AL- NEELAIN UNIVERSITY
THE GRADUATE COLLEGE
THE ROLE OF MONSTER IN FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHUES AND
FRANKENSTEIN IN BAGHDAD
(A CRITICAL STUDY)
Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctorate of philosophy in English
Language
Submitted by
Mr. SAIF LATIF M. ALSSAFY
Supervised by
Dr. HALA SALIH MOHAMMED NUR
Department of English- Khartoum University
Khartoum, Sudan
January 2019
جمهورية السودان
جامعة النيلين
كلية الدراسات العليا
بحث علمي رائد أصيل ومتجدد
أعتماد الرسالة في صورتها النهائية
أسم الطالب وتوقيعه: ......
رقم وعنوان البريد االلكتروني للطالب: ......
أسم المشرف وتوقيعه: ......
أسم الممتحن الداخلي وتوقيعه: ......
توقيع رئيس لجنة الدراسات العليا بكلية: ......
أعتماد عميد كلية الدراسات العليا ......
حقوق الطبع والنسخ محفوظة لجامعة النيلين
© Al- Neelain University
Qur'an Verse
In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Praise be to Allah (1) the
Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds (2) Most Gracious, Most Merciful (3);
Master of the Day of Judgment (4) Thee do we worship, and Thine aid we seek (5)
Show us the straightway (6) The way of those on whom Thou hast bestowed Thy
Grace, those whose (portion) is not wrath, and who go not astray (7).
(Sourat Al Fatiha)
DECLARATION
I hereby declare that the present thesis entitled, “The Role of Monster in
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and Frankenstein in Baghdad” is the record of original research work carried out by me and it has not previously formed the basis for the award of any Degree, Diploma, Fellowship or other similar Title or Recognition.
Date: / /2019 Place: Khartoum Mr. SAIF LATIF M. ALSSAFY
CERTIFICATE
I hereby certify that the all corrections and suggestions pointed out by the State
Sudanese examiner(s) are incorporated in the thesis titled “The Role of Monster in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and Frankenstein in Baghdad”.
Submitted by Mr. SAIF LATIF M. ALSSAFY
.
Date: / /2019
Place: Khartoum, Sudan Research Supervisor DR. MRS. HALA SALIH MOHAMMED NUR
Associate Prof., Dept. of English,
Khartoum University, Khartoum, Sudan
DEDICATION
To the soul of my father, my dear mother, my wife who stood with me, and my
daughters
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page No.
Dedication ...... vi
Table of Contents ...... vii
Acknowledgements ...... x
Abstract (English) ...... xii
Abstract (Arabic) ...... xiv
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
1.0 Overview ...... 1
1.1 Background ...... 2
1.2The Statement of the problem ...... 3
1.3The Rationale of the Study ...... 4
1.4The Study Aims ...... 4
1-5The Research Questions ...... 4
1.6The Methodology ...... 5
1.7The Study Limits ...... 6
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CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW
2.0Introduction ...... 7
2.1 Definitions and Characteristics of a Monster ...... 7
2.2 The concept of Monster in English Literature ...... 12
2.3 The Concept of the Monster in Arabic Literature ...... 34
2.4 The Gothic novel ...... 39
2.5 Mary Shelley’s Life ...... 50
2.6 Ahmed Saadawi’s Life ...... 53
CHAPTER THREE:
The Role of Shelley’s Monster in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
3.0 Introduction ...... 55
3.1 Roles ...... 56
3.1.1 Human ...... 56
3.3.2 Revenger ...... 70
3.2 Frankenstein’s creature as hero or villain ...... 81
3.3 Frankenstein’s Creature as Victim-Offender ...... 96
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CHAPTER FOUR:
The Roles of Monster in Frankenstein in Baghdad
4.0 Introduction ...... 107
4.1 Roles ...... 108
4.1.1Revenger ...... 108
4.1.1.1Monster’s motives for revenge ...... 116
4.1.2 Abbreviated descriptive names ...... 142
4.1.2.1Alshesma or Whatitsname ...... 148
4.1.2.2 Frankenstein ...... 157
4.1.2.3 Daniel ...... 164
CHAPTER FIVE:
Conclusion and Recommendations
5.0Introduction ...... 170
5.1 Findings ...... 170
5.2 Recommendations for Future Research ...... 179
5.3 Suggested Topics for Future Researchers ...... 181
Works Cited ...... 182
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, praise and thanks to Allah, the Almighty, for His showers of blessings throughout my research work to finish the research successfully.
I would like to express my deepest and sincere gratitude to my research supervisor, Dr.
Hala Salih Mohammed Nur, PhD., Department of English, College of Arts, University of
Khartoum, Khartoum, Sudan, for supervising me during my research and providing invaluable guidance throughout this research. Her dynamism, vision, sincerity and motivation have deeply inspired me. As my supervisor, she has constantly forced me to remain focused on achieving my goal. Her observations and comments helped me to establish the overall direction of the research and to move forward with investigation in depth. It was a great privilege and honor to work and study under her guidance. I am extremely grateful for what she has offered me. I would also like to thank her for her friendship, empathy, and great sense of humor. I am extending my heartfelt thanks to her family for their acceptance and patience during the discussion I had with her on research work and thesis preparation.
I would like to extend my special thanks to Prof. Emeritus Dr. Emil Sirbulescu,
Professor, Department of Anglo-American and German Studies, Faculty of Letters, University of
Craiova, Romania, for his generous time in proof reading and all what he has done to help me to carry out this research work.
Thanks are due to the numerous local and global “peers” Lecturer Qassem Hassen, Asst.
Lecturer Falih Mahdi, Asst. Lecturer Haider Mohammed, and Asst. Lecturer Saad Laftha for the help they extended me whether in the form of advice, suggestions, loan of, or helping in procuring books.
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I also take this opportunity to thank the administrative staff of the University of Al
Neelain for providing me the opportunity to achieve this research work. I must also express my sincere gratitude to the Iraqi Ministry of Education, and Ministry of Higher Education and
Scientific Research.
Finally, my thanks go to all the people who have supported me to complete the research work directly or indirectly.
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ABSTRACT (English)
Title of thesis:The Role of Monster in Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus and Frankenstein in Baghdad Name of researcher: Mr. SAIF LATIF M. ALSSAFY
English and Arabic literature have featured a multitude of characters with monstrous qualities with diverse roles and functions. The aims of this thesis are to analyze and identify the role of the monster in two novels that belong to different time periods and literary cultures,
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus and Frankenstein (1818) by the English novelist Mary
Shelley and Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) by the Iraqi novelist Ahmed Saadawi. This critical study sets to analysis the remarkable and effective roles of the monster in two novels. The qualitative research methodology was used in the research with critical analysis used as the tool in addition to thevarious types of theories were used to analyze the two novels such as the work of Jeffrey S. Nevid, in order to examine the notion and motivations of the monster's role thoroughly. By analyzing the character of the monster in the two texts through the lens of the concepts and mind of the eighteen-century society and the contemporary Iraqi society sequentially for Shelley and Saaadawi, the thesis illustrates several findings. The monster in
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus has many roles such as the human who learns from the human's violent rejection and as revenger who learns about the emotions of hate, anger, revenge and does not see the advantages of happiness and love, however the monster in
Frankenstein in Baghdad has been created as revenger and having descriptive names to indicate and highlight the social anxieties resulting from the sufferings of infinity killing's cycle in the
Iraqi society after Baghdad's invasion.The thesis concludes with the idea the monster in literature has been a popular figure in Western and Eastern society for centuries, as a mirror to a collective fear of problems in a specific society and time in history. In both novels, the writers used the
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monster to highlight evil's side in theirsocieties, which reflect especially his functions as a symbol of warning to the writers' own society
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مستخلص البحث
يضماألدباإلنجليزيوالعربيةالعديدمنالشخصياتذاتالصفاتالوحشيةتظهرها فيأدوارهاووظائفهاالمتنوعة.
تهدفهذهالرسالةإلىتحليلوتعريفدورالوحشفيروايتينالتان تعودان الىفتراتزمنيةوالثقافاتاألدبية مختلفة،فرانكنشتاين.
أو،بروميثيوسالحديث)8181( للروائيةاإلنجليزيةماريشيليوفرانكشتاينفيبغداد )3182( للروائيالعراقيأحمدسعداوي.
الدراسةالنقدية فيهذه الرسالة عدت لتحليالألدوارالبارزةوالفعالةللوحشفيروايتين. منأجلدراسةفكرةودوافعدورالوحشبشكلكامل
تماستخداممنهجيةالبحثالنوعيباستخدامالتحلياللنقديكأداة في البحثباالضافة الىاستخدامأنواعمختلفةمنالنظرياتمثلعملجيفريس.
نيفيد.انتحليلشخصيةالوحشفيالنصينمنخاللعدسةمفاهيموعقلمجتمعالقرنالثامنعشرلشيلليوالمجتمعالعراقي
المعاصرلسعداويبرزالعديدمنالنتائج. منهاالوحشفيفرانكنشتاين.
أو،بروميثيوسالحديثلديهالعديدمناألدوار,دورهكأنسانالذييتعلممنرفضالمجتمعالعنيف لهوكمنتقمالذييتعلممنعواطف
والكراهيةوالغضبواالنتقامواليرىمزاياالسعادةوالمحبة في حياته،بينما دورالوحشفيفرانكنشتاين برزكمنتقمووصاحب
االسماءالوصفيةلإلشارةإلىالمخاوفالمجتمعيةالناتجةعنمعاناةمن دائرة القتل الالمتناهيةفيالمجتمعالعراقيبعدغزوبغداد.
وتختتمهذهالرسالةبفكرةأنالوحشفياألدب كان ومايزااللشخصيةالمشهورة كمرآة لعكسالخوفجماعيمنمشاكلفيمجتمع محددووقتمعين
منالتاريخفيالمجتمعالغربيوالشرقي منذ قرون. وفيكالالروايتين،استخدمالكتابينالوحشلتسليطالضوءعلى جانب
الشرفيمجتمعاتهم،والتيتعكسبشكلخاصوظائفهكرمزللتحذيرلمجتمعالكاتبنفسه.
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Chapter One
Introduction
1.0 Overview
This study is an attempt to analyse the role of the monster and its functions in
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Shelley (English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer) and Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) by
Ahmed Saadawi (Iraqi novelist, poet and screenwriter), although, the two novels were written in different epochs, under entirely different circumstances.
An analysis of the epistemological function of monsters in a literary text adds more to the understanding and interpretation of its thematic meanings. This research can go beyond descriptive analysis of the monsters to reach their hidden roles or meanings in the texts. It is an analytical study that examines the roles of the monster in both novels. It proves that in literature, the role of a monster as well as its image, and the style of social reaction and communication differ from one period of time to another and from author to author. The study is also a criticism of the main features of the characters in Shelley’s and Saadawi’s community. To achieve their goals, both writers present their monsters as nameless characters around which all events in the novels are revolve, reflecting the social and political problems of the respective periods and societies.
Last but not least, the study shows that a consideration of the presence of monsters in literary works across a span of a thousand years will give a reader the chance to consider some key questions, such as: What makes a monster a monster? How do monsters change (or stay the
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same) in different historical periods? How do monsters provide insight into the fears and challenges of humankind?
1.1 Background
Since its publication in 1818, by an “anonymous” author, Frankenstein, or, the Modern
Prometheus has been re-published twice more: reprinted in 1823, a revised edition was produced in 1831, with it an introduction written by Mary Shelley herself, acknowledging her authorship.
Frankenstein has generated numerous replications, parodies, alternative versions, intentional, and unintentional misreading in writings, as well as in films, which all accentuate the novel’s massive influence on popular media and across literary genres.
The novel is infused with elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement, and is also considered to be one of the earliest examples of science fiction, tackling such themes as life, consciousness, science, existence, appearance, revenge … etc. Frankenstein is a literary piece that touches on many different issues, relevant not only in the author’s time, but also today.
The creation of life in Frankenstein was Shelley’s symbolic warning to the new industrialized era. Regardless of Shelley’s employment of many literary and cultural themes in her novel, the fear factor is considered as the supported factor, as Shelley intentionally composes the monster in such a manner in order to reflect the themes as well as his roles through the process of his creation and actions.
is an Arabic novelفرانكشتاين في بغداد ) :On the other hand, Frankenstein in Baghdad (Arabic by Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi. In 2014, he became the first Iraqi to win the prestigious
International Prize for Arabic Fiction. This prize was awarded to Frankenstein in Baghdad, which also won Le Grand Prix de l’imaginaire in 2017. Also, the English version (translated by
Jonathan Wright) was shortlisted for Man Booker international prize 2018. In addition to the
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English language, the novel is translated into more than thirty languages in various countries of the world.
Saadawi tries to explain the Iraqi security forces’ failure to develop successful security plans for dealing with car bombs and other traditional methods of violence adopted by extremist groups in 2005, and the absence of logical answers to those problems leads Saadawi to write
Frankenstein in Baghdad. The epistemological functions of the monster in his novel are different from that in Shelley’s Frankenstein. In any case, Frankenstein in Baghdad deals with different themes: the monster in this novel is a condensed symbol of Iraq’s current problems, reflecting the atmosphere of horror strongly prevalent in Iraq during the period covered.
Saadawi has employed his hybrid creature to describe the violence in our time. It is a desperate marker of the brutal violence that has taken countless lives in the wars unleashed in the region, but Frankenstein in Baghdad is also a sign that the imagination can still survive in these conditions, literary works flowering in the cracks of the rubble.
1.2 TheStatementof Problem
Although literature has been filled with various types of characters, the Monster is perhaps one of the most complicated, shifting characters in literature, past and present. Much of defining the Monster means defining ourselves and our views of the world. No other character relies so much on perspective to explain who (or what) the evil really is. Therefore, it is significant that these characters are to be explained from the perspective of their essential roles in literary texts. Reading Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and Frankenstein in Baghdad sheds lights on various roles which the monsters have in both novels. Thus, our study attempts to analyse and explain the fundamental roles of monster in both novels with take into consideration the commonalities and differences between two them.
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1.3 The RationaleofThe Study
The study intends to prove that the monster in fiction offers a mirror to the collective fears of a society in a specific moment in history. As projections of society’s political, racial and ideological angst and monsters are as much marked by the period in which they are created, as they are representatives of that period. Moreover, the study explicates the function of the monster acting as portent, as warning, or a reminder, or as an evil omen, it corroborates that monsters can be considered as symbolic expressions which need to be interpreted by giving concrete actual evidences.
Regarding to field of study that focuses on such daunting questions as why reader is attracted to and repulsed by monsters, and what the form, function and meaning of monsters in two novels are, the study gives the numerous philosophical, epistemological and ontological frameworks by way of which the research tries to answer these questions with respect to the monsters in the two novels.
1.4The Study Aims
The aim of the research is to study the role of the monster in each novel and his effect on the society around him. The role of the monster in the two novels is also studied under their relations with human kind. Furthermore, it analyses the reasons of appearance of such monsters in the two novels and the sort of reactions of society in each novel.
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1.5 The Research Questions
The study approaches not only the roles of the monster in the two novels, but also the monster’s appearance, actions, and motives of action. The study provides the best answers to the number of questions, as follows:
1. Long ago, the monster character in literature had different forms, meanings, and
functions; this variety is altered from time to time and from one writer to another.
And the differences betweenShelley’s creaturethat, in many respects, differs from
other popular monsters associated with Halloween, and Saadawi’s creature who
captures with white-knuckle horror and black humour the surreal reality of a city at
war, are giving concrete actual evidences to this truth. If so, what are the main roles
of the monster in Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus and Frankenstein in
Baghdad?
2. As mentioned above, the existence of a monster in a literary text means there are
goals or purposes it has to achieve. Under these conditions, do the monsters in both
novels achieve their aims?
3. The connection between names and identity does not only affect people. Names and
naming also constitute an important part of the building in a literary work. Character
names and place names are some of the most important tools of the author in the
creation of credible characters placed in a literary universe that gives the impression
of being authentic. If so,why the writers of two novels do not give name for their
monsters?
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1.6 TheMethodology
This thesis is an analytically and descriptively study of two texts Frankenstein; or, The
Modern Prometheus and Frankenstein in Baghdad, which are seen to represent the monsters of two societies, namely the English and the Iraqi in their writers’ time. It focuses on what will be referred to as a role of monster that has been created within a society in order to express the anxieties of its members, as well as to define the distinction between normality and otherness.
