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The Limits of the Romantic Aesthetic in Mary Shelley's THE LIMITS OF THE ROMANTIC AESTHETIC IN MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN _______________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of San Diego State University _______________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English _______________ by Erica B. Aguillon Spring 2011 iii Copyright © 2011 by Erica B. Aguillon All Rights Reserved iv DEDICATION To my husband and my family, for their support. v ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS The Limits of the Romantic Aesthetic in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Erica B. Aguillon Master of Arts in English San Diego State University, 2011 In this thesis I examine Mary Shelley’s departure from the Romantic tradition in order to reflect of the failure of Nature to inspire tranquility, in the context of the growing concern with urban menace picked up in the works of her father, William Godwin, and his contemporary, Thomas Holcroft. At the heart of this project is a conversation between Shelley and her contemporaries regarding both the limits of the Romantic aesthetic and shifting attitudes towards the city. Tracing these anxieties to the fears generated by the Gordon Riots and the French Revolution, I argue that sublime Nature, in the tradition of William Wordsworth, is unable to contain the evils unleashed by metropolitan horrors, ultimately suggesting that Shelley’s novel inaugurates the Gothic shift from the rural castles of Walpole and Radcliffe to the urban streets of Stevenson and Stoker. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT ...............................................................................................................................v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................... vii INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 REIMAGINING THE GOTHIC....................................................................................5 2 IMAGINING URBANITY ..........................................................................................19 3 NATURE’S FAILURE AND THE CREATURE’S TRIUMPH .................................40 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................52 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to the faculty and staff of the English department for all of their assistance and support. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Quentin Bailey, without whom this thesis would not have been possible. 1 INTRODUCTION Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours, arising from putrid gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulencies, rank armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues, plasters, ointments… Such is the atmosphere I have exchanged for the pure, elastic, animating air of the Welsh mountains – O Rus, quando te aspiciam!1 Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker, 1771 I slept indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818 Victor Frankenstein’s dream directs the reader’s attention to a number of the novel’s more chilling motifs. Having “rushed” from the room following the birth of the Creature, Victor dreams his future fiancé decays into the body of his dead mother at the touch of his lips, only for him to wake and behold again “the miserable monster whom [he] had created” (Shelley, The 1818 Text, 39). Long held to be indicative of the novel’s concern with Faustian overreaching, patriarchal ambition, and the usurpation of feminine creation powers, Frankenstein’s nightmare has courted substantial critical attention. 2 Anca Vlasopolos situates the dream within what she describes as the novel’s dominant theme of incest-avoidance, pointing to Victor and the Creature’s oedipal obsession (125), while Jerrold Hogle, borrowing from Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva, points to the underlying infantile drive in Victor’s dream: “The hero's nightmare in Frankenstein, it seems, is at least the Freudian displacement where we are all shown to be concealing, in fact to be reversing, infantile 1 From the book notes: Horace, Satires, 2, 6, 60; O country house, when shall I behold you! 2 See Hogle, “Frankenstein’s Dream,” para 6; George Levine, “The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein,” 8-9. 2 longings of both eros and thanatos”(FD).3 Overlooked in scholarship, however, is the location of Frankenstein’s dream—a city street—which itself presents significant implications. Set in the streets of Ingolstadt rather than the Frankenstein home in the country, this rendering speaks to Shelley’s awareness of the city’s role in Victor’s downfall.4 The inclusion of Elizabeth in the dream, who is carefully described as “in the bloom of health,” identifies a concern with the dangerous possibilities associated with Elizabeth’s removal from her rural home. 5 This concern, as I argue in this thesis, is partially the result of a growing anxiety with urbanization which manifested itself in the writings of period as moral contamination, fear, and the Romantic aesthetic. In the case of Shelley’s novel, the overarching theme of domestic affection and the destructive effects of ambitious excess are symbolically represented in Victor’s nightmare. 6 The setting the dream, in which an innocent youth is infected with a disease contracted in the streets, is one that preoccupied many writers of the period. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the fear of city contamination was so widespread that guides to navigating the city were a popular form of both entertainment and urban education. The Countryman’s Guide to London (1775) offered its readers, “a picture of low-life that is daily acted in this town, to the ruin of thousands of innocent youth, and the distress of thousands of disconsolate parents” (Cooke iii). Shelley’s choice to cast Frankenstein’s dream in the city streets rather than rural countryside of his home reveals her interest in the city as a source of Gothic nightmares, and, as I shall ultimately argue, marks the beginning of the urban gothic genre. Although Shelley’s work is 3 For additional readings see Bibliography, VanWinkle, Rieder; in addition to Jonathan Glance, “Beyond the Usual Bounds of Reverie”? Another Look at the Dreams in Frankenstein.” (The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 7.4 (1996): 30-47; Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Methuen, 1988); Fred Botting, “Freud’s Navel, Frankenstein’s Dream: Mastery or the Return of Difference” (118-138) in Making Monstrous: Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1991); and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s iconic reading in The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1979). 4 Though Ingolstadt is certainly not on the same metropolitan scale as London, it’s distinction from the country is perhaps on par with Oxford in Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor. 5 Interestingly, Elizabeth’s decay is a reference to Victor’s reflections on his study of decomposing cadavers, “I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life” (34). 6 The theme of “domestic affection” has been exhausted in critical research on Frankenstein. Some important contributors include Kate Ellis, George Levine, Anne K. Mellor, and Michelle Levy. 3 certainly not a treatise on the dangers of urban contamination, it does share with such writing a suspicion about the detrimental effects of city life and, conversely, with the regenerative effects of Nature. Nature—in an explicitly Wordsworthian sense—figures predominately throughout the text, serving to counterbalance urban threats. 7The Romantic aesthetic, in which Nature serves to mitigate the effects of “the din/ Of towns and cities” (Tintern Abbey, lines 25-26), is interrogated in Frankenstein; Shelley contests this aesthetic in Victor’s fruitless appeals to Nature to “Teach the adverting mind” (Mont Blanc, 100), and in her creation of a monstrous force that cannot be contained even by “The still and solemn power” (128) of Mont Blanc. In so doing, Mary Shelley not only articulates a new vision of Romantic sublimity, but also introduces a new paradigm for the Gothic novel to engage. This thesis examines Mary Shelley’s departure from the Romantic tradition in order to reflect on the failure of Nature to overcome menaces and cement domestic affections. My study specifically aims to locate the source of Shelley’s evil—long associated with the masculine birth, technophobia, and Godwinian critique—in social and literary concerns centered on urban development and menace. Shelley’s attention to urban horrors, which previous Gothic writers had generally ignored, is occasioned by a number of socio-historical factors. Shelley’s writing is appreciably influenced by her reaction to the political and intellectual radicalism of her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.8 In Frankenstein, as Lee Sterrenburg has pointed out, Shelley “attempts to move beyond the utopian politics of [her father]” (144), while, as I will later argue, interrogating the Romantic aesthetic of husband Percy Shelley and his contemporaries. References to Frankenstein throughout are, unless otherwise noted, from the 1818 edition of the text. In the first chapter I examine the Gothic novels preceding Frankenstein, situating Shelley’s writing within
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