Frankenstein: Ego, Body, Creation and Monstrosity

Year 2003, Volume: 43 Issue: 1, 127 - 155, 01.01.2003

Erinç Özdemir

Abstract

This study aims to explore the themes and concepts of self, body, creation and monstrosity inscribed in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. it will approach these issues from a mainly posmodern point of view that takes gender as its central focus. Although gender is not an explicit theme in the novel, it plays an enormous part in ehıcidating the deeper meanings embedded at its heart, and is woven into its fabric in a multi-layered manner that can be roughly summarized as follows: 1 as a rewriting of Paradise Lost as a masculinist text and as a Romantic version of culturally central mytlıs such as the creation myth and the Promethean myth in ways that covertly question Romantic notions of şelf and creativity; 2 in connection with some of the most influential cultural and philosophical discourses of Shelley's time such as Godwinian rationalism, the Enlightenment belief in the beneficience of selence and human progress and Rousseau 's Romanticism, ali of which deal with "civilized" man's relationship to nature, to society and to himself; 3 in relation to the domestic ideology that constituted a major cultural basis of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century middle-class domination; 4 as an inseription of crucial aspects of Shelley's own life such as parental loss and ambivalence about her gender role in relation to her artistle self; 5 through the narrative marginalization of the female characters refleeting the sodalı'cultural marginalization of woman.

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