Frankenstein, like Dracula, can be understood as a book in the tradition of
Gothic horror. We have Castle Dracula, that Dracula arises from and from which he
tries to assume power over most of the world. Frankenstein is created, that is
the monster, in a garret. He goes away in an island. We have buildings
thrumming to the storms outside. We have lightning flashes. Gothic horror is meant
for many things. One of them of course is to give us a thrill, but Mary Shelley uses
Gothic horror not to talk about the problems of aristocracy versus democracy,
but rather to talk about something else. "I busied myself to think of a story," she
says in the 1831 introduction, "A story to rival those which had excited us to this
task, one which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken
thrilling horror, one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood,
and quicken the beatings of the heart." She wants to think of a story that will excite
us to this task. The stories that she said were being read were those by a certain,
German horror writer. Those stories were read by: her; her not yet husband Percy
Bysshe Shelley; Lord Byron, another poet; J.W. Polidori, an Englishman of Italian
descent who was Byron's personal physician; and Claire Clairmont, the
daughter of her father's, Mary Shelly's father's, second wife. They were together
in Switzerland. They listened to these ghost stories and they thought, "Ah, let us
find something that will match these." Why match them at all? "The answer was not
simply to have horror, but rather to have my chief concern solved." This chief
concern is what's mentioned in the earlier 1818 edition. "To avoid the innervating
effects of novels of the present day," too realistic, "and show the amiableness of
domestic affection and the excellence of universal virtue." Let`s put those two
together. What Mary Shelley is saying is, we can use the literary tools of fright in
order to tell a story that validates domestic affection, the kind of virtues
that grow up naturally. Now the virtues that grow up naturally are the ones the
monster has before he is spurned by society. He is a natural man and the
problems that occur in this novel occur because Victor is egotistical and does not
allow himself to respond to the needs and bonds of people around him. This
egotistical search, in Victor's case for science, ruptures community. That rupture
is a horrifying thing in Mary Shelley's understanding and hence, adequately
represented by Gothic horror. To understand how, perhaps, deeply she felt
this, one might want to realize that Mary Shelley at the time of beginning her
composition of Frankenstein, had by her side a young, feeble child she'd borne to
Percy, a child they assumed would die - their first child had already died - a
child that she kept by her as she wrote. When the monster turns his vengeance on
Victor's family, in order to try to force Victor to create for the monster a bride
so that, he, the monster, will be able to have a sense of community, and then Victor
destroys the bride, the first member of Victor's family that the monster attacks
is his little brother William. Mary Shelley's child by her side as she wrote,
that feeble soon to die child, was William. Clearly we have reason to suppose that
Mary Shelly understood these things deeply. The idea of such an extraordinary
coincidence, that you would have a child in life and a child in fiction and both would
die, would strike some as romantic. The word romantic is very important in the
discussion of fantasy and particularly of science fiction. There really are six
different meanings to the word romantic that are worth our keeping in mind, and so
let's try to disentangle them. First, we have romance languages, languages that are
based on the older language of the city of Rome. In Rome, they spoke Latin and the
languages that Latin spawn include French, Spanish, Italian, Romany, Romance and so
on. So the Romance languages give us one meaning of romantic. Second, we have
romance content. Now in the middle ages, as these languages were developing, there
was a belief that the languages of the learned, which of course were Latin and to
some extent ancient Greek, were the languages fit for epics, fit for
philosophy, fit for high-minded tales. But if you wanted to tell a rousing story of
eros, of comedy, of unbelievable coincidence, that would be the work that
you would write in the vernacular. In other words, you would write these stories
in the romance languages, and so we have a romance content, which is fundamentally
heightened emotion that allows us to bring in all kinds of dramatic things. Now, this
romance allows us to write stories that move us and today we look back and find
them powerful. For example, "The Roman De La Rose," "The Romance Of The Rose," is a
story of a knight searching for a perfect red rose, which comes to represent the
Virgin Mary. Notice that the French, "Roman De La Rose," "The Romance Of The Rose" is the
modern French word Roman that we use for novel. So, romance has from it's
beginnings this sense of exciting novel. There is a romantic attitude that one can
identify as developing from a belief in the significance of the individual ego. If
we look at the great cathedrals of the middle ages, one often notes that the
stained glass, the statuary, even the paintings are typically unsigned. It's
only when we get to the Renaissance that we find authorship attributed, that the
individual artist begins to rise in importance over the art that the artist
has created. That belief in the importance of the individual correlates
with many, many things including the rise of democracy, for example. And this
romantic attitude, that the feelings of the individual, that the individual's ego, are
important, this I think marks a change. Now this change we see for example in
Wordsworth's "Prelude with the Growth of a Poet's Mind." Wordsworth is considered to
be one of the founders of what is canonically understood as romantic poetry
and this whole long book and verse is only the prelude to becoming a poet. Obviously
there's great belief in the importance of the feelings development of the
individual. To this day, we're concerned with these romantic images as I'll discuss
later in these clips when we talk about Charles Krauthammer's essay called, "Of
Headless Mice and Men." So we have so far romance languages, romance content and
romance attitude. The fourth meaning of the word romance is this romantic period
in art. Obviously no one said, "Ah, it`s Thursday, we must be in a romantic period;
the neoclassic period is over." Work periods of art develop over time and who
knows where they begin. Gray's "Elegy on a Country Churchyard" feels very romantic to
us. It's from 1740. However, canonically people say, "ah, the romantic period begins in
1798 when Coleridge and Wordsworth publish "Lyrical Ballads," ballads which are
nominally not in the prescribed, rhetorically polished language of poetry
but the language of the common people. "The world is too much with us late and soon
getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. What is there in nature that is
ours?" That's one of Wordsworth's sonnets from "Lyrical Ballads." That's not the
language of the common people I know, but it's a lot more common than the language
one would have encountered say from Alexander Pope. "A little learning is a
dangerous thing. Drink deep ere ye sip at the Pierian Spring," clearly much further
from the language of ordinary people. So we have this romantic period in art. And
that romantic period in poetry is known as romance poetry, characterized by
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, the man who
ultimately will marry Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who is to become the author of
Frankenstein. There is a sixth meaning for romantic that I've argued for in other
places and that is a structural meaning. If you read a heavily realistic novel,
you're in doubt about what's going to happen next. You don't know, for sure even,
which characters will live and die. When you read a romantic story, in a sense, its
end is implicit in its beginning. When you see a romantic comedy, a Hollywood type
where two people meet cute and they have an instant dislike for each other, we know
they're going to wind up in love and about to be married at the end of the movie. The
question isn't what will happen. The question is how will we get there? That
structure of foreknowledge, where our aesthetic engagement is not about the
what, but the how, the presentation of the ideals implicit in its very beginning
throughout the work as a whole, that structure is a romantic structure. And so,
we have six meanings of romance and they all are related to each other: the
languages of Rome; romantic content, heightened; romantic attitude, the
importance of feeling and ego; the romantic period of art, like the beginning
with "Lyrical Ballads," the romantic poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats,
Byron; and the romantic structure in art, where art gives us the pleasure of a world
in which, unlike the world we really inhabit, things work their way out as they
should. And indeed, being completely alone in the world, as the monster is once the
only person who knows how to make him a companion has died, there is no
possibility but the solution and tragedy. Romance need not eventuate in comedy.
It can in fact be sorrowful. That is the fate of Victor's monster in the first great
novel of science fiction.