Jerrold E. Hogle, "The Dream of Frankenstein:
An Introduction"
There are really two main "dreams" in Mary Shelley's original Frankenstein
novel: Victor Frankenstein's daydream about the grand future effects
of his creating artifical life and the nightmare into which he falls
after he recoils from his finished creature in revulsion and exhaustion.
This second dream, quite complex, has become the subject of many interpretations,
particularly in the twentieth century. Even so, I raise a number of
questions that these previous readings have not answered and show how
the rest of the essays in this collection respond to those in new and
striking ways. In recounting the most influential existing interpretions,
I also show how many profound cultural and psychological issues are
raised by both of Victor's dreams, especially his nightmare about embracing
his dead mother. As a result, the newer interpretations offered here
address some major unresolved quandaries in the history of Western culture.
Mainly through the work of my fellow contributor's, then, we collectively
offer new insights about long-standing issues in the West: the relationship
between sentimentality and sadism, the role and nature of parody in
human creativity, the need for several radical repressions for the enforcement
of a patriarchal society, and the parallels between dream-language and
the movement between images in modern motion pictures. Because of the
questions raised by these readings, as well as in Frankenstein's dream,
these essays claim, we are thrown back on and must therefore confront
the most basic ways in which Western self-representation has occured
over the last several centuries.
[go to Hogle's essay]
Anne Williams, "'Mummy, possest':
Sadism and Sensibility in Shelley's Frankenstein"
Frankenstein's dream after "giving birth" suggests that the creature
represents the unspeakable body of the mother within the Symbolic Order.
Shelley's representation of female characters implies that sadism and
sensibility are complementary responses to the paradoxical views of
motherhood within patriarchy. The novel is a hybrid of male and female
Gothic narrative conventions: Frankenstein's story follows the male
Gothic trajectory of the overreacher who fails and dies. Embedded in
this story is the creature's Bildungsroman, tragically diverted from
the comic female plot. Shelley does represent her own mother; her complex
frame narrative contains, at five removes from the outer frame (Walton's
letters), the story of a woman very like Mary Wollstonecraft. Subsequent
versions of the Frankenstein myth in popular culture tend to repress
the female (as Victor refuses to create a bride for this creature);
she may appear, however, in the proliferation of horror movies about
mummies.
[go to Williams's essay]
Matthew VanWinkle, "Mocking Stupendous
Mechanisms: Romantic Parody and Frankenstein's Dream."
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, often read as an indictment of
Romantic excess, instead takes a parodic stance that opens up a critical
distance on conventionally Romantic attitudes even as it maintains a
familiarity that precludes wholesale dismissal. The novel takes its
place in an alternative Romantic tradition that reads literary activity
as inherently parodic, in which authors create not out of a void but
from a chaos of pre-existing texts. The practice of parody calls attention
to the ways in which authors are themselves readers; it also underscores
the value of eliciting imitations, flattering or otherwise, from a scribbling
readership. By mocking and partially adopting the characteristic excesses
of her contemporaries, Mary Shelley accepts the possibility of being
parodied herself, which would at least foster a future audience, however
damaging such a response might be to the fantasy of unqualified success.
Frankenstein, in the way it treats its antecedent texts, suggests
that parody in the Romantic era is less antagonistic than is often assumed.
[go to VanWinkle's essay]
John Rieder, "Patriarchal Fantasy
and the Fecal Child in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and its Adaptations"
This essay tries to account for the power that gives Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein its unusual place in literary and cultural history.
The central thesis is that the fantasy of male creation, a fantasy the
novel straightforwardly connects to Paradise Lost and Genesis,
refers consistently to the infantile sexual theory of birth by defecation.
The power of Mary Shelley's novel has much to do with its exposure of
this reference. The novel associates the infantile yet authoritative
fantasy of male birth with a pre-Oedipal economy of gift-giving and
womb envy that is desperately at odds, in the text, with the Oedipal
economy of castration and exchange. The result is that Shelley's novel
denaturalizes patriarchal authority and radically subverts its Western
mythic or religious foundation. But at the same time the novel recuperates
and conceals its own anti-patriarchal critical power by ultimately forcing
Frankenstein and his creature to submit to an Oedipal rivalry based
on the creature's desire to enter the sex/gender system ideally represented
to him by the De Lacey family. The early stage adaptations and the later
cinematic tradition even more emphatically recuperate patriarchal authority
by making castration and rivalry into the plot's dominant motifs.
[go to Rieder's essay]
Marc Redfield, "Frankenstein's
Cinematic Dream"
In this essay, Marc Redfield weaves together readings of Shelley's
novel and of James Whale's 1931 film, arguing that in different ways
both texts make legible a certain monstrousness of vision and figuration.
The film renders the monster hypervisible as an image in, and of, the
age of mechanical reproducibility, and as an uncanny icon of the "cinematic."
Shelley's novel provides an implicit critique of the fantasy of seeing-itself-seeing
that animates Whale's film by suggesting that the act of seeing cannot
be isolated from the unreliable performativity of figurative language.
The secret of life is a "sudden light" that breaks in on Victor, obliterating
his own understanding of the cognitive processes that got him to the
point of illumination. He cannot tell his secret to Walton because the
secret posseses him; his understanding and his act never catch up with
each other. The novel thus suggests that no aesthetic perception can
catch up with or understand its own technical enactment and proliferation,
while Whale's film in turn helps us recognize this monstrous predicament
as one of technoshock.
[go to Redfield's essay]
