FROM MEDITATIVE ROMANTICISM (WORDSWORTH AND KEATS)
TO TURBULENT ROMANTICISM (SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN)
--The
Enlightenment objectification/categorizing of nature leads to the
benefits of scientific experimentation/technology/medicine, etc.
But it also leads to a sterile nature: Wordsworth (in the short
poem "The Tables Turned") says we "we murder to dissect" when we
see only with a scientific, rationalist eye.
--Wordsworth in “Tintern
Abbey” fuses self to the natural scene. The sublime sense of
“something far more deeply interfused”--intertwining self and
nature--overcomes the alienating rift between
mind (subject/no dimensionality) and what is external to
mind (objectified/3-D world--Wordsworth calls it the
"unintelligibility" of the world). Wordsworth's fusion with
nature, the absorption of his ego into the harmonious "beauteous
forms," becomes an emotional/metaphysical form of rapture (however
quietly expressed) and is, in effect, a substitute for bonding
with God/a deity. I.e., the emotions expressed in the poem,
ultimately, are spiritual/metaphysical ones. He seeks a "peak"
experience, in which selfhood is dissolved.
--Wordsworth's "Tintern
Abbey"--with its somber rhythm and complex syntax/long meaning
units--tries to lull us into an almost hypnotic state, in which
there is no split between "subject" and "object," just sublime
being or perceiving. Yet he also recognizes he is self-conscious
and not euphorically at “one” with nature as in his carefree,
thoughtless youth. Also, he hears the “Still sad music of
humanity”—i.e. death.
--Romantics seek
to inhabit realms of bliss and beauty, but such are typically
vexed by alienation and mortality, which makes the
bliss/out-of-time sensation (Keats’ “Ode to the Nightingale”) all
the more poignant. Keats' poetry is full of flowery/Classical
references, but once you "get" that he's addressing key
psychological/metaphysical issues, the floweriness should not
inhibit appreciation. Keats, in a profoundly raw existential way,
is expressing the miracle that we all get to perceive beauty/be
sentient and yet live within a world of undeniable finitude. It is
the latter (death) that makes the former (beauty) all the more
exquisite. Christian theology and many other theologies, would
console with the promise of resurrection, with the promise that
life can emerge from death, or that grace can fill one's heart.
The best Romantics were not so consoled. Keats, on his deathbed,
did not think he would be ushered into a sweet eternity.
--Because what is being explored is
metaphysical, about the autonomous soul/self relating to the
totality of what is external to the self, social relations are not
paramount. Wordsworth refers to the hermit/vagrant, but is not
apparently concerned about socio-economic turmoil that would lead
to vagrants miserably hanging out in the woods.
--Keats' "Ode to Nightingale" and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" are
both relatively quiet, meditative works (similar to the Chopin
piano music). In Shelley's Frankenstein romantic selfhood
is more willful and embattled, self-glorifying, and tragic or
melodramatic (similar to the H. Berlioz symphonic music). And the
mix of desire/beauty and death that we see in either poem takes on
a much more transgressive/aggressive form in Shelley's novel.
FRANKENSTEIN REVIEW
After you read the novel, check out the
interpretive material in our edition around page 300+. Below
follows the themes there, but I've tweaked them to get at more
disturbing/profound aspects of Romanticism and identity issues,
most particularly the fundamental problem of being human--which is
to have both a mind and a body.
1. MOTHERHOOD ANXIETIES/BOURGEOIS FAMILIES
--Enlightenment-thru-19th-century:
property/inheritance secures bourgeois family as the fundamental
meaningful unit.
--But Romantic rebels tend to find little
solace or meaning in the family (Wordsworth's and Keats's poems
are about autonomous selves; Mary Shelley and her husband and
their pal Lord Byron were most non-conventional; William Blake,
although married, did not want to put any constraints on
expressive energy/desire).
--The structure of Frankenstein
indicates that one's selfhood/sexuality/ambition/etc. are
antithetical to the family unit:
1st third:
Frankenstein leaves family to create monster/follow his egotistic
ambition and will.
2nd third: Monster
recounts story of being only a voyeur upon cottage family.
3rd third:
Frankenstein leaves family again to chase monster (monster
destroys family).
--Romantic writers are
obsessed with the self being subsumed into something larger than
the self, which could mean a fascination with the power of titanic
historical figures (Napoleon) or vast, turmoiled vistas (the Alps)
or exotic travel (Victor chasing the monster) or quiet harmonious
scenes of nature (Wordsworth & Keats).
--But to seek such peak
experiences/grandiose bloatings of the self (or self-surrender to
the natural scene) requires becoming detached from social
relations … forsaking the family.
--Anxiety about the value/meaning of the
family is compounded, in Frankenstein, by anxiety about
mothering: the monster as ugly offspring, the tearing apart of
the monster's mate which resembles an aborted fetus or
miscarriage, etc.
2. MONSTROSITY
--Extrapolate away from the monster's
description at the beginning of Chapter 5. What makes him
monstrous?
--When we are in the womb, presumably we are
"at one" with our mother's body; we do not have a separate
identity.
