Romantic Monsters, Rational Scientists, and Gothic Monsters

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an example of a Romantic novel, and it also includes many of the conventions of the Gothic style.

However, Victor Frankenstein’s character is—or strives to be—highly rational—and to approach life (and death) as a scientist. In this regard Frankenstein belongs to the Enlightenment, those whose logical world view the Romantics were reading against. To Victor's way of thinking, why respect the mystery of life and death (as the Romantics surely do) if there is a rational, scientific way to recreate life?

The Gothic movement, in many ways, grew out of both traditions:

“…cultivation of a Gothic style was given new impetus in the mid-eighteenth century with the emergence of Enlightenment beliefs that extolled the virtues of rationality. Such ideas were challenged in Britain by the Romantics at the end of the eighteenth century, who argued that the complexity of human experience could not be explained by an inhuman rationalism. For them the inner worlds of the emotions and the imagination far outweighed the claims of, for example, natural philosophy. The Gothic is at one level closely related to these Romantic considerations, and poets such as Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron at various times used the Gothic to explore, at different levels of explicitness, the role that the apparently irrational could play in critiquing quasi-rationalistic accounts of experience… However, although the Gothic often shares in such anti-Enlightenment ideas (because it focuses on thoughts and feelings), it is important to acknowledge that the early Gothic appears to be highly formulaic, reliant on particular settings, such as castles, monasteries, and ruins, and with characters, such as aristocrats, monks, and nuns who, superficially, appear to be interchangeable from novel to novel. Nevertheless, these stories are not as stereotyped as they may seem, and it is necessary to look beyond such narrative props in order to consider the anti-Enlightenment impulses and related themes and issues which are central to the form” (Smith 2-3)

Consider the interplay of Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic irrationality in the novel. Does Victor’s tragic fall function of a condemnation of Rationalism?
How about the monster? To which movement does he most clearly belong, and why?

Finally, why does this idea and this character have such resonance for us as a culture? Why does Frankenstein’s monster endure in popular culture with such ubiquity?  

Smith, Andrew. Gothic Literature. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013. Questia School. Web. 31 Oct. 2014.