UNIT 3

Pre-romantic and gothic echoes/contributions: imagination and improbability

The Gothic: By the late 18th the term had come to symbolise the “medieval” or the
“Dark Ages” prior to the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, denoting that
which was barbaric, disordered, irregular. In the mid-18th there appeared a number of
works idealising medieval culture and architecture in opposition to neo-classical form
and design. The irregularity of the medieval cathedral or garden came to be prized
above neo-classical Palladian architecture, and the ruin, whether real or faked, became a
source of aesthetic delight. Burke provided a justification for its aesthetics by arguing
that terror was an expression of the sublime. The melancholy and, often, morbid poetry
of “Graveyard School” similarly created a climate and readership (lectores, tirada) for
Gothic subjects. It began as an antiquarian and architectural trend, but the Gothic
became associated with the novel form with the publication of Horace Walpole’s
medieval romance, set in 17th in Spain, The Castle of Otranto, which set the pattern for
future novels with its southern Mediterranean setting, its aristocratic and patriarchal
villain, its persecuted heroine, its Castle, garrulous servants and supernatural events.
Many writers abandoned Walpole’s medieval settings, some, like Radcliffe, avoided the
explicitly supernatural preferring suggestion to outright (rotundo) horror. The gothic
was not confined only to the novel form but encompassed drama and poetry as well.

