Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from March, 2018

“Alternative” View

In his study on the Gothic wanderer, Tyler Tichelaar comments that one reason Frankenstein is an unusual masculine Gothic novel, is that it was written by a woman, the most unusual Mary Shelley. “Masculine Gothics,” he says, “are usually written by men and contain male main characters who fail as heroes” (35). Certainly Victor Frankenstein, that figure who searches for forbidden knowledge, rails against the limitations of natural philosophy, and defies his scientific colleagues by subscribing to the derided lessons of the past is a failed hero, but who is his Adam, he who is “irrevocably excluded” from “everywhere [he] sees bliss” (ch. 10 Shelly)? When they meet at the Alpine glacier, Dr. Frankenstein labels his creature “Devil” and “Abhorred Monster” (ch. 10 Shelly), but it is Victor Frankenstein’s unfettered obsession and casual disregard for the sanctity and mystery of life that both created and doomed the monster “to a perpetual life of horror and glum.” In his victo