Let the Bodies Hit the Floor: a Comparison of Corporal Morphology in Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Buchner’s Lenz (1836)

Abstract

This article compares representations of corporal morphology in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) with Georg Büchner’s Lenz (1836). Focusing on anecdotes where corpses are the focus reveals a diverging literary style in representing the emerging science of morphology, or the study of the shape and form of natural objects. When read through Immanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Teleological Judgment’ from his Critique of Judgement and Johan Wolfgang von Goethe’s essay ‘On Morphology’, I argue that Shelley’s and Büchner’s works contain the seeds of critique of two very different effects of idealism, teleology, and the purposiveness of nature. Whereas idealist scientists and doctors proposed a distance between the observer and the object of study, in Kant’s words to perceive and act ‘as if’ the object has a purpose from a human-centered point of view, Goethe suggested a study of the morphology of living objects, which simultaneously affects the object and observer. A comparative methodology, where the focus is short anecdotes, follows close reading methods proposed by Erich Auerbach, Stephen Greenblatt, and Catherine Gallagher. The scenes where corpses are highlighted in Büchner’s Lenz and Merry Shelley’s Frankenstein reveals extreme examples of neutral descriptions of an ‘object’ and the observer’s intimate link with that which is observed. The goal of objectivity developing in eighteenth century scientific practices, when read through the chiastic structure of these two literary works-animation and failed animation of a material body-reveals unique critiques of Enlightenment Idealism: the failure of success in Frankenstein, and the success of failure in Lenz.

Keywords

• Georg Büchner
• Mary Shelley
• Frankenstein
• Lenz
• comparative literature

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