Frankenstein Encounters

Domestic Particulars

Reminder

Data Collation

Lee Sterrenburg

"Mary Shelley's Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein"

http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/sterren.html

Connection:Literacy seen as either being composed of or revealing multiple parts, difference

Ch 11 So soon as he had finished, the youth began, not to play, but to utter sounds that were monotonous, and neither resembling the harmony of the old man's instrument nor the songs of the birds; I since found that he read aloud, but at that time I knew nothing of the science of words or letters.

Ch 11 "My thoughts now became more active, and I longed to discover the motives and feelings of these lovely creatures; I was inquisitive to know why Felix appeared so miserable and Agatha so sad. I thought (foolish wretch!) that it might be in my power to restore happiness to these deserving people. When I slept or was absent, the forms of the venerable blind father, the gentle Agatha, and the excellent Felix flitted before me. I looked upon them as superior beings who would be the arbiters of my future destiny. I formed in my imagination a thousand pictures of presenting myself to them, and their reception of me. I imagined that they would be disgusted, until, by my gentle demeanour and conciliating words, I should first win their favour and afterwards their love.

Ch 15 It was your journal of the four months that preceded my creation. You minutely described in these papers every step you took in the progress of your work; this history was mingled with accounts of domestic occurrences. You doubtless recollect these papers. Here they are... 'Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred.'

Mary's Parents

Husband

Percy

• Questions of writerly power (neurological and political). This book is written in a epistolary format in which we are supposedly reading letters and having pretty direct access to the author—but there are a lot of stories within letters and references to books and other texts—so who is the real author of the text and who should we trust? What role does literacy play in authorship?
• How literacy and political power come together: Victor is the son of a powerful man. How does that impact his access to the written word?
• Is literacy a result of economic advantage, or a cause of it? How has reading impacted Walton, Victor, and the Creature?
• What ideals of gender difference does the Creature's education give him? How are those ideals tied to the books he reads?
• What model of child development is suggested in volume II's account of the Creature's early history?
• How do the various models of pedagogy we see affect their pupils? To what does Shelley connect literacy in this text?

Application

Frankenstein Encounters

So What

Literacy seems to be about creating political communities through creating a "mass humanity", but it’s really about separating humans from each other and the world around them. This changes our understanding of the political value of literacy by emphasizing its power to further atomize rather than connect different elements of humanity.

In "Gender Must Be Defended," Armstrong suggests that "mass humanity," or a vision of humanity as made up of many parts that reflect its history as well as its present can be connected to the literacy of the monster in Frankenstein. She suggests that literacy connects to multiple ways of being human, though in being created of multiple parts, the monster is "paradoxically different" from humanity so literacy mirrors humanity, but cannot equal it. In Frankenstein, I observed that the creature connects moments of literacy to growing understanding of difference in the world around him. Armstrong’s point makes sense of the way the creature understands himself as different from others when he learns to read, but the fact that he often uses literacy to notice difference in others--such as the different "motive and feelings" of Felix, Agatha and the blind man reveals that literacy actually functions as a way to understand difference in others as much as an attempt to join the larger group of humanity. This suggests that literacy is never a means of creating cohesion or commonality, although it seems to be. Instead it always stresses difference--between people, as above,between man and animal, as when the monster recognizes that speech is unlike the natural "songs of birds," between human and devil as when the monster points out that even Satan had a cohort which his entrance into literacy has denied him. In each case, literacy leaves the reader feeling "solitary and abhorred." Thus Shelley suggests that the idea that literacy allows entrance into a community of like minded thinkers, can be modified to understand that literacy actually isolates humans not just from other humans but from the natural and supernatural world.

Domesticity in Frankenstein

How does literacy serve as means of political power?

Are there different modes of political power available through different modes of literacy?

How does literacy shape cognitive processes and how does this serve as a means of political power?

Encounter

Collation: Nancy Armstrong "Gender Must be Defended" (541)

Missing Mothers

• Victor’s mom dies, he creates “monster”
• Elizabeth’s mother dead, stepmother rejects
• Parallel with Justine’s story—rejected by mother
• Caroline loses mother, father goes into decline
• Walton=orphan

But how does literature atomize different elements of humanity? (further complication of political results of literacy)

The monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been called many things, but Foucault’s description of mass humanity as “the reappearance, within a single race, of the past of that race” (“Society,” 61) strikes me as the most literal description of Shelley’s enduring figure. Made of parts taken from many former human beings, with a mind shaped by repeated social abuse and an empathetic reading of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the monster is human and not human, at least not human in a way that might earn it admission to even the most cosmopolitan of communities. Rather than a struggle between master and slave that pursues a dialectical course to resolution, the struggle between Victor Frankenstein and his creation is staged as a confrontation between contradictory and yet interdependent ways of being human that yields only a standoff. No matter how many traits that creator and his creation share with each other, neither man nor monster can become human in the same way the other is. As a composite of anonymous bodies united only by the vital energy coursing through its disparate members, the monster bears all the signs of mass humanity reborn as a single body. Being both highly literate and made entirely of human parts, thus all too human, and still paradoxically different in his lack of individuality from all other human beings, the monster is inadmissible to the little societies that Shelley assembles as the stage on which to play out the contradiction embodied in the monster. (541)

Male surrogate

“In attempting to “father” a new race, Victor Frankenstein turns to metaphors of motherhood, fueled by his own loss of the maternal. If we read the creation of the monster as a response to the missing mother, we can see Victor’s repulsion as one that links technology with the female body and fears it for that reason.

