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-based environment are inappropriate to urban capitalism. The inadequacy of the workers to their new situation is rendered in all the social writings of the period in terms of inarticulacy and unsteadiness – characteristics of children (infant = unable to speak; cf Beer, G, in Barker, 1978). But Gaskell also sees that the manufacturers have in a sense created this class of people, and have therefore a functional responsibility towards them. In Chapter 15, explaining the growth of class-antagonism, Elizabeth Gaskell uses the image of Frankenstein and his monster (making the common
. Instead I have stitched together the pieces of this book (in the way that Frankenstein’s creature was made) as a kind of persistent bad memory. I suppose for some who might find it excessively difficult, seemingly discontinuous, totally unfounded, it is a sort of nightmare. In the blink of an eye, neither simply hard eyed and vigilant nor blindly asleep, this vision of the
Coleridge’s publisher for Christabel, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Pains of Sleep’.18 Byron recited Christabel to his Diodati circle in Switzerland, thereby galvanising the famous ghost-story competition that would eventually result in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But, as is the case with Frankenstein, Mazeppa’s most conspicuous literary debt to Coleridge comes not from Christabel but from The Ancient Mariner. McGann’s editorial notes point out specific verbal echoes and situational parallels between The Ancient Mariner and Mazeppa.19 More broadly and organically, the entire
its other, therefore being just as monstrous or hybrid. The unpaired shoes, like Frankenstein’s monster, are cut out and sewn back together, and like the Riss of earth and world they cut out (rift) but also sow back together (design) the pair, since the pair is not just absolutely different from them but also in a certain way the same. (Both the professors’ pairs are
’s famous tricks involved constructing a human figure from vegetables. Hood, for this feat of animating the inanimate, humorously compares Joe Grimaldi to ‘Joe Frankenstein’, an analogy that creatively links different kinds of grotesque composition.27 Between the 1820s and the 1830s, at the same time as he was producing comic verse, Hood supplied captions for a couple of sets of etchings entitled Comic Composites for the Scrap Book. Each of the drawings in these sets illustrates a different profession: the gardener, the carpenter, the grocer, and so on. In each case the
. [. . .] this geezer gets a bolt through the neck’ (O 67), thus ironically suggesting that the road he has taken will not lead him to spiritual renewal and wholeness, but to the crude sewing together of the split facets of a monstrous human being, as in the case of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In the fifth Book of the ‘Octateuchus’, God commands Moses to restate the Ten Commandments. Parodying God’s commanding voice, the fifth chapter of Oranges is narrated by the godlike voice of an external author-narrator who interrupts Jeanette’s narration in order to reflect on time and
Factory under ‘contemporary Gothic transformations’ although his description of the book is brief and does not make explicit the links between Banks and the gothic. Victor Sage is more methodical and focused in his approach and identifies Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as the novel’s gothic influence: ‘Frank’s is the story of Frankenstein’s monster written ironically from the monster’s deceived point of view, and set in the world of the 1980s’ (Sage, 1996, 24). We might add to Sage’s account that Banks makes this debt clear early on in the novel in Frank’s description of
telescope’ (p. 388). To Birdie, Deck is a kind of Frankenstein, and she, his monster: ‘He was the same father who had started me, who had begun but never finished me’ (p. 393). This image of Birdie as Frankenstein’s monster recalls the blue vein on her forehead: ‘Alexis had told me once that it made me look like Frankenstein. I had liked that image of myself as a monster, an unfinished creation turned against its maker’ (p. 297). 48 Deck uses both his daughters as research material, having them take a racial IQ test for his book Wonders of the Invisible World (p. 27
‘intertextual archetype’ (quoted in Stoneman, 1996: 127) – and often, as Lloyd Jones acknowledges in the epigraph (also from Eco) to his neo-Dickensian Mister Pip (2006), archetypes or ‘characters migrate’. Chris Baldick observed, in the context of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), that texts which acquire the status of iterable myths are reduced ‘to the simplest memorable patterns’ (Baldick, 1987: 3) – and it is true that, while ‘artists inspired by Jane Eyre have responded to the diverse aspects of the novel quite differently’ (focusing on childhood, or rebellion, or
Frankenstein’s creature as a figure of dis-re-pair, as we saw in Chapter 1 , cut out and stitched back together in a way that affirms the monstrous hybridity, the non-self-identical doubleness, of the institution itself. Readings’ ‘rhythm of disciplinary attachment and detachment’, not dissimilar to the rhythm of the blinking of an eye in Derrida’s ‘The principle of reason’, thus