Neil Bowen on
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’
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‘Shelley wishes her reader to undo some (if not all) of their established conviction about this character’ Jane Bathard.
‘Knowledge tips him over into Gothic obsession’ Dr. Townsend.
‘When they encounter civilization they become corrupt’ Mike Rossington.
The Gothic - Fred Botting
Excess:
“shadows the despairing ecstasies of Romantic idealism and individualism and the uncanny dualities of Victorian realism and decadence” Gothic atmosphere portrays the disturbing return of a feared past (eg. the creature disappeared for 1 year and was forgotten and just when Victor thought himself safe, the creature returned)
Gothic focuses on the negative anxieties of society (eg. “delusions, religious and human evil, mental disintegration”)
“Anxiety of cultural limits and boundaries” -> Frankenstein tries to break these obvious boundaries between life and death. Suggests boundaries are there for a reason because he is punished for breaking them?
The sublime is “evoked by excessive emotion”
“Gothic signifies an over-abundance of imaginative frenzy, untamed by reason and unrestrained by 18th century conventional demands for simplicity, realism or probability”
Transgression:
transgression helps to re-establish values by glorifying villains -> provokes fear of social disintegration
“Threats a spiced with thrills, terrors with delight” -> thrill of overcoming fear
“Transgressing the bounds of reality and possibility, they also challenged reason through their overindulgence in fanciful ideas”
Quote on Duality:
“He himself sees that the monster serves his own destructive urges.”, “Frankenstein knows the monster’s intentions because deep down they are his own”
Duality physically portrayed in the 2011 “Frankenstein” play where actors switch roles to play both monster and creator (highlights similarity between both)
Binary opposition - theoretical opposites that rely on each other
Allison Millbank
-Idea of gothic double emerging following enlightenment era. Less fear of supernatural/ spiritual due to more understanding of the world, explanations through reason and science. Fear instead residing in the self, still unknown. Also more emphasis on the self due to reduction in religious influence. Increasingly secular society. Charles Taylor, Max Webber.
Warren Montag- Marxist
French revolution was the major event of the period yet is not mentioned in the novel- even Walton’s letters to his sister have the decade and year omitted
“the monster is a product rather than a creation, assembled and joined together not so much by man.. as by science, technology, and industry”
the monster “elicits pity” and “Shelley thus lends her voice to the voiceless, those who, bowed and numbed by oppression and poverty, cannot speak for themselves”
for Marxism, “history is a struggle between antagonistic social forces”
for Frankenstein “every thought, word, and deed are revealed to have been steps toward a destiny that awaited him from the beginning”
Frankenstein has “been the instrument of science”, every “experience, sensation, and feeling was a step on the road to his damnation”
reversal of positions for Frankenstein and creature- “the ironic reversal of Frankenstein’s position is perhaps clearest when his creation, far more powerful than he, calls him “slave”.”
“Frankenstein thus rejects one of the most fundamental myths of the Enlightenment, the notion that scientific and economic progress will continually improve the condition of humankind”
separation from family- “from the moment Frankenstein surrenders to the “enticements of science” he is irrevocably divided from his family and friends”.
absence of creation scene from book- “utterly absent from the narrative is any description or explanation of the process by which the monster was created”
“The process of production is evoked but never described, effectively presenting us a world of effects without causes” + “technology and science, so central to the novel, are present only in their effects”
Victor’s denial/forgetting after the initial shock of the creation “resembles the movement of the text itself, which “turns away” at certain key points, omitting every description of the technology so central to the tragedy of Victor Frankenstein and his creation”
the creature is the “sole embodiment of the industrial in an otherwise rural world and this is the source of his monstrousness”
Critic quotes (can be used within sentences/arguments)
Ellen Moers
- “the trauma of afterbirth”
- “he defies mortality by giving birth”
- “death and birth were hideously mixed”
Barbara Johnson
- “the story of Frankenstein is the story of a man who usurps the female role by giving birth”
Anne Mellor
- “Victor cannot do scientific research and think lovingly of Elizabeth and his family at the same time”
- “Victor’s most passionate relationships are with men rather than women”
- “nature pursues Victor”
-“nature punishes Victor”
Marilyn Butler
- “when it comes to parenting, Frankenstein himself is a monster”
Lawrence Lipking
-“is the creature a natural man or an unnatural monster?”
Percy Shelley
-“the being in Frankenstein is, no doubt, a tremendous creature”
- “His original goodness was gradually turned into revenge”
Christopher Small
- “Frankenstein himself is clearly, and to some extent must intentionally have been, a portrayal of Shelley”
- “If he is not Shelley, he is a dream of Shelley”
George Levine
- “he is destroyed by his own nature”
- “the monster and Frankenstein are doubles, two aspects of the same being”
-“there is simply no way to define the relationship with parents and offspring in this novel”