No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs. Pursuing these reflections, I thought that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.” (Ch 4)

connections: mass of humanity/multiple body parts/disparate members

literacy/society

ways of being human/literate/way of being human

Contrasts: monster vs human

one way of being human vs another

literate vs human parts

note to selves for voice over. point out that encounters are condensation and narrowed expansion of questions about literacy and politics. need to choose specific focus.

starting from the encouter here and then going back out to a collation (actually set of collations-- secondary plus primary--note this is the pattern we ask you to do for application because it's a really common critical move

mayybe rewrite encounter at end? show them recursiveness of process?

There is reason to assume that Mary Shelley had Barruel in mind when she composed Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein of course does not produce a real Jacobin monster. But he does create his Monster in the same city, Ingolstadt, which Barruel cites as the purported secret source of the French Revolution -- and as the place in which the "monster called Jacobin" was originally conceived. Victor, in effect, is producing the second famous literary monster to issue forth from the secret inner sanctum of that city. This second coming differs significantly from the first. Even though the demonic personification remains intact and though the story is nominally set in the 1790s, the French Revolution has simply disappeared. Mary Shelley retains the monster metaphor, but purges it of virtually all reference to collective movements. Her monster metaphor explains the coming of a domestic tragedy. Political revolution has been replaced by a parricidal rebellion within the family. And, as Kate Ellis suggests above, that family is essentially bourgeois.

The form of Mary Shelley's novel further serves to depoliticize the monster tradition. Instead of watching the birth and career of the monster from without, as we do in Burke and Barruel, we watch it from within, from the personal viewpoint of the participating parties. This shift within opens up subjective perspectives left untapped in the political milieu of the 1790s. Mary Shelley's new formal subjectivity does more than efface and replace politics. It also subverts the clear, definable melodrama of external ideological causes that informed writings of the 1790s. The world is now much more problematic. Monsters are still abroad, but we are no longer quite sure why. In order to find out, we have to piece together and compare the various subjective explanations offered by Victor, by the Monster, and even by the frame narrator, Robert Walton. But these narratives are patently at odds with one another, especially when it comes to explaining causes. Mary Shelley's world-view is less political than Godwin's or Burke's; it is also far more labyrinthine and involuted when it comes to telling us why things fall apart. (157)

(144)

So What

"Mary Shelley does more than conflate two traditions. She molds them into a unique third. She moves inside the mind of the Monster and asks what it is like to be labeled, defined, and even physically distorted by a political stereotype" (165)

Literacy seems to be about political separation, but it's really about the cognitive actions that create that separation. This changes our understanding of the relation between reading and writing by suggesting that the cognitive process reading leads to monstrous writing/creation.

The confessional structure of Frankenstein pulls our attention away from the world of politics. We shift our attention from the social object to the perceiving subject. The novel often deals with the problems of the subjective viewer, who is projecting upon others a private vision of demonic persecution. Mary Shelley pays a good deal of attention to how characters misperceive or half invent the social forces aligned against them. For example, she goes to great lengths to portray Victor's subjective fantasies of the Monster he has created. Subjective images of the fiend intrude upon Victor's nighttime dreams; they also appear during his waking hours as a kind of spectral hallucination. (159)

In what ways is Frankenstein an exploration of the different types of texts that shaped the story and how literacy creates political monstrosity?

Victor's Mother troubles are serious

Application

"My children, she said,my firmest hopes of future happiness were placed on the prospect of your union. This expectation will now be the consolation of your father. Elizabeth, my love, you must supply my place to my younger children. Alas! I regret that I am taken from you; and, happy and beloved as I have been, 

is it not hard to quit you all? But these are not thoughts befitting me; I will endeavour to resign myself cheerfully to death and will indulge a hope of meeting you in another world."

Encounter

"Elizabeth had caught the scarlet fever; her illness was severe, and she was in the greatest danger. During her illness many arguments had been urged to persuade my mother to refrain from attending upon her. She had at first yielded to our entreaties, but when she heard that the life of her favourite was menaced, she could no longer control her anxiety. She attended her sickbed; her watchful attentions triumphed over the malignity of the distemper -- Elizabeth was saved, but the consequences of this imprudence were fatal to her preserver. On the third day my mother sickened; her fever was accompanied by the most alarming symptoms, and the looks of her medical attendants prognosticated the worst event. On her deathbed the fortitude and benignity of this best of women did not desert her. She joined the hands of Elizabeth and myself."

