Gothic Literature and Frankenstein

1. Gothic LiteratureandFrankenstein AP English IV

2. Gothic Literature • A novel in which magic, mystery, and chivalry are chief characteristics. • Horrors abound: one may expect an inanimate object to come to life, ghosts, clanking chains, and charnel houses. • *charnel house—vault or building where human skeletal remains are stored.

3. Elements of the Genre • Claustrophobic confinement and threatening architecture. • Underground pursuit and subterranean peril. • Supernatural encounters. • Sentience (awareness) of architecture • Extraordinary positions and lethal predicaments

4. Elements cont’d • Suspension of rationality and morality • Spectral and demonic machinery • Atmospheric superiority of evil • Psychopathic and destructive emotions • Genealogical complications, jeopardy, mysteries.

5. Gothic Literature and Women • Despite a number of male achievements in Gothic literature (Horace Warpole writes the first), the genre has held a special attraction for women. • In the early days of the genre, reading Gothic fiction became a favorite pastime of the middle-class female • Women, oppressed by needlepoint, whalebone stays, psychological frustrations, shame, and babies, found reading/writing these stories as a way to outline their pain. • Gothic feminism seeks to escape the female body though a dream of turning weakness into strength

6. Shelley as a Gothic novelist • Female pain abounds in Frankenstein • While writing the novel, Shelley was dealing with a number of biological matters • Ellen Moers claims that the novel deals with “the motif of revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences. . . Frankenstein seems to be distinctly a woman’s mythmaking on the subject of birth.”

7. According to Leonard Wolf. . . • The novel is a living artifact of the age-old risk of love. • Mary Shelley, eighteen years old and scared, gave expression to an insight that is as simple as it is heartbreakingly true: women have literally everything to fear from men. • The flattery of women as primordial life-givers, as instinctive nurturers is overshadowed by the fact that death sits on her side of the bed. This is not rhetoric. One is talking about real death. . It is a commonplace, an age-old fact that men and women both know, but which only women have to confront; and it is this fact, deeply experienced by Shelley, that gives Frankenstein a special eeriness.

8. According to Leonard Wolf. . . • The novel is a living artifact of the age-old risk of love. • Mary Shelley, eighteen years old and scared, gave expression to an insight that is as simple as it is heartbreakingly true: women have literally everything to fear from men. • The flattery of women as primordial life-givers, as instinctive nurturers is overshadowed by the fact that death sits on her side of the bed. This is not rhetoric. One is talking about real death. . It is a commonplace, an age-old fact that men and women both know, but which only women have to confront; and it is this fact, deeply experienced by Shelley that gives Frankenstein a special eeriness.

9. Women are “quite different creatures [from men]—better though weaker.” Influenced by guilt of her mother’s untimely death Death of 3 of her 4 children She suffered quite severely in pregnancy; her husband was rarely supportive and often involved in other affairs during her pregnancies women are completely excluded from the creation process in Frankenstein; men sure do make a mess of things! Mary Shelley, the non-feminist

10. Typical Gothic female is blameless, virginal, innocent, good (absolute) Triumphs over various passive-aggressive strategies (Gothic villain, typically male) Depicts woman as innocent victims of a corrupt and evil patriarchy Argues that demure, docile behavior is hardly a protection (or virtue) Female heroines in the Gothic tradition

11. From the critics. . . • Diane Long Hoeveler: Gothic feminism was born when women realized that they had a formidable external enemy—the lusty, evil patriarch, in addition to their own worst internal enemy—their consciousness of their own sexual difference, perceived as weakness. • From “Mary Shelley and Gothic Feminism: The Case of ‘The Mortal Immortal’

12. Mary Shelley as the Gothic hero • Carries a heavy intellectual burden as the result of her parentage, and even her marriage • Her real (and imagined) victimization, first as a result of being Percy’s wife, then later his widow • Some critics suggest that while Percy haunts her works, the true hero-villains of her stories were her parents • Mary Shelley felt destined to fulfill her mother’s aborted philosophical and literary visions

13. As such. . . • Frankenstein stands paradoxically as the Gothic embodiment of the critique of Gothic feminism • Shelley puts her fictional women into that world and reveals that the sensitive male hero is a mad egotist intent on usurping feminine values and destroying all forms of life in his despotic quest for phallic mystery • Taken from Hoeveler

14. It replaces the maternal womb with chemical artifice, only to blast masculine attempts at procreation as futile and destructive. Hoeveler: Frankenstein punishes every female body in that text. . . .

15. Gothic feminism and Mary Shelley • Realization that women would always be life’s victims, not simply because of external forces, but because their own bodies cursed them to forever serve the wheel of corruption. • Bringing to life a child who would die, or perhaps soon die, condemned women to serve a merciless god—the cycle of generation, birth, and death– in a way that men did not. • Could Victor be her own person striving to overcome his/her own weaknesses? • Hoeveler: “railing against the female body. . . .is the only [gender] position Mary Shelley can take”

16. Consider. . . • Wolf contends that Shelley’s novel is a not a “properly Gothic novel,” though it does inspire fear. • Primarily because a young woman of genteel breeding is usually at the center of the work • What about Shelley’s work does fit the “bill” of Gothic fiction? • Where does this novel address the condition of women? Would you classify Shelley as a feminist? • Where does it call for social change (in any arena)?