Frankenstein 1
Outline
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Dominance of the new realism
Repression of the Gothic
The subversiveness of Frankenstein
Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein
Dominance of the new realism
• WS’s re-positioning of the novel through a regendering 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)
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 credulity nor amusing our imagination by wild
variety of incident’ (Quarterly Review
(1816))
• CR>MP>W (+ the Waverley Novels) = the
new novel of realist consciousness
Dominance of the new realism
• Dominance of the new realism – transformation 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 . . .
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. JA’s spoof Gothic novel, Northanger Abbey
(written 1798-1803, published 1818)
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)
Repression of the Gothic
• At once popular but attacked and repressed – 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)
Repression of the Gothic
• After the realist triumph symbolized by the
success of MP and W in 1814 it is nonrealist works of fiction such as Frankenstein (1818) and The Private Memoirs
and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(1824) that come to represent the repressed underside of ‘realist’ or ‘bourgeois’ consciousness
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’
The subversiveness of
Frankenstein
• F as a non-realist work of fiction – a ‘wild’ amalgam of forms
• . . . an epistolary novel (Walton’s letters); a
fictional journal (Frankenstein’s account of his
experiments); a Gothic fantasy (Frankenstein’s
creation of his monster); a Bildungsroman (an
account of the monster’s growth and development), etc. – finally, an epistolary novel again
(Walton’s letters)
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, Frankenstein’s monster
emerges as the symbol of the wide diversity of fictional forms (supernatural
tales, romances, travel narratives) held
under the sway of a hegemonic realism
The subversiveness of
Frankenstein
• The symbolic diversity and hybridity of Frankenstein’s ‘collectivized’ monster is what makes
the monster truly monstrous in the eyes of bourgeois realist consciousness – see F. Moretti,
Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), pp. 83-108
• Consider the significance of the contemporary
reception of MS’s novel . . .
• F receives remarkably strong criticism in the
reviews
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 unless their taste has been deplorably vitiated’
• See also Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley (2000)
p. 196 on the novel’s ‘hostile’ reception . . .
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 philosophical conclusion’
• See further back-handed praise from
Blackwood’s Magazine when, in 1823,
MS’s identity as author is revealed . . .
The subversiveness of
Frankenstein
• Blackwood’s 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 MS’s
1826 novel The Last Man, in The Literary
Magnet (1826): ‘. . . another Raw-head-andbloody-bones’ – i.e. the novel is as badly made
as is Frankenstein’s monster
• (A useful summary available at: http://www.
english.upenn.edu/~curran/250/frankrev.html.)
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 novel’s reception
• In terms of the contemporary reviews (‘deplorably vitiated’, etc.), the strong criticism seems a
symptom of the ‘monstrousness’ of F having
thus been perceived as a subversive threat . . .
The subversiveness of
Frankenstein
• . . . a subversive threat to everything that is respectable, rational and moderate about realism in
its current position of dominance within the field
of fiction
• . . . Frankenstein’s 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 threatened status of realism on the part of the critical
establishment
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!
Mary Shelley and
Victor Frankenstein
• Victor’s 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 murderous figure)
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)
• Victor’s dream of Elizabeth (ch. 5) thus serves
as MS’s way of staging a return of the repressed
in order to expose the deathly repressiveness of
modern science
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 exhausted state immediately afterwards
• ‘. . . I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of
health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I
imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became
livid with the hue of death . . .’
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, MS’s description of Victor’s dream
thought to be inspired by Henry Fuseli’s painting, The Nightmare (1781), recently on show at
Tate Britain’s Gothic Nightmares exhibition)
Mary Shelley and
Victor Frankenstein
• The dream itself an expression of ‘the repressed’ in Victor’s 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 feeling 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)
Mary Shelley and
Victor Frankenstein
• See also Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman (1986), p. 96:
‘[Freud’s 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 [Freud’s] own
researches but to all scientific quests for the origins of
life’
• MS brings the dream of Elizabeth and the dead mother
into Victor’s 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
Mary Shelley and
Victor Frankenstein
• The sign of this fateful return of the repressed occurring in MS’s novel is precisely Frankenstein’s 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
Mary Shelley and
Victor Frankenstein
• More than that, F reveals how it is often
the case that a literary text is more interesting 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 relationship between speech and silence in literary works is Pierre Macherey, A Theory
of Literary Production (1978)
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)
Mary Shelley and
Victor Frankenstein
• Reading a work for its ‘silence’ rather than
its ‘speech’ a radically alternative approach to the study of literary texts
• In this regard, reading MS’s F for its structural 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
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 selfunderstanding
• MS’s novel claims to speak the selfunderstanding of modern science, namely
that within a whole realm of precious
human feeling science is death