Frankenstein
Galvanism
the 18th and 19th century scientific theory that life is made up of "animal electricity" or electric currents that result in life.
Romanticism
Shelley targeted the enlightenment idolatry of reason and mechanistic forces but attacking the idea that man was a predictable and rationally controllable machine.
Frech revolution
the novel makes veiled reference to the Revolution which hints that the personality tuen of the creature mirrored the turn in the French Revolution from the early hopes for liberty, equality, and fraternity to the subsequent dark days of the Reign of Terror
Enlightenment
the story bears on current moral debates about cloning and the responsibility of a scientist for his discoveries.
science
Shelley captures the Romantic sensibility of such sublime beauty by setting her story in rugged regions of the Swiss alps with jagged snow peaks and cascading waterfalls. the antithesis in setting thus mirrors the antithesis of the characters personality, yet the intersectional natures of them at the same time.
The sublime- the 18th century and early 19th century had a heavily coded way of looking at the environment-
the sublime- grand, dark and often terrifying
human profundity in collision with nature's scale
terror- antithesis of emotion, the sublime is more enigmatic because it is a painful pleasure- the sublime and the gothic are quite intertwined- the question of why we enjoy this mixed enjoyment
The Enlightenment was the late 17th-18th century intellectual movement emphasisng reason, individualism, skepticism and science. Enlightenment thinking helped to give rise to deism, which is the belief that God exists, but does not interact supernaturally with the universe
The thinking encapsulated a range of ideas focused on the value of knowledge learned by a way of rationalism and of empiricism and political ideals
religion
Shelley was able to hold firm to her beliefs on christian morals and ethics even though she was surrounded by philosophical discussions that were set against what she believed.
She was very firmly rooted in her Christian faith despite pressures from her husband and friends who were radical in their unchristian beliefs and ideas
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Her personal theistic views and knowledge of the science of her time help contrast help contrast Frankenstein's scientific monster with the Genesis account of creation
David Hogsette- "according to Mary Shelley, God is "a beneficient and gentle power" a necessary creative being who is the cause of earthly and heavenly existence... whose creative power is vastly different than that of humans who are themselves God's creation"
Her father- William Godwin- had very strong opinions and views on Christianity that he shared with his daughter and she held onto them and let them shape her opinions for the rest of her life
her belief in an afterlife comforted and kept her calm with the vast amount of losses that she endured
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The views that Victor has of creating science are the disturbing antithesis to the accounts of creation in Genesis - the creation is born out of selfish ambition and perverted knowledge
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knowledge
Rauch- "knowledge was a make artifact in the 19th century"
"Shelley's story which revolves around the appropriation of reproduction of a man, underscores that concern"
narrative structure
Rauch- "Shelley requires active readers who will question the coherence and the consistency of all the narratives as they develop throughout the book"
"the novel is self-consciously constructed as a kind of knowledge-text that functions in the traditional style of the "thought problem"" 144
Gender Roles
Rauch- "the compilation of narrative is of course the work of two women, two manuscripts overseen by Margaret Saville and her creator Mary Shelley. Together they silently preside over narrative that purport to be accurate and scientific. Their silence requires each reader, in a process that is similar to scientific discovery, to examine the narratives closely in a n effort to determine their reliability" 144
Elissa marder suggests that Frankenstein can be read "as the attempt to forget the mother's legacy entirely" "Frankenstein is driven by a compulsion to circumvent the necessity of passing through the mother in order to give birth and be born"
Rauch- "Shelley's narrative technique is an inclusive one, conscripting the reader into a participatory process that is diametrically opposed to Frankenstein's isolationist and exclusionary methodology" 144
Rauch- "the author of this text has not only assembles a set of narratives for the reader, she has allowed the reader to become part of that structure
"the female body was frequently conceptualized as a fragmented form in terms of the way it was viewed and the knowledge that was derived from it"
The Gothic as a genre
Gothic narrative as having a double function- gothic narrtaives retain a double function
Gothic is about excess in some ways- doubles and binaries
the gothic is built up around binaristic relationships- it destablises relationships between human and animal or normal and abnormal, healthy and pathological.
The way that the gothic responds to anxieties around events that are happening in society- the response to the French Revolution, The rise of capital from urbanisation, new mobility- people moving and having different kinds of lives all the way from the Victorian moral reforms, imperialism, and then the emergence of different kinds of sciences, psychology, criminology, anatomy
Gothic helps consider how the visual sits with the literary.
