Search results
Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein reflects both Romantic critiques of autonomy, as they have been recently defined by Nancy Yousef, and discourses of isolation and addiction as they appear in key texts by Samuel Coleridge and Charles Lamb. For Coleridge and Lamb, addiction leads to what current specialists often call ‘terminal uniqueness’, a feeling of isolation both incommunicable to others and incapable of being heard by a non-addicted audience. In its own portrayals of isolation, Frankenstein may be seen to intersect with these larger discourses of isolation, chemical dependence, and what Anya Taylor calls ‘the empty self ’ of Romantic addiction.
Frankenstein (or the Monster that often goes under his name) and Dracula are without doubt the two ‘stars’ of the horror genre as well as being the most influential and widely known products of literary gothic. This fact raises the question of how Hammer’s Frankenstein and Dracula cycles relate to the earlier novels and films which originated and developed these figures. To put it another way, how can one conceive of Frankenstein’s and Dracula’s historical passage from their nineteenth
Movies speak mainly to the eyes. Though they started talking in words some seventy years ago, what they say to our ears seldom overpowers or even matches the impact of what they show us. This essay proposes to read one more time the issue of homosexuality in Mary Shelley‘s first novel, Frankenstein. In order to offer a new angle on the homosexual component of Victor Frankenstein‘s relationship with his creature when next teaching this most canonical Romantic novel, this essay considers Shelley‘s work alongside four film adaptations: James Whale‘s 1931 Frankenstein, Whale‘s 1935 The Bride of Frankenstein, Richard O’Briens 1975 The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Kenneth Branagh‘s 1994 Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein. These films present their audience with original readings of their source material, readings that can be questioned with regards to their lack of truthfulness to the original works themes and characters.
twentieth-century take on Frankenstein. Cronos is, therefore, just as much an atypical Frankenstein film as it is an atypical vampire film. Del Toro has combined the myths of Dracula and Frankenstein in order to form his own creation myth. According to David Skal, who refers to Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster as ‘the dark twins’, both characters are such familiar cultural icons that ‘each conjures
This essay argues that Victor Frankenstein‘s project, the creature that results from it, and the disgust inspired by the creature in all who behold him, all allude consistently and coherently to the infantile sexual theory of fecal reproduction. The fantasy of fecal reproduction, a widespread feature of male god creation myths, is integral to the structure of patriarchy, but is usually subsumed into the normative family structure in the course of the oedipal crisis and its resolution. Victor Frankenstein‘s violent repudiation of his creature stems from Frankenstein‘s inability - or stubborn refusal - to negotiate the transition between the oral-anal fantasy and the normative genital model. The violent disparagement directed at the creature by all who see him testifies to the social disruption threatened by this unresolved tension between the pre-oedipal economy, based on gift-giving and womb-envy, and the oedipal economy of rivalry, castration anxiety, and patriarchal appropriation.
Victor Frankenstein relates his narrative ‘marking the dates with accuracy’, determined that his improbable story will be believed. Through examining the time references, this essay reveals the extent to which the novel is preoccupied with realism and temporal accuracy and demonstrates why the time scheme of Frankenstein is a problem for critics. The narrative can be charted via a consistent and extensive system of time references provided by the three narrators. At a point near the end, Shelley is momentarily vague. Previous decisions on how to deal with this difficulty are opened up to scrutiny, and a detailed chronology of the 1831 version is proposed. Readings which have based their arguments for political or biographical significance on embedded numerology are reexamined using the new chronology.
This article examines the effects of early anthropological accounts of other races in producing tropes for monstrosity in the Gothic, such as we see in Frankenstein where the monster, although not of any known race since he is hybridly created from parts of dead bodies, shares features with popular accounts of the racially other, echoes Haitian slave rebellion violence in his responses to ill treatment, and achieves his literacy and independence in the manner of popular slave narratives. Gothic tropes were sometimes employed in anti-slavery narratives such as Uncle Tom‘s Cabin, and many of the descriptions of brutality and terror in realist slave narratives are properly to be considered Gothic (and may in fact borrow from gothic fictional techniques). Slavery itself could be argued to outdo the Gothic in its actuality, as well as serving as a source for gothic fantasy. This provokes a rethinking of the now conventional assumption that Frankenstein‘s acknowledgement of responsibility for his creature implies that it does his unconscious bidding; on the contrary, Frankenstein admits his responsibility as a slaveholder might for the actions of his slave, but without in any way endorsing them.
Critical approaches to Gothic origins usually bear on theme and ideology rather than on textuality. This article argues both that by the side of thematic issues we must carefully examine the forms of Gothic and that, beyond the literary and philosophical, the folk sources of Gothic remain to be acknowledged. Making use of tools familiar to mythographer and folklorist, textual analysis of a passage from the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein reveals this novel is built on the traditional narrative structure of the heroic quest; while Victor‘s tragic destiny is shown to result from a deliberate manipulation of traditional patterns.
As she had done in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley reworked the gothic dopplegänger motif time and again in her short fiction not only to entertain but also to educate her readers. Focusing on four tales written in the late 1820s and early 1830s, this paper considers how Shelley repeatedly set up a triangle of desire in which an intensely competitive and destructive relationship between men is mitigated or resolved by a female character. A close look at these tales contributes to our understanding of the extent to which Mary Shelley devoted herself to remodelling Gothic modes. More importantly, these tales demonstrate the degree to which her ‘New Gothic’ was intended to contribute to a reconfiguration of traditional gender roles and a revaluation of the domestic affections, particularly in terms of their relevance to the political arena.
This essay examines the Gothic trope of monstrosity in a range of literary and historical works, from writings on the French Revolution to Mary Shelleys Frankenstein to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I argue that, in the various versions of the Frankenstein myth, what has ultimately come to seem most monstrous is the uncanny coupling of literary and political discourse. Beginning with Jacobin and anti-Jacobin discourse, this essay traces the tendency of literary tropes to turn into political tropes. In Frankenstein and in the Victorian rewritings of Shelley‘s novel, the trope of monstrosity functions, with remarkable consistency, as a mechanism which enables the unstable and often revolutionary turns between aesthetic and ideological discourse. Because the trope of monstrosity at the heart of Frankenstein exists on the border between literary and political discourse that trope has emerged as one of the most crucial forces in current critical theoretical debates about the relationship between aesthetics and ideology.