When Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was published in 1818, the novel immediately found itself labeled as Gothic and, with a few exceptions, promoted to the status of masterpiece.
The Gothic wave began with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), followed by aristocrat William Beckford's Vathek (1787), and peaked with the works of Ann Radcliffe (1791–1797). After a few spurts with The Monk by Lewis (1796), it has since been in marked decline. After that, the novel moved on to something else, becoming historical with Walter Scott, and later truly romantic with the Brontë sisters. The Gothic did, however, persist within the Victorian novel, particularly in Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, but only as a hint.
Before 1818, or at the time of Frankensteins composition, the genre was considered in bad taste, if not downright laughable. In accordance with Edmund Burke's warnings,Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757. the line between the fantastique and the ridiculous seemed to have been crossed. Coleridge, familiar with the Godwins and thus with Mary Shelley, wrote as early as 1797, in reference to M. G. Lewis's The Monk, that "the horrible and the supernatural [...], powerful stimulants, are never required, unless for the torpor of a drowsy or exhausted appetite". He criticized "tiresome enemies, insubstantial characters, screams, murders, subterranean dungeons, [...] imagination and thought out of breath, [...] vulgar and low taste." In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen, in 1817, had Henry Tilney give Catherine Morland a lesson in common sense: "Remember that we are English, that we are Christian. Appeal to your understanding, your appreciation of verisimilitude, your sense of observation [...] does your education prepare you for similar atrocities?" In other words, the critics embraced the ,Horace, Ars Poetica, Ar, translated by C. Lefebvre-Laroche, Paris, P. Didot l'aîné, 1798, c. 188, p. 22. which led to an overdose of the marvelous, whose very nature, as Walter Scott pointed out in 1818, is to be "easily exhausted.
Frankensteins immediate and undeniable success was based on foundations that differed from those of its predecessors, if not in appearance, then at least in essence. The novel substitutes horror for terror, divests itself of all wonder, favors internalization and anchors itself in rationality, to the point where its gothic style becomes almost realistic and has revelatory value.
The Gothic novel The great Gothic wave, which stretches from 1764 with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto to around 1818-1820, features ghosts, castles and terrifying characters; Satanism and the supernatural are favorite subjects; for instance, Ann Radcliffe presents sensitive, persecuted young girls who evolve in a frightening universe where secret doors open onto visions of horror, themes even more clearly addressed by M. G. Lewis at the age of twenty. His novel's youthful ardor and satanism gave the genre the extreme model it sought. After these excesses of terror, the genre could but slowly decline, and Frankenstein, through its originality, struck a decisive blow.
Terror and horror When Edmund Burke addresses the notion of the "sublime", he describes the feelings inspired in the viewer or reader in terms of "terror" or "horror", but, it seems, without making much distinction between the two, although "terror" is the word most often used.Edmund Burke, Recherche philosophique sur l’origine de nos idées du sublime et du beau (In French), B. Saint-Girons (éd), Paris, Vrin, 1990.
Substitution of horror for terror in Frankenstein Max Duperray explains that the choice of the term "horror" served to distinguish a later school within the Gothic movement, which Frankenstein is partly part of: "[...] whereas the early novels separate good and evil with an insurmountable barrier," he writes, "the later ones usher in the era of moral ambiguity, involving the reader more deeply in the mysteries of the transgressive personalities of their heroes-scoundrels."
The first great gothic wave based its effects on what was more commonly referred to as "terror", the desired feeling being "fear" or " fright" (frayeur), hence the use of well-known devices, which Max Duperray calls "a machinery to frighten." There are still many hints of this in Frankenstein: Victor works in a secret laboratory plunged into darkness; his somewhat remote house is streaked with labyrinthine corridors; he enters, without describing them, into forbidden vaults, he breaks into cemeteries soon to be profaned; the mountains he climbs are pierced by sinister caves, icy spaces stretch to infinity, lands and oceans tumble into chaos, etc.
The emancipation of Gothic wonder However, apart from the very young man's brief and unsuccessful foray into esotericism, there is nothing reminiscent of the supernatural, the ghostly. There are apparitions, but they are those of the monster, who appears when he is least expected, following his creator step by step without much vraisemblance (likelihood), an expert in concealment and an excellent director of his own manifestations. The reader is transported far from his familiar surroundings by the exoticism, for the 19th century, of Switzerland, Bavaria, Austria and so on. But if they are disoriented, it's by something other than traditional Gothic wonder. The only manifestations that are remotely reminiscent of an extra-human power are those of nature, the storm, the lightning. Moreover, Victor Frankenstein is careful to point out that his education has rid him of all prejudice, that the supernatural holds no appeal for him, in short that his knowledge and natural disposition lead him along the enlightened path of rationalism.
