The Romantic Literature Paper-5

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.