Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" (1818) - A Summary of Modern Criticism - The Diigo Meta page

• 02 Dec 09
  

  courteney kim
  • raws a
    correspondence between young Frankenstein's hope of scientific glory
    prompting him to manufacture a monster and God's creating the archangel who
    would become the rebel Satan.
  • Shelley's fable thus enquires into the responsibility of the Creator for
    the misery and evil in His created world.
  • 4 more annotations...
  • • Mary Shelley was no ordinary nineteen-year-old; rather, as the daughter
      of
      radical novelist William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and the
      wife of one of the leading second-generation Romantic poets, she was, as
      Gilbert and Gubar style her, "one of England's most notable literary
      heiresses" (221). After endlessly studying her mother's and father's works,
    • Edenic quality of the valleys, rivers, and lakes in
      Frankenstein
    • Peter (Petersburgh)
      and Michael (Archangel)
    • national character were
      profoundly shaped by climate, and specifically how the novel was written
      during one of Europe's most inclement summers.
• 26 Apr 09
  

  ggratton
  • Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
    
    To mould Me man?
  • From seventeen to twenty-one, moreover, Mary was almost
    continually involved in physical procreation: pregnant, confined, or
    nursing. "For her developing sense of herself as a literary creature and/or
    creator seems to have been inseparable from her emerging self-definition as
    daughter, mistress, wife, and mother" (Gilbert and Gubar: 224).
  • 3 more annotations...

  • • For Gilbert and Gubar, the Miltonic creation epic is central to the
      meaning of Frankenstein; indeed, they maintain that Mary Shelley's
      novel is a nineteenth-century, Romantic, and Feminist reading of Paradise
      Lost:

      
      
      

      Like Victor Frankenstein, his author and superficially better
      self, the monster enacts in turn the roles of Adam and Satan, and even
      eventually hints at a sort of digression into the role of God. Like Adam, he
      recalls a time of primordial innocence, his days and nights in "the forest
      near Ingolstadt," where he ate berries, learned about heat and cold, and
      perceived "the boundaries of the radiant roof of light which canopied me"
      (88, ch. 11). Almost too quickly, however, he metamorphoses into an outcast
      and Satanic figure, hiding in a shepherd's hut which seems to him "as
      exquisite . . . a retreat as Pandemonium . . . after . . . the lake of fire"
      (90, chap. 11). . . . . Eventually, burning the cottage and murdering
      William in demonic rage, he seems to become entirely Satanic: "I, like the
      arch-fiend, bore a hell within me" (121, chap. 16) . . . . At the same time,
      in his assertion of power over his "author," his mental conception of
      another creature (a female monster), and his implicit dream of founding a
      new, vegetarian race somewhere in "the vast wilds of South America,"
      (131, chap. 17), he temporarily enacts the part of a God, a creator, a
      master, albeit a failed one. [Gilbert and Gubar,
      235-36]

    • While Walton's polar expedition
      (actuated by the wrong-headed notion acquired as a child that Hyperboreans
      lead a paradisal existence at an iceless North Pole) threatens the lives of
      his crew, Frankenstein acknowledges that his experiment has loosed a killer
      upon unsuspecting humanity.

    • Mothers in Frankenstein are categorically dead because
      their biological function is primordially defiled. . . . . Mary Shelley's
      own life as child and mother bore ample witness to this paradox [that life
      lives upon death]. It has become almost obligatory for critics of
      Frankenstein to cite the long list of deaths that dogged the early
      life of its author: her mother Mary Wollstonecraft expiring eleven days
      after Mary's birth; her half-sister Fanny Imlay poisoning herself and
      referring obliquely in her suicide note to her illegitimacy; Percy's first
      wife Harriet Westbrook dying pregnant by another at the time of her suicide;
      and finally, Mary's first daughter passing quietly two weeks after her
      premature birth. All of these deaths implicate the mother by exaggerating
      the proximity of life's origin and end. (351)

      
      
      
      
      

      The monster, however, is not a fully formed individual, but an
      "abortion," a defilement of the human form, and so deeply repulsive to all
      (including himself) who see him. "The monster is an ugly botch because he
      incarnates a male fantasy of creative autonomy" (347). The fault is not the
      monster's but his creator's; the monster is a sympathetic consciousness
      trapped in a repulsive form that even Victor, his mother-and-father,
      detests. The creature's appearance immediately makes manifest his creator's
      violation of social norms, for the monster's ugliness exemplifies his
      impurity; his very form contradicts Wollstencraft's liberal feminism for it
      "demonstrates openly the implied imperatives of corporeal life: there can be
      no transcendence of sex, no rationalist utopia oblivious to the body"
      (

• 02 Dec 08
  

  ashley choi
  • Frankenstein is the
    author's alterego

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