From the viewpoint of a thematic content analysis, the study examines themes and patterns of responses taking into account an attempt to conduct it ethically in order to respect the cultural norms. This includes a careful review of the available material for the objectives. The study is highly diverse in the use of references; it employs various types of resources such as books, essays and websites.
1.7 The Study Limits
Due to limitations in the scope of the thesis, the study will be limited to Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in
Baghdad (2013) only. Both novels belong to monster literature and are used here to study the roles of the monsters and how they achieve their functions. Meanwhile, the study presents a literary analysis in order to investigate what the two texts can say about both writers’ own time and society.
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Chapter Two
Literature Review
2.0 Introduction
This chapter provides an overview of the monsters in English and Arabic literature, and how the writers use monsters to reflect and critique human existence in all ages. We deal with the definitions and characteristics of monsters in literature as characters having physical features that make them abnormal characters, even though they are human (like vampires) or non-human
(like giants). We review the typology and morphology of the monster in both English and Arabic literature. It shows that the variety of forms, shapes and functions of the monster are reflected in the features and cultures of specific period, which enable writers to portray the character of monsters with different traits from others monsters in the same or different era. The second part of this chapter specializes in the concept of monsters in English literature from old literature to the present day. It proves that the variety in the concept of monsters results from the diversity of monster’s origins. The last part of this chapter deals with the concept of monsters in Arabic literature, and shows how writers use monsters as symbolic and semantic figures in literature.
2.1 Definitions and Characteristics of a Monster
There are numerous dictionary definitions for the word monster, and all these definitions are derived from lexicographical and monstrological definitions. Basically, the American
Heritage Dictionaryof the English Language defines monster as “an imaginary or legendary
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creature, such as a centaur or Harpy which combines parts from various animal or human forms; a creature having a strange or frightening appearance.” In an archaic meaning, it is “an organism that has structural defects or deformities”. Informally, a monster is “a very large animal, plant, or object” and, more generally, “a very large animal, plant, or object”. Finally, from a psychological point of view, a monster is “one who inspires horror or disgust: a monster of selfishness”.
The Collins English Dictionary defines the monster in many different ways: according to one of them, the word monster – as found in classical myths and legends – is “an imaginary beast, such as a centaur, usually made up of various animal or human parts”. This dictionary also mentions the biological definition for the word monster, “a person, animal, or plant with a marked structural deformity” or “a very large person, animal, or thing”.
At the same time, the Merriam Webster Dictionary gives several definitions of the word: firstly, it refers to a monster as “an animal or plant of abnormal form or structure,” or “one who deviates from normal or acceptable behaviour or character”; also, it indicates the monster as “a threatening force”, or “an animal of strange or terrifying shape”.
There are several lexicographical definitions which give special descriptions and different types of monsters and consider them as a number of a category. For instance, Merriam Webster defines the dragon as “a mythical animal usually represented as a monstrous winged and scaly serpent or saurian with a crested head and enormous claws”. This definition is only applied to the term dragon. The online Dictionary.com describes the dragon as a huge creation spouting fire: “a mythical monster generally represented as a huge, winged reptile with crested head and enormous claws and teeth, and often spouting fire”.
Since the very beginning of literature monsters have found their way in literature with their common features, and these characteristics make monsters more affective and attractive to
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people of all ages and in all ages. People have interacted with monsters in myths, legends, ballads as well as horror stories. Murgatroyd, in his seminal study Mythical Monster in Classical
Literature (2007), states that “since earliest times monsters have awed, terrified and enthralled us, and they have figured in myths, stories, poetry and prose of numerous cultures of down the ages” (1).
According to the above-mentioned monstrological definitions, monsters are characterized by horrifying and terrifying features; they are physically and psychologically hideous, a freak of nature that shifts with requirements of life, society and developing in literature. Time, culture and writer influence and determine the characteristics of monsters in literature, and therefore monsters reflect these affections in a literary work as “a method of reading cultures from the monsters they engender” (Cohen 3).
One characteristic of monsters is a measurement of our own humanity or credibility: they help humans define themselves: “they [monsters] are part and parcel of our condition, our imagination, our spirituality, our arts, and they won’t go away – ever. We need them too much, and hence we are ever finding them, creating them, carrying them with us, and surrounding ourselves with them. They are legion” (Capasso 7). Seemingly, this is why monsters are present so frequently in literatures of different times and cultures.
The variety of monsters in form, function, and even meaning (characteristics) depends on time, culture and writer. Ina Helen Storøy mentions in her thesis that “a monster is not the product of one specific set of characteristics” (2). Monsters apparently change from one age to another. In order to show the differences of monsters from period to those in another period, we have chosen two examples of monsters which belong to different eras, more specifically, Old and
Modern English literature.
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Beowulf is an Old English poem consisting of 3182 lines. There are three monsters in
Beowulf: Grendel, Grendel's mother and the Dragon. The Dragon is a legendary creature. The final act of the poem Beowulf is about the last fight between Beowulf and the third monster in the poem, the “dragon”. After killing Grendel and his mother, Beowulf becomes king of the Geats and rules peacefully for a long time. The stealing of a jewelled cup from the dragon’s lair by a slave awakens and angers dragon, who burns homes and lands of the Geats, and Beowulf, decides to fight the dragon, which he eventually kills.
Dragons apparently have various forms and roles in the imagination of human beings, and have been present in myths, legends, folklores, and fairy tales throughout ages. According to the characteristics of the age, the dragons have been portrayed in different forms: as fire- breathing or without fire, flying or crawling, and good or evil. The unnamed dragon in Beowulf is considered the earliest one in English literature. According to Maja Gajek,
The Beowulf dragon is the earliest example of the typical European dragon, and
possibly the first one to have the ability of fire-breathing. It is described as a
wyrm (Old English for “worm” or “serpent”) with a venomous bite, a nocturnal,
vengeful and treasure hoarding beast. Fiery breath could be identified with hell-
fire and Devil, the drake itself read as a symbol of evil and God’s wrath (23).
The dragon in the last act of Beowulf emerges with different features which reflect the different cultures where the dragon comes from. It is a mixture of features of many dragons from
Christian legends, Scandinavian dragon sagas, and others, as Brett mentions:
Although in its external analogues the Beowulf dragon tend to share more
characteristics of dragons of hagiographic Christian legend than the Scandinavian
dragon sagas, the pagan treatment of the hoard, the dragon’s participation in feud,
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and its role as a tool of Wyrd suggest that the dragon in Beowulf is a product of
both Christian and pagan imagination, and, as such, is the only formidable enemy
for a hero in both of these cultures (1).
External sources or internal clues are very essential to explain and analyse the significations and functions of the dragon. Thus, the dragon in Beowulf comes from many different cultures, the scribes successfully combining Christian and pagan elements. As Dubois says, “the Beowulf dragon is not just any dragon. It is the Beowulf dragon. And the poet seems to me to spend a tremendous amount of time building up a context against which it may be seen and understood” (822). As mentioned before, the concept of the dragon differs from one culture to another. In the Western culture, the dragon represents evil, while in Eastern cultures (China,
Japan, Korea... etc.) the dragon represents happiness and the meaning of life. According to the cultures of the different peoples, the functions and significances of the dragon may be interpreted in a variety ways. But, as Tolkien argues, “Whatever may be his origins, in fact or invention, the dragon in legend is a potent creation of men’s imagination, richer in significance than his barrow is in gold.” (Tolkien 16).
In Modern English literature, we find dragons in the work of the English writer, poet, scholar and university professor J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973), who uses many dragons
(Glaurung, Ancalagon the Black, Scatha the worm, Smaug and other dragons) in such works as
The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. The traditional dragons he portraits are based on European legends, but he combines these features with modern aspects. For instance, in
The Hobbit the dragon Smaug reflects the traditional characteristics of a European dragon and modern character, being respected and civilized, who has “a good notion of the current market value” (22), as seen in this conversation between Smaug and Bilbo:
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I don’t know if it has occurred to you that, even if you could steal the gold bit by
bit – a matter of a hundred years or so – you could not get it very far? Not much
use on the mountain-side? Not much use in the forest? Bless me! Have you never
thought of the catch? A fourteenth share, I suppose, or something like it, those
were the terms, eh? But what about delivery? What about cartage? What about
armed guards and tolls? (212, italics added)
All this questions show the materialistic mind set of civilized people in the modern age.
The writer (Tolkien) brings the dragon (monster) from the tradition of fairy, myth and legend to which he adds new features in order to state the function and significances of dragon according to the requirements of modern society and life. How these monsters develop and shift over the ages depends on society’s needs and also on individuals who either write about them (monsters) or reacts with them. In spite of the long period of time that has elapsed since monsters first appeared in literature, monster’s characteristics are as fashionable as ever.
2.2 The Concept of Monster in English Literature
In addition to entertainment, different kinds of knowledge, vicarious experience, expanding horizons, appreciation for other cultures and beliefs and others benefits, literature reflects all aspects of life during all eras. It deals with human and non-human issues “literature is above all, about the human, about what it means to be human, and therefore about the non- human, about what it might mean not to be human” (Bennet and Royle 299). The monster becomes a device used in literature as a powerful expression of the imagination and the rational.
In his book Monsters and the Monstrous Niall Scott states the significance of monster:
The monster is perhaps one of most significant creations serving to reflect and
critique human existence. Whether it has it’s etymological roots in a
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demonstration of something (monstrere) or warning (monere), the monster as a
metaphor continues to be powerful expression of the imagination and rational.
Through the imagination monstrosities are brought into being while the rational
seeks to control and explain such manifestation of literature, art, cinema and
biology. The monster gives a space in which perspectives can be adopted and
permissible and impermissible can be played with (1).
Monsters have always haunted the imagination of people from all ages, because of their explanatory power. According to Cohen, “the monster and his history (myth, hagiography, epic, artwork, elegy) becomes exhibit and demonstrative. Most cultures have recognized and made use of the explanatory power of monsters” (Cohen 1-2). Monsters can be divided into two kinds based on their origin: first, the physical monsters, and secondly, the psychological monsters or the monsters in behaviour: “theories on origin can be divided into two categories: those that look for the physical, natural or scientific roots of monster figures, [body] and those that look to inner, personal or cultural psychological cause [behaviour]” (Posthumus 9). Behaviour monsters are literary characters who are physically like humans, but psychologically, they are monsters: for example, Lady Macbeth, Regan, Claudius, or Aaron the Moor are villainous characters who appear in William Shakespeare’s dramas, while Mr. Bumble is an equally villainous character in
Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist, and the list may continue.
This study deals with physical monster in literature, its shapes, forms, kinds and functions. Physical monsters in literature have emerged in three versions: monsters of excess, monsters of lack and hybrid monsters. The excess monster is a kind of monster whose body is more than human’s body. The lack monster has less of a human’s body (such as a one-legged monster, or a headless one). The third kind is the hybrid monster whose body combines parts
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from different creatures (human being and animal). Dana Oswald briefly describes and explains these three types of monsters:
A monstrous body can differ from a human body in three ways, and we see across
medieval literature examples of each of these kinds of difference: they can be
more than human, less than human, and human plus some other element not
intrinsic to an individual human body. Thus, three types of monstrous humans
exist: monsters of excess, monsters of lack, and hybrid monsters. Monsters of
excess include the giants of Middle English romance, whose bodies are
excessively large, excessively hairy, and usually excessively violent. The
sciapods (one-footed men) and blemmye (men with no heads and faces in their
chests) featured in both Wonders of the East and Mandeville’s Travels, are
monsters of lack – they do not have all the body parts expected of normal
humans. Finally, monsters of hybridity combine attributes of different creatures,
different species, or even different sexes into one body (6).
Obviously, all kinds of monsters in literature are part of our life, our imagination, and our spirituality, and this importance of monsters has magnetized the attention of audience of all display modes (stage, page screen...etc) for a long time. As elements of fiction “monsters have held the attention of audiences for thousands of years. Their presence on the stage, page, and screen are often signifiers of myth fantastic and grossly on anthropomorphic forms are today recognized as elements of fiction” (Bromley 4). The use of monsters in literature has led to a classification into genres – Horror, Terror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction – or into subgenres such as Monster Literature.
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As mentioned earlier, monsters classify into two kinds: physical and behavioural
(according to the tendency to monstrous in their treatment). Also, the morphological shapes of monsters can be classified into types: combinatory and single shape (abnormalities). The first kind of monsters, namely the physical monster, subdivides into three kinds: excess, lack, and hybrid monster, and they may be classified into combinatory or single abnormalities. Monsters of excess have huge bodies, such as the giants whose bodies are excessively large and who are excessively violent, and have a single abnormality (for instance, the giants in Homer’s The
Odyssey). Translator and editor Stanley Lombardo, in his book Homer: The Essential Odyssey describes the Cyclops as “One-eyed, man-eating giants. Their occupation of Hyperia forces the
Phaeacians to relocate. The term in the singular (Cyclops) also refers to Polyphemus” (Lombardo
248). Lombardo successively defines Laestrygonians and Polyphemus giants as “giant cannibals who eat part of Odysseus’ crew and destroy all the ships but Odysseus” (ibid. 252).
In Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750, by Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston, in the caption to the Hereford map of Africa, we find references to the lack monsters, creatures whose bodies are less than human beings and who have a single abnormality, such as the
Blemmys, born without heads and their mouth and eyes in their chests:
The detail of Africa ... includes, for example, a winged salamander (a “venomous
dragon”) next to an anthropomorphized mandrake root (a “marvellously powerful
plant”). The strip of land on the far right includes a number of the monstrous
human races, including the one-legged Sciopodes; the hermaphroditic
Androgynes; the Himantopodes, here shown on all fours; and the headless
Blemmyes (28).
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Another variety of monsters in literature appear with combinatory abnormalities, the so- called hybrid monsters. Hybrid monsters combine attributes of different creatures, either human or animal. The category of monsters exist in literature in various form, the mixing of human with animal or various animals, and it is the most common form of the monster. The Centaur is the best example of this type of monsters, a mythological creature that is a combination of a human body and a horse’s body. In the Oxford Dictionary, Centaur is defined as “a mythological creature with the upper body of a human and the lower body of a horse”. The Centaur appears in such literary works as Harry Potter and The Narnian Chronicles. Other monsters which have found resonance in literature are those that combine elements from the bodies of many animals.
For instance, the Cerberus and Hippogriff: according to the classical Greek mythology, Cerberus is usually represented as a dog having three heads, that guarded the entrance to Hades, while
Hippogriff is a monster of Greek mythology with “a griffin’s head, wings, and claws and a horse’s body” (Collins English Dictionary). Cerberus and Hippogriff are widely popular in the
Harry Potter novels by J. K. Rowling.
Transformative monsters are very popular in literature, and the essential forms for this type of monsters are the Werewolf and the Vampire. Werewolves are people who have ability to transform into wolves (monsters) every full moon night, thus moving from human form and culture into animal form and instinct. As defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a werewolf is
“a person transformed into a wolf or capable of assuming a wolf’s form”. For example, Reuben
Golding is a werewolf character, who appears in the thirty-first novel, The Wolf Gift (2012), of the Gothic writer Anne Rice. The novel tells the story of Reuben Golding, who is attacked by transforms into a werewolf.
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Vampires as shape-shifting monsters are especially popular in literature. They are the protagonists in different genres of literature like romance, adventure, and horror. The Merriam-
Webster Dictionary defines a vampire as “the reanimated body of a dead person believed to come from the grave at night and suck the blood of persons asleep”. Dracula (1897), by Bram
Stoker, is the best example that incarnates the features of this definition. In spite of changing of vampires, they are still effective in literature. Though totally different from Dracula and the like, vampires continue to be present in popular literature today.
