{"id":2682,"date":"2019-10-28T18:25:51","date_gmt":"2019-10-28T18:25:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2682"},"modified":"2019-10-28T18:28:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-28T18:28:00","slug":"romantic-reimaginings-victor-victorious-frankensteins-creation-as-failed-romantic-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2682","title":{"rendered":"Romantic Reimaginings: Victor Victorious? Frankenstein’s Creation as Failed Romantic Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

Romantic Reimaginings is a BARS blog series which seeks to explore the ways in which texts of the Romantic era continue to resonate. The blog is curated by Eleanor Bryan. If you would like to publish an article in the series, please email ebryan@lincoln.ac.uk.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today on the blog, Garrett Jeter discusses Frankenstein’s monster as a metaphor for a failed Romantic revolution.<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Victor Frankenstein gazes at his Creature in admiration, then horror, in reality he contemplates a failed revolution. More, he witnesses the failure of a Romantic project. What had fuelled a passion, a glowing vision for radical improvement in human existence, ended in wrecked hopes: \u201cI had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but \u2026 the beauty of the dream vanished\u201d (43). Victor had employed science to advance a revolution in the human condition, dethroning the tyrannical rule of Nature, and realising a utopia of human happiness. As Peter Vernon notes, he speaks of his experiments \u201cin visionary terms\u201d (278). Fred Randel asserts that Frankenstein<\/em> (1818) is Shelley\u2019s \u201castute extension and complication\u201d involving revolution and revolutionary ideas (466). In his estimation, Nature\u2019s imposition of mortality on humanity constitutes oppression. Victor\u2019s creative process and quest set two ideals of Romanticism – revolutionary spirit and the glorifying appreciation of both Nature and beauty – at odds. The result is the debacle of a revolutionary dream. With Frankenstein<\/em>, Mary Shelley critiques the failure of Romanticism to achieve that vision – namely, the perfection of human existence.<\/p>\n

Victor maintains a conflicted attitude toward Nature that undermines his revolutionary dream. She is both wondrous and oppressive. He admires her but wishes to subdue her in her \u201csecret hiding places.\u201d As a Romantic admirer, Victor extols her aesthetic achievements in human appearance and design. He seems \u201cto view creation as a mystery\u201d (Vernon, 274). Nature practices artistry in endowing \u201cbeauty\u201d and a \u201cfine form\u201d to mankind (40). This handiwork includes fashioning physical perfection: \u201cstrength\u201d (40). A creator himself, Victor lauds Nature as a transcendent creative force. Nature is the perfect Designer and Builder of \u201cthe wonders of the eye and brain\u201d (40). His science, much like Romantic humanism, honours Nature in that it desires to recreate – to imitate – and preserve what Nature gives. Certainly, Victor\u2019s Romantic secular humanism admires man as an ideal of Creation, but glowing praise of the human form and construction implies a Romantic exaltation of Nature\u2019s divinity.<\/p>\n

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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, painting by Richard Rothwell<\/p><\/div>\n

Yet, the same Nature that giveth taketh away; she is both Creator and Destroyer. For this scientific revolutionary, Nature is an obsolete medieval aristocrat, an ancient relic of privilege that tyrannizes man with mortality as an encastled lord. He besieges \u201cfortifications and impediments that seemed to keep human beings from entering the citadel of nature\u201d (25). Victor regards himself as a liberator of man from mortality\u2019s chains. Authors have used the Gothic to \u201calign the author and reader with the supposedly enlightened against the anachronistic and benighted\u201d (Randel, 466). A revolutionary needs an army. His new species is a legion of \u201csoldiers\u201d who will conquer death and overthrow the ancien r\u00e9gime <\/em>of Nature. A revolutionary desires to liberate the common people: the Creature\u2019s parts originate from the corpses of the anonymous masses.<\/p>\n

Victor\u2019s Creature\u2019s body incarnates both the success and failure of the Romantic revolution. At his birth, he is a corporealized locus of Romantic and anti-Romantic principles, his physique contradictorily marrying exaltation and mockery of those ideals. Some features recall those of the Greek heroic ideal: he has proportion, perfectly balanced beauty according to natural measurements; here the Creature honours Nature. In terms of physique, he has \u201cthe work of muscles and arteries,\u201d Victor\u2019s gesture to artistry and aesthetics, including the handiwork of Nature herself (43). His hair is a \u201clustrous black\u201d and his teeth are pearly white, all \u201cluxuriances\u201d (43). In forming his Creation, Victor attempted to emulate aesthetic sensibility, for he \u201cselected the features as beautiful\u201d (43). However, Victor subverts his own glorious revolution with a \u201chorrid contrast\u201d of Romantic ideals and parodic-Romantic (43). The eyes and skin are yellow, the eyes dull, suggesting sickness and lifelessness. Dull, watery eyes mock Romantic optimism and the \u201cvision\u201d of a glowing future, metaphorizing failed foresight. Shrivelled skin opposes beautiful appearances with ugliness. Furthermore, Victor forcibly enlists Nature in his hideous experiment, raiding slaughterhouses; comely Nature participates in a grotesquerie of itself. A crowning Romantic achievement of the noble heroic ideal becomes the corporealized travesty of the Revolutionary New Human.<\/p>\n

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Frontispiece for Frankenstein<\/em>, 1831 edition<\/p><\/div>\n

