Frank critical essay notes

Frankenstein critical essay notes

Monster is not ‘Adam’ but an Eve. In whose image is Eve/the monster made of? Man or God? Like Eve looks into a transparent pool in the garden of Eden (in Milton) and is transfixed by her reflection (link to Narcissus) , the Monster is instead “terrified when I viewed myself in a transparent pool”.

The Monster could be seen as a “woman seeking to escape the feminine condition into recognition by fraternity (an organised society of men)”.

The monster is an object to look at and seeks to escape this

The woman’s body is the key to forbidden knowledge (life and where you came from), and this is shown all throughout Frankenstein.

Freud: The Monster “grinning” through the window during his parent’s wedding night- viewing the forbidden moment of origin wherein the observer is punished.

Frame narrative: narcissism. Each character as a doppelgänger of each other, looking inwards at the transparent pool because they love themselves. That’s also why it’s a bit gay.

Interesting point- the Monster actually “eludes gender definition”= we just assume he’s male although no willy is seen… Freudian castration= theory is that a child has a fear of damage being done to their genitalia by the parent of the same sex (i.e. a son being afraid of his father) as punishment for sexual feelings toward the parent of the opposite sex (i.e. a son toward his mother= “portrait of a most lovely woman…I gazed with delight on her dark eyes, fringed by deep lashes, and her lovely lips; I remembered that I was forever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures could bestow”)

The portrait of Frankenstein’s mother acts as a curse= Justine and William both die. Miniaturised role of women. Both the miniature portrait of the mother and of Mrs Saville= “unrepresented presence that haunts the novel” (link to Mary Wollstonecraft)

The Monster’s eloquence: “The godlike science of language is a cultural compensation for a deficient nature; it offers the possibility of escape from ‘monsterism’”

Frame narrative/nested structure: “monsterism” is passed down

  “my own vampire, my own spirit set loose from the grave and forced to destroy all that was dear to me”- the monster is a symptom

Importance of Mrs Saville= as a “dead letter office” with no characterisation makes her simply the receiver of messages. She also represents the private, female corruptible women who were the main readers of Gothic texts.

In Frankenstein, “authorial presence has an ambiguous status”

What is a monster?

• Horror, during the 18^th century, was a “response to things not neoclassical…an aesthetic deformity which equated moral laxity”. He is a “transgression of aesthetic limits”.
• -Monsters are supposed to represent vice in stories and novels and act as a warning and evoke horror. However, in Mary Shelley’s novel, the Monster’s “vices ARE visible, but so too are his virtues”
• He “blurred boundaries, crossed lines that distinguished virtue from vice, rendering readers who had yet to develop proper powers of discrimination [often young women] susceptible to corruption”
• The monster shows “Literature’s refusal to be subordinated to moral uses and categories, a diabolical power that cannot be made to secure a master”
• “Monsters reveal the will of God”- Augustine
• “Transgressed the bounds of nature as to become a moral advertisement”

The monster is a “terrible literary abortion”

• -          The “product of Frankenstein’s paternal labours delivers, no the dutiful offspring he imagined- but a rebellious satanic force whose demands for love turn into violent energy
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•  Monster definitions and usage in the 18th century often encompassed “vices of ingratitude, rebellion and disobedience towards parents…break natural bonds of obligation towards friends and blood relations” and “implied rebellion and turning against one’s benefactor” (*cough* monster is Shelley *cough* ?)

Shelley reverses the patriarchal systems in Romanticism:

·         Beauty to death

·         Benevolence to destructive

·         Eternal life to death

·         Paradise of light to ice-bound

·         Authority to sufferance

The introduction of Frankenstein “duplicates her position as Frankenstein” (being the creator of her own offspring- the novel) but also “differentiates her position from Frankenstein”.

Link to Burke and the French revolution

Parisian mob is the monster

-          Burke: “out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre”

-          “Once the state is threatened, it can no longer be identified and the human parts dispersed” (Monster’s body)

Monster could symbolise the “replacement of the King with the parliament” (Monster’s multitude of body parts= lots of different people/the majority/the oppressed)