As a matter of fact, all the significant types of monsters and their morphological shapes have originated from the writers’ views: monsters come into the world because there is no perfection in creation. All types of monsters that appear in literature are imaginary or unnatural creatures, defined by the Merriam Webster as “strange or horrible imaginary”. The different shape of the monster and its origin, either from myths or from any other source, does not necessarily indicate the real monster. Monsters have all elements of perfection without difficulties. The representations of monsters in society have changed from time to time, and these alterations of monsters have been based on their creators (writers) and their affections and reflections from the society they belong to. Thomas Scott Cason underlines this aspect in his article, “Creature Features: Monstrosityand the Construction of Human Identity in the Testament of Solomon” (2015): “Monsters do not exist outside of the spectrum of human identity but are in fact a radicalized form of human identity. … Monsters are like men in the sense that their aim is to dominate others. …Fittingly, it is this relentless hunger for hostility that distinguishes monster from man” (Cason 266).
Viewed historically, the presence of Monsters in the history of literature differs from one age to the other. They first appeared in English literature as early the end of the first millennium,
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and the Old English epic Beowulf is an indication that monsters have existed ever since the beginning of literature. Monsters in old English literature have different features from those which appear in other times. The concept of monsters in Old English has different aspects. Dana
Oswald refers to old monsters as a monster who appear with permanently physical body to show its significant in society:
Monstrous bodies in Old English are permanent, unchanging and located at
significant distance from communities. Thus, in Old English literature, monsters
are born not made. To be a monster is to process permanently a physical body that
differs significantly from the norm: the monster’s identity is defined by the
monstrous form. There can be no hope for inclusion or acceptance by community
because the body [the body of monster] marks one as inherently liminal, which
quite often (although not always) means dangerous or evil. Indeed, when the
monster threatens this distance by getting too close to community, it is removed.
The threat of Old English monstrosity can only remove by death in case of
Grendel and his mother, or by artistic or narrative erasure in the case of Wonder
of East. The monstrous body must either remain remote from human society or it
must be removed through dismemberment as well as death. And yet, the trace of
the monster remains within the text and on page, despite the attempt to erase it.
For example, although Beowulf has rid the Danes of Grendel and his mother,
Beowulf’s repetition of the story and his encounters with other monster invokes
them again and again (23).
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As most of classical monsters, Beowulf’s monsters in old English have presence that makes them as the best examples for this period. This is how Dinah Birch, in The Oxford
Companion to English Literature (2009), summarizes Beowulf:
An Old English poem of 3,182 lines, surviving in a 10th-century
manuscript. The poem’s date is unknown. The young Beowulf, a Geatish
hero, fights and kills Grendel, a monster who has attacked Heorot, the hall
of the Danish king, Hrothgar. He then kills Grendel’s mother, who has
come to avenge her son. Fifty years later, when Beowulf has for a long time
been king of the Geats, he fights a dragon which has attacked his people. He
and the dragon are mortally wounded (117-118)
Writing about the monsters in Beowulf, Emily Kemp mentions that, “Each of these monsters Beowulf battles has distinct characteristics from one another. All three monsters are enraged and fighting for different reasons: Grendel is an angered, social outcast; Grendel’s mother is out to avenge her son’s death; and the dragon is furious after being burgled” (1).
Grendel is described by the poet as a fierce, unblessed creature, belonging to a race of monsters:
Then a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark,
nursed a hard grievance. It harrowed him
to hear the din of the loud banquet
every day in the hall, the harp being struck
....
Grendel was the name of this grim demon
haunting the marches, marauding round the heath
and the desolate fens; he had dwelt for a time
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in misery among the banished monsters,
Cain’s clan, whom the Creator had outlawed
and condemned as outcasts (Heaney 9).
Grendel is an evil demon, and a devil. The society refuses Grendel and exiles him to distant lands. Grendel has the ability of killing and he artlessly kills people with joy; his actions have the traits of fierce and animalism, but at the same time they depend on human emotions, such as animosity and dissatisfaction. In fact, these features make him seem as a more intractable challenge to Beowulf.
The second monster which appears in the poem is Grendel’s mother. She does not have a name, and the poet does not draw her physical description:
Monstrous hell-bride, brooded on her wrongs.
She had been forced down into fearful waters,
The cold depths, after Cain had killed
His father’s son, felled his own
Brother with the sword. (Heaney 89)
Grendel’s mother, a water monster, is unlike her son, she is an outcast of society because of her ancestor Cain who had killed his own brother. After her son gets killed, she comes to
Heorot and kills just one man. The third monster is the dragon, as mentioned in the poem:
... until one began
to dominate the dark, a dragon on the prowl
From the steep vaults of a stone-roofed barrow
Where he guarded a hoard. (Heaney 151)
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The Dragon is a monster completely different from Grendel and his mother, and he appears in the poem to criticize theft and to show a moral story of agreed thief in society.
Another example of monsters in Old English Literature is The Wonders of The East or
The Marvels of The East. It is An Old English prose piece. Dana Oswald has argued that:
“Wonders of the East depicts thirty-seven marvellous places and creatures, twelve of which are monstrous humans. Only two of them are designated as female” (Oswald 3). Indeed, Andrea
Rossi-Reder has confirmed that:
The most bizarre creatures appear in Wonders of the East. This is a medieval
account of various creatures believed to inhabit India and Ethiopia. Three
versions of the work remain extant-all of them produced in England between the
11th and 12th centuries and all of them illustrated. In Wonders we find a variety
of monsters, including many of the same creatures described in Alexander’s letter.
Wonders describes Cynocephali, Sciapodes (creatures with one leg and one foot)
Blemmyae (creatures with their faces embedded in their chests), Cyclopes,
Panotii (a race of beings with ears long enough to use as coverlets at night); and a
whole host of other oddities. As if these beings' appearances were not strange
enough, we learn that their behaviour, particularly their eating habits, is just as
odd. Cynocephali breathe flames and eat humans, Homodubii eat raw fish, Hostes
eat human flesh, and Donestre devour human bodies, but save the heads and weep
over them. If the creatures are indeed human or part-human, their cannibalistic
tendencies emphasize not only their outrageousness, but also their threat (24-25).
Monsters in Middle English literature are different from those these appear in the
Anglo-Saxon. Alixe Dovey mentions that “A monster, in Middle Ages, is a creature with the
ALSSAFY 22
body that differs from the normal in significant ways. The category of the monsters implies that there is a set of characteristics that defines the bodies of humans” (Dovey 7). Monsters appear in medieval ages in two different forms: first, hybrid monsters or monsters that combine parts from a human body and an animal’s body, and second, monsters of bodily transformation. According to Astrid Jungmann,
Although those bodies served specific cultural needs, they were not only
understood as something abstract and symbolic. There was also a clear tendency
in the Middle Ages to concretise the metaphorical and figurative in order to
produce the idea of real monstrous races populating distant locations of the world.
The monster exists – not here, but in remote places instead (6).
Many monsters appear in literature during this age, the best example being The Travels of
Sir John Mandeville which is translated from the French into English by Sir John Mandeville. It describes the lands whose inhabitants have bodies of human with heads of dogs, while other creatures that appear in this story are pygmies and one-eyed giants. In fact, the Travels’ monsters are clearly different from earlier works. Mandeville’s monsters portray the function of the moral symbolic more than previous works: “Travels monster depict different features such as spiritual, moral, political and religious issues and others. Monsters describe these issues all in same time, but sometimes independently” (Verner 6).
After the end of Medieval Ages, the Renaissance begins with different features in all aspects of life. The term Renaissance is a French word meaning “rebirth”. The English renaissance marks changes in people’s values, beliefs, and behaviours. It changed the way people thought about life and culture, and this change followed five directions: humanism, trade and exploration, scientific developments, the development of the printing press, and the Reformation.
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The Renaissance in England (1500-1700) includes three periods: the Elizabethan Age (1558-
1603), the Jacobean Period (1603-1625) and the Caroline Age (1625-1649). It is considered as the bridge among ages. There are famous writers in this age who have effects on literature such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, and many others.
Faerie Queene is written by Edmund Spenser, it is considered the best example on monsters in Renaissance period. This is how Dinah Birch describes Faerie Queene:
The greatest work of Edmund Spenser, of which the first three books were
published 1590, and the second three 1596 ... Of the six books Spenser published
in his lifetime, the subjects are: I, the adventures of the Redcrosse Knight of
Holiness (the Anglican Church), the protector of the virgin Una (truth, or the true
religion), and the wiles of Archimago and Duessa; II, the adventures of Sir
Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, his encounters with Pyrochles and Cymochles,
his visit to the Cave of Mammon and the House of Temperance, and his
destruction of Acrasia and her Bower of Bliss (Canto X of this book contains a
chronicle of British rulers from Brut to Elizabeth); III, the legend of Chastity,
exemplified by Britomart and Belphoebe; IV, the legend of Triamond and
Cambell, exemplifying Friendship, together with the story of Scudamour and
Amoret; V, the adventures of Artegall, the Knight of Justice, in which allegorical
reference is made to various historical events of the reign of Elizabeth I: the
defeat of the Spaniards in the Netherlands, the recantation of Henry IV of France,
the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and the administration of Ireland by Lord
Grey de Wilton; VI, the adventures of Sir Calidore, exemplifying Courtesy. There
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is also a fragment on Mutabilitie, being the sixth and seventh cantos of the legend
of Constancie, which was to have formed the seventh book. This fragment, first
published in 1609, contains a charming description of the seasons and the months.
(357)
Edmund Spenser shows three types of monsters in his poem Faerie Queene, and he depicts his monsters throughout adventures. Monsters of excess, monsters of lack and transformative monsters are all found in Faerie Queene. In her dissertation, Michele Joy
Bromley elucidates the presence of all monsters in Faerie Queene as following:
Edmund Spenser capitalizes on the contemporary scientific and spiritual
understanding of monsters to supplement his own allegorical agenda—the
pedagogical enforcement of moral imperatives through anthropomorphic
representations of human frailty. He does this by presenting known examples of
Early Modern monstrosities such as giants and dwarves, extensions of these
monstrosities such as conflations of human and monster, and transformative
monsters such as those that were once fully human and become fully monstrous
on the page. This chapter focuses on these literary categories of monstrosity and
the ways in which they both reinforce and intensify the contemporary perception
of visceral monstrosity. To strengthen the realistic probability of their existence,
Edmund Spenser allows his first monster, or anthropomorphic deformation, to
appear as a dwarf – again, individuals with dwarfism or gigantism in the Early
Modern era would have been considered proof of deformative monstrosity. The
introduction of a dwarf as a less threatening deformation is followed by the
introduction of a hybrid human-reptilian monster, reestablishments of realistic
ALSSAFY 25
deformation in the form of giants, and finally, a human figure that transforms into
a monster. These latter examples are all used by Spenser as monstrous vessels for
his allegorical representation of evil and vice. These fantastic extensions of
visible monstrosity and supposed transformative monstrosity act as a warning to
Spenser’s readers of their own inherently repressed monstrosity and bestial
tendencies. They force the audience into a perhaps unwilling but inevitable
identification with these anthropomorphic manifestations of human flaw. These
literary manifestations of mental or spiritual corruption would have presented
themselves as realistic possibilities to a susceptible Early Modern conscious. The
conflation of human and beast or the transformation of human into beast – an
evocation of Marie de France’s “Bisclavret” accomplish this goal with varying
levels of unsettledness (27).
The Neoclassic period can be divided into three parts: the Restoration Age (1660-1700), the Augustan Age (1700-1750), and the Age of Johnson (1750-1798). According to William J.
Long the features of Neoclassical Age are:
In the literature of Restoration Age we note a sudden breaking away from old
standards, just as society broke away from the restraints of Puritanism. Many of
the literary men had been driven out of England with Charles and his count, or
else had followed their patrons into exile in the day of the Commonwealth. On
their return they renounced old ideals and demanded that English poetry and
drama should follow the style to which they had become accustomed in the
gayety of Paris (238-239).
ALSSAFY 26
In different shapes and purposes, monsters appear in all periods of the Neoclassical
Period in order to depict the features and reflect the cultures of every period. In the Neoclassical
Age the roles and functions of monsters are different. Neoclassicism is considered the reverse of the preceding period, focusing on logic and order. One of the most important features of this period is the preservation of religious issues and heeding in political and economic affairs, with a particular stress on philosophy. The Neoclassical writers such as Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope,
Jonathan Swift, have neglected the supernatural elements in their writings:
While the Enlightenment had challenged the very notion of the existence of
marvellous monster-types, evolutionary science in the nineteenth century
eradicated the possibility of fantastic and hybrid creatures. Paralleling
developments in eighteenth-century science, in literature, mainstream discourse
during the neoclassical period readily rejected the notion of both excess and the
supernatural monster figure (Beville 48).
The forms of monsters are changed according to the cultures and characteristics of the age, and the epistemological functions of the monsters. The epitome of this change is incarnated by Jonathan Swift in his novel Gulliver’s Travels. As example of monsters in Neoclassicism,
Gulliver’s Travels shows the role and function of monster (the Giants). Swift’s giants are different from those which appear in literature in previous periods.
Unlike Gulliver’s Travels, Mandeville portrays giants as monsters with no head, or with the head of a dog and four eyes, but Swift’s giants are depicted as huge human beings (excess of human) without monstrous elements. This is how Jonathan Swift describes them: “It stood prominent six feet, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference. The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and the hue both of that and the dug, so varied with spots, pimples,
ALSSAFY 27
and freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous” (Swift 108-109). Swift uses giants to show various aspects in his novel which has different elements of fairy tale. Giants are employed to satirize the human beings and the political system in Swift’s time.
Literature in the Romantic period changed along with the changes that occurred in
England and the other European countries, as a result of the significant events that happened in this age (1790-1837). The Romantic literature is characterized by a shift of focus from reason to sensibility (feelings and imagination), from the writers’ interest in urban society to the countryside. In fact, the decampment from rural society to civilized, urban society, the agricultural and industrial revolution conferred new dimension to the literature of this period.
The result of scientific developments and discoveries of new technologies was a feeling of fear of relinquishing from all principles and morals of religion. Romantic writers reflect all this alarmist conception, when they deal with all details of life, human feelings, nature and imagination, and create a monster as a hero who knows the details of his life and the meaning of the world. Burwick mentions in his article that:
The monsters created by the Romantic imagination are much the same as those
that still prowl the stories and cinema of the present day. From generation to
generation significant changes nevertheless occur. ... Monsters proliferated in
response to the increase in foreign immigration, urban crime, and the fear of
“unholy” scientific research. Solicited by current events, the cast of monsters was
augmented by new characters not previously represented in the literature of terror:
the mummy, the alien, the zombie, and creatures created by scientific or by
mechanical means. (1)
ALSSAFY 28
Imagination, sensibility, irrationality and the scientific discoveries, all of these lead writers depict monsters as heroes in their writings. Vampires, werewolves, ghost and all supernatural monsters are rooted in the Romantic Age with lasting effects until now. In the
Romantic period, there emerged a new mode of literature and subgenre that combines the feelings of horror and terror by including good and evil monsters in one work – the Gothic fiction. The gothic novel is invented almost single-handedly by Horace Walpole, whose The
Castle of Otranto (1764) contains essentially all the elements that constitute the genre.
Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) not only reflects the aspects of the eighteenth century, but it has exerted its influence on writing poetry, and even film making up to the present day. It introduced the term “gothic romance” to the literary world. The Castle of
Otranto is regarded as the first novel in Gothic fiction. Laurence W. Mazzeno says that “[The
Castle of Otranto] is among the best-known, best-loved, and best-crafted novels of the gothic genre in English. It is also one of the first. Gothic fiction was representative of the late eighteenth century” (1).
The best example of monsters in Gothic Fiction is Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus by Mary Shelley, a novel has all the elements of a Gothic monster tale. In her
Introduction to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stephine Foward argued that “Mary Shelley’s novel is a complex work that defies classification. She successfully blended Gothic and
Romantic elements to produce an enduring literary masterpiece” (9).
The next period is the Victorian Age (1837-1901), in fact, the longest period in the history of English literature, covering about 63 years and 7 months. As Michael Alexander mentions in his book A History of English Literature, “‘Victorian’ is a term that is often extended beyond the queen’s reign (1837-1901) to include William IV’s reign from 1830” (257).
ALSSAFY 29
In fact, there are many events which take place in the Victorian Age that had enduring effects on the themes, and styles of writings. The period is marked by a number of defining elements: the increase of the population in England from 14 to 32 million; the Industrial Revolution with the significant improvement of the technologies that entirely changed the way that people lived their life; the developments in scientific theories which changed the people’s world outlook; and the social stratification of the society into three classes – the high class, the bourgeoisie, and the low class. All these changes greatly inspired the literature of the age.
