Frankenstein critics Flashcards
Dr Bhagwat and Tanya D’souza
Essay: Master-Slave dialect and miming a postcolonial analysis of subjectivity.
“nuances of racial stereotypes projected in the narrative of Frankenstein”
Coffee
Essay: Frankenstein and Slave Narrative
Shelley “works perceptively and innovatively within the logic of the master and slave dynamic”
“their fates are bound up with one another”
Andrew Griffin
Essay: Fire and Ice in Frankenstein
“nowhere is it [Fire] more confidently located, or more necessary to thought and discourse, than in the very seat of life, the inner world of human feeling”
Rosemary Jackson
Essay: Narcissism and Beyond. A psychoanalytical analysis
“The monster is Frankenstein’s lost selves, pieces of himself from which he has been severed, and with which he seeks re-unification, hence his reluctance to kill it.”
Abdul Jan Mohammed
“The colonizer’s assumption of a moral superiority means that he will not be inclined to expend any energy in understanding the worthless alterity of the colonized”
Smith
2004
The monster’s thoughts on Justine was a “sinister rape fantasy”
Sawyer
“The monster’s savage strength is obvious in his bare-handed strangling of William, Henry and Elizabeth, a kind of murder anecdotally attributed to runaway slaves who often had no means to procure sophisticated weapons of any sort”
Liminality in Frankenstein
“The fact that he falls between the two mirrors his inner conflict; the conflict that is typical of Gothic protagonists.”
Liminality in Frankenstein
“The creature is both miserably alone and triumphant - he stands between the two.”
Chris Bond
Newspaper Article: Is it really about the dangers of science?
“It is not realistic, but rather hocus-pocus, and serves a representative purpose.”
Chris Bond
Newspaper Article: Is it really about the dangers of science?
“His life with Elizabeth is asexual, living mostly as brother and sister, and when sexuality threatens to enter the relationship with their engagement, he cuts himself off from friends, family and fiancée for two years, while creating a means by which the reproductive faculty of the fiancée would become redundant.”
Chris Bond
Newspaper Article: Is it really about the dangers of science?
Science is a side issue, for the dangers of Frankenstein, and the Gothic in general, are much closer to home.
Paul Cantor
Essay: The nightmare of romantic idealism
“Frankenstein does God’s work, creating a man, but he has the devil’s motives: pride and the will to power”
Shelley
1831
“my hideous progeny”
Dr Mike Rossington
“the novel seems to suggest how destructive it can be if male values come to dominate. The women, while being beautiful and warm, are proved largely ineffective and are in the main victims.”
Film: The Curse of Frankenstein
- The portrayal of Frankenstein
When playing Frankenstein, Peter Cushing is always amazed by his creations. In the book, Victor is appalled by the monster’s appearance when he is born.
Chris Bond
Magazine: Is it really about the dangers of science?
“Instead, his vanity and ego promote extravagant notions for his positioning at the head of all hierarchies, denying God as the sole creator of man.”
Sharon Ruston
Essay: The science of life and death in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
“When Victor Frankenstein creates the creature, he collapses because of a nervous illness and describes himself in this state as “lifeless”.”
Chris Bond
Essay: Is it really about science?
“his creation craves human contact, and desperately pleads for a companion capable of accepting him”.
Dr Mike Rossington (chief lecturer on Romantic Literature in Newcastle University)
In an interview
“She believed in the value of science and running through her novel there is a strong thread of intellectual excitement about all it had to offer.”
January 1818
The Quarterly Review
‘a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity’
Judy Simons
Essay: Order, Narrative, Chaos
“The reader is thus primed to accompany Walton on a psychological journey into a desolate and disconcerting landscape”
Alan Rauch
On monsters desire for mate
the monster, in asking for a mate, is merely trying to find a social context for his own existence.
