Paper -3 Assigment

• Name : Asari Bhavyang  

• Roll no :-4

• Enrollment No:-3069206420200002

• Course:-M.A (English)Sem1

• Subject:-Literature of The Neo-Classical period

• Topic:- critically analyze Frankenstein as a Gothic scientific fiction

• Teacher Name :- Dilip Barad sir 

• Batch :- 2020-2022

• Email :- asaribhavyang7874@gmail.com

[1.] critically analyze Frankenstein as a Gothic scientific fiction?

Mary Shelley :-

Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Somers Town, London, in 1797. She was the second child of the feminist philosopher, educator and writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the first child of the philosopher, novelist and journalist William Godwin. Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever shortly after Mary was born. Godwin was left to bring up Mary, along with her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft's child by the American speculator Gilbert Imlay.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and feminist activist Mary Wollstonecraft.

video lecture on Frankenstein :-

Frankenstein :-

The plot begins with a Captain Walton waiting for passage into Russia. He discovers an emancipated man on the ice in his journey and this man is Victor Frankenstein. Victor introduces himself and starts his story beginning with his childhood. Victor was born in Naples where he lived with his parents and brothers. Their parents adopt Elizabeth whom Victor falls for later on.
Some weeks before Victor leaves for University, Elizabeth and his mother contract scarlet fever and his mother’s condition deteriorates. Grief-stricken Victor tries to find ways to handle this problem using science. He starts by developing a way to reanimate non-living matter. He extends his research further and decides to create a human. Putting together parts of different bodies, he succeeds, but his creation turns out to be hideous. The creature wakes up, and Victor runs away, disgusted.
He runs into Henry, his friend on the street and decides to take him back to his apartment. Victor fears what Henry will have to say when he sees what he had created, but when they get there, the creature had escaped. Henry becomes ill after this and is nursed back to health in four months. Henry receives information that his youngest sibling had been killed and returns home. Henry spots the creature from a distance in the crime scene and becomes certain that it had done it.

Victor goes to hide in the mountains, but the creature finds him. The creature pleads with Victor to create another that looked like him so it would not be alone. The creature argues that if Victor made him a companion, they would retreat into the wilderness and if not he would destroy victors family.
Victor starts on the female companion but in fear, destroys it, convinced it would be the eviler than the former.  The creature vows vengeance and kills Henry, then plants the body to ensure victor was blamed for the murder. The creature goes on to kill Elizabeth, and Victor vows to take revenge on the beast. He follows it to the north pole where he falls due to hypothermia and exhaustion. Walton resumes his story from here. Walton saw the creature and pursued it only for the ship to get stuck in ice. He takes Victor’s story as a warning and turns the ship around. He then finds the creature mourning over Victor’s body. He vows to kill himself and retreats in the darkness.

Gothic fiction :-

The term Gothic fiction refers to a style of writing that is characterized by elements of fear, horror, death, and gloom, as well as romantic elements, such as nature, individuality, and very high emotion. These emotions can include fear and suspense.

This style of fiction began in the mid 1700s with a story titled, The Castle of Otranto in 1764, by Horace Walpole. This story was about a doomed family and is filled with death, desire, and intrigue. This story is considered to be the first of the Gothic fiction tales, since it encompassed many of the characteristics of the genre. The term Gothic actually originated as a term belittling the architecture and art of the period, which was dark, decaying, and dismal.

The settings were often old, dilapidated buildings or houses in gloomy, lifeless, fear-inducing landscapes The Fall of the House of Usher, mentioned later, is a great example of the use of nature and setting as a fearful element. Much of the literature involved monsters, such as vampires, who brought suffering and death to the forefront. There were also stories that simply displayed these elements of fear and suffering in the settings themselves.

Gothic fiction, sometimes Gothic horror in the 20th century, is a genre of literature and film that incorporates horror, death and at times romance. It is said to originate with the English author Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, later subtitled "A Gothic Story". Early contributors included Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, William Thomas Beckford and Matthew Lewis. It tends to stress emotion and a pleasurable terror that expands the Romantic literature of the time. The common "pleasures" were the sublime, which indescribably "takes us beyond ourselves." Such extreme Romanticism was popular throughout Europe, especially among English and German-language authors. Its 19th-century success peaked with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and works by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens , and in poetry with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Also well known was the later Dracula by Bram Stoker. The name Gothic spread from the Goths to mean "German". It also conjures up the Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, where many of the stories take place. Twentieth-century contributors include Daphne du Maurier, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice and Toni Morrison.

Frankenstein as a Gothic Novel :- 

The first Gothic horror novel was The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, published in 1754. Perhaps the last type of novel in this mode was Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, published in 1847. In between 1754 and 1847, several other novels appeared using the Gothic horror story as a central story telling device, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1794) by Ann Radcliffe, The Monk (1796) by Matthew G. Lewis, and Melmouth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin.

Gothic novels focus on the mysterious and supernatural. In Frankenstein, Shelley uses rather mysterious circumstances to have Victor Frankenstein create the monster: the cloudy circumstances under which Victor gathers body parts for his experiments and the use of little known modern technologies for unnatural purposes. Shelley employs the supernatural elements of raising the dead and macabre research into unexplored fields of science unknown by most readers. She also causes us to question our views on Victor's use of the dead for scientific experimentation. Upon hearing the story for the first time, Lord Byron is said to have run screaming from the room, so the desired effect was achieved by Mary Shelley.

Gothic novels also take place in gloomy places like old buildings , dungeons, or towers that serve as a backdrop for the mysterious circumstances. A familiar type of Gothic story is, of course, the ghost story. Also, far away places that seem mysterious to the readers function as part of the Gothic novel's setting. Frankenstein is set in continental Europe, specifically Switzerland and Germany, where many of Shelley's readers had not been. Further, the incorporation of the chase scenes through the Arctic regions takes us even further from England into regions unexplored by most readers. Likewise, Dracula is set in Transylvania, a region in Romania near the Hungarian border. Victor's laboratory is the perfect place to create a new type of human being. Laboratories and scientific experiments were not known to the average reader, thus this was an added element of mystery and gloom.

Just the thought of raising the dead is gruesome enough. Shelley takes full advantage of this literary device to enhance the strange feelings that Frankenstein generates in its readers. The thought of raising the dead would have made the average reader wince in disbelief and terror. Imagining Victor wandering the streets of Ingolstadt or the Orkney Islands after dark on a search for body parts adds to the sense of revulsion purposefully designed to evoke from the reader a feeling of dread for the characters involved in the story.

In the Gothic novel, the characters seem to bridge the mortal world and the supernatural world. Dracula lives as both a normal person and as the undead, moving easily between both worlds to accomplish his aims. Likewise, the Frankenstein monster seems to have some sort of communication between himself and his creator, because the monster appears wherever Victor goes. The monster also moves with amazing superhuman speed with Victor matching him in the chase towards the North Pole. Thus, Mary Shelley combines several ingredients to create a memorable novel in the Gothic tradition.

Reference :-

1. Seymour, Miranda. Mary Shelly. Faber, 2011.
2. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus : the 1818 Text. Oxford ; New York :Oxford University Press, 1998.
3. WASSON, SARA, and EMILY ALDER, editors. Gothic Science Fiction: 1980–2010. 1st ed., vol. 41, Liverpool University Press, 2011. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vj98n. Accessed 15 Feb. 2021.

Thank you 

Dilip Barad sir

Words :-1560