The Victorian Era witnessed the birth of a new literary genre, Science Fiction (SF). Brian
Stableford mentions in his introduction of the book Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction
Literature that:
Instead of these difficulties, there are many critics try to define Science Fiction,
such as science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein in his book The Science Fiction
Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism, Science Fiction is “a handy short
definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about
possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world,
past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance
of the scientific method (28).
Critics have different opinions on the origin of the Science Fiction genre: some go back to H G. Wells or Jules Verne as the founders of Science Fiction: “Jules Verne (1828-1905) is conventionally regarded as the father of science fiction” (Derbyshire 81). Some critics say that the roots of Science Fiction belong to earliest literature, and they (literature and science fiction) developed together: They “insist on the elements of fantasy and science fiction in literature as ancient as literature itself, there are journeys to the moon or heroic protagonists seeking out new
ALSSAFY 30
worlds and strange new civilizations in oldest epics of human culture from ancient Sumerian
Epic of Gilgamesh” (Roberts 47). Some others indicate that the roots of Science Fiction are to be found in the Gothic novel. Thus, according to Brian Aldiss, “Science fiction was born from the
Gothic mode, is hardly free of it now. Nor is the distance between the two modes great. The
Gothic emphasis was on the distant and the unearthly” (Aldiss 1973: 18), while Roberts argues that “Archivists and academics may insist that the long history of science fiction is the most complete, but if we are interested in SF as a presently vibrant cultural fact, then only those texts still ‘alive’ in some sense should be included; and the earliest such text is probably Mary
Shelley’s short novel Frankenstein (1818)” (42).
In fact, the role of monsters alters in Gothic Literature from the Romantic Period. In his essay, “The Gothic Origins of Science Fiction” (1980), Patrick Brantlinger argues that “an important sense in which the whole development of science fiction from Frankenstein forward has been characterized by an anti-Promethean, anti-utopian, anti-scientific pessimism” (31).
In Victorian literature the presence of monsters is based on imagination and sensibility associated with scientific developments as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The Victorian monsters concentrate on criminality, degeneracy and devolution:
The monster in the English Gothic novel can be seen as a representation of social
fears and problems. An important aspect of these fears, particularly in the
Victorian Period, is the aspect of repressed emotions. These fears can be seen as a
result of uncertainty due to the decline of religious certitude, which grew with
every new scientific discovery (Schneider 2).
Traditionally, a monster’s physical description is very essential in highlighting the monstrosity of any creature. If a monster is “an imaginary creature that is a large, ugly, and
ALSSAFY 31
frightening” (Cambridge Dictionary Online), then the appearance of the monster can be related with the life time of the monster itself. In addition to physical description, the actions of the monster are very important to reflect the features of the monster itself. These actions are not always controlled, as monsters have “unpredictable, uncontrollable force that cannot be reasonable with or persuaded. It’s an incarnation of Nature itself, upsetting our optimistic project to tame and use her” (Asma 153).
We find an example of a Victorian monster in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde (1886) by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson: in this case, Mr. Hyde can be considered as a monster, but he has not the features of traditional monsters. This monster (Mr.
Hyde) is a human character who has the traits of a monster – contrary to the traditional appearance of a monster who has the traits of human. As for the actions of Mr. Hyde (the monster), they resemble the actions of traditional monsters.
The Modernist, Postmodernist, and Contemporary writers have established new ways to express their sense of being, in the attempt to break the traditional methods of writing literature.
The modernists believe that new life needs new forms and it depends on their experience to construct an individual form of writing. As James Gindin explains:
Early in the twentieth century writers realized that values and alternatives in
society were becoming far less fixed and secure. In part because of rapidly
changing values of conduct and class, novels frequently tended to centre on
personal and metaphysical issues, to use social issues only as temporary
decoration for the structure of permanent metaphysical and personal concerns (4).
Monsters in literature are gadgets meant to express what writers want and, as instruments of literature, monsters (and literature itself) have changed after World War II. Fundamentally,
ALSSAFY 32
monsters are variable and consistent creatures, the purpose and the epistemological function of each form of monster has completely changed. Telling examples are the monsters that appear successively in the 1990s in J. R. R. Tolkien’s works – The Hobbit, The Lord of The Rings and
The Silmarillion. Different form of monsters in Tolkien’s works, such as Dragons, Trolls,
Goblins, Fellbeasts, Gaints, Fire-drakes, Watchers in the Water and even Worms have appeared to reflect the essential characteristics of the world and human life. Among Tolkien’s resources mention should be made of Beowulf and Old English resources, and the Icelandic sagas, among others. In his 1936 lecture, Beowulf: The Monster and Critics, Tolkien has argued that:
Monsters of more or less human shape were naturally liable to development on
contact with Christian ideas of sin and spirits of evil. Their parody of human form
(earmsceapen on weres wæstmum) becomes symbolical, explicitly, of sin, or
rather this mythical element, already present implicit and unresolved, is
emphasized: this we see already in Beowulf, strengthened by the theory of
descent from Cain (and so from Adam), and of the curse of God (Nicholson, An
Anthology 89).
In his works, Tolkien uses fantasy elements and monsters belonging to the pre-Christian world of fairies, fables and mythological tales, as in The Lord of The Rings. Tolkien’s monsters reflect Tolkien’s expertise in old tales and history of monsters in literature, and then he uses them in the same form to chronicle new issues and new characteristics of new life (modern life).
Another example of monsters in Modern English Literature is Harry Potter by J. K.
Rowling. Rowling uses in her series of fantasy novels many monsters such as: Acromantula,
Hippogriff, Basilisk, Centaur, Dragons, Ghoul, Three-headed dog, troll and Pixie. Some of these monsters belong to mythological creatures like Three headed dog and Hippogriff: “The wildly
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popular Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling have also renewed public interest in a whole menagerie of classic, mythical beasts from three-headed dogs (Cerberus to the Greeks, “Fluffy” to Potter fans) to hippogriffs (part horse, part bird of prey)” (Godfery 12). Other creatures
(monsters) are derived from the folklores of different areas. Mohammad Kawish Haider asserts that:
The world of Harry Potter abounds with non-human creatures like werewolves,
house elves, centaurs, dragons, trolls, phoenixes, goblins, hippogriffs. These semi
– divine creatures also exist in Egyptian, Roman, Greek mythologies, Arthurian
legends, and European folklore. She has made a conscious choice in selecting
myths, reworking it, and then adapting it into her novel series. (424)
Factually, Rowling uses magic creatures in the Harry Potter series, and the movie
Fantasy Beasts and Where to Find Themthat originate in myths, fairy tales, and folklores:
“Rowling’s magical creatures are rooted in the Western magical tradition, that find in ancient empires of the Middle East, Greece, and Rome. Many creature (Rowling’s monsters) roots in rich tradition and other creatures derive from Modern Europe folklore and British” (Zola and
Kronzek xiv). The purpose of using myths in literature is to show and describe the world, cultures, social problems and social issues. J. K. Rowling uses British myths and folklore to create a complete plot that reflects all these directions. In an interview, Rowling explains how she uses myths and folklores:
I have taken horrible liberties with folklore and mythology, but I’m quite ashamed
about that, because British folklore and British mythology is a totally bastard
mythology. You know, we’ve been invaded by people, we’ve appropriated their
gods, we’ve taken their mythical creatures, and we have soldered them all
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together to make, what I would say, is one of the richest folklores in the world,
because it’s so varied. So I feel no compunction about borrowing from that freely,
but adding a few things of my own (Interview with Stephen).
Modern and contemporary literature presents new monsters that are vastly different from those of the past, and J. K. Rowling constructs a magic world using myths and folklore to create new monsters, like the dragons, or the ghoul.
2.3 The Concept of Monster in Arabic Literature
Monsters in Arabic literature are different from their English counterparts. Readers do not find monster as frequently as they appear in English Literature – such as lack, excess, and hybrid monsters. In fact, from various reasons, monsters were very scarce in the Arab literature.
The explanation resides in the preponderance of the Islamic religion and beliefs, and the late emergence of the novel in Arabic literature (not before the beginning of the nineteenth century) that prevented the appearance of such characters. The novel, however, is the fertile ground of acquired or inherent cultures.
The idea of the monster or the sense of the most accurate image of the mythical object, combines with characteristics that blend humans and animals with its depth and historical formation, and its tributaries in Arab civilization takes two dimensions or two levels. Each of them has appealed to and caused a shift in the imagination and Arab consciousness in general and literary awareness in particular. First, we refer to the mythological dimension of the “myth”, which finds its reflections in the legends and beliefs of ancient civilizations such as Assyrian,
Babylonian, Phoenician, and pre-Islamic Arabs. The myth is associated with literature in general and poetry in particular, but myth is the first creative adventure created by the human imagination.
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There is a strong relationship between literature and myth, and there are those who view myth as literature, and it is the literary expression of the activities of the men of old who had not yet developed a method of historical writing to identify the events of their day: the myth became the container in which they put the summary of their thoughts. There are many evidences of the use of myth in the Arab poetic heritage, starting with legendary references in the pre-Islamic poetry of Al-A'sha, Ibn Abi Al-Salat, Al-Nababah Al-Zubayni, and others. The myth is considered one of the most important sources for the novel all over the world, achieving qualitative progress on the two levels of content and beauty. The Return of Spirit (1933), written by Tawfiq al-Hakim, is considered as “the first novel in Arabic literature inspired by the myth of death and rebirth of Pharaonic (Isis and Osiris)” (Salih 30).
The Legend of Gathome (2002), written by Ahmed Khalid Tawfiq, though a short novel in the famous series of supernatural novels, presents a new form of Arab horror to the core, despite the use of many of the world’s legends in the events. This novel represents a monumental shift in the supernatural chain, transmitted from stories that destroy the horrifying legends and confirmed their untrue, to the beginning of the belief in the existence of supernatural powers in the world. This story brings about many new terms to the Arabic readership at the time of its issuing, such as the Gathome, who crouches on the chest of the sleeper at night and makes him suffer from choking and nightmares. The Gathome often appears in the hour of the wolf, the hour when the human body is at its peak from three to five in the morning, when the hero suffers from serial nightmares every night, and takes him to a strange place he does not know, to find a memento of these strange places and events.
The existence of mythological monsters in Arabic literature is derived from old stories and literary works like the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the Persian collection of stories Kalileh
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and Demneh and The Arabian Nights or One Thousand and One Nights, long before the mentioning of mythological creatures in the Holy Quran. For example, in Surah Al-Fil (“The
Elephant”), we read:
أَلَ ْم تَ َر َك ْي َف فَ َع َل َر ُّب َك بِأَ ْص َحا ِب ا ْلفِي ِل
أَلَ ْم يَ ْج َع ْل َك ْي َدهُ ْم فِي تَ ْضلِي ل
َوأَ ْر َس َل َعلَ ْي ِه ْم َط ْي ًرا أَبَابِي َل
تَ ْر ِمي ِهم بِ ِح َجا َر ة ِّمن ِس ِّجي ل
فَ َج َعلَهُ ْم َك َع ْص ف َّمأْ ُكو ل
1. “Have you not seen how your Lord dealt with the companions of the
elephant?”2. “Did He not make their stratagem go awry?”
3. “And He sent upon them birds in flocks,”
4. “Pelting them with stones of petrified clay,”
5. “Thus He made them like straw eaten up.” (Al Qur’an Surat Al-Fil, 1-5)
There are many explanations for the “birds in flocks” which Allah sends them to destroy the elephant's army which comes from Yemen under the command of Abrahah Al Ashram to destroy the Ka’aba in Mecca. Jewad Ali mentions in his book that Saed Bin Jobaer describes the
“birds in flocks” as “a kind of birds which nest between sky and earth, they have beak such as bird’s beak and palm such as dog’s palm”, and Akrima describes them as “green birds with lion’s head that come from sea”, (182). Another example of a mythological creature which appears in Arabian Nights is the Phoenix. Ateaa and Kamal describe the Phoenix as “a large bird which has the head and wings of an eagle, but its wings are very long. Phoenix appears in the story of Sinbad the Sailor, and has the ability to carry a large elephant in its claws” (2).
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As a matter of fact, Arabic literature emerged in the 6th century and only fragments of the written language had appeared before. The Holy Qur’an appears in the Arabic world in the
7th century, and has the most lasting impact on Arab culture and its literature. Arabic literature flourishes in the sense of the most accurate image of the Arab culture during the Islamic Golden
Age and this flourishing continues even today. Arabic culture and its different manifestations, such as poetry, maqams, the novel and the short story presents a wide area through which we can identify the presence and dimensions of the monster, but not at a mythological level. The image of the monster is re-employed at the level of creativity and literary imagination in topics such as employment, creativity and innovation in a field completely different to the first level
(mythological level), and “the recruitment of monsters gives Arabic literature a new form which increases the semantics and symbolism of the monster” (Al Jamal 36).
The semantic and symbolic meaning of monsters in Arabic literature gives a new concept to prove the new functions of these monsters. For example, Demneh and Calileh is considered the constituent text for this new concept of monster, and Ahmed Aumarah mentions in his book that “the book seemingly is clear in its themes and chapters that it is moral story or stories ... it propagandizes to a good morality, it advises kings to do so and, moreover, to keep their property sure-footed in the existing buildings. It is a story about human values and philosophical themes”(45). Demneh and Calileh is an example of using animals which talk with each other to convey moral values. We find the same method in the voyage to the country of the Houyhnhnms
(the talking horses) in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, or in George Orwell’s Animal Farm where almost all the characters are animals. Badr Shakir Al-Sayab in his poem “Rain Song” and
Adonis, in his collection of 141 poems “Songs of Mihyar the Damascene” are the best example
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for the employment of semantic and symbolic meaning of monsters in the poetry. They have employed the myth of the phoenix in their poetry.
Arabic literature has had an effect on English literature and it has been influenced by
English literature. We may discern two kinds of literature exchange of influence between them.
Arabian Night is a gem of literature world, the influence of the Arabian Nights is frequent in its impact on English writer in making his\her literary work in different periods. In William
Shakespeare’s works, Othellolikes Ubaydallh in the Arabian Nights story of ‘The Tale of Qamar al-Zaman'. Fahd Mohammed Taleb shows the impacts of Arabian Nights on English literature:
The Arabian themes of fables, fairy tales, romances, and historical anecdotes are
in the English literary works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For
example, the inspiration of the Arabian Nights is remarkable in works such as
Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Goldsmith's Citizen
of the World (1760), Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), and most particularly Beckford's
Vathek (1786). John Payne, in The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night
(1884), remarks that these superficial tales were improved for the Western
conditions and to the taste of Western civilization. (386)
The influence of Western literature on Arabic literature is frequent and obvious throughout the history of literature. Over time, these effects have increased to level of imitation.
The novel is the most influential genre of literature from the west because the novel, in spite of the difference in the critics’ opinions on its origin in Arabic literature; but majority of them refers to it as the result of the influence of the Western novel on Arabic writers. The best example of these influences is the winner of the 2014 International prize for Arabic fiction, the novel
Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) by the Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi.
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2.4 The Gothic Novel
The adjective “gothic” has been used with reference to a kind of novel that first appeared in the 18th century. These kinds of novels are indicated by three connotations: Medieval (linked to the architecture of the 12th-14th centuries); Classical (clear, simple and balanced, modern, harmonious, elegant and civilized); and wild, supernatural, in the sense of mysterious. Gothic has represented excess, the wild, the barbarous and primitive, the rude, and the dark. After the middle of the century, it has acquired a positive connotation, in accordance with the change in cultural values. Sentiment has begun to substitute satire, and mystery supplanted rationalism.
This accompanied the general tendency – common to many European countries, notably
Germany – to revalue the past, seen as possessing vigour, a spontaneity which has long been forgotten.
The word ‘Goth’ and ‘Gothic’ have described the Germanic tribes such as Goths,
Visigoths or Ostrogoths who sack Rome and ravage the rest of Europe in 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries. From this source, the word Gothic has come to mean barbarous. By the 18th century in
England, the Gothic has become synonymous with the Middle Ages, a period which is in disfavour because it was perceived as unenlightened and chaotic. The word Gothic first has appeared in 1611 in a reference to the language of the Goths was extended in sense in several ways, meaning Germanic, medieval, barbarous and also an architectural style that was not Greek or Roman.