Victor\u2019s valorization of the body over mind and spirit completes the Romantic failure. Privileging ancient over modern science exacerbates that debacle. In \u201cinfus[ing] a spark of being,\u201d Victor employs a mystical, neo-alchemical vivification (43). The terms Victor employs \u201crelate more to alchemy and miracle than they do to science. \u2026 [H]e is \u2026 like a magus\u201d (Vernon, 275). In Romanticism\u2019s credo, the human being\u2019s soul possesses a divine spark; that ideal valued intuition, spirit, aesthetic sensitivity\u2014transcendent components of mind. However, Victor neglects this aspect. If revolution espouses \u201cprogress,\u201d Victor states that modern science encourages him: \u201cI considered the improvement which every day takes place in science and mechanics\u201d (39). His mention of mechanics is notable; it implies privileging exclusively physical design over attention to intellectual and emotional development. He forgets to equip the revolutionary body with the necessary revolutionary mind and soul. Abdullah identifies the crux of this failure in a confused scientific perspective: \u201cIn order to go out of the infinite circle of obsolescence and achieve the desired scientific finalization, Frankenstein uses the right means, but with faulty procedure. He uses the means and resources of modern science, but he maintains the attitude of ancient chemists\u201d (47). When that body sprung from the anonymous masses in its parts, the Romantic Victor failed to imbue it with the uplift of spirit and beauty. Instead of elevating humanity, it is destroyed by undeveloped souls and conscience. Mark Hansen argues that Victor\u2019s methods undermine Romanticism: \u201cShelley highlights the impotence of inspirational science (and romantic poetry) to control its creation; the inspirational leap, she suggests, gives rise to forces which act beyond the poet-scientist\u2019s control\u201d (582). Ironically, Victor\u2019s liberatory dreams turn on themselves. While his vision is to free man to thrive, he also unchains destructive drives. Life and existence are not necessarily synonymous; full life entails the Romantic values of intuition, spirit, and aesthetic appreciation. The alchemical elixir of life contemplates only freedom from disease and mortality, not a dark heart. Perhaps the greatest travesty of Nature lies in this failed emancipation. Narcissistically, Victor sought to liberate humanity from Nature\u2019s restrictive boundaries, but unwittingly removed the restraints on the Creature\u2019s natural primitive impulses. The Romantic appreciation of Nature\u2019s beauty is mocked when he negligently frees her equally ugly side to reign.<\/p>\n

In its depiction of a hideous creation\u2019s horrific consequence, Frankenstein<\/em> critiques Romantic revolutionary ideals and their failure to achieve the radical purpose of overturning an old order for a liberated utopia. Frankenstein<\/em> articulates our contemporaneous society\u2019s reluctance to shape the ideal individual during periods of radical social change (Abdullah, 48). The Romantic Movement reacted against what it saw as the cold, sterile rationalism of the Enlightenment. What it substituted was spirit, sensitivity, and intuition. However, Victor neglects these in his reanimation. Shelley wrote to promote the liberal version of enlightenment \u201cas the only alternative to the spread of violent revolution\u201d (Randel, 466). Frankenstein\u2019s visions of beauty suffer from a conflicted perspective of Nature as both creator and destroyer, of science as working both within and outside of Nature\u2019s limits; he represents the \u201cideals of the present\u00a0 \u2026 that modern science should not adhere to certain limits\u201d (Abdullah, 48). In so doing, he both exalts and debases the Movement\u2019s ideals in the Creature\u2019s body. Romantic liberatory drives emancipate the horrific along with the comely. Shelley captures the hellish reality of the Romantic project\u2019s disaster in Victor\u2019s shocked realization; after the beauty of the dream vanishes, \u201cbreathless horror and disgust filled my heart. \u2026 [The Creature] became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived\u201d (43, 44). In this way, Victor and his Creature both uneasily combine the twin antagonists of the beautiful and the hideous.<\/p>\n

Works cited:
\n<\/span>Abdullah, Shamil Taha. \u201cThe Moulding of the Scientist Individual in Frankenstein<\/em>.\u201d The <\/em>Eski\u015fehir Osmangazi \u00dcniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi Aral\u0131k<\/em> 19:2 (2018). 37-50.
\nHansen, Mark. “Not Thus, after All, Would Life Be Given”: “Technesis”, Technology and the Parody of Romantic Poetics in “Frankenstein” Studies in Romanticism<\/em> 36:4 (1997). 575-609.
\nHindle, Maurice. \u201cVital Matters: Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein<\/em> and Romantic Science. Critical\u00a0<\/em>Survey<\/em> 2:1 Science and the Nineteenth Century (1990). 29-35.
\nL\u00f3pez-Varela Azc\u00e1rate, A. and Saavedra, E. \u201cThe Metamorphosis of the Myth of Alquemy in the Romantic Imagination of Mary and Percy B. Shelley.\u201d Icono<\/em>14, 15:1, 108-127.
\nRandel, Fred V. \u201cThe Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein.\u201d ELH\u00a0<\/em>(2003), 70:2. 465-491.
\nSha, Richard C. \u201cRomantic Skepticism about Scientific Experiment.\u201d The Wordsworth <\/em>Circle, 46:3 Romanticism and Experiment (2015). 127-131.
\nShelley, Mary. Frankenstein<\/em>. 1818. Introd. Diane Johnson. New York: Bantam, 2003.
\nVernon, Peter. \u201cFrankenstein<\/em>: Science and Electricity.\u201d\u00a0 \u00c9tudes Anglaises<\/em> (1997), 50:3. 270-83.<\/p>\n

Garrett Jeter has a Ph.D. in English literature with a focus on 19th<\/sup>-century Gothic. His dissertative work addressed the Gothic as an intellectual, empirical reader experience. He currently teaches Composition and Literature as an Assistant Professor of English at Georgia Military College in Warner Robins, GA.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Romantic Reimaginings is a BARS blog series which seeks to explore the ways in which texts of the Romantic era continue to resonate. The blog is curated by Eleanor Bryan…. Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2682"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2682"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2686,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2682\/revisions\/2686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}