HUM 3905: Junior Seminar in the Humanities Deconstructing the Modern Prometheus: The Case of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein HUM 3905: Junior Seminar in the Humanities Spring 2014 Dr. Perdigao January 15, 2014

Envisioning Technology Term technology—from Greek noun meaning “a systematic treatment” (Rhodes 22) Machines, technology, science Conflation of science and technology (Rhodes 22) Old and new technology Prometheus and Eve as examples—curiosity and caution Changing ideas about creation—from religious contexts to modern industry and scientific experimentation Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines, Systems and the Human World, Ed. Richard Rhodes

The Path to Modernity “By relying on convention, eighteenth-century writers could be seen as trying to control an unstable world. The classical past, for many, provided an emblem of that stability, a standard of permanence. But some felt that the high valuing of the past was problematic, the problem epitomized by the quarrel of ancients versus moderns in England and France. At stake in this controversy was, among other things, the value of permanence as opposed to the value of change.” (Lawall 6) “Those proud to be moderns, on the other hand, held that men (possibly even women) standing on the shoulders of the ancients could see further than their predecessors. The new was conceivably more valuable than the old. One might discover flaws even in revered figures of the classical past. And not everything had yet been accomplished.” (Lawall 6) Ideas about progress, modernization Man’s ability to create and manipulate life The possibilities and limitations of science and technology

Literary Theory: The Basics Formalism/New Criticism Biographical Criticism Reader Response Structuralism Linguistics Narratology Semiotics Mythological Criticism/Archetypal Criticism Race, class, gender, sexual orientation New Historicism/Cultural Criticism Marxist Theory Constructions of class, class conflict Feminist Criticism/Gender Studies/Queer Theory Critical Race Theory Postcolonial Theory

Literary Theory: The Basics Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Theory Psychoanalytic Theory Freud and Lacan Deconstruction Absent present Decentered center Binary oppositions—from either/or to and/both

From New Criticism to Deconstruction: On Themes Question of reason Creation—scientific and religious discourses Politics, construction of society Role of women Masculinist pursuits Death, loss, and recovery

Biographical Criticism: Mary Shelley (1797-1851) Mary W. Godwin born in 1797 to William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft; mother dies ten days after her birth 1801: William Godwin marries Mary Jane Clairmont who has children Charles and Jane (Claire); join Mary and Fanny 1812: Percy Shelley begins correspondence with Godwin; visits Godwin house; eventually meets Mary 1814: Mary returns home; starts affair with Percy; they elope, bringing Claire; Harriet Shelley gives birth to second child 1815: Mary gives birth to daughter who dies 1816: Mary gives birth to son William; leave England for Geneva; meet Byron; Mary writes Frankenstein; Fanny commits suicide; Harriet Shelley drowns; Mary and Percy marry 1817: Mary gives birth to daughter Clara 1818: Frankenstein published in January; Clara dies 1819: Return to Rome; William dies; Mary writes Mathilda, not published in lifetime; gives birth to Percy Florence

Biographical Criticism: Mary Shelley (1797-1851) 1822: Mary almost dies from miscarriage; Percy lost at sea 1823: Valperga published; second edition of Frankenstein published; Mary returns to London 1824: Mary begins work on The Last Man; her edition of Percy’s Posthumous Poems published but suppressed 1826: The Last Man published; Charles, Percy’s son, dies 1830: Perkin Warbek, fourth novel, published 1835: Mary contributes sections in Cabinet Cyclopaedia 1836: William Godwin dies 1837: Falkner, Mary’s last novel, published 1839: Mary prepares and publishes four-volume edition of Percy’s Poetical Works 1851: Mary dies in London; buried between her parents

Archetypal Criticism: Tracing Prometheus Greek mythology; Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound; Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound Ovid’s Metamorphoses (she was reading in 1815): plasticator, “figure who creates and manipulates men into life, rather than ‘saves’ them” (xxviii) Prometheus account in Hesiod’s Theogony and Work and Days Punishment from Zeus for transgression Ovid’s Metamorphoses, shifts emphasis to celebrate act of creation Prometheus’ act of creation—viewed as transgression, requiring punitive measures, or to be celebrated Ideas about science and technology Tragic hero in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound Percy Shelley returns to story with Prometheus as allegorical figure for the Romantics, transgressing prescribed boundaries Mary Shelley’s revision of the story with Frankenstein: calls Enlightenment and Romantic ideas into question

New Historicism: Weird Science Galvanism—Luigi Galvani (1737-98), Italian physiologist and experimenter, studied “animal electricity” in nerves and muscles of animals, experimenting with frogs (267) Humphry Davy, electrochemistry and discoverer of potassium and sodium, experimental chemist (xxix); Mary was reading Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812) and A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry (1802), in 1816, progressive views Conversations in 1816 in Geneva between Percy, Dr. Polidori, and Byron on the “nature of the principle of life” (xl), experimental science in physiology 1803 Giovanni Aldini, nephew of Luigi Galvani, published a book on “galvanic experiments in public” on the body of a “freshly executed criminal” (xli)