James Thomson (1700-48): Is the first and most popular nature poet of the century,
who grew up in Scotland and lived in London after his 45. The earliest version of his
descriptive poem “Winter” in 405 lines of blank verse was published in 1726, after that
he published “Summer” (1727), “Spring (1728) and “Autumn” in the first collected
edition of The Seasons (1730), where the poem grew length to 5.541 lines, and
continued to be popular well into the Romantic period.
The Seasons set the fashion for the poetry of natural description. Readers learned to
look at the external world through Thomson’s eyes and with the emotions that he had
taught them to feel. The eye dominates the literature of external nature during the
eighteenth century as the imagination was to do in the poetry of William Wordsworth.
Thomson amazed his readers with his capacity to see the general effects of light and
cloud and foliage, or the particular image of a leaf tossed (lanzada) in the gale
(temporal) or the slender (estilizado) feet of a robin (petirrojo) or the delicate film of ice
at the edge of a brook.
He tries to view each season from every perspective, as it might be perceived by a bird
in the sky or by the tiniest insect, by God or a painter or Milton or Sir Isaac Newton.
The poem became an omnium gatherum of contemporary ideas and interests: natural
history; ideas about the nature of man and society, primitive and civilized; the
conception of created nature as a source of religious experience; and as a continuing
revelation of a Creator whose presence fills the world.
Thomas Gray (1726-71): He wrote the English poem most loved by Samuel Johnson,
and was a scholarly recluse (solitario) who lived the quiet life of a university professor
in Cambridge. In Eton he made intimate friends: Richard West and Horace Walpole
(son of the prime minister) with whom took the grand tour of France and Italy. The
death of West desolated Gray, and memories of West haunt his verse.
Most of Gray’s poems take part in a contemporary reaction against the wit and satiric
elegance of Pope’s couplets; pots sought a new style, at once intimate and prophetic.
Gray was not easily satisfied and he constantly revised his poems and published very
little. Because he held that “the language of the age is never the language of poetry”, he
often uses archaic words and a word order borrowed from Latin, where a verb can
precede its subject (line 35: “Awaits alike the inevitable hour”). But the “Elegy” stands
alone in his work. It balances Latinate phrases with living English speech, and the
learning of a scholar with a common humanity. Johnson acknowledged that “The
Churchyard abounds (rebosa) with images that find a mirror in every mind, and with
sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo”.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus: It was first published in 1818
and revised in 1831, where Shelley added an “Introduction” which influenced the reader
in how to read her story. The novel belongs to the Gothic although it eschews (evitar,
rehuir) the medievalism of Walpole’s Otranto, and is concerned with recent
developments in scientific thought. Frankenstein is not concerned with the supernatural
but with the future possibilities of current ideas, so much so that many claim it as an
early work of science fiction. It also contains sensational events and excessive emotion.
It avoids much of the cliché of Gothic writing, dealing with issues such as education,
environment, crime and responsibility. The novel is dedicated to Goodwin, Shelley’s
father, to whose school of ideas it belongs. Her husband was Percy Shelley, and it was
during the couple’s visit to Byron’s rented villa on the shores of Lake Geneva that the
ideas for the novel took shape after those present agreed to try their hand at each writing
a tale of terror.
Frankenstein has an unusual narrative structure, in that the novel is composed of several
embedded (incrustar) narratives (rather concentric circles) and we have no omniscient
narrator to provide an obvious scheme of moral values against which to judge the
events; hence (de ahí) the reader has to exercise her/his own judgement. The
“Introduction” was written some twelve years after the novel and contains several
inaccuracies, for she claims the intention to “speak to the mysterious fears of our nature,
and awoken thrilling terror”, deflecting (desviar) the reader form some of the serious
questionings. She places the novel in a very clear moral framework, and readers should
be wary (cauteloso) of Shelley’s attempt to provide a conventionally moral framework
in which to read the novel as being about a man “playing God”, far more suited to the
various cinematic adaptations than the original text. Percy Shelley’s “Preface” of the
1818, places the novel in the context of contemporary natural philosophy, and claims
that it is not “merely weaving supernatural terrors”, identifying its purpose as “the
exhibition of the amiableness (afabilidad) of domestic affections, and the excellence of
human virtue”. It would imply that Victor’s crimes, if such they are, are committed
against society and family, rather than God, and human virtue twisted by social forms,
as the Godwinian reformers would have it, is “universal”.
Captain Robert Walton writes four letters to his sister (who shares the same initials as
Shelley), feeling isolated and alienated, desiring the “company of a man who would
