Victors dream
  thought to be inspired by Henry Fuselis
  paint-ing, The Nightmare (1781), recently on show
  at Tate Britains Gothic Nightmares exhibition)

24
(No Transcript)
25
Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein

• The dream itself an expression of the
  repress-ed in Victors life family ties and
  connections symbolized by first Elizabeth then
  the dead mother coming back to the surface
• Symbolically, it is a whole realm of human
  feel-ing that has to be repressed in order for
  Victor to become a man of science
• On the man of science, see further Genevieve
  Lloyd, The Man of Reason Male and Female in
  Western Philosophy (2nd ed., 1993)

26
Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein

• See also Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman (1986), p.
  96 Freuds remark that the scientific
  motivation might be said to serve as a pretext
  for the unconscious erotic one could stand as
  the epigraph not only to Freuds own researches
  but to all scientific quests for the origins of
  life
• MS brings the dream of Elizabeth and the dead
  mother into Victors narrative of science,
  repression, and death in order to make the
  silences in the text speak of that precious realm
  of human feeling that is otherwise lost to the
  world of science, reason, and knowledge

27
Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein

• The sign of this fateful return of the re-pressed
  occurring in MSs novel is pre-cisely
  Frankensteins inability to speak of that which,
  wrongly, he cares most dearly about, namely his
  act of giving life to his own creation
• Ch. 5 the dream of Elizabeth, etc. presents
  us with an extremely revealing gap, silence, or
  fissure in the text at issue

28
Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein

• More than that, F reveals how it is often the
  case that a literary text is more in-teresting
  for what it does not say than what it actually
  says (cf. the silences in CR, MP, and W)
• Perhaps the best account of the relation-ship
  between speech and silence in lit-erary works is
  Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production
  (1978)

29
Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein

• PM . . . in order to say anything, there are
  other things which must not be said. . . . Speech
  eventually has nothing more to tell us we
  investigate the silence, for it is the silence
  that is doing the speaking. . . . What is
  important in the work is what it does not say
  (pp. 85-87)

30
Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein

• Reading a work for its silence rather than its
  speech a radically alternative app-roach to the
  study of literary texts
• In this regard, reading MSs F for its
  struc-tural silences instead of its constitutive
  speech is what helps to bring out what is
  alternative in this sense, subversive about
  this particular novel in the struggle of the
  Gothic against realism

31
Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein

• F is a novel which investigates what it is that
  realism (i.e. science, reason, knowledge)
  cannot say about itself in order to expose the
  limits of its own self-understanding
• MSs novel claims to speak the self-understanding
  of modern science, namely that within a whole
  realm of precious human feeling science is death