"She died calmly, and her countenance expressed affection even in death. I need not describe the feelings of those whose dearest ties are rent by that most irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she whom we saw every day and whose very existence appeared a part of our own can have departed forever -- at the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished and the sound of a voice so familiar and dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard. These are the reflections of the first days; but when the lapse of time proves the reality of the evil, then the actual bitterness of grief commences. Yet from whom has not that rude hand rent away some dear connection? And why should I describe a sorrow which all have felt, and must feel? The time at length arrives when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity; and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished. My mother was dead, but we had still duties which we ought to perform; we must continue our course with the rest and learn to think ourselves fortunate whilst one remains whom the spoiler has not seized."

In “Mary Shelley’s Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein,” Sterrenburg claims different reading and writing practices demonstrate the connection between personal ways of reading and writing and the political purposes to which they are put. In Frankenstein I observed that creation and writing are connected. Everyone knows that Frankenstein learned how to create the monster through reading, but Sterrenburg’s point about writing as a form of madness suggests that we need to consider what makes dangerous writing in the context of Frankenstein, particularly its repeated connection of mutilation, filth, and text. If Armstrong showed that literacy allows us to recognize difference, then Sterrenburg’s point about the madness of creation allows us to argue that writing as a form of creation actually creates difference and division.

Does this claim really account for the data we encounter in Frankenstein?

Victor Frankenstein enacts a similar graveyard melodrama. But he does so in more psychological terms. He is not simply the victim of invasions from without. The innate benevolence of his "human nature" is at war with a counter tendency, his perpetually increasing "eagerness" to revive the dead. His fanatical desires (which are symbolized by his staring eyes and incessant nighttime labors) do battle with his natural "loathing" of the horrors around him. The fanaticism wins. But a battle has taken place within. And that battle renders Victor into a more complex character than Frederick Fenton, who is merely an ideological conduit for Godwinism.

Stylistically, then, the rigid schisms and dualisms of Walker's world have been shifted within. Disturbing and demonic forces are no longer simply portrayed as invasions from without. The world is still dualistic. But the contending poles of the dualism are now contained within the parameters of a single psyche. Victor Frankenstein goes through the motions of a 1790s melodrama. He robs graves, revives the dead, and spawns a monster who rises parricidally against him. But the vector of external forces assumed by writers of the 1790s is largely dissipated. There is no longer a Jacobin Revolution at hand, so robbing graves ceases to be a revolutionary act. It is a private act, carried out in isolation. The psychology is also private. Victor responds not primarily to outer influences, but rather to obscure drives within. These drives prompt him to reenact -- in private terms -- an anti-utopian melodrama from the age of the French Revolution. (152)

The critics who see Mary Shelley's Monster as a furtively female character have a historical precedent on their side. The most extravagant and demonic pictures of mass insurrectionary violence in both Wollstonecraft and Burke concern female rebels. Wollstonecraft depicts the sansculotte women of July 1789 as devouring, cannibal-like monsters destroying their own parents. Burke depicts the women who marched on Versailles to bring back the King and Queen on October 6, 1789, in the following terms:

. . . the royal captives who followed in the train were slowly moved along, amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women.32

Mary Shelley knew these passages well. She had available to her models of monsters, specters, and furies who actually were female. These female monsters are a collective force; they have behind them the weight and resonance of actual historical events, including {164} the march on Versailles. But Mary Shelley turns her Monster into a lone male, rebelling on his own. She thereby denies herself many of the sexual and political implications already inherent in the image of the female, parricidal monster.

She settles instead for a rebellion within and against the bourgeois family. The Monster kills off Victor's friends and kin, promises to be with him on his wedding night, and murders his new wife. If nothing else, his rebellion effectively brings about the demise of one socially prominent family with a long history of public service. Victor comes from a long line of officials and syndics. His father gives him a university education, so he might better perpetuate the family fame and tradition. Victor also inherits a "competent fortune" (p. 149) that enables him to carry on his scientific researches without having to work for a living. Victor is in a position to further the social responsibilities historically associated with his family, but he does not do so. The Monster ensures the end of this "distinguished" line (p. 27) by killing little William and finally leading Victor to his death. (163)

Elizabeth's death

Encounter

When I recovered I found myself surrounded by the people of the inn; their countenances expressed a breathless terror, but the horror of others appeared only as a mockery, a shadow of the feelings that oppressed me. I escaped from them to the room where lay the body of Elizabeth, my love, my wife, so lately living, so dear, so worthy. She had been moved from the posture in which I had first beheld her, and now, as she lay, her head upon her arm and a handkerchief thrown across her face and neck, I might have supposed her asleep. I rushed towards her and embraced her with ardour, but the deadly languor and coldness of the limbs told me that what I now held in my arms had ceased to be the Elizabeth whom I had loved and cherished.