sympathise with me”. The first ten chapters of the novel proper are Victor’s firs-person
account of his childhood, education and the creation of the monstrous being. The next
six chapters contain Victor’s account of his Creature’s narrative, the Creature claims to
have been born benevolent and sympathetic, but has become violent, criminal and
aggressive as a result of his treatment by society, rather as Rousseau claimed for
humanity as a whole. The Creature describes how he murdered Victor’s brother and
pleads with Victor to create a mate for him. The following seven chapters return the
reader to Frankenstein’s main narrative telling how he fails in this promise to create a
female mate, of the Creature’s revengeful murder of his wife Elizabeth. The novel
closes with Walton’s account of Victor’s death, the remorse of the Creature and his
desire to journey to the Pole to destroy himself on a funeral pyre.
It is important to realise that all the narrators in the text (and there are other embedded
narratives like those of the De Lacey famiy and of Elizabeth Lavenza to consider) are
seeking to persuade their auditors to act in a certain way (and thus the reader to judge
them in a certain way). There is no omniscient narrator to judge the actions of the
characters or to corroborate the truth of what they say; only the perspective of others
characters whose own moral judgments may be suspect or biased.
Frankenstein as a novel is up to date with regard to its treatment of scientific discovery,
anachronistically so for its settings in the 1790s. Captain Robert Walton presents
himself as a natural philosopher and explorer to investigate the secrets of the North
Magnetics Pole and search for a passage through the Arctic Ocean. Similarly Victor’s
experiments are equally current, since discoveries and speculations led to a public
debate which became known as the “Vitalist Debate”. The most orthodox faction
argued that life was the product of some extra essential force or spiritual substance
applied to the body rather as Jehovah communicates the spark of life into Adam’s
fingertip in the panel of Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. Othres argued that life is a
product of the assemblage of the parts of the organism, a property of its material
organisation. In Great Britain the debate developed between Abernethy and his pupil,
Lawrence (Percy Shelley’s personal physician). This context led Marilyn Butler to
argue that Victor Frankenstein is a parody of the Abernethy position, infusion life into
his creature, in a parody of the Christian God.
The novel also arises social and political questions about the reality of crime and guilt.
Rousseau had claimed that all humans were born free, virtuous and benevolent but were
corrupted by society. Shelly’s father argued that crime was the result of a flawed
environment and education rather than the consequence of any original sin or capacity
to depravity. This was the argument of the French revolutionaries in their attempt to
reform government and society through democracy, and many critics argue that the
Creature is a metaphor for the violent actions of the revolutionary masses. The Creature
tells us how he was naturally sociable, greeting his creator with a smile before the latter
flees. He seeks acceptance, aware that his physique is monstrous, he hides himself away
and secretly helps De Laceys family. The Creature claims that he is “malicious” only
because he is “miserable” and that “if any being felt emotions of benevolence” for him
he would “return them an hundred and an hundred fold; for that one creature’s sake’ and
“make peace with the whole kind! At the centre of the novel is the worst crime society
can imagine, the murder of a child; nevertheless, the reader may maintain a sympathy
for the Creature and attach the blame and responsibility to his creator and society at
large.
If the Creature’s actions do not derive from any intrinsic evil, what then is
Frankenstein’s error? He fails to take responsibility for his creation. After infusing life
into the Creature he collapses and when awakened by his creation he flees and abandons
it. Victor is a damaged being, he shuns (rehuir) his family and is the indirect cause of all
their deaths. Some have argued that Victor’s obsession with the secrets of life results
from the early death of his mother, and this seems to indicate that his giving life to his
creation will lead to Elizabeth’s demise (fallecimiento). It also argues for a pronounced
Oedipal obsession with maternity and death. Freudian critics have argued that the
Creature may be considered as Victor’s dark self, carrying out those murderous desires
he harbours in his own subconscious. Other critics have argued that Frankenstein is a
feminist text in which male science, in the person of Victor, usurps the female role of
giving birth. What Frankenstein does is thus unnatural. Science or natural philosophy is
defined in the text as a maculine activity. Waldman, Victor’s tutor, uses the image of a
female nature penetrated or raped by a male science. The context of the novel would
argue that what Victor does is unnatural and a crime against nature, rather than a crime
against God. If we read the text this way, we locate it more firmly in the free-thinking
and radical circle of minds and ideas amid (entre, en medio de) which it was created.

