Frankenstein
Literary Gothic in Special Collections
Brontë family manuscripts in Special Collections
Oscar Wilde in Special Collections
Twentieth century gothic: Dennis Wheatley & Sophie Hannah
Dr David Higgins, Associate Professor in English Literature introduces Frankenstein:
Often taken as a straightforward warning about the dangers of unchecked human ambition and scientific experimentation, Frankenstein is in fact a complex and ambivalent novel that refuses to find easy answers to difficult questions. Written by Mary Shelley in her late teens, it addresses the innovations of its age, as well as drawing on a wide range of older sources and contexts.
Subtitled ‘The Modern Prometheus’ and featuring extensive allusions to John Milton’s epic religious poem Paradise Lost (1667), it is concerned with what happens when humans explore areas traditionally thought of as the prerogative of the divine, but does not necessarily suggest that such explorations are unjustified. Similarly, it takes a sceptical approach to the utopian imaginings associated in the period with scientific discoveries and political revolution (and often articulated by Mary’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley) without promoting a conservative agenda.
A key reason for its complexity is its innovative narrative structure, in which the Arctic explorer Robert Walton frames the stories told by Victor Frankenstein and the being he creates only to reject. This self-reflexive narrative form, as well as the novel’s concern with discovered texts and stories, has made it a goldmine for literary critics.
It shares a number of tropes with earlier Gothic novels: sublime landscapes, extreme psychological states, macabre occurrences, and supernatural entities. However, unlike most of these texts, it is concerned not with looking back into more barbaric past, but with imagining what human beings might attempt in the future. For that reason it is sometimes seen as the first science fiction novel.