The word Gothic is an architectural term. The style is best known for the pointed arch that was the feature of Gothic churches. Gothic architecture was prevalent in Western Europe between the 12th and 16th centuries. In her essay, “Gothic spaces: the political aesthetics of Toni
Morrison’s ‘Beloved’”, Liliane Weissberg mentioned that “‘Gothic’ has its origins as an
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architectural term, applied to medieval buildings marked by pointed arches and vaults” (8). The gothic buildings have been characterized by castles, ruins, monasteries, and convents with labyrinths, dungeons, trap doors, hidden passages, secret rooms and forbidden wings; Gothic buildings are grand, spacious and capable of holding vast secrets. They have become a perfect playground for ghosts, monsters and unethical behaviour.
The roots of the Gothic novel can be found much earlier in writing dating back to the
Middle Ages. It’s still popular today with current authors and is considered a category within
Romantic literature. Indeed, the word “gothic” was officially used to describe a kind of fiction in the Romantic age, having been applied by Horace Walpole in his novel The Castle of Otranto: A
Gothic Story (1765). In A Glossary of Literary Terms, M. H. Abrams provides a general definition of the Gothic by using Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story as a building block to explain the development of this type of narrative:
The Gothic novel, or in alternative term, Gothic romance, is a type of prose
fiction which was inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A
Gothic Story (1764) [. . .] and flourished through the early nineteenth century.
Some writers followed Walpole’s example by setting their stories in the medieval
period; others set them in a Catholic country, especially Italy or Spain. The locale
was often a gloomy castle furnished with dungeons, subterranean passages, and
sliding panels; the typical story focused on the sufferings imposed on an innocent
heroine by a cruel and lustful villain, and made bountiful use of ghosts,
mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and supernatural occurrences
(which in a number of novels turned out to have natural explanations). The
principal aim of such novels was to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery
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and a variety of horrors. Many of them are now read mainly as period pieces, but
best opened up to fiction the realm of the irrational and of the perverse impulses
and nightmarish terrors that lie beneath the orderly surface of the civilized mind.
(123-124)
However, Gothic literature is said to have been born in 1764. It originated in the 18th century, flourished in the 19th century and continues to thrive even today.Due to the fact that the
Gothic literature dealing with demons and abnormal states of mind is not a phenomenon of only medievalism and romanticism, modernism and perversion, death and destruction resulting from political and social aberrations; in addition, the fantasy is also a part of the Gothic in order to reflect the realities of life “Gothicism, whatever it is, is not a literary tradition so much as a fairly realistic assessment of modern life” (Dominic 308).
The eighteenth-century witnesses the birth of a new kind of a novel called “Gothic” that becomes a major force in English fiction, so much so that tales set in Italian castles and Spanish monasteries begin to crowd out those set in London houses and Hampshire mansions. The
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), by Ann Radcliffe, and The Monk (1796), by Matthew G. Lewis spawn numberless imitators in a craze whose original impetus carries it into the next century. A very few are works of talent and genius, among which are Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). By then, the original impulse of the Gothic romance had played itself out, although the tale of terror is to survive as an element within and as an influence on mainstream realist fiction through the
Victorian era and indeed beyond, and as a minor component of the house of fiction in both high and popular art up to the present.
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All the way through the history of literature, the elements of Gothic novel can be divided into elements of setting and atmosphere, a protagonist, emotions, foreboding, decay, and the supernatural. The setting elements of the Gothic novel are, usually, an exotic location and a location that includes “gloomy” structures and buildings. So, the actions of a Gothic novel take place in and around an old castle or an old mansion, or the ruins of an old castle or mansion “An awful silence reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some blasts of wind that shook the doors she had passed, and which, grating on the rusty hinges, were re- echoed through that long labyrinth of darkness” (Walpole, 24). Sometimes the edifice is seemingly abandoned, sometimes occupied, and sometimes it's not clear whether the building has occupants (human or otherwise). The castle often contains secret passages, trap doors, secret rooms, trick panels with hidden levers, dark or hidden staircases, and possibly ruined sections:
The term ‘Gothic’ has also been extended to a type of fiction which lacks the
exotic setting of the earlier romances, but develops a brooding atmosphere of
gloom and terror, represents events that are uncanny or macabre or
melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states. In
this extended sense the term ‘Gothic’ has been applied to William Godwin’s
Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Shelley’s remarkable and influential Frankenstein
(1818), and the novels and takes of terror by German E. T. A. Hoffmann. Still
more loosely, ‘Gothic’ has been used to describe elements of the macabre and
terrifying that are included in such later woks as Emily Bronte’s Wuthering
Heights, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House [...] and
Great Expectations. (Abrams 123)
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The geographical settings and environmental surroundings (atmosphere) has a major role to play in the novel. Together,both of them are created by writers to depict an overall sense of tension constantly in the events of the novel. Thus, by creating the suitable settings and places for the events to occur, the atmosphere that the writers want to achieve will be brought out successfully and will thus show the relationship between the atmosphere and the characters in the story. The atmosphere of a Gothic novel is characterizes by mystery, horror, dread, and suspense.
The novel is pervaded by a threatening feeling, a fear enhanced by the unknown. Often a complex plot itself is built around a mystery, such as unknown parentage, a disappearance, or some other inexplicable event. The most common feature of Gothic Literature is the indication of mood through the weather:
[…] geographical features (the recess, ruins, the rock, Alps, black valley, black
tower, haunted cavern); architectural features (priory, castle, abbey, convent,
nunnery, ancient house, cloister); … ghost and its cognates (apparition, specter,
phantom, the ghost-seer, sorcerer, magician, necromancer, weird sisters); exotic
names […] conventional settings (one castle – preferably in ruins; some gloomy
mountains–preferably the Alps; a haunted room that locks only on the outside)
and characters (a passive and persecuted heroin, a sensitive and rather ineffectual
hero, a dynamic and tyrannical villain, an evil prioress, talkative servants). Gothic
novel often seem to disintegrate into fragments, irrelevant digressions, set-pieces
of landscape description which never refer back to the central point […]. (Kilgour
4-5)
In addition to setting and atmosphere, supernatural or otherwise inexplicable events, dramatic, amazing events occur, which are ultimately given a natural explanation; the events are
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truly supernatural, and all these and more have motivated the gothic writers to utilize and fill up their works by gothic characters who have dominated by exaggerated reactions in front of mysterious situations or events, supernatural beings vampires, monsters, ghosts, Sensitive heroes who save heroines stricken by unreal terrors and persecuted by the villains, Satanic, terrifying male characters, and victims of their negative impulses.
In the statement of J.M.S. Tompkins who mentions that “the Gothic is simplistic in its representation of characters, which it subordinates to a plot, scenery, and moralizing [besides, in the statement of Elizabeth Napier who claims that] the Gothic, far from being psychologically profound, is a shallow and superficial form” (Kilgour 5), the purpose of the Gothic authors is to wind up the feelings of their reader until they become for a moment identified with those of a ruder age. Also, it is feared that readers of fictions who seduce by the tempting charms of an illusory world, would lose either their grip on or their taste for reality. Furthermore, the Gothic is claimed to be a part of the reaction against the political, social, scientific, industrial, and epistemological revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which enabled the rise of the middle class. This class mostly produced and consumed the Gothic genre which fills up with characters such as a passive and persecuted heroin, a sensitive and rather ineffectual hero, a dynamic and tyrannical villain, an evil prioress, talkative servants “they [Gothic novels] rely on so heavily stock characters and stock scenes” (Graham 12).
The Gothic novel is a genre popularized by the idea that it depicts or simulates reality through the tempting magic of a deceptive world, resulting in the emergence of types of heroes whose names and characteristics vary according to the evolution of the Gothic novel. The Gothic novel has changed over the years, but it is still characterized by including a hero. The hero is probably one of the most well-known and ever-changing aspects of the Gothic novel, and the
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heroes, accordingly, have been classified into three types: Satanic, Promethean and Byronic hero.
The satanic hero is a villain-hero whose nefarious deeds and justifications of them make him a more interesting character than the rather bland good hero such as Beckford’s Vathek,
Radcliffe’s Montoni, and just about any vampire.
The Promethean hero is a villain-hero who has done good but only by performing an over-reaching or rebellious act. Prometheus from ancient Greek mythology saved mankind but only after stealing fire and ignoring Zeus’ order that mankind should be kept in a state of subjugation. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is tellingly subtitled the Modern Prometheus. In addition to the Satanic and Promethean hero, we have the Byronic hero who relates to Lord
Byron’s writing in eighteenth and nineteenth century. Indeed, a Byronic hero is one of the most prominent literary character types in the Romantic period, and one of the most important characteristics of the Gothic and Romantic literature. There are many features that distinguish the
Byronic hero from other heroes. The Byronic hero is a villain-hero, suave, moody, handsome, solitary, secretive, brilliant, cynical, sexually intriguing, and nursing a secret wound; he is renowned because of his fatal attraction for female characters and readers and continues to occasion debate about gender issues. Byron’s Childe Harold and, more gothically, Manfred are the best examples, but this darkly attractive and very conflicting male figure surfaces everywhere in the 19th and 20th century gothic e.g. Heathcliff, or Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Byron himself is described as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”.
The word Gothic refers to a mode of fiction dealing with supernatural or horrifying events, and doubtless supernatural beings accumulate in this type of fiction. The name of Gothic literature is associated with the supernatural events and beings. Moreover, the word “Gothic” becomes synonymous with “supernatural”. The supernatural trait is definitely one of the main
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characteristics of Gothic literature, but its form and elements are different from one text to another and from time to time depending on where the story is set and the context in which it is written. The use of the supernatural in Gothic texts started in The Castle of Otranto, or as some might argue even earlier in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In both texts the protagonist is aided by a ghost.
As the most prominent trait of the Gothic novel, the supernatural element is “valid enough device for removing the narrative from the realm of the everyday” (Hume 284).The supernatural elements in the Gothic novel are meant to arouse and sensitize the reader’s imagination, as a part of the attempt of the later eighteenth-century literature to involve literature in a new way. To achieve this, the supernatural elements are used as a powerful device the author’s principal engine (Hume 282). The supernatural elements are usually masked with mystery and thence it cannot be proved whether they truly appear in the stories. These elements occur only in the characters’ minds or the writer offers a natural explanation for them, such as
Ann Radcliffe in the novel The Mysteries of Udolpho.Moreover, the Gothic novel is ridiculed because of the supernatural elements. John Bowen discusses the key motifs in Gothic novels that
“[the supernatural] creates in the reader’s mind the possibility that there may be things beyond human power, reason and knowledge”.
In addition to all features mentioned above, the concept of the sublime is considered one feature of Gothic literature. The idea of the sublime is essential to an understanding of Gothic literature and, especially, this term is linked to gothic literature to defend or justify the literature of terror. The idea of the sublime is nothing new and has a long history. In The Cambridge
Companion to Gothic Fiction, Jerrold E. Hogle briefly described its history and its application:
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The concept of the sublime originated in a classical text, the treatise On the
Sublime (Peri-Hypsous) attributed to Longinus. In 1674 this text was translated
into French by Boileau, and the resulting account of the “grand style” of writing
which provokes powerful emotion became immediately influential. Writers from
John Dryden to John Dennis began using this classical concept to counter other
classical concepts, most notably mimesis. (27)
Additionally, another significant characteristic of the Gothic novel, especially of the early writings, is regarded to be the sublime. The sublime in literature refers to the use of language and description that arouses thoughts and emotions beyond ordinary experience. The concept of the sublime is first attributed to the Greek critic Longinus. In his work Peri-Hypsous or On
Sublimity. Longinus writes that “the sublime is a certain eminence or perfection of language, and that the greatest writers, both in verse and prose, have by this alone obtained their prize of glory, and filled all time with their renown” (23)
The Gothic novel is not a dominant literary genre in the Victorian era as it was in the period before it. The characteristics of the Gothic novel that had emerged in the Romantic era did not remain for long. Victorian Gothic was blended with more realistic elements, including a focus on science and human psychology. One of the most interesting aspects of the Victorian
Gothic genre is the commentary on science and human nature. Botting states that these changes were made in order to reflect the different anxieties of the time. The objects of terror were no longer the medieval background, wild landscapes and sentimental heroines, but the industrial, urban environment and deviant individuals (80). This kind of Gothic focuses on terrible human mutations and the scene of horror is shifted from rural areas to the heart of the city, so it is called
“modern metropolitan Gothic” (Dryden 30).
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Otherwise, the “processes of industrialization, urbanization and imperial expansion had radically transformed British society and the nation’s sense of its identity at home and abroad.”
(Chaplin 20) Due to the problem of identity – social, psychological, religious as well as moral – the issues of duality became a Gothic theme, such in theGothic novella by the Scottish author
Robert Louis Stevenson The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). As Irving S.
Saposnik states it,
[p]resent evidence indicates that Victorian man was haunted constantly by an
inescapable sense of division. As rational and sensual being, as public and private
man, as civilized and bestial creature, he found himself necessarily an actor,
playing only that part of him suitable to the occasion. (716)
Through the centuries gothic fictions (and, later, gothic films) have sought to bring terror and shock into the hearts of its readers and audience.From arguably the first gothic novel The
Castle of Otranto (1765) to modern novels asThe Silent Companions by Laura Purcell in 2017,
Modern gothic novels might have different elements, but still hold the same mystery and dangers as their predecessors. Modernist writers have changed their own writing due to increasing industrialization and globalization. New technology and the horrifying events of both World
Wars (but specifically World War I) made many writers question the future of humanity.
Therefore, the appearance of a decline of civilization, cold and machinery, and the increased capitalism, which alienated the individual and led to loneliness lead the themes of Gothic novel to a different side that is changed according to circumstances and atmosphere of the writers and their society. The Modernist Gothic novels are often more of a stream of consciousness. Irony, satire, and comparisons were often employed to point out society’s ills.
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Gothic novels in Modern literature are essentially novels of terror or horror. The atmosphere or mood of the novel is usually dark and threatening. It depicts the event of something horrible that could happen at any moment. The setting helps to establish this threatening mood as in Interview with a Vampire, a gothic horror and vampire novel by
American author Anne Rice, published in 1976. The supernatural elements, ghosts, haunted castles, and seemingly magical events abound in Gothic tales in the modern age and led to the development of what Ann Radcliffe called “the supernatural explained”. The events are rationally explained as not supernatural at the end of the novel, and in “the supernatural accepted”, the events appear to be actually supernatural. One of the Gothic features is represented by the occurrence of heroes, heroines, and villains. The villain-hero is a morally ambiguous character whose actions prevailingly suggest his evil nature, but at the same time indicate his fractional morality. Also, the villain-hero is regarded to be the most significant character that the actions derive from (Hume 287). In the Modern period, the Gothic novels usually have a hero or heroine, but do not always have an explicit villain. Considerably, the heroes and heroines do not choose to become heroes or heroines. Instead, their circumstances force them to act in brave or heroic ways that they would normally avoid.
It is obvious that literature reflects all aspect of life including the downside. The Gothic fiction is an inseparable part of literature, it professionally reflects the terrorism issue which is considered the most important issue in the postmodern era: “Gothic postmodern as an amplification of gothic language of terror to encompass the more recent terror of our postmodern age and also the theories of terror that have been put forward as a part of the enterprise of postmodern cultural theory” (Beville 9).In their contribution to the Akdeniz Language Studies
Conference (2012), Shahram Afrougheh, Reza Abduhaideri, and Hossein Safari add that:
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This type of fiction in comparison with earlier romance does not have any striking
and exotic setting and involves in itself atmospheres in affinity with gloom and
anxiety, terror and horror. The narratives generally deal with supernatural,
mysterious or ghostly events in which the character experiences terror in the
anticipation of some dreaded event; the character experiences a horror when the
event really happens. The typical story focuses on an innocent heroine who is
under suffrage made by a cruel and lustful a rogue character. Other characteristics
relevant to the Gothic novel are a plentiful use of ghosts, mysterious
disappearances, and other sensational occurrences. (1389-1390)
The Postmodern Gothic writers have recently focused on terror, terrorism, anxiety, and death as sources of fear in society. Gothic postmodernism is a hybrid model that emerges from the dialogic interaction of Gothic and postmodernist characteristics in a text. Furthermore, in the modern era, the development of Gothic fiction’s themes led to the emerge of many genres that combine good and evil and proposes to evoke a sensation of horror and terror in its readers by presenting the evil side in a text – such as Monster literature and Vampire literature that are approached as the stock figures of gothic fiction.