Psychological analysis in Frankenstein; or the Modern “Narcissus”.

The real monster in Frankenstein is the scientist whose monstruous empathic failure
comes back to haunt him.
Nearly every critic has alluded, if only in passing, to the way in which the Creature
embodies Victor Frankenstein's monstruous sexual and aggressive passions. An Oedipal
interpretation of the novel would be viewing Victor's obsession with the origin of babies
as an ambivalent wish to present his mother with another child. The scientist dreams he
is embracing Elizabeth; seconds later he imagines he is holding the corpse of his dead
mother in his arms.
Ellen Moers interprets the novel as a “phantasmagoria of the nursery”. One of the
earliest critics to probe (investigar) a text's gender identity, Moers reads Frankestein as
“distinctly a woman's mythmaking on the subject of birth precisely because its emphasis
is not upon what precedes birth, not upon birth itself, but upon what follows births: the
trauma of the afterbirth”. In Mary Shelley's personal tragedies death and birth are
intermixed. Her mother dies as a consequence of giving birth to her, and all her children
died in infancy or childhood.
Hill argues that Victor's “dominant incestuous root for Promethean sin seems to take
hold in uncompromising psychic wishes for exclusive love, and in possession of the
mother – the source of first love”. Joseph suggests that Victor's terror of incest is the
veiled cause of his disintegration. Hirsch concludes that the “monster is psychologically
a lady, or perhaps one should say, a little girl”. Knoepflmacher: “Thoughts on the
Aggression of Daughters”, which demonstrates that Frankenstein is a novel of
emotionally distant fathers and absent mothers. The brief history of psychoanalytic
criticism on Frankenstein thus reveals a movement from Oedipal to pre-Oedipal
approaches.
The narcissistic implications
Victor exhibits all the characteristics of the narcissistic personality disorder: a grandiose
sense of self-importance; preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success;
exhibitionism; cool indifference or feelings of rage in response to criticism including
exploitativeness, overidealization and devaluation, lack of empathy. Victor
demonstrates the paradoxical nature of narcissism where self-love exists with self-hate,
and fragile self-esteem results in a sense of entitlement, the expectation of receiving
special favours from others. Victor pursues fantasies of unlimited power and glory with
a pleasureless, monomaniacal intensity. He experiences depression often accompanying
a narcissistic disorder: dejection, loss of interest in the external world, inability to love,
and a lowering of self-esteem, culminating in an expectation of punishment. As if he
has internalized a poisonous object, the Creature, who is now consuming his heart.
Frankenstein is, like Ovid's myth of Ech and Narcissus, a tragic love story leading to
madness and despair. “Treat a person ill and the will become wicked” appears in the
Introduction of the novel. Like Narcissus, Victor coldly spurns (rechaza) an individual
who asks for love; like Echo, the Creature remains hopelessly devoted to a man who
rejects him. Both Echo and the Creature make futile efforts to validate themselves
through another's approval. Ovid's myth and Shelley's novel both reveal a pathological
union of two individuals who sadomasochistically torment each other.
Functioning as a self-object, the Creature embodies Victor's narcissistic rage, and he
narcissistically invests himself in his offspring, the helpless Creature. With fitting poetic
justice, Victor finds himself punished by his shadowy double. To understand Victor's
narcissism, we must confront his failure to understand and empathize with an innately
benevolent individual. Before exploring Victor's wish to destroy life, we must consider
the motives behind his wish to create life:
“longing to penetrate the secrets of nature”, his own words, suggests a link between
sexual and intellectual discovery. Victor's interest in the science of anatomy reflects his
fascination with the structure of the human body, a wish to participate in the mysteries
of sexuality and usurp the mother's role in the act of procreation. Levine observes: “we
are confronted immediately by the displacement of God and woman from the acts of
conception and birth”. Victor's decision to create new life also seems related to his
efforts to master fears and death. Through his interest in regeneration following his
mother's death, Victor seems to attempt to reverse the forces of time by resurrecting the
dead. Knoepflmacher speaks about the fantasy of restitution in Frankenstein that would
reconcile the apparently antagonistic aims of resurrecting a lost mother and regaining a
father's undivided love. Birth fantasy and restitution fantasy help us to understand
Victor's need to create new life, but they do not explain the narcissistic implications of
his scientific work. Narcissism, not humanitarianism, dictates the gigantic shape of his
progeny.

For if Victor truly was motivated by humanitarianism or Prometheanism, as he claims,

his rejection of the Creature would be inconceivable. We could not then reconcile
Victor's view of himself as an intellectually curious scientist, free from superstition and
fear. Victor offers several explanations for the rejection of the Creature, and would
rather justify his own fickleness (veleidad) as an aspect of human nature than as a
uniquely individual failure.
If, as we sense, grandiosity is the secret motive behind Victor's creativity, then his
horrified retreat from the Creature may lie in the primitive defence mechanism
characteristic of pathological narcissism: splitting, denial, defensive idealization,
omnipotence, and devaluation. There are dangers in applying a psychiatric diagnosis to
a literary character, we must be careful not to reduce art to illness or subordinate
literature to psychiatry. Victor's inner world is highly unstable. Good object relations
involve “the capacity both to love well, and to hate well, and particularly to tolerate
varying combinations of loving and hateful feelings. Victor's division of the world into
“all good” and “all bad” objects, betrays the inability to acknowledge ambivalence. Two
of the most common defences of narcissism, omnipotence and devaluation, reflect
Victor's overinvolvement and subsequent underinvolvement with the creation of new
life.
Victor also demonstrates the all-or-nothing behaviour common to narcissism. He
repudiates violently the ideas and ideals that no longer interest him. His brief infatuation
with the volume of Cornelius Agrippa that Mr. Krempe derides.