Neil Bowen on
David Punter and Glennis Byron, from 'The Gothic'
The Monster: "Monsters, as the displaced embodiment of tendencies that are repressed within a specific culture not only establish the boundaries of the human, but may also challenge them." They are "hybrid forms that exceed and disrupt" within a culture, and "demand a rethinking of the boundaries and concepts of normality."
"Gothic texts repeatedly draw attention to the monster's constructed nature, to the mechanisms of monster production, and reveal precisely how the other is constructed and positioned as both alien and inferior. In turn, this denaturalises the human, showing the supposedly superior human to be, like the monster's otherness, simply the product of an ongoing struggle in the discursive construction and reconstruction of power."
With regards to intertextuality: "The novel as an aggregate for narrative pieces and literary influences is closely connected to the creature, constructed from fragments of corpses".
Frankenstein- edited by Johanna M. Smith:
A psychoanalytic perspective: David Collings:
The monster and maternal thinking: Mary Shelly’s critique of ideology:
‘Victor’s obsession with his double compels him to resist or attach his father, friend and potential wife whenever they threaten that self. His solitude is so profound that his obsession with the fear of the monster would amount to madness were it not that another person, Walton, encounters the monster in the final pages’
‘the son gives up the physical mother and desires a figurative representation of her, a substitute for her in the realm of language or social relations’
‘The break from the family represents Victor’s entrance into the public world and his separation from his mother’
‘ Feminine sexuality can never be separated from the mother he has lost’
‘All woman are for him the dead mother the all-too physical person he left when he went to university’