Study of Frankenstein in the light of Cultural Studies

Topic: Study of Frankenstein in the light of     cultural studies

Name: Ranjan P.Velari

Class: M.A Sem. 2

Paper No.: 8 (Cultural Studies)

Year: 2014-2016

Enrollment no.: 14101032

Email ID: ranjanvelari@gmail.com

Guidance: Dr.Dilip Barad

Submitted to: Smt. S.B.Gardi

                          Department of English

                          M.K.Bhavnagar University

Topic: Study of Frankenstein in the light of cultural         studies

Introduction:

The novel Frankenstein written by Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley’s novel has morphed into countless forms in both highbrow & popular culture, including the visual arts, fiction and nonfiction, stage plays, film, television, advertising, clothing, jewelry, toys, key chains, coffee mugs, games, fan clubs, web sites and even food. Shelley’s creation teaches us not to underestimate the power of youth culture.

1.    Revolutionary Births:

         Born like its creator in an age of revolution, Frankenstein challenged ideas of its day. As it has become increasingly co- modified by modern consumer culture, one wonders whether its original revolutionary spirit & its critique of scientific, philosophical, political, and gender issues have become obscured, or whether instead its continuing transformation attests to its essential oppositional nature.

        George Levine remarks, Frankenstein is “a vital metaphor, peculiarly appropriate to a culture dominated by a consumer technology, neurotically obsessed with ‘getting in touch’ with its authentic self and frightened at what it is discovering.”

        The political & scientific issues of the novel, the survey it’s amazing career in popular adaptations in fiction, drama, film, and television. Perhaps no other novel addresses such critical contemporary scientific and political concerns while at the same time providing Saturday afternoon entertainment to generations.

A.   The Creature as Proletarian:

    Mary Shelley lived during times of great upheaval in Britain; not only was her own family full of radical thinkers, but she also met many others such as Thomas Paine and William Blake. In Frankenstein, what Johanna M. Smith calls the “alternation between revolutionary ardor and fear of the masses?”  Mary Shelley’s Creature is a political and moral paradox, both an innocent and a cold-blooded murderer.

   Monsters like the Creature are indeed paradoxical; on the one hand, they transgress against “the establishment”: if the monster survives he represents the defiance of death, an image of survival, however disfigured. On the other hand, we are reassured when we see that society can capture and destroy monsters. Such dualism would explain the great number of Frankenstein-as-mutant movies that appeared rebellious nature is rooted for in the past.

    In the Delacy’s shed he reads three books, beginning with Paradise Lost. Not only is the eternal Paradise Lost relevant to the Creature’s predicament, but in the Shelley’s time Milton’s epic poem was seen, as Timothy Morton puts it, as “a seminal work of republicanism and thus sublime that inspired many of the Romantics.”

    The Creature next reads a volume from ‘Plutarch Lives’, which in the early 19^th century was read as “a classic republican text, admired in the Enlightenment by such writers as Rousseau”.

   Goethe’s ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, the Creature’s third book, is the prototypical rebellious Romantic novel. In short, says Morton, “the creature’s idealistic education is radical”. But the Creature’s idealistic education does him little good, and he has no chance of reforming society so that it will accept him. His self-education is his even more tragic second births into an entire culture impossible for him to inhabits, however well he understands its great writings about freedom.

B.   “A Race of Devils”:  

     Frankenstein may be analyzed in its portrayal of different “races”. Though the Creature’s skin is only described as yellow, it has been constructed “out of a cultural tradition of the threatening ‘other’- whether troll or giant, gypsy or Negro- from the dark inner recessed of xenophobic fear and loathing”, as H.L. Malchow remarks. Antislavery discourse had a powerful effect on the depiction of Africans in Shelley’s day, from gaudily dressed exotics to naked objects of pity.

      Frankenstein’s Creature also recalls theories of polygeny and autogenesis from German race theorists of the day. But Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes the novel as a critique of empire and racism, pointing out that “social engineering should not be based upon pure, theoretical, or natural-scientific reason alone…”

     Frankenstein’s ‘language of racism- the dark side of imperialism understood as social mission-combines with the hysteria of masculism into the idiom of sexual reproduction rather than subject-constitution’. The novel is “written from the perspective of a narrator ‘from below’”.

C.    From Natural Philosophy to Cyborg:

    Today in an age of genetic engineering, biotechnology, and cloning, the most far-reaching industrialization of life forms to date, Frankenstein is more relevant than ever. Developments in science were increasingly critical to society during the Romantic period, when a paradigm shift occurred from science as natural philosophy to science as biology, a crucial distinction in Frankenstein. As described in ‘Frankenstein: penetrating the secrets of Nature’, an exhibit mounted in 2002 by the National Library of Medicine, Mary Shelley attended public demonstrations of the effect of electricity on animal and human bodies, living and dead. At an 1802 show in London, electricity was applied to the ears of a freshly severed ox head, and to the amazement of the crowd the eyes opened and both tongue and head shook. The experiments of Luigi Galvani, an Italian physicist and physician who discovered that he could use electricity to induce muscle contractions, were among the scientific topics discussed in the Geneva Villa by Percy Shelley, Byron, and Polidori.

     According to cultural critic Laura Kranzler, Victor’s creation of life and modern sperm banks and artificial wombs show a “masculine desire to claim female reproductively”. Frankenstein and its warnings about the hubris of science will be with us in the future as science continues to question the borders between life and death, between “viability” and “selective reduction”, between living and life support.