2.5 Marry Shelley's Life
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin is born in London on 30 August 1797, to the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the philosopher William Godwin. Her mother died as a result of complications following the birth, and after Godwin’s second marriage Mary was brought up with two stepsiblings, a half-sister (Fanny Imlay), and a half-brother (named William, after their father). Their home in Holborn is located near the candlelit abattoirs under Smithfield: indeed, the children can hear the screams of animals being slaughtered. On a more positive note Mary
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benefits from a broad education, enhanced by visits to the household from literary luminaries including William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
At the age of ten she has an amusing poem published: Mounseer Nongtongpaw; or, The
Discoveries of John Bull in a Trip to Paris. Unfortunately, her relationship with her stepmother is far from cordial, and the onset of eczema when Mary is thirteen may have been partly psychosomatic. As she has poor health generally, she is sometimes sent away for long periods of recuperation. During one of the journeys, she hides her money in her stays for safekeeping; nevertheless, it is stolen from her. The poet Percy Shelley first met Mary in 1812. Later they arranged clandestine meetings beside her mother’s grave. Shelley and his friend Byron advocated that people should follow ideals rather than imposed conventions and rules. Lady
Caroline Lamb famously declared that Byron is “Mad, bad and dangerous to know”, and similar accusations are pointed at Shelley (who is nicknamed “Mad Shelley” at Eton). In 1814 he deserted his pregnant wife, Harriet, to elope with Mary, who was also expecting a baby. Their travels took them to France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, and are described in the co- authored text History of a Six Weeks Tour (1817). They were accompanied by Mary’s stepsister,
Jane (later Claire) Clairmont, in a scandalous, unconventional triangular relationship which lasted for eight years.
Baby Clara was born in February 1815, but lived for only twelve days. Mary’s journal records concerns that her death might have been prevented. In January of the following year she gave birth to a son, William. The travellers were in Geneva when Byron proposed that they should write ghost stories. Ultimately, Mary’s contribution developed into her novel
Frankenstein. It is remarkable to think that she began this extraordinary work when she was just eighteen years old. The suicides of Fanny Imlay and Shelley’s wife also occurred in that
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memorable year 1816. Shelley married Mary, and their third child, another Clara, arrived in
1817. Mary completed her book: Frankenstein and published it – anonymously – on 1 January
1818. Little Clara passed away in the same year, and then William died of malaria in 1819. Percy has a jotting book, in which he conveys their heartbreak:
My dearest M. wherefore hast thou gone
And left me in this dreary world alone,
Thy form is here indeed – a lovely one –
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode…
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee
Do thou return for mine.
Fortunately their fourth child, Percy Florence, survived. Percy Shelley drowned in 1822, after visiting Byron and Leigh Hunt. During his cremation onlookers tried to retrieve keepsakes from the flames. Mary salvaged what was left of her husband’s heart, wrapped it in silk, placed it between the pages of his poem Adonais, and secreted it in her travelling-desk. It was discovered there almost thirty years later. The desolate widow had returned to London. Her financial situation was precarious, particularly as she had a youngster to support; luckily, Mary was a versatile author and managed to earn a living from writing. Her other novels are: Valperga
(1823), The Last Man (1826), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835) and
Falkner (1837). During 1824-40 she also has penned short stories, biographies, articles and reviews for journals, and travel narratives. A novella, Mathilda, was published posthumously in
1959. Mary’s son Percy proved to be a very decent man. After the author’s death on 1 February
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1851 her affectionate daughter-in-law created a special shrine for Mary Shelley and their circle at
Boscombe Lodge, near Bournemouth.
2.6 Ahmed Saadawi’s Life
Ahmed Saadawi is an Iraqi novelist, poet, screenwriter and documentary film maker. He is born in 1973 in Baghdad, where he still lives. He is married, with four children. Saadawi, who also won France’s Grand Prize for Fantasy, is selected for Beirut39, as one best Arab author under the age of 39. The 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction winner Frankenstein in
Baghdad was selected as one of six novels for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. The
Man Booker International Prize celebrates the finest works of translated fiction from around the world. It is awarded every year for a single book, which is translated into English and published in the UK. Saadawi’s remarkable novel is translated into English by Jonathan Wright and published by Oneworld Publications. In addition to that, the novel has translated more than thirty languages.
Saadawi was born into a simple family in Sadr City, a densely populated district of
Baghdad. His father was a driving instructor, and his mother, a housewife. Luckily for the child, he was close with two of his uncles, an illustrator and a poet, who noticed their nephew’s gift for drawing and storytelling, and helped him develop his artistic skills. Saadawi wrote poetry before he turned ten, and he even worked as an illustrator at a publishing house specialized in children’s educational materials. This is how the writer explains his early love for literature: “I’ve had a personal relationship with storytelling ever since I was a kid. Writing has been the pulse of my life” (Hankir 2018). He was 20 when he first watched a bootlegged video copy of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, the 1994 film version of the novel, starring Robert De Niro. Those were difficult times for a lover of reading, because of the trade embargo and the state censorship that prevented
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the people’s access to foreign books: “If my friends and I could get our hands on a book, we’d go to shops to photocopy it and distribute it among ourselves. Sometimes, we’d photocopy a photocopy” (Ibid.). His interests were multiple – critical theory, mysticism, philosophy – and he became an avid reader of Michel Foucault’s works. As a writer, he was greatly influenced by
Ghassan Kanafani and Mehdi Issa Saqr. In the early 90s Saadawi earned a teaching diploma, but preferred to join the army instead. Meanwhile he wrote three volumes of poetry, and worked in the media, joining the BBC in 2005.
In 2005, he joined the BBC. “What I witnessed on the streets would form the first phase of my work on the book,” particularly as sectarian violence intensified from 2006 to 2008, he says. “I saw unimaginable things.” As journalism did not satisfy him, and he took to writing fiction: “In journalism, a headline might say ‘13 people dead and 20 wounded’, but that’s that.
Journalism can be forgotten. But in literature, I will find one of the deceased, go to his family home, meet his wife and his children, see into his dreams, and learn about what he was thinking and feeling—even what he felt the moment he died” (Ibid.).
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Chapter Three
The Role of Shelley’s Monster in Frankenstein
3.0 Introduction
Mary Shelley’s waking nightmare in 1816 gives birth to one of the most common creatures in literature. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus is often presented as Shelley’s encoded image of her own life. Shelley’s Frankenstein is a piece of work that reflects Shelley’s life in the eighteenth century. She is a Romantic writer, and she deals with nature, human feelings, the compassion for humankind, freedom of individuals, and the Romantic hero, in addition to features of Gothic literature, such as the non-rational experience, elements of horror, and the supernatural. Shelley believes that the Romantic and Gothic movements reflect the contemporary life, so the characteristics of these movements are discernible in her works, reflecting her experience and knowledge of the writers and poets of her age. It explains why
Shelley shows more psychological than actual horror aspects in her works.
Shelley’s epistolary novel contains 24 chapters and tells the story of an ambitious scientist Victor Frankenstein who creates an eight foot creature from dead body parts. In a flashback manner, Shelley tells the story by means of Captain Robert Walton who relates to his sister Margaret the conflict between Victor and his creature and how they suffer from each other.
Thus, the creature in Shelly’s Frankenstein is considered as one of the main characters in the novel. This chapter will discuss the different roles of Dr. Frankenstein’s creature in the novel.
The researcher will analyse the role of the creature to clarify the aspects of humanity and focus
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on the motives of the creature’s revenge. This chapter will also focus on the idea of who is the real victim or hero in the novel.
3.1 Rolesof Monsterin Frankenstein; or,theModern Prometheus
3.1.1 Human
Marry Shelley presents her creature in Frankenstein with properties of a human being. In addition to his physical aspect, the creature presents elements that support his humanity, and it is apparent that this being is indeed human. In his essay “Definition of Man”, Kenneth Burke has defined what it is meant to be human:
Man is the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, inventor of
the negative (or moralized by the negative), separated from his natural condition
by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by
the sense of order), and rotten with perfection. (507)
Burke’s definition states that human beings are distinct from other creatures by using symbols (language) to communicate. They use gesture in their communication system and they are separated from nature by their own techniques and tools. According to Burke’s definition
Shelley’s creature is human, because he learns language by which he can communicate with
Victor and the other human beings in the novel. The narrator says:
the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and
his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he
muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might
have spoken, but I did not hear. (Frankenstein 44)
As a matter of fact, humans uniquely use syntactically and grammatical complex language that make them different from nonhumans: “the human being will speak and conduct a
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wide range of social interactions” (Wilson 72). Actually, animals or all animates can communicate by using gestures, screeches, and calls. Throughout the events of the novel,
Victor’s creature shows his ability to communicate by using articulate language in talking with
De Lacey, Victor, and Walton. De Lacey states his appreciation to the creature’s language: “from your lips first have I [De Lacey] heard the voice of kindness directed towards me; I shall be forever grateful, and your present humanity assures me of success with those friends whom I am on the point of the meeting”. (Frankenstein 123)
In addition to his aptitude for language, Victor’s monster illustrates his ability to learn from the experience of others. Indeed, human beings are unique in having the ability to learn from others. Douglas Adams states that “human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so” (Singh 42). Victor’s creature can learn and use advanced vocabulary and speech; he quickly learns French from De Lacey’s family and easily uses it to communicate with others. He shows his ability to learn when he explains how can he live in a hovel, and look and hear from the small gap what happens in De Lacey’s cottage:
By great application, however, and after having remained during the space of
several revolutions of moon in my hovel, I discovered the names that were given
to some of the most familiar objects of discourse; I learned and applied the word,
‘fire’, ‘milk’, ‘bread’, and ‘wood’. I learned also the names of the cottagers
themselves ... I discovered that he [Alex] uttered many of the same sounds when
he read as when he talked. (Frankenstein 100-101)
In the book ‘On Human nature’, Wilson asserts that the defining characteristic of human culture is “gathering and sharing of knowledge” (96). The creature demonstrates such a
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tendency. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, Safie (the Arabian) arrives to stay with De Lacey’s family.
Unfortunately Safie can’t speak their language (French), and they decide to teach her how to speak and write their language. They surely teach the creature as well who lives with them in secret place (hovel). As the lessons continue, the creature learns more and more. In contrast to the Arabian lady, the creature speedily learns their language, and his capacity to learn fast makes him appear as superhuman:
My days [creature’s day] were spent in close attention, that I might more speedily
master the language; and I may boast that I improved more rapidly than Arabian,
who understood very little and conversed in broken accents, whilst I
comprehended and could imitate almost every word that was spoken.
(Frankenstein 106-107)
As a matter of fact, humans alone seek for information to understand the world around them and desire knowledge for sake of knowledge. But, in a kingdom of animals and even sophisticated animals, they use knowledge for living and to provide food. For instance, in the kingdom of bees, bees develop their skills and collect information that are necessary only for obtaining food, reproducing, and carrying out other basic functions. Indeed, Victor’s creature, as a human, learns for wonder and delight “while I [the creature] improved in speech, I also learned the science of letters as it was taught to the stranger, and this opened before me a wild field for wonder and delight” (Frankenstein 107). The creature spends the majority of his time in observing to learn from De Lacey’s family which consists of the old blind father De Lacey, the brother Felix, the sister Agatha, and Arabian lady Sofie who comes to live in the same cottage.
The creature’s progress in language and his information about different subjects in world come from his observing through a small chink in the wood of cottage, where the he and De Lacey’s
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family live in. When Felix reads and explains Volney’s Ruins of Empires to Sofia, the creature learns about many things, such as the governments and religions of the empires of the past, including the Asians, the Greeks, the Romans (and their decline), as well as the concepts of
“chivalry, Christianity, and kings”, and about the American hemisphere.
The book from which Felix instructed Safie was Volney’s Ruins of Empires. I
[creature] should not have understood the purpose of this book had not Felix, in
reading it, given very minute explanations. He had chosen this work, he said,
because the declamatory style was framed in imitation of the Eastern authors ... I
heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere and wept with Safie over the
hapless fate of its original inhabitants. (Frankenstein 107)
As Felix reads on, the creature learns about humanity: “these wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? ... my wonder ceased, and I turned away with disgust and loathing” (Frankenstein 107).
Every piece of knowledge or information that the creature learns in De Lacey’s cottage gives him a way to develop an insight of the outside world. The creature knowingly distinguishes between the actions and appearances of the humans, and how they are horrified not by his actions, but by his appearance:
Every conversation of the cottagers now opened new wonders to me. ... I learned
that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow creatures were high and
unsullied descent united with riches ... I was, besides, endued with a figure
hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man ...
When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a
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bolt upon the earth, from which all fled and whom all men disowned
(Frankenstein 107-108).
Unlike human beings, the creature’s humanity is not embodied in his physical being, but it is proved by his intellectual and emotional thoughts, which, he has optimum one. It appears that the “human” characteristics of the creature come not from his construction, but rather undoubtedly from his human nature.
As the creature continues to progress in his comprehension of the world, he discovers and studies the three books – Milton’s Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of
Young Werther – which he unknowingly found them in an abandoned bag in the forest. The reading of these books gives him infinity of new images and feelings which make him arrive at an ecstasy with the cultivated mind, “I [the creature] can hardly describe to you the effects of these books. They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to ecstasy” (Frankenstein 116). In fact, the selection of books in the bag is not accidental, as
Shelley has chosen these three titles to enlighten the creature, and to confirm the thematic contents of her novel.
The Sorrows of young Werther tells the story of a boy, Werther, who falls in love with a girl Lotte, and he struggles to achieve the happiness in their life, but the girl engages to an old rich man. In the end, Werther realizes that one of the three must die, and he commits suicide by shooting himself with a hunting gun. Through this book, the creature learns a lot of feelings and emotions, and he finds the similarity between himself and Werther. Both of them have been rejected by the people they love. Werther is left alone when Lotte accepts to marry an old man, and the creature is abandoned without the support of his creator Victor Frankenstein, alone in the
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world, and he is left to meet the world without everything even language to communicate with people.
‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ offers the creature new insight into the world of feelings. As the creature says, “as I read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read and to whose conversation I was listener” (Frankenstein 117). After reading this novel, the creature sympathizes with its characters and understands that he creates alone to live with none and relates to none. It educates him and gives him the courage to ask substantial questions: “what did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them”
(Frankenstein 117). ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ educates the creature how humans respond to misery. The creature tries to make Victor Frankenstein miserable by killing his bother
William, his close friend Henry Clerval, and his bride Elizabeth because Victor refuses to create a bride for the creature. Like human beings, the creature gathers and shares experience from what he reads, like Werther, then he plans to burn himself at the North Pole, thus completing his revenge against Victor:
‘But soon’, he cried with sad and solemn enthusiasm, I shall die, and what I now
feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend
my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The
light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by
winds. My spirit will sleep in peace or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus.
Farewell. (Frankenstein 213)
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Plutarch's Lives is the second book that the creature finds in the leather portmanteau,
Plutarch’s Lives or Parallel Lives’ “is a series of biographies of famous men, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings, probably written at the beginning of the second century AD, comprises 23 pairs of biographies, each pair consisting of one Greek and one Roman” (James vi). The creature has comparably different reactions to this book:
The volume of Plutrach’s Lives which I possessed contained the histories of the
first founders of the ancient republics ... Many things I read surpassed my
understanding and experience. I had a very confused knowledge of kingdoms,
wide extents of country, mighty rivers, and boundless seas. (Frankenstein 117)
As a matter of fact, the creature learns new things on human nature from Plutarch's
Lives’ which gives the creature greater insight into the nature of human beings in addition to his observations of the De Lacey family. The creature gains the human characteristics from interpretations of the life of famous Greek and Roman leaders, the creature states “... I read of men concerned in public affairs, governing or massacring their species. I felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice ... . [As a human, the creature has a paradox in behaviour, he prefers these famous figures “peaceable lawgivers”]... I was of course led to admire peaceable lawgivers, Numa, Solon, and Lycurgus, in preference to Romulus and
Theseus” (Frankenstein 118). Although they have demerits such as Romulus who builds a great city, he commits murder against his own relatives. The creature is influenced by this book in order to again De Lacey family’s acceptance when he shows what he learns from this book by his intellectual behaviour in speech and his possession of information about civilizations, kings, and cities, the creature states that “the patriarchal lives of my protectors caused these impressions
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to take a firm hold on my mind” (Frankenstein 118). The creature learns more about the nature of humans and their behaviour that means he learns how to communicate with other.
