Frankenstein - Critical Quotes

Question 1

Critical Quotes on the structure of ‘Frankenstein’ and the epistolary form (2)

Answer 1

“This novel works to show the limits of that individuality and replace the individual voice with a network of voices. ‘Frankenstein’ refuses to be solely Victor Frankenstein’s story. The novel has a new task which requires the combination and confusion of identity”

Question 2

Critical quotes on narrative authority and reliability (4)

Answer 2

“Because of a triple narrative (Walton’s, Victor’s, the monster’s) and an elaborate series of parallel personalities and events, we wonder just whose story we are hearing”

“Is the whole story only a drama of Mary Shelley’s adolescent mind, the dreamwork fabricated by a troubled girl?”
Mary A. Favret: Romantic Correspondence (2005)

“Shelley creates a situation in which it becomes impossible to know the reliability of a given narrator”
–>Forces the reader to question the powers of our own interpretation as we are faced with a similar predicament to the characters of the novel: questioning the truth of other’s discourse and questioning who is ‘good’ and who is ‘bad’

Michael Gamer: The Cambridge companion to the Gothic

“the narrative structure, with its tendency to place stories within stories, distances the reader and throws doubt on the accuracy of what is said” - Eve Sedgewick

Question 3

Critical quotes on the role of Walton (2)

Answer 3

“the frame story of the explorer, who appears disinterested in the forbidden knowledge Frankenstein cultivates and the monster exemplifies, adds credibility to these internal voices”
–>Strongly disagree- Walton further personifies the Romantic quest for the knowledge (eg. “elixir of life”)

Jason Marc Harris: Folklore and the fantastic in 19th Century fiction (2008)

“How can we be sure that Victor’s story has not been dreamed up by Walton- imaginative, ice-bound, isolated and longing for a friend?”

Nora Cook (2011)

Question 4

Critical quotes on the role of the reader in ‘Frankenstein’? (3)

Answer 4

“we, the readers, are frequently reminded that we are reading.”

“the reader’s presence, our avid involvement in a suspenseful narrative”
Karen Ann Hohne, Helen Wussow: A dialogue of voices (1994)

“Shelley has begged readers to see her alliance with Victor Frankenstein”
Susan Snaider Lanser (1992)

“The reader has to absorb the narratives and draw their own conclusions”

Question 5

Critical quote on Frankenstein’s treatment of his creature? (1)

Answer 5

“Frankenstein was probably the first to invite sympathy for the monster, to allow him to speak and explain the origins of his monstrous behaviour”
–>Debatable; agreeable to an extent, though Victor was also the first to reject and display disdain in the face of his creation
D Punter and G Byron: ‘The Monster’ in The Gothic

Question 6

Critical quotes on the Creatures gender (1)

Answer 6

“The creature whose voice, if not female, is also not humanly male”

Susan Snaider Lanser: Women Writers and Narrative Voices (1992)

Question 7

Critical quotes on Frankenstein as a feminist text (2)

Answer 7

“The uninhibited scientific penetration and technological exploitation of female nature is only one dimension of a patriarchal encoding of the female as passive and possessable, the willing receptacle of male desire” - Anne K. Mellor: Usurping the Female

“Frankenstein has eliminated the necessity to have females at all. One of the deepest horrors of this novel is Frankenstein’s implicit goal of creating a society for men only: his creature is male; he refuses to create a female; there is no reason that the race of immortal beings he hoped to propogate should not be exclusively male” Anne K. Mellor ^^

“by minimizing the female characters in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley made a silent protest against this stereotyped language about women in literature.” - Louise Othello Knudsen

“The male scientist who created without a female was not only a warning against the rapidly developing science but also bespoke of an increasing marginalisation of women in society and in literature” – unknown

Question 8

Critical quote on the De Lacey family (1)

Answer 8

“the De Lacey family represents an alternative ideology: a vision of the polis-as-egalitarian-family, of a society based on justice, gender equality, and mutual affection.” - Anne K. Mellor: Usurping the Female

Question 9

Critical quote on the creature

Answer 9

“the monster, whatever else it may be, represents a remarkable “body” of knowledge” […] “Frankentsein’s knowledge […] represents both threat and promise to an uninformed public” - Alan Rauch

Some critics have suggested Shelley’s monster may be read as an emblem of the French Revolution itself; a “gigantic body politic” as Anne Mellor states, which originated “in a desire to benefit all mankind but was so abused that it is driven into an uncontrollable rage”

Maurice Hindle points out that the Frankenstein monster image is appropriated repeatedly to signal the threat ‘revolting mobs’ posed to an increasingly affluent bourgeois class.