If reading leads to monstrous writing/creation, why should we value literacy?

Data Collation

Mary Shelley

Creation and writing are connected:

Ch 15 It was your journal of the four months that preceded my creation. You minutely described in these papers every step you took in the progress of your work; this history was mingled with accounts of domestic occurrences. You doubtless recollect these papers. Here they are... 'Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred.'

His tale is connected and told with an appearance of the simplest truth, yet I own to you that the letters of Felix and Safie, which he showed me, and the apparition of the monster seen from our ship, brought to me a greater conviction of the truth of his narrative than his asseverations, however earnest and connected. Such a monster has, then, really existence! I cannot doubt it, yet I am lost in surprise and admiration. Sometimes I endeavoured to gain from Frankenstein the particulars of his creature's formation, but on this point he was impenetrable. "Are you mad, my friend?" said he. "Or whither does your senseless curiosity lead you? Would you also create for yourself and the world a demoniacal enemy? Peace, peace! Learn my miseries and do not seek to increase your own." Frankenstein discovered that I made notes concerning his history; he asked to see them and then himself corrected and augmented them in many places, but principally in giving the life and spirit to the conversations he held with his enemy. "Since you have preserved my narration," said he, "I would not that a mutilated one should go down to posterity."

)

So What

Data Collation: Sterrenburg

Contrast: childhood reading as either anti-social (Walton wants guide) or as way of forming community and values (Clerval brings in others)

WHAT DO WE DO WITH THIS??

Letter 2: "But it is a still greater evil to me that I am self-educated: for the first fourteen years of my life I ran wild on a common and read nothing but our Uncle Thomas' books of voyages. At that age I became acquainted with the celebrated poets of our own country; but it was only when it had ceased to be in my power to derive its most important benefits from such a conviction that I perceived the necessity of becoming acquainted with more languages than that of my native country. Now I am twenty-eight and am in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen. It is true that I have thought more and that my daydreams are more extended and magnificent, but they want (as the painters call it) KEEPING; and I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavour to regulate my mind. ."

Ch 2 Henry Clerval was the son of a merchant of Geneva. He was a boy of singular talent and fancy. He loved enterprise, hardship, and even danger for its own sake. He was deeply read in books of chivalry and romance. He composed heroic songs and began to write many a tale of enchantment and knightly adventure. He tried to make us act plays and to enter into masquerades, in which the characters were drawn from the heroes of Roncesvalles, of the Round Table of King Arthur, and the chivalrous train who shed their blood to redeem the holy sepulchre from the hands of the infidels.

Bad reading is connected to creating monstrosities:

"In this house I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa. I opened it with apathy; the theory which he attempts to demonstrate and the wonderful facts which he relates soon changed this feeling into enthusiasm. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind, and bounding with joy, I communicated my discovery to my father." (Ch 1)

Not that, like a magic scene, it all opened upon me at once: the information I had obtained was of a nature rather to direct my endeavours so soon as I should point them towards the object of my search than to exhibit that object already accomplished. I was like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead and found a passage to life, aided only by one glimmering and seemingly ineffectual light. (Ch 3

Seeming contrast: learned/read/philosophical rebellion (monster) vs knowledgable/mad/experimenter (Victor),

"The novel assigns to Victor the conventional role of the experimenting philosophe-scientist; but he raves like a mad demon. Conversely, the novel assigns to the creature the role of the mad, Jacobin demon, risen from the grave to spread havoc abroad. But he talks like a philosophe, indicting the social system for the suffering it causes individuals. Mary Shelley does not always escape from the stereotypes of the revolutionary age, but she does conflate and mix them in new and subversive combinations." (159)

the Monster's rhetorical style tells us that his identity as a rebel was learned, not innate. In direct contradiction to the Burkean tradition of the monster as evil incarnate, the creature tells Frankenstein: "I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend" (p. 95). This disjunctive rhetoric itself reenacts a passage from benevolence to rebellion. In part, the Monster has been converted to his demonic identity...the monster proves a very philosophical rebel" (159)

Anomaly: brings together political and personal and says that they are the same

"Mary Shelley does more than conflate two traditions. She molds them into a unique third. She moves inside the mind of the Monster and asks what it is like to be labeled, defined, and even physically distorted by a political stereotype" (165)

It seems to be about a contrast between political and personal, but it's actually about the ways that reading and writing conflate those two.

We may think we have a good handle on what Shelley is up to, but the details of her text consistently suggest there is more than we first thought. It probably pays, as always, to test initial applications against more data.