Topic
write
a note on Frankenstein as an ending cultural myth.
Paper 5 The Romantic Literature
Name Devendra A Joshi
Class M.A. Sem-2
Submitted To Prof. Dilip Barad (Head of English Dept. M. K.
S. Bhavnagar University)
Write a note on Frankenstein as an ending
cultural myth.
When Frankenstein was published
anonymously in 1818, most critics assumed the author to be a man cpercy Shelley,
Mary’s husband, because of the dedication of the novel to williarn Godwin,
whose political justice (1796) had greatly influenced him. The eventual
discovery that it was Mary Shelley, the poet's wife and Godwin’s daughter,
caused some conster nation; the blasphemous ideas expressed were woman. The
style of the novel was generally praised; most agrees with Blackwood’s (march
1818) assessment of "the author's original genius and happy power of
expression" Finally, while being impressed with the power and vigour of
the work, many reviewers criticized the subject matter and the author’s refusal
to moralize about victor frankensteiris blasphemous act. The quarterly review (January
1818) proves a typical complaint. After summarizing the plot and declaring it
to be a “tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity”, the reviewer concludes;
“our taste and our judgment alike revoit at this kind of writing and the
greater the ability with which it may be executed the worse it is it in
culcutes no lesson of conduct, manners, or
morality.
“Frankenstein reveals,” I was seized by
remorse and the sense of guilt, which hurried me away to a hell of intense
tortures, such as no language can describe.”
For much of the twentieth
century Frankenstein was considered an interesting novel but by no means “great
literature”. Writing in 1938 in Mary Shelley. A biography, R. colynn coryllis considered
It to be a “period piece”, of not very good date, historically interesting, but
not one of the living novels of the world. It was generally agreed to be a
minor masterpiece, relegated to the margins of “popular” literature literary
relations. Frankenstein was considered of some importance primarily because,
the general consensus was, and it encapsulated in a conveniently simple form
the preoccupations of romanticism. As the concept of a “canon” of great works disappeared
and the boundaries of “literature” expanded, Frankenstein began to attack more
critical attention.
In 1979 George Levine and G.c.knoe-p, filmmaker,
edited a collection of essays. The Endurance of Frankenstein, that marked a
turning point in Frankenstein criticism. While still convinced that
Frankemastein was a ‘minor’ novel, radically flawed by its sensationalism by inflexibly,
public and oratorical nature of even it’s most intimate passage” Levine argued.
That Frankenstein was the” most important minor novel in English”. it had become
a metaphor for our own most crucial concerns expressing the” central dualities
and tensions of our time by positing a
world without God”. Approaching the novel from a variety of critical
perspectives, feminist materialistic and psychoanalytical the essays in this
collection demonstrated that there was far more to Frankenstein than a quaint perspective
on romanticism. Marry Shelley was no longer considered to be simply echoing the
ideas of her more illustrious romantic friends and relations. Instead, she was
seen as a woman writer offering a female perspective on such issues as birth
and the family and a female critique, rather than a celebration, of the musical
masculine preoccupations of romanticism.
The last quarter-century has been a
significant reassessment of Frankenstein. Feministic criticism has been of
particular importance in this process, stressing the need to consider Mary
Shelley as a woman writer who explores woman’s experience. Materialistic and
new historical readings have also added new dimensions to reading of
Frankenstein stressing the significance of particular social and economic
condition to our interpretation of the text. By looking at various rewritings
and reworking of the Frankenstein myth, from films to cereal boxes to
electricity advertisement, critics have also examined the ever changing
significance of the monster, the changing cultural anxieties which he is
adapted to embody, psychological studies, such as William veeder’s mary Shelley
and Frankenstein (1996) now complement frendian readings with lacaniam
analysis.
For many of the most recent critics, the
text itself is, “monstrous” calling into question traditional values and
comfortable categories. The idea of in freed battings making monstrous.
Frankenstein, criticism. Theory (1991), which engages with both the text of
Frankenstein and the criticism that has attempted to (identify) and fix the
text’s significance.
As early as 1823, Richard Brinkley peake
produced an enormously successful melodramatic version of Frankenstein called
presumption: or the fate of Frankenstein. The story had been quickly
appropriated the monster conveniently mute even as it removed all speeches
against social injustice subsequent popular resurrections of the novel have
ranged from (politician) political cartoons deploying the Frankenstein motif in the nineteenth
century to countless cartoon and cinematic versions in the twentieth century.
The “meaning” of the novel in the popular imagination today is similarly
defined by Hollywood’s obsessive affair with the Frankenstein myth.
According to
Roland Barthes,
Myth
is neither a lie
Nor
confession
It
is an
Inflection.
The persistence of Frankenstein is then. A
phenomena that tempts one to resort to chiche-“the hideous progeny” that Mary
Shelley wished would” go forth and prosper”- has indeed proliferated
monstrously. The novel’s remarkable resistance to be stabilized can be traced
to it’s define characteristic a suggestive ambivalence that provides
Fertile sail for
interpretation.
Ambiguity characteristics the novel. The
interrogative mode of quotation from Milton that forms the epigraph to
Frankenstein is thus appropriate for a text that raises more questions than it
answers. From the formal issues of genre ( is the novel “gothic”, that hybrid
genre halfway between romance and realism; “female gothic”, “realistic”, or
early” science fiction”?) and authorial voice (there are multiple dramatized
narratives) to the related and equally vexed question of ideology (who is the
monster in the story? or how is a monster made?) the novel tantalizes
incessantly. It is not surprising therefore; that the novel has come to be read
as one that addresses modernity’s sence of a fundamental philosophical
indeterminacy.
According to David E Mussel white,
“Anomalons and exorbitant with respect to all that would define it the monster
is the very figure of the unknown that haunts modern thought.
Frankenstein has maintained its
imaginative appeal and sociopolitical relevance for more than 200 years and at
present there seem to be no limits to its ongoing popularity, thus proving that
mary Shelley was “no inept neophyte who chanced upon a myth.”
The myth of the monster made by man
explores the human drive to push beyond the limits of knowledge. That drive
necessarily carries us into realms of risk and danger. Society has a love-hate
relationship with this instinct. On the one hand, it is essential to invention
and discovery; on the road to unpredictably disastrous consequences. The
monster embodies this ambivalence. The monster comes from an even deeper well
of meaning. However, akin to what Carl Jung called the archetype of the shadow:
the primitive life-force, the dark underbelly of our ideal and rational self
which may be quitted or ignored in orderly society but which rears up and shows
itself in times of chaos or social change.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the over
reaching and punishment of the character from Greek mythology. The story has
had an influence across literature and popular culture. The story of
Frankenstein monster is a myth of claiming long forbidden knowledge and facing
the consequences.