“The creature has become a metaphor for our own cultural crises” - Levine

Question 10

Critical quotes on Victor Frankenstein

Answer 10

“Frankenstein is searching after forbidden knowledge, one of those over reachers who refuse to accept limitations and are subsequently punished” – Punter

Question 11

Critical quotes on the doppleganger (2)

Answer 11

“we wonder whose story we are hearing. Is the monster’s tale a demonic projection of Frankenstein’s tormented psyche?

“Frankenstein offers a narrative of excessive duplication and reduplication of dreamlike regressions and endless mirroring” - Vijay Mishra

“incarnation of Frankenstein’s own grotesque soul”
Susan Snaider Lanser (1992)

Question 12

Critical quotes on Frankenstein as an autobiographical text

Answer 12

“Frankenstein is also presumed to reveal, or betray, many different and opposing attitudes she may have held towards those around her.”[Sic] (Botting, 1991: 75)

Question 13

Critical quotes on narrative technique to enhance the horror

Answer 13

“when 19th century writers turned to supernatural materials calculated to disturb their audiences, they often sought an analogous realism through epistolary and documentary styles”

• Jason Marc Harris: Folklore and the fantastic in 19th century British fiction (2008)

Question 14

Critical quotes on monsters and men

Answer 14

“The boundaries between the human and the monster in Frankenstein remain problematically blurred.” - Williams

Question 15

Critical quotes on terror and horror (their differences)

Answer 15

“it is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realisation” - Devendra Varma

Question 16

Critical quotes on Paradise Lost in relation to Frankenstein

Answer 16

Paradise Lost “elaborates upon the connections between two kinds of myth: a myth of creation and a myth of transgression. Frankenstein does this too, but its sinister travesty collapses the two kinds of myth together so that now creation and transgression appear to be the same thing”

• Chris Baldick

Question 17

Critical quotes on the education of the creature

Answer 17

“he is educated only to know the full extent of his exclusion, denied social identity by the very society he longs to join”

• Anne McWhir

Question 18

Critical quotes on settings

Answer 18

“the landscape becomes a reflection of an internal state of mind”

• York Notes

“heightened appreciation of Nature, engendered by Romantic poetry, was partly of a growing literary interest in the individual self, in state of feeling that affect and are affected by our perceptions of the external world”

• David Lodge

“The gloom and horror of Gothic landscapes become markers of internal psychological states rather than embodiments of external threats”

• York Notes

Question 19

Critical quotes on the female

Answer 19

“female characters are just copies; part of an extensive series of reproductions of the devoted daughter/wife/mother” - York Notes

Question 20

Critical quotes on Clerval

Answer 20

“The contrast between Victor and Clerval is reflected in the naming of the characters. Clerval suggests ‘clear valley’ while Frankenstein may be translated as ‘open rock’ “

• Peter Dale Scott

Question 21

Critical quotes on the Gothic

Answer 21

“The transgressive acts generally focus on corruption in, or resistance to, the patriarchal structures that shaped the country’s political life and its family life, and gender roles within those structures come in for particular scrutiny”

• Donna Heiland

Gothic fiction of the 19th century have a three-part structure. The text “first invites or admits a monster, then entertains and is entertained by monstrosity for some extended duration, until in its closing pages it expels or repudiates the monster and all the disruptions that it brings”

• Christopher Craft

Question 22

Critical quote on the killing of Elizabeth

Answer 22

“by killing Elizabeth, the creature is acting what Victor, subconsciously, desires to do; kill Elizabeth and thus avoiding sexual intimacy” - Joseph Kestner

Question 23

Critical quotes on Mary Shelley

Answer 23

“Mary Shelley doubted the legitimacy of her own literary voice, a doubt that determined her decision to speak through three male narrators” - Anne Mellor

Question 24

Critical quotes on Paradise Lost and Prometheus

Answer 24

“Paradise Lost with its anti-authoritarian themes has such an important role in the text, implies support for revolutionary activity”

” ‘The Modern Prometheus’ suggests not only awareness of the rebellious element of her story but a desire to draw them to the attention of the reader.”

• All: Jane Blumberg

Question 25

Critical quotes on the novel itself

Answer 25

What can be asserted however is that Mary Shelley’s ‘hideous progeny’ will continue to ‘go forth and prosper’ and is an important literary, historical, cultural and social document in its own right” - Siv Jansson