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?
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.