--Infants, although physically separate from
mommy, do not yet have a sense of the totality/surface of their
bodies (an infant doesn't know his/her arm belongs to
himself/herself).
--The child grows, and gains a sense of
autonomy, of selfhood, of identity largely defined by the integral
physical contours of the body/skin.
--The body should be inviolable; we live,
complacently, within the intact shell of our skin.
--In gothic/horror films, what
repulses/fascinates is the revelation of the inside ... of blood
spurting out/ of bones protruding thru the flesh, or, perhaps, the
internal viscera per se; shards of flesh, body parts. That is,
any flesh not animated. Which is to say death. Which is, if you
think about it, the big anxiety in the novel (why is it that
Victor keeps dreaming of his dead mother?).
--The monster's stitched together body,
comprised of dead body parts, shows the body in fragments rather
than being cohesive and integral. Most disturbing and ugly and
taboo-breaking, as is also the case with all inside fluids when
they inappropriately get outside in the form of spittle, etc.!
--Bliss-out Romanticism (Keats and
Wordsworth) involves some sort of harmonious non-body rapture, of
oneness with the cosmos, of pure perceiving/being (no
subject/object dichotomy).
--Gothic Romanticism (Shelley) focuses on
disharmonious body parts and on turmoiled, contradictory
emotions. See Fuseli painting below.
3. SECRECY/INTERIORS/TURMOILED PSYCHES
--Romantic writers are always fascinated by
secrets and interiors.
--Victor seeks to discover the secrets of the
flesh/nature in his experiments.
--But the entire narrative structure is also
one that proceeds through a box within a box within a box
sequence: Walton frame story . . . interrupted for Victor F's
story, which is inside it . . . which is interrupted for monster's
story, which is inside it.
--No stable
exterior geography/bourgeois space or any space is lingered on. We
don’t linger mimetically/realistically on a scene or locale, but
move rapidly thru one exotic locale after another. Shelley is not
attempting to mirror reality, but rather providing an
imaginative vision unto “realities” that have nothing
to do with day-to-day life, except that the family is obsessively
returned to and evaded, as if the family/nurturance is at once
desired and spurned.
--The monster
continually manifests longing & hate, a desire to be embraced by
his father-creator and a desire to destroy him. As for Victor:
what if the point of Victor's creating the monster is not so much
creating him, but the subconscious sadistic/aggressive pleasure of
spurning him (and later tearing apart his mate)? Victor loves his
wife Elizabeth; but rather than a night of libido, there is a
night of murder. The story merges what Freud will call
eros (sexual love) and the death
instinct (a desire to destroy/be aggressive).
See the scene at page 241! See roughly parallel Fuseli painting
below. What is being depicted:
imaginative rape or seduction by dark demon forces; is
this a nightmare or a dream of desire?
Johann
Heinrich Fuseli: The
Nightmare
(1781) Oil on canvas
Click links below if embedded image isn't visible.
http://encarta.msn.com/media_121627059_761573163_-1_1/Fuseli%E2%80%99s_The_Nightmare.html
http://artyzm.com/obrazy/fuseli-nightmare.jpg
4. TEXTS/LANGUAGE
--What do you think of the
prose style? Notice how the description of the landscape or
internal mental states oftentimes is given in
absolute/catastrophic/extreme terms. Romantic/gothic literature,
in contrast to prosaic Realistic novels, is always over-the-top,
with the phrasing trying to express the inexpressible. Extreme
states of terror, ecstasy, hate, sublime peak experiences tend to
be beyond our capacity to articulate them.
--On 259/260 Victor refers to a "mutilated"
narrative. Speculate why the language to describe the monster's
body, in effect, should be transferred to describing how
narratives are conceived and conveyed?
BIG
PICTURE: FROM ENLIGHTENMENT THRU ROMANTICISM
--From
Locke to Equiano: We studied
the emergence of a “possessive selfhood,” a self defined in terms
of the delights (and protection) of property and a self, which by
objectifying the world, gains rationalist mastery over it.
--Wordsworth,
Keats, and Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern age
(in the West) by and large inherits the Enlightenment Era emphasis
on property/inheritance (Locke) and stable selfhood. We believe
that the family should be entrepreneurially free to pursue its
self-interest, free from the tyranny of kings or religious
enthusiasts (who would prescribe a particular theology).
Bourgeois spaces, however, are critiqued in the Romantic Rebellion
Era for a more profound metaphysical need (Wordsworth’s disgust
with "getting and spending" and yearning for “something far more
deeply interfused” or Keats’s longing to be out-of-time in his
garden with the bird) or in recognition of inward/turmoiled
psychology, i.e., Victor’s/the monster’s mix of love and hate,
anticipating Freud.
--Our
next set of writers, after the Romantics, will
add the new concept of evolutionary/geological “deep time”
(Darwin)
or a concept of social forces/relations changing over time (Marx)
or layered-time/memories within (Freud). For
Enlightenment writers, although there was a sense of
perfectibility and progress, the latter was deemed less in
evolutionary/dynamic terms than in the elimination of prejudice
and partial perspectives, of tyrannies of the mind and
social/political sphere (Paine's loathing of all authority and
dogma).