The third book has fallen into the creature’s hands is Paradise Lost. The reading of this book arouses the creature’s strongest feelings and deeper emotions; the creature indicates that “...
Paradise Lost excited different feelings and far deeper emotions” (Frankenstein 118). On the top of the mountain, the creature describes his adventures to Victor. By reading Paradise Lost, the creature realizes that there is one God who creates all human beings on the earth, and the Creator gives his creations happiness, prosperity, and quarters them by his special care. These thoughts in Paradise Lost excited new feelings, and emotions. The creature knows that he is created by another creator who doesn’t nurture his creation and leaves him alone without an interest or care.
For many reasons, the creature compares himself to the biblical Adam, and shows the similarities and differences between Adam and him: “Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence, but his state was far different from mine in every other respect”
(Frankenstein 118). Both of them are alone on this earth (Adam is the first human on the earth and the creature is the first “human” is created by the human on the earth), but God creates Eve for Adam as a companion and a wife when Adam ask God to do. The creature lives alone, lonely spending his time without a friend or someone to communicate with, so he asks his creator
Victor to make him a companion. The creature realizes that God creates human beings and provides them with all means of living, and he, who is made by man, is not. The creature explains that:
He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and
prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to
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converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but I was
wretched, helpless, and alone. (Frankenstein 118)
Throughout this message that the creature sends to Victor, the creature recognizes the differences between Adam and him. Adam was created by God who made him happy and prosperous and allowed him to communicate with humans because God is perfect and his creation is perfect too. But, the creature is created by the man “Victor” who is imperfect; Victor
“the creator” creates and abandons his creation with helpless and none to converse with. The new thoughts and deep emotions the creature feels make him compares himself with Satan, because both of them suffer from the lack of love that the human around them share: “many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me” (Frankenstein 118). Like Satan, the creature in Frankenstein holds Victor “the creator” responsible for his creation and even worse holds him responsible for his misery. Absolutely, Paradise Lost boosts the creation/creator relationship that the creature has with his creator Victor. This relationship is made unique because of the creature’s feelings of revenge and hatred toward the creator Victor and the creator’s feelings of neglect and abandonment toward his creation. The creature elucidates his humanity through his capacity for emotions, his reflections for thoughts in books that he reads, and his ambitious personality makes him compare himself again with Satan. The creature asks his creator a reprimanding question: why does he create something so hideously that everyone turns away from him? The creature states:
Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned
from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own
image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very
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resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage
him, but I am solitary and abhorred. (Frankenstein 119)
In On Human Nature, Edward O. Wilson examines humans through a sociobiological lens.
Wilson states that “the channels of human mental development, in contrast, are circuitous and variable. Rather than specify a single trait, human genes prescribe the capacity to develop a certain array of traits” (Wilson 56). According to Wilson’s statement, the creature is very human or possibly almost superhuman in this regard. Traditionally, a normal human being’s children learn about everything from observation or training from those around them, while the creature contrastingly learns not from anyone such as his parents or his creator, but he observes everyone in the cottage from a safe and distance place. By the time, the creature has the ability, thoughts, and deep emotions that enable him to persuade Victor to create another creature. Surprisingly enough, the creature has what human beings have: characteristics which distinguish human beings from other such as the ability of mental developing even though the creature encounters many difficulties and obstacles, but he evolves in remarkable time. These supreme qualities are possessed by the creature that makes him appear as a human being, a confirmation that the creature is a human being, or a superhuman.
According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, human nature is “the ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that are common to most people”. These ways vary according to the different kinds of human nature. There are two kinds of human nature organic and nature social, in his introduction to Cooly’s book Human Nature and Social Order, Philip Rieff mentions that:
There are two kinds of human nature, the first nature [organic] turns out to be the
undiluted and unmodified instincts primitive “drives” emanating from body
tissues. The nature distributes itself in the body and it is also taken up, so to say
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into the mind. “Second nature” [nature social] refers, of course to the “super-ego”.
It is a term that is equivalent to “inner conscience” derived of course from
parental management. First nature is somehow organic; second nature social. Here
is perpetuated the myth that man has two natures, one supervising the other. (xv)
The human nature of the creature is prominent in his behaviour with himself and others to the extent of its conformity with a superhuman being. The creature reflects his human qualities through his reaction to what is happening around him. He feels what a natural person feels when he is left alone in harsh conditions. He feels cold and lonely when he is left alone in the forest and tries to improve his condition as if he were human. He mentions all these details in his conversation with Victor, when he tells Victor that:
It was dark when I [the creature] awoke; I felt cold also, and half frightened, as it
were, instinctively, finding myself so desolate. Before I had quitted your
apartment, on a sensation of cold, I had covered myself with some clothes, but
these were insufficient to secure me from the dews of night. I was a poor,
helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing; but feeling
pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept. (Frankenstein 90-91)
The creature’s organic nature is the same as that of any human being, prepared to live within societies, and to be loved and accepted by others. Like all human beings, the creature feels good and evil forces (organic nature) within him, and these forces are brought to the surface through his interactions with other (social nature). However, he shows his humanity with De
Lacey family in many different situations, but they are horrified at sight of him:
At that instant the cottage door was opened, and Felix, Safie, and Agatha entered.
Who can describe their horror and consternation on beholding me [the creature]?
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Agatha fainted, and Safie, unable to attend to her friend, rushed out of the cottage.
Felix darted forward, and with supernatural force tore me from his father, to
whose knees I clung, in a transport of fury, he dashed me to the ground and struck
me violently with a stick. (Frankenstein 123-124)
In spite of the negative feelings of humans against him, he continues to show his innate nature (organic nature) to be helpful with humans. After the terrible reaction of the De Lacey family, he saves the young girl from drowning. His full-force rush to rescue the girl from drowning in a rapid stream is caused by his innate abilities, but her protector’s reaction reflected the human view toward the creature, he only sees the face of the creature and shoots him by gun:
… she fell into the rapid stream. I rushed from my hiding-place and with extreme
labour, from the force of the current, saved her and dragged her to shore. She was
senseless, and I endeavoured by every means in my power to restore animation,
when I was suddenly interrupted by the approach of a rustic, who was probably
the person from whom she had playfully fled. On seeing me, he darted towards
me, and tearing the girl from my arms, hastened towards the deeper parts of the
wood. I followed speedily, I hardly knew why; but when the man saw me draw
near, he aimed a gun, which he carried, at my body and fired. I sank to the
ground, and my injurer, with increased swiftness, escaped into the wood.
(Frankenstein 130)
People, who will never be able to see his external deformities, are interested only in appearance. The creature has good internal feelings, but these feelings are related with his external grotesque features. The creature finally realizes that no matter how he speaks or how kind he is, people only view his appearance. The creature possesses all the ingredients of murder,
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aggression, and revenge, but he does not hurt anyone because he is good and kind. However, he is treated as monster, he is abandoned by his creator, adults consider him as a dangerous creature and even children are scared of him and, because of his appearance, think he is an “ogre”. The creature has converted to social nature in his meeting with the young boy, Victor’s brother.
When the creature arrives in Geneva, he suddenly meets Victor’s brother, William: “At this time a slight sleep relieved me from the pain of reflection, which was disturbed by the approach of a beautiful child, who came running into the recess I had chosen, with all the supportiveness of infancy” (Frankenstein 131). The creature wants to persuade him to be his friend and companion: “I could seize him and educate him as my companion and friend, I should not be so desolate in this peopled earth” (Frankenstein 131), but like others, the boy refuses him because of his deformity and calls him “ogre”: “He struggled violently. ‘Let me go,’ he cried; ‘monster!
Ugly wretch! You wish to eat me and tear me to pieces. You are an ogre” (Frankenstein 131).
Till this moment, the creature tries to persuade him. Spontaneously, the boy mentions his brother’s name “Frankenstein”, for whom the creature has come to Geneva: “Hideous monster!
Let me go. My papa is a Syndic – he is M. Frankenstein – he will punish you. You dare not keep me” (Frankenstein 131). When the creature learns the boy belongs to his enemy Frankenstein –
“Frankenstein! you belong then to my enemy – to him towards whom I have sworn eternal revenge; you shall be my first victim” (Frankenstein 131) – he kills the boy and thus accomplishes the first step of his revenge. The feelings of revenge reflect the social nature of the creature who realizes that the inescapable reaction of human beings toward him makes him unable to communicate and live with them, so he asks his creator to create a companion for him.
This request shows again his organic nature as a human who cannot live without coexisting with others. He wants to live with a female who looks like him in form and qualities, and he realises
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that no one can accept him unless she looks like him or she has even more malformations, his unselfish request shows his organic nature: “You must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being” (Frankenstein 134).
First and foremost, the creature is an abandoned and a helpless child who has been created in a horrifying way. The creature determines that he can never be accepted by the human race and he vows vengeance by killing Victor’s (his creator’s) family and close friends.
Furthermore, this revenge depends on how Victor responds to the creature’s request. The creature promises to make peace with humanity if Victor creates a similar the creature, one to be his companion in his isolation. The complexity of the creature depends on the excesses of his traits; on the one hand, he possesses the capacity of killing when Victor refuses to fulfil his promise to create the female requested, he kills Victor’s friend and bride. On other hand, he possesses the capacity of love and loyalty: the creature weeps at the death of his creator and fulfils the creator’s hope to destroy himself at the frozen pole: “Farewell! I leave you and in you the last of humankind whom these eyes will ever behold” (Frankenstein 212).
As a matter of fact, the definition of monster points to something inhuman or someone who does not respect the life and nature. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, there is a being who respects life and nature, but he has physical characteristics which distinguish him from the others:
His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his
hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these
luxuriance only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed
almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his
shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. (Frankenstein 43)
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The creature has no physical characteristics of beauty (his creator creates him in this composition), but that does not mean he cannot be considered as a human from the inside. The creature, as he progresses through the novel, clearly shows his humanity and becomes comparable with his creator Victor in many situations. The creature is really the character who loved culture and adored life and family.
Lastly, the nameless creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is physically a monster, but behaviourally he is a human who uses his own humanity to prove his human desires and emotions.
3.1.2 Revenger
The revenge is one of the most eminent themes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This theme has deeply ingrained the relationship between characters and plot of a story that excites the statue of love, emotion, and action. In Marian Webster Dictionary revenge means that “the act or an instance of responding to an injury with an injury”. It is very important to distinguish between “revenge” and “retributive punishment”. In his book, Punishment and Retribution
(2006), Leo Zaibert shows that the differences between revenge and retributive punishment “tend to revolve around one basic idea: revenge is ‘mindless’ or barbaric, irrational, etc., and thus unjustifiable, whereas punishment is ‘rational’ or civilized, enlightened, etc., and thus justifiable”
(82). Marry Shelley paints the portrait of the endless cycle of revenge between the creator
(Victor) and his creation. All the events in Frankenstein are expressed revenge as the main theme, due to the struggle between the creator and his creation, despite the harsh reality of their situations.
Throughout the novel we find the theme of revenge expressed in the feelings of the two characters who want to destroy each other. The creator (Victor Frankenstein) shows his feelings
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toward his creation when he says that: "I must pursue and destroy the being [the creature] to whom I gave existence; then my lot on earth will be fulfilled and I may die" (Frankenstein 202), and the creature expresses his revenge toward his creator “For the first time the feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom, and I did not strive to control them ... (Frankenstein 127).
Surely, the creatures’ feelings of hatred and hostility toward the creator are feelings of revenge and not retributive punishment. Whitley R.P. Kaufman in his book Honor and Revenge:
A Theory of Punishment claims that many supposed distinctions between revenge and retribution punishment, firstly, revenge is personal “The claim that revenge is essentially personal whereas retribution is by nature impersonal ...” (Kaufman 95). Certainly, the revenge should be carried out by the revengers and not by other people for justice. The creature takes over and declares his revenge against his creator for having made him physically hideous and for having neglected him when he needed him most, but Victor abandons and leaves his creature without supports, aside from that the human society that rejects the creature because of his deformity. After having lived with them for a long time, when he introduces himself to them, they alienate him. Their reaction triggers his desire for revenge: “from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and more than all, against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery” (Frankenstein 125-126). The creature confirms that revenge is for himself and not for another person, and he decides to accomplish this revenge:
…cursed, cursed creator! Why did I [the creature] live? Why, in that instant, did I
not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed? I
know not; despair had not yet taken possession of me; my feelings were those of
rage and revenge. (Frankenstein 125)
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Secondly, “revenge is inherently excessive” (Kaufman 97). It is widely recognized that the revengers appear as crazed, irrational, and uncontrolled persons, but the fact is that they are people who can be dealt with, to reduce the cycle of violence resulting from vengeance in exchange for something else, and this is what happened to the creature who accepts to give up the revenge and forget all his tragedies if Victor, in return, creates a female for him:
You must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those
sympathies necessary for my being. This you alone can do, and I demand it of you
as a right which you must not refuse to concede ... I demand a creature of another
sex, but as hideous as myself; the gratification is small, but it is all that I can
receive, and it shall content me.(Frankenstein 134-135)
After negotiating and recounting his moving story, the creature swears that he will live with his companion in isolation from the other people, on an isolated land:
I swear to you, by the earth which I inhabit, and by you that made me, that with
the companion you bestow I will quit the neighbourhood of man and dwell, as it
may chance, in the most savage of places. My evil passions will have fled, for I
shall meet with sympathy! My life will flow quietly away, and in my dying
moments I shall not curse my maker. (Frankenstein 136)
Satisfactorily, Victor “the creator” executes what the creature demands in order to end the circle of revenge after sympathizing with the creature’s suffering and his peaceful living in the cottage: “I consent to your demand, on your solemn oath to quit Europe forever, and every other place in the neighbourhood of man, as soon as I shall deliver into your hands a female who will accompany you in your exile” (Frankenstein 137). The creature confirms his good intention when he says that:
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I swear,’ he cried [the creature], ‘by the sun, and by the blue sky of heaven, and
by the fire of love that burns my heart, that if you grant my prayer, while they
exist you shall never behold me again. Depart to your home and commence your
labours; I shall watch their progress with unutterable anxiety; and fear not but that
when you are ready I shall appear. (Frankenstein 137)
After reasonable arguments that the creature gives to Victor; he lives alone without a companion and every one flees from him. In spite of that, he is a good creature even though he kills Victor’s brother, William. Actually, the murder of William brings the creature closer to his creator, who responds to the misery and sufferings of his creation. Under the pressure of the creature’s threat and oath, Victor accepts to create a female. By acquiring this desideratum, the creature convincingly stops his revenge and waits his creator fulfil the promise.
Thirdly, Leo Zaibert mentions another common perception verging on the caricature of revenge culture: “Another common perception verging on a caricature of revenge cultures is that they make people hypersensitive to perceived slights or insults, rather than to what we take as genuine moral wrongs”. (99) Zaibert hypothetically speaking elucidates that revenge is irrational and disproportionate for revengers and their societies which they live in. In fact, the creature’s revenge disparately is different. The creature explains to his creator the reasons for his revenge.
Victor physically creates his creature with the frightening form that frightens everyone who sees him.