The painting of Caspar David Friedrich Wanderer above a sea of fog- 1818- the sublime- summarises the human experience- the rise of individualism- attempt to find and establish one's own identity.
vitalism vs materialism- vitalism is the idea that there is something wonderous about the human that we will never be able to understand fully- we can't explain in by understanding the body. The materialists say that if you understand human biology and the scientific part- you will understand all the other parts of the human mind. This debate was very much apparent at the time of Shelley and the Gothic
Materialism- When Frankenstein talks about how he is going to make his creature. the work of physionomists, they weould look at the body in order to understand the mind. they would read the features of the body in order to understand the intangible.
Doubling
Abjection
Frankenstein and his creature.
"I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind... nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me" (104)
The uncanny
Familiar in the unfamiliar- Freud- if you stretch two opposites together they become almost one- something that we don't look at bu the gothic shows us- utilise as a technique to pull out the not so normal aspects of domestic life.
Abject objects- faces, decaying bodies, maternal bodies Kristeva suggests that we must abject the maternal, the object which has created us in order to construct an identity. in a psychoanalytic way she says that there are more thing that are domestically abject
Women's bodies -
quotes from lecture slides
"Frankenstein is a woman's mythmaking on the subject of birth and the trauma of the afterbirth"- Ellen Moers, Female Gothic, 81
"by stealing the female's control over reproduction, Frankenstein has eliminated the female's primary biological function and source of cultural power. Indeed, for the simple purpose of human survival, Frankenstein has eliminated the necessity to have females at all (Anne, Mellor 115)
Disaster ensues when a man "appropriates the power of woman" by attempting to give birth to new life without the agency of woman" (Creed, Phallic 41)
"Victor is engaged upon a rape of nature, a violent penetration and usurpation of the womb in place of a heterosexual attachment to Elizabeth, Victor has substituted a homosexual obsession with his creature" (mellor, 122)
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the idea that women's power lies in child bearing is a biologically deterministic statement. Such sexual branding reduces women to a sum of their biological reproductive parts and suggests that they are childbearers foremost"(Wagner, Gothic evolutions)
The women characters are "beautiful, gentle, selfless, boring nurturers and victims who never experience inner conflict or true desire" (Barbara Johnson, 341)
Robert Walton- "I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me, whose eyes would reply to mine (53)"I begin to love him a sa brother... i have found a man who... I should have been happy to have possessed as the brother of my heart" (60)
"in Frankenstein, the fact that women are excluded from science, politics and philosophy must surely be at least linked to the ensuing disasters... the homosocial world of this novel challenges the notion that women are intellectually and biologically less suited to the public sphere then men... the monster is a manifestation of separate spheres ideology" (Wagner , GOthic Evolutions)
The reasons there is some many faults in the novel is implied to be due to the lack of involvement of women as they are pushed out of the public sphere into the domestic sphere- the exclusion of the "the other half"- means that nothing can be complete.
Epistolary narrative
Margaret Saville as the recipient of the letters- Frankenstein account to Walton which is relayed to Margaret- the narrative of the creature- a journey through a series of narrative frames - the final recipient of the foolish and traumatic events is a woman (a domestic figure in England- similar to Joseph conrad's Heart of Darkness) - the horror that is accounted- the ultimate addressee is a woman
The voice of the creature stands at the centre of the narrative frames - focus on the books that the monster uses to teach himself relationship- the creature has an autodidact.
Framing narrative creates a reader bias towards Victor which further alienates and isolates the monster before the beginning of his narrative
begins in a sublime landscape- Coleridge outlines to what extent the antartic was a sublime landscape- polar explorations- the sublime is about individuals who confront and test themselves against that landscape- the individual measuring their fragility against their surroundings- the Romantic twinning of Victor and Walton
the boundaries that Victor defies are scientific rather than geographic as opposed to Walton.
the overreaching Romantic self risks- losing sociability, perspective and ethics "The same feelings whih made me neglect the scenes around me caused me also to forget those friends who were so many times absent"
"their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds. my heart... now swelled to something like joy" "i suddenly beheld the figure of man, at some distance, advancing towards me at superhuman speed... i trembled with rage and horror"