Science Ed “eager desire to learn,” “secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn,” the “metaphysical,” the “physical secrets of the world” (39) Cornelius Agrippa: ancient as “chimerical” and “modern science” as “real and practical” (41), but Victor is unaware Paracelsus (Swiss alchemist and physician, empirical observation), and Albertus Magnus (Dominican theologian, magic to pursuit of knowledge, natural science), reference to Newton Untaught peasant versus most learned philosopher: “He might dissect, anatomise, and give names; but, not to speak of a final cause, causes in their secondary and tertiary grades were utterly unknown to him” (41)

New Historicism Characteristics of Romanticism sacredness of the individual suspicion of social institutions belief in expressed feeling as the sign of authenticity nostalgia for simpler ways of being faith in genius valuing of originality and imagination an ambivalent relation to science (492)

New Historicism Godwin’s “rational philosophy”: new system based on “universal benevolence” a just and virtuous society, emerging from the “exercise of reason and free will” developed in an enlightened society that is free from “superstitions of religion, the despotisms of government and the property fetishes attached to marriage and inheritance, for all these tended towards the establishment of selfishness, division and malevolence” (xxxii), contradicts 17th century Hobbesian view of “self-interested” man Godwin’s “Enlightenment insight into the dangers of putting the ‘abstracted’ pursuit of knowledge before collective responsibility and happiness” (xxxiii) “The Romantic idealism of Shelley and his ‘over-reaching’ heroes was, like all idealisms, based on a faith in man’s, or more correctly, men’s supposedly ‘divine’ or creative powers. It is Mary Shelley’s critique of where such highly abstracted creative powers can lead when put in a ‘realizing’ scientific context and then driven along by ‘lofty ambition’ and ‘high destiny’”(xxiv). 18th century French philosophes, Diderot and Condillac, following John Locke (xxxiv); tabula rasa theory

On Print Culture 1818, 1823, and 1831 Influence of Percy Shelley, his death in 1831 Changes to original Revision of Elizabeth Account of education

The Monster Metaphor and Marxist Theory Edmund Burke’s use of the metaphor in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), monster as armed insurrection (xliii) “During their systematic efforts to understand the Revolution and its outcome in Napoleonic despotism, Mary and Percy Shelley read not only the works of radicals like Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, but also conservatives and anti-Jacobins, among them Burke and Abbé Barruel” (xliii) Marxist interpretation—text born of “the fear of bourgeois civilization” (xliii) “Monster” metaphor popularized during the 1830s with calls for democratic reform in England (xliii), but also before as warning for dangers of reform during the French Revolution and the Terror

Feminist Theory Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): importance of education for women Caroline, Elizabeth, Justine, Safie Female creature “My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to the chain of existence and events, from which I am now excluded.” (150) Idea of the female creation— “thinking and reasoning animal” (170); destroys her (175)

The Case of the Modern Prometheus “What kinds of action can be defended as reasonable? What are we to make of the discrepancy between the ‘mad’ scientist’s reason, and the ‘Godwinian’ reason exercised by his ‘hideous progeny’?” (Hindle xii). Choose a side . . . Who or what is to blame for the destruction in the novel? Victor Frankenstein The creature Society Science

Casting Robert Walton Mrs. Saville, Margaret Victor’s mother Caroline Beaufort Alphonse Frankenstein Elizabeth Lavenza Father, a Milanese nobleman, German mother died during childbirth (36-7) Henry Clerval Justine Moritz William Ernest

Casting Krempe (47) Waldman (49) De Lacey Agatha Felix Safie

The story within the story: Evolution “Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?” (122). The Comte de Volney’s Ruins of Empires: philosophy of history Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (100 AD) Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) “Romantic cyclopedia universalis” (271) (130) “Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?” (131)

Evolution of the Creature “I observed, with pleasure, that he did not go to the forest that day, but spent it in repairing the cottage and cultivating the garden” (114). “I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers—their grace, beauty, and delicate complexions: but how I was terrified, when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification. Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal effects of this miserable deformity” (117). De Lacey’s and Safie’s stories (125) Persecution of Safie’s Turkish merchant father because of “his religion and wealth rather than the crime alleged against him” (125) in Paris Perpetual exile for the De Lacey family due to involvement in plot—exile to Germany (128) Justice system—inhumanity (Justine, Safie’s father, De Laceys)

Didacticism Elizabeth’s death (199) Retells story to magistrate (202), “Chinese box structure” Rewrites the story (213) “When younger. . . I believed myself destined for some great enterprise. . . From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition; but how am I sunk” (214) “Seek happiness in tranquility, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries” (220)

Last Words Description of creature (221) “Evil thenceforth became my good” (222): Milton “I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filed with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness” (223). “I shall collect my funeral pile” (225).

Contextualizing Frankenstein http://www.nlm.nih.gov/frankenstein/ (The Birth of Frankenstein: Boundary Crossings in 1818-Body Parts; The Celluloid Monster; Promise and Peril) http://www.pbs.org/teachers/thismonth/technology/index3.html Norma Rowen, “The Making of Frankenstein’s Monster: Post-Golem, Pre-Robot”: http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/rowen.html

The Legacy of Frankenstein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H3dFh6GA-A The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026138/?ref_=fn_al_tt_4 Young Frankenstein (1974) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072431/?ref_=nv_sr_1 Frankenstein (1994) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109836/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2 Frankenweenie (2012) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1142977/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 I, Frankenstein (2014) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1418377/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1