2.    The Frankenpheme in Popular Culture: Fiction, Drama, Film, Television:

   In the ‘Routledge Literary Sourcebook’ on Frankenstein, Timothy Morton uses the term Frankenphemes, drawn from ‘phonemes’, as “elements of culture that are derived from Frankenstein.” Either a separate work of art is inspired, or some kernel is derived from Shelley’s novel and repeated in another medium. Broadly defined, Frankenphemes demonstrates the extent of the novel’s presence in world cultures, as the encoding of race and class in the 1824 Canning speech in parliament, in today’s global debates about such things as genetically engineered foods, and of course in fiction and other media. We end with a quick look at some of the thousand of retellings, parodies; and other selected Frankenphemes as they have appeared in popular fiction, drama, film, and television.

A.   “The Greatest Horror Story Novel Ever Written”:

   Frankenstein’s fictions Peter Haining, editor of the indispensable ‘Frankenstein Omnibus’, has called Frankenstein “the single greatest horror story novel ever written and the most widely influential in its genre.” In Renaissance Italy, a scientist constructs a mechanical man to ring the hours on a bell in a tall tower, but it turns instead upon its Creator.

  The first story about a female monster is French author Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s “The Future Eve”, an 1886 novelette not translated into English until 50 years later, in which an American inventor modeled on Thomas Edison makes an artificial woman for his friend and benefactor, a handsome young lord who has despaired of finding a mate.

  Frankenstein inspired the set of tales published in ‘Home Brew’ magazine called “The Reanimator” by H.P. Lovecraft, which later became a cult classic movie. “Herbert West: Reanimator”(1986), the saga of a young experimenter, barred from medical school, who practices unholy arts on the corpses of human beings and reptiles. “The Reanimator” helped initiate the “splatter film” genre. There have been numerous illustrated editions of Frankenstein for children, from full-scale reprinting to comic books. There is a surprising amount of Frankenstein- inspired erotica, especially gay- and lesbian- oriented.

B.   Frankenstein on the Stage:

From his debut on the stage, the Creature has generally been made more horrific, and Victor has been assigned less blame. Most stage and screen versions are quite melodramatic, tending to eliminate minor characters and the entire frame structure in order to focus upon murder and mayhem. In stage versions, only a few key scenes-the creation scene, the bridal night, and the destruction of the Creature-are used. On the 19^th century stage, the Creature was a composite of frightening makeup and human qualities. He could even appear clownish, recalling Shakespeare’s Caliban.

  The first theatrical presentation based on Frankenstein was ‘Presumption, or, The Fate of Frankenstein’ by Richard Brinsley Peake, performed at the English Opera House in London in the summer of 1823 and subsequently revived many times. Mary Shelley herself attended the play and pronounced it authentic.

    In more modern times Frankenstein has been a staple of many stages. ‘Frankenstein and His Bride’ was performed at a club called Strip City in Los Angeles in the late 1950s.

C.    Film Adaptations:

    In the ‘Frankenstein Omnibus’, readers can study the screenplay for the 1931 James Whale film Frankenstein, the most famous of all adaptations. It was loosely based on the novel with the addition of new elements, including the placing of a criminal brain into the monster’s body. The first film version of Frankenstein, however, was produced by Thomas Edison in 1910, a one-reel tinted silent.

   Whale’s Frankenstein and especially Boris Karloff’s performance have had the greatest influence on subsequent portrayals, and the changes Whale made to the story have also stuck: his grunting creature has been dumbed down from Shelley’s novel; Victor is called “Henry” Frankenstein- noble though a bit mad; an assistant named Fritz is added, who is responsible for getting the criminal brain; and there is a happy ending, with “Henry” saved. The criminal brain reflects the biological determinism popular among Americans in the early decades of the 20^th century. People considered heredity rather than environment, economic systems, or education to be the critical factor in problems of social unrest, immigration, unemployment, and crime, and they looked to such pseudo sciences as eugenics to promote the reproduction of groups judged to have sound genetic backgrounds and prevent those who did not.

   In Whale’s ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ (1935), there is a return to the frame structure, but this time we begin with Mary Shelley discussing her novel with Percy and Byron, she is played by Elsa Lanchester, who also plays the female creature, with her darting black eyes and Queen Nefertiti hair. Unlike the first Whale film, this one tends toward comedy, parody, and satire rather than pure horror. Some viewers note its attacks on sacred institutions like marriage and its gay subtext. ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ construes the Creature more as an innocent victim, showing that he kills only when provoked. The dramatic focus is on the posse that is after him; as Albert Lavalley explains, “The blindness of the rage expressed toward the Monster and his half-human incomprehension of it thus recaptures much of the bleak horror of the book, its indictment of society; and its picture of man’s troubled consciousness.”

D.   Television Adaptations:

Frankenstein has surfaced in hundreds of television adaptations, including ‘Night Gallery’, ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’, ‘Scooby-Doo’, ‘Frankenstein Jr. and the Impossible, Alvin and the Chipmunks’, ‘The Simpsons’, ‘Wishbone’, and so on.

Conclusion:

So, we can conclude that Frankenstein novel related to highbrow and popular culture in film, drama, fiction, and television. And with regard to the text “historical context”, Frankenstein is interpreted as allegorical of the industrial revolution.