GOTHIC
With Mary Shelley we talk about post gothic. Gothic in fact was a trend
of first romanticism and it is referred to Middle
Ages. This term originally designated the architectural style of middle-ages
and was employed to designate the revival of interest for the middle ages, as
testified for istance by Walpole's
castle. In literature it expresses the revival of interests for the poetry of
the so called Dark Ages and found its best expression in poetry. This new trend
was turned against the realism of writers as Richardson and Fielding and
expresses the rebellion against Reason and the new stress put upon the dark passions of the soul.
There isn't a didactic aim and the facts are associated to fear, horror and
blood. It aimed at thrilling the reader rather than amusing or educating him.
The interest in
the Middle Ages is expressed by the kind of setting used, that is a medioeval
one (castles, prisons, unknown countries and gothic buildings). The gothic
novelists discovered the charm of horror and the power of sensation, connected
with the grotesque and the supernatural. The middle ages
was seen as the age of passion. The passion, caused by the great and the
sublime, is astonishment, that is the state of the
soul in which all its motions are suspended. Sublime= horror associated to
astonishment.
MARY SHELLEY (1797 - 1851)
Frankenstein written in 1818 is post gothic, in fact there
aren't medioeval castles, dungeons, dark lands. Besides ghosts were
sopernatural or imaginary projections of a distorted perception, whereas
Frankenstein's monster is a creation of science. In classical gothics dark
villains enact dreams of lust, incests and rape. There is nothing in Frankenstein
of this behaviour, in fact the creature will became a villain, but as a
consequence of living in the human society. He is the prototype of the
outsider, because of his differences. Nature:
the natural world is a mirror of human feelings and emotions, its obscure and
gloomy places reflect human pains and fears, whereas its beatiful places
reflect happy moods. The duoble: is
one of the many ways of dramatizing the two aspects of the same character (his good and bad
selves such as Frankenstein and the monster). Frankenstein says of his monster
that he is 'my own spirit'. The monster's actions express the
emotional intention of the author himself. It's an autobiographical product of her own
upsetting experience of life. Tecniques:
it is narrated in the first person by three different narrators. It starts as
an epistolary novel. There is frame and thus it's built like a story inside the
story. The influence of Godwin is considerable, in fact from Godwin Mary had
taken the notion that man in his wild state is a social being, capable of
living in cooperation. Yet society, after Rousseau's idea of it, has also a
corrupting force. The monster, like Rousseau's natural man, is naturally good
untill he is embittered by the contact with human society.
