Gothic Literature women and Frankenstein Gothic Literature A

Gothic Literature, women, and Frankenstein

Gothic Literature ►A novel in which magic, mystery, and chivalry are chief characteristics. ► Horrors abound: one may expect an inanimate object to come to life, ghosts, clanking chains, and charnel houses. § *charnel house—vault or building where human skeletal remains are stored.

Elements of the Genre ► Claustrophobic confinement and threatening architecture. ► Underground pursuit and subterranean peril. ► Supernatural encounters. ► Sentience (awareness) of architecture ► Extraordinary positions and lethal predicaments

Elements cont’d ► Suspension of rationality and morality ► Spectral and demonic machinery ► Atmospheric superiority of evil ► Psychopathic and destructive emotions ► Genealogical complications, jeopardy, mysteries.

Gothic Literature and Women ► Despite a number of male achievements in Gothic literature (Horace Warpole writes the first), the genre has held a special attraction for women. ► In the early days of the genre, reading Gothic fiction became a favorite pastime of the middleclass female ► Women, oppressed by needlepoint, whalebone stays, psychological frustrations, shame, and babies, found reading/writing these stories as a way to outline their pain. ► Gothic feminism seeks to escape the female body though a dream of turning weakness into strength

Shelley as a Gothic novelist pain abounds in Frankenstein ► While writing the novel, Shelley was dealing with a number of biological matters ► Ellen Moers claims that the novel deals with “the motif of revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences. . . Frankenstein seems to be distinctly a woman’s mythmaking on the subject of birth. ” ► Female

According to Leonard Wolf. . . The novel is a living artifact of the age-old risk of love. Mary Shelley, eighteen years old and scared, gave expression to an insight that is as simple as it is heartbreakingly true: women have literally everything to fear from men. ► The flattery of women as primordial life-givers, as instinctive nurturers is overshadowed by the fact that death sits on her side of the bed. This is not rhetoric. One is talking about real death. . It is a commonplace, an age-old fact that men and women both know, but which only women have to confront; and it is this fact, deeply experienced by Shelley, that gives Frankenstein a special eeriness. ► ►

Mary Shelley, the non-feminist ► ► ► Women are “quite different creatures [from men]—better though weaker. ” Influenced by guilt of her mother’s untimely death Death of 3 of her 4 children She suffered quite severely in pregnancy; her husband was rarely supportive and often involved in other affairs during her pregnancies women are completely excluded from the creation process in Frankenstein; men sure do make a mess of things!

Female heroines in the Gothic tradition Typical Gothic female is blameless, virginal, innocent, good (absolute) ► Triumphs over various passive-aggressive strategies (Gothic villain, typically male) ► Depicts woman as innocent victims of a corrupt and evil patriarchy ► Argues that demure, docile behavior is hardly a protection (or virtue) ►

From the critics. . . ► Diane Long Hoeveler: Gothic feminism was born when women realized that they had a formidable external enemy—the lusty, evil patriarch, in addition to their own worst internal enemy—their consciousness of their own sexual difference, perceived as weakness. § From “Mary Shelley and Gothic Feminism: The Case of ‘The Mortal Immortal’

Mary Shelley as the Gothic hero ► Carries a heavy intellectual burden as the result of her parentage, and even her marriage ► Her real (and imagined) victimization, first as a result of being Percy’s wife, then later his widow ► Some critics suggest that while Percy haunts her works, the true hero-villains of her stories were her parents ► Mary Shelley felt destined to fulfill her mother’s aborted philosophical and literary visions

As such. . . ► Frankenstein stands paradoxically as the Gothic embodiment of the critique of Gothic feminism ► Shelley puts her fictional women into that world and reveals that the sensitive male hero is a mad egotist intent on usurping feminine values and destroying all forms of life in his despotic quest for phallic mystery ►Taken from Hoeveler

Hoeveler: Frankenstein punishes every female body in that text. . ► It replaces the maternal womb with chemical artifice, only to blast masculine attempts at procreation as futile and destructive.

Gothic feminism and Mary Shelley ► Realization that women would always be life’s victims, not simply because of external forces, but because their own bodies cursed them to forever serve the wheel of corruption. ► Bringing to life a child who would die, or perhaps soon die, condemned women to serve a merciless god—the cycle of generation, birth, and death– in a way that men did not. ► Could Victor be her own person striving to overcome his/her own weaknesses? ► Hoeveler: “railing against the female body. . is the only [gender] position Mary Shelley can take”

Consider. . . ► Wolf contends that Shelley’s novel is a not a “properly Gothic novel, ” though it does inspire fear. ► Primarily because a young woman of genteel breeding is usually at the center of the work ► What about Shelley’s work does fit the “bill” of Gothic fiction? ► Where does this novel address the condition of women? Would you classify Shelley as a feminist? ► Where does it call for social change (in any arena)?