Mary Shelley, at least initially, seems to substitute horror for terror. Horror is based on repulsion, and it is well known that Mary was attracted to the macabre as a young girl.In her Diary of 1815, Mary Shelley recalls the death of her seven-month-old baby, and has a vision of his return to life through the friction she administers to him. It is death, its manifestations and attributes, that take the center stage: thus, what was vaulted in earlier Gothic becomes a mortuary vault, what was a dungeon becomes a mass grave and charnel house, what was a torture tray becomes a dissection table, what was torn clothing is metamorphosed into shreds of flesh. The medieval castle has disappeared; in its place, an isolated office in a town unknown, at least to the English reader, then a filthy laboratory on an almost deserted northern island.
The physical horror of appearances What's more, the horror comes to life in the figure of the monster who, although alive, has lost none of his cadaverous characteristics, and it's this complacently supported description of his physical appearance that is one of the driving forces behind the action, since it provokes social rejection, hence revenge, the reversal of the situation, and so on. The horror of the eyes, eyelids, cheeks, lips, colors, mummification, open body, functional organs but gangrenous and infested with morbid decay, is further accentuated by the unfinished making of a female creature: although not explicitly stated, the text suggests that it is precisely at the moment when the woman's genitals are to be placed that Victor's rage leads him to lacerate, tear, destroy, restore the assembled shreds to chaos. Here we find the symbolism of the dream, where the love kiss is transformed into a fatal incestuous embrace, where desire is the bearer of death.
Frankenstein's work unleashes into the world of men a creature of gigantic hideousness, scruffy, cadaverous, and it stops when it was not far from finding its fulfillment in the possibility of a monstrous lineage. It is appearance alone that arouses horror, since the monster possesses the intellectual, emotional and sentimental qualities of uncorrupted man. Society bases many of its reactions, and the behavior of the human community depends essentially on the way things look, a fragile equilibrium based on the gaze of one on the other and of the other on the other. Alienation - the feeling of being different - is at the heart of Mary Shelley's Gothic.
During the implementation of Victor's project, horror is adorned with a scientific alibi. Mary Shelley places the act of creation in an experimental context, naming the disciplines involved: physics, chemistry and the natural sciences. A sincere alibi, she and her parents, companion and friends have always been rationalists. Moreover, Victor is presented as a relentless, obstinate researcher, whose intellectual activity is clearly compartmentalized: nothing else interests him, literary and artistic culture, the so-called moral sciences being left to Clerval.
Return to terror, but internalized Once the act of creation is complete, the Gothic aspect of the novel leaves the stage of the outside world - with the exception of a few appearances by the monster and the repetition of Chapter V when the female creature is made again - to confine itself to the mysteries of the psyche: this exploration focuses primarily on Victor, but also takes into account the analysis of the monster by itself, in the central section devoted to his apology and at the end, during the ultimate encounter with Walton next to Frankenstein's corpse.
The despicable or the sublime emanate, as Saint-Girons notes in his preface to Burke's work, from states of mind most often subject to exhausting existential anguish, linked to isolation, feelings of guilt and also manifestations of the unconscious. The dramatic spring then oscillates between terror and pity (), this gothic of the soul returning indeed to the primary sources of the literary movement of the same name, terror, but an internalized terror: each character takes refuge in confession, oral or written (epistolary or narrative), or even, with Walton, in a correspondence that is the vector of the whole story.
The reader is then invited to share the psychological torments that beset him, his sympathy or antipathy is solicited, and a kind of love-hate relationship is established between character and audience. This feeling is based on ambiguity and tension, further accentuated by the distortion (amplification, radicalization, etc.) inflicted on everyone by the narrative structure of a story composed solely of superimposed memory facts.
The quest of modern man This is a step forward in the Gothic movement, which now merges with modern man's quest for identity. This is a confluence with Romanticism, of which the Gothic had previously been no more than a precursor. The terror inflicted, for the reader's pleasure, is that of a rendezvous with a being in a universe belonging to the genre now known as science fiction, where the possible becomes reality and the impossible merely possible. As Brian Wilson Aldriss wrote in 1973 in Billion Year Spree, "science fiction is the quest for the definition of a man and his status in the universe"; to this should we add the quest for his integrity.
Imagination and reason