... His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his
hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these
luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed
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almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his
shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. (Frankenstein 43)
The creature digests that human beings establish a link between one’s outer appearance and inner reality, that beauty is a mark inner virtue while ugliness indicates inner evil. The creature deduces that from the reaction of villagers when they see him in their hamlet:
... I [the creature] entered, but I had hardly placed my foot within the door before
the children shrieked, and one of the women fainted. The whole village was
roused; some fled, some attacked me, until, grievously bruised by stones and
many other kinds of missile weapons, I escaped to the open country and fearfully
took refuge in a low hovel. (Frankenstein 94)
The creature is aware that his presence among humans causes panic due to his deformity, and that what happened to him with “the barbarous villagers” is normal. After their refusal for the creature to live among them, he decides to stay away from humans. The creature tries to match their sounds, learn, and speak their language that enables him to locate how he can communicate with humans who shun his deformity. The creature regards language as “a royal road to the family’s disregard for his deformity” (Chao 224). Spectacularly, the role of De
Lacey’s family is obvious on the creature in all aspect of his life, they teach him what the concept of sympathy means, the theme of family, and he learns their language which enables him to read many books. The creature learns through his thorough observation of the De Laceys from the small slot in his hovel. Intellectually, the creature is a cultivated and shrewd character, he believes that his appearance is different from any they have seen before, so he decides to meet the old man (the father), who is blind and can’t see the creature’s deformity. At the first time, the creature is successful: by means of his speech and his choice of words, he persuades the blind
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father that he is good and sincere man: “I am blind and cannot judge of your countenance, but there is something in your words which persuades me that you are sincere” (Frankenstein 123).
Thus the creature believes that he can determine old De Lacey to convince the others of his good nature, but when the others unexpectedly return and they are shocked by the creature’s horrified appearance:
At that instant the cottage door was opened, and Felix, Safie, and Agatha entered.
Who can describe their horror and consternation on beholding me? Agatha
fainted, and Safie, unable to attend to her friend, rushed out of the cottage. Felix
darted forward, and with supernatural force tore me from his father, to whose
knees I clung, in a transport of fury, he dashed me to the ground and struck me
violently with a stick. (Frankenstein 123-124)
On the way to revenge, the creature rescues a girl from drowning in the river, but the man who accompanies her thinks that the creature attacks her, and shoots a his gun at him:
She continued her course along the precipitous sides of the river, when suddenly
her foot slipped, and she fell into the rapid stream. I rushed from my hiding-place
and with extreme labour, from the force of the current, saved her and dragged her
to shore. She was senseless, and I endeavoured by every means in my power to
restore animation, when I was suddenly interrupted by the approach of a rustic,
who was probably the person from whom she had playfully fled ... but when the
man saw me draw near, he aimed a gun, which he carried, at my body and fired. I
sank to the ground, and my injurer, with increased swiftness, escaped into the
wood. (Frankenstein 130)
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All this suffering and the humans’ negative reactions towards the creature are the results of distortions which make him a hideous presence. Victor Frankenstein alone is responsible, and the creature realizes that he is unacceptable in any human society; his life turns hopeless and all that is left to him is revenge. Therefore, his feelings of revenge are rational and different from what Zaibert supposes about revenge, that revenge is irrational and disproportionate for the revengers and the society which they live in.
Fourthly, Leo Zaibert supposes that “revenge is based on sadistic pleasure” (101) – the revenger takes pleasure in the pain and sufferings of his enemy. The creature acquires a fraction of his vengeance in killing William (Victor’s brother), Justine Moritz (a servant in Victor’s house), Henry Clerval (Victor’s boyhood friend) and Elizabeth Lavenza (an adopted girl in
Victor’s house). After killing William, on the threshold of his revenge, the creature feels enjoyment and intensity, and he thinks that he can cause pain and sufferings to others who torture him, especially to Victor. This corresponds to Zaibert’s assumption:
I [the creature] gazed on my victim [William], and my heart swelled with
exultation and hellish triumph; clapping my hands, I exclaimed, ‘I too can create
desolation; my enemy is not invulnerable; this death will carry despair to him, and
a thousand other miseries shall torment and destroy him. (Frankenstein 131-132)
The creature is the reason for the death sentence of the judge to Justine for the murder of
William, the creature learns a lot from De Lacy’s family, such as the “sanguinary laws of man” and how evidence is sufficient in condemning the person. Coincidently the creature finds Justine asleep, and he puts the portrait taken from William killing him in the folds of her dress to frame her for murder. Actually, the creature ends up indirectly causing the death of a few others. Here is another example of matching what Zaibert supposes and what the creature does after the
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murder of Elizabeth on the wedding night. The creature puts a smile of hatred and gloom on his yellow face to reflect the joy of victory and the pain he has inflicted on Victor by killing his wife on their wedding night:
I [Victor] saw at the open window a figure the most hideous and abhorred. A grin
was on the face of the monster [the creature]; he seemed to jeer, as with his
fiendish finger he pointed towards the corpse of my wife. (Frankenstein 187)
In spite of the fact that the creature murders Henry (Victor’s close friend), he feels desolation and dissatisfaction “after the murder of Clerval I returned to Switzerland, heart- broken and overcome. I pitied Frankenstein; my pity amounted to horror” (Frankenstein 210).
Also, the creature leads Victor to his death by luring him to the frozen North Pole and declares that his tragic life is ended by putting an end to his Victor’s life, who created him without any hopes of happiness and good life. The creature concludes that he has to die now that his enemy is dead and his revenge is completed:
I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will
be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of
the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will
be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it
will not surely think thus. Farewell. (Frankenstein 213)
The final conclusion is that the creature’s revenge is not based on sadistic pleasure, except after killing his first victim (William); to the contrary, he feels awkward and regretful of himself and his victims, and even his real enemy, Victor. Moreover, the creature weeps over
Victor’s dead body in the cabin of Walton’s ship and he promises that he will never meet another
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human being after the death of his Creator: “he [the creature] cried with sad and solemn enthusiasm” (Frankenstein 213).
The fifth objection is that “revenge is based on the principle of collective responsibility”
(Zertat 102). The famous phenomenon of traditional cultures of revenge is that revenge doesn’t have to be on the enemy himself, but maybe on his family, relatives, and even his close friends.
As a matter of fact, the creature is created with a plenty of human features, but his physical deformity caused his aversion and isolation from the human being, so he over and over again declares many different pledges of revenge in many various situations. his unacceptability and refusal from the other human beings in general and De Lacey’s family in special, have resulted in his declaration of revenge: “from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and more than all, against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery” (Frankenstein 125-126). Another promise of vengeance is when the creature saves a girl from drowning and her companion shoots him by gun “I [the creature] vowed eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind” (Frankenstein 130). After the long suffering that has come from the oppressive sense of mistreatment, injustice, and ingratitude of humankind toward him, the creature makes a new promise for revenge: “my daily vows rose for revenge-a deep and deadly revenge, such as would alone compensate for the outrages and anguish I had endured”
(Frankenstein 130). Compulsively, the creature has sworn “eternal revenge” against his creator
Victor who leaves him without support and help. It is for this reason that the creature wants to show his power over his creator and to cause similar emotions that he has been subjected to – such as despair, pain, and desperation – to his creator. So the creature decides to travel to Geneva where Victor’s family lives and give his creator misery. Coincidentally, the creature meets
William and kills him as a first victim for his eternal revenge: “you [William] belong then to my
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enemy – to him towards whim I [the creature] have sworn eternal revenge; you shall be my first victim” (Frankenstein 131).
Through a conversation at the top of the mountain between the creator and the creature, the creature was able to convince Victor to create a female, in return leaving him and his people live in peace. After a long wait, Victor revokes the covenant between him and the creature, which leads to the creature announcing new promises of revenge which would be directed upon
Victor and his family and friends. The creature states that his power, which can destroy anything, is able to make Victor’s life miserable and free from the elements of happiness: “remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master; obey!” (Frankenstein 157) The creature promises Victor to complete his revenge, as he has nothing else left in his life: “revenge remains revenge, henceforth dearer than light and food” (Frankenstein 158). The creature announces another promise before the end of the conversation with Victor: “I [the creature] shall be with you on your wedding-night” (Frankenstein 158). The creature is aware of what he says and is capable of executing it. Decisively, he kills Victor’s close friend Henry and he honours his promise to be with Victor on his wedding night and swears revenge and kills Elizabeth.
Factually, the creature’s revenge is divided into portions which are instituted on the psychological reaction that effects on the creature. At the beginning, the creature seeks revenge on his creator who has made him physically gruesome and abandons him and the time the creature needs support and a companion, so he decides to travel to Geneva for revenge where he kills Victor’s brother William and contributes to the execution of Justine Moritz. The path of revenge is changed after the meeting between the creator and the creature on top of mountain, when the creature can convince Victor after begging a female version of him. Entreatingly, the
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creature requests a female with a hope to end his struggle with loneliness and the feelings of isolation so that the creature vows him if he refuses his request: “I could no longer suppress the rage that burned within me” (Frankenstein 134). The second portion of revenge starts when
Victor destroys the creature’s dream and refuses to achieve his promise. The creature announces the start of the second phase of revenge: “Your [Victor’s] hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your happiness forever” (Frankenstein
158). The creature is well aware of what he says, and he kills Elizabeth, Victor’s wife on their wedding night and thus destroys his life forever. According to the pack of revenge that the creature inflicts on Victor’s family and friends, the creature still follows the famous phenomenon of the traditional cultures of revenge. Nevertheless, the creature is distinguished from traditional phenomenon of revenge in the last scene, when the death of the enemy means the end of the task of revenge and the revenger’s achieving the desired goal. On one hand, the creature expresses different feelings than expected from him when he sees the body of his enemy Victor. However, the creature goes so far as to cry over his enemy, and vows to end his life, because it means nothing without existence of his creator. The creature, on the other hand, is opposite to his creator who ends his life to destroy his enemy’s life, and who swears to destroy his own life by ending that of his enemy:
I [the creature] shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these
burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and
exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade
away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in
peace, or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell. (Frankenstein 213)
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One more time, the creature proves that he is more than just a creature and surpasses his own creator in everything, even in revenge and the purpose of revenge. Qualitatively, the creature’s revenge is personal and is not based on other elements. The creature appears as a character who is cultured and treats things rationally and that makes him be rational with everything, even his revenge. Actually, his revenge is not based on sadistic pleasure, however, he shows his sadness and sorrow on the corpse of his enemy Victor, and his revenge stems from a sense of responsibility towards himself, forcing him to take revenge as a means to achieve his desires. So, the creature does not revenge for something like an offense from him, but he wreaks havoc on his imperfect creator who has created an imperfect and distorted creature and, more than that, abandoned him without supports and a suitable female companion. What the creature demands from his creator is the simple right to live his life in happiness.
3.2 Frankenstein's Creature as Hero or Villain
The terms hero and villain are widely used in all kinds of literature and popular cultures.
There are indeed obvious differences between both terms. There are two main characters nominated to be either hero or villain in Frankenstein:the ambitious young student Victor
Frankenstein and the sensitive, fierce, intelligent, and good-hearted creature. Clearly, it seems difficult to differentiate between the meanings of both terms in Frankenstein. There are several definitions of two terms which apply to the two protagonists of the novel.
The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines “hero” as “a person admired for achievements and noble qualities”. This definition indicates to two meanings: on one hand, it indicates that there are many characters in one literary work that have good qualities; however, they are not heroes because the word “noble” would suggest that heroic features are associated with certain character qualities. On the other hand, there is only one character appearing as a hero in a literary
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work, and no more. In Frankenstein, there are two characters who display features of heroism –
Victor and his creation. Both of them have admirable achievements, they are moved by ‘noble qualities’, and they have heroism qualities.
Victor nourishes feelings of love and affection towards his family, the beloved and his friend: “and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics, and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation” (Frankenstein 18). As a hero, Victor lives a love story with his beloved since early youth:
“I looked upon Elizabeth as mine – mine to protect, love, and cherish. All praises
bestowed on her, I received as made to a possession of my own. We called each
other familiarly by the name of cousin. No word, no expression could body forth
the kind of relation in which she stood to me – my more than sister, since till
death she was to be mine only. (Frankenstein n 29)
And also Henry Clerval, Victor’s close friend, is his childhood dearest friend: “Clerval beloved friend” (Frankenstein 145). According to this definition, even the second main character in the novel – ‘the creature’ – exhibits traits of heroism. His is an innocent and gentle nature from his awaking moment, he is confused when Victor unintentionally abandons him after his coming to life, and does nothing: “I [the creature] sat down and wept” (Frankenstein 91). The creature leads his life without the love of parents and family, but he secretly lives in De Lacey family’s cottage and learns from them the meaning of life. Passionately, the creature considers this family as his own and likes them: “they [the family] are kind – they are the most excellent creatures in the world” (Frankenstein 122).
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The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘hero’ differently: “a person which is the subject of the tale”. Frankenstein is an epistolary novel written with framing devices so that it tells the story of many different characters. The main plot of the novel revolves around the story of Victor and his creature; both of them are the subject of the novel, to the extent that it is difficult to distinguish whether the novel is the story of a scientist who creates a supernatural creature or it is the story of an awesome creature created by the scientist. According to this definition, both
Victor and the creature are the heroes of the novel.
In Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature (1997),Margery
Hourihan claims that a hero in a literary work takes the same structure and follows the same invariable pattern. Hourihan’s patterns of the hero prove that both Victor and his creature have the same qualities of a hero. The first of Hourihan’s patterns of a hero is that “the hero is white, male, British, American or European, and usually young” (9). Both characters completely own this quality: Victor is a Genovese (his parents come from around Geneva, Switzerland).
However, Victor is born in Italy, he is Italian by birth and Genovese by birthright and ancestry:
“I, their eldest child, was born at Naples” (Frankenstein 19), “I am by birth a Genovese”
(Frankenstein 17), whereas, the creature is created in Victor’s laboratory at Ingolstadt, where
Victor turns one of the rooms into a laboratory to achieve his goal.
According to Margery Hourihan, the second trait that characterizes a hero is “he [hero] leaves the civilian order of home to venture into wilderness pursuit his goal” (9) this meaning is clearly visible in the life of Victor, who lives in isolation when he decides to create his creature –
‘his goal’. Victor lives alone for many years and throws himself only into school work, reading everything that falls in his hand about science, especially chemistry: “Two years passed in this manner, during which I paid no visit to Geneva, but was engaged, heart and soul, in the pursuit
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of some discoveries which I hoped to make” (Frankenstein 36-37). Victor divorces the outside world and discontinues any connections with his family and his friend, leaving their letters without answer for a long time:
I knew well therefore what would be my father’s feelings, but I could not tear my
thoughts from my employment, loathsome in itself, but which had taken an
irresistible hold of my imagination. I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that
related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up
every habit of my nature, should be completed. (Frankenstein 41)
After many attempts, Victor succeeds in blowing the soul in the lifeless parts of dead humans that he has collected from cemeteries and oratories:
It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my
toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments
of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that
lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally
against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of
the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it
breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. (Frankenstein 43)
Victor Frankenstein oddly ignores his social life and his family for a long period so as to study anatomy, after hard and tireless work; he zealously discovers the secret of life and becomes unique in his profession by creating his fascinating nameless creature. Undoubtedly, Victor possesses the hero qualities mentioned in Hourihan’s definition and so does the creature who isolates from people for one reason or another and then he accomplishes something that even a man who lived in similar circumstances could not. Victor leaves him without support or any
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means of living, even without a language to communicate with others (villain quality). After many failed attempts to connect with people, the creature decides to isolate himself, so he hides himself into a hovel in the house of villagers of whom he acquires everything except their friendship: “I escaped to the open country and fearfully [not a hero’s qualities] took refuge in a low hovel, quite bare, and making a wretched appearance after the palaces I had beheld in the village” (Frankenstein 94). Secretly, he watches the villagers through a small slot in the hovel, and he learns how to speak and read their language (French):
My days were spent in close attention that I might more speedily master the
language; and I may boast that I improved more rapidly than the Arabian, who
understood very little and conversed in broken accents, whilst I comprehended
and could imitate almost every word that was spoken. (Frankenstein 106-107)
For six months (through the winter and into the spring), the creature learns a lot of things from his ‘adopted family’. During his staying in the hovel, he fortunately finds a leather case containing books: “I found on the ground a leathern portmanteau ... Fortunately the books were written in the language, the elements of which I had acquired at the cottage” (Frankenstein 116).
In the portmanteau there are three books: “they consisted of Paradise Lost, a volume of
Plutarch’s Lives, and the Sorrows of Werther” (Frankenstein 116), from which the creature learns about the virtue and vices of the humans, the structure of civilization, and the history of ancient Greece and Rome. Probably, the creature achieves his goal by learning the language and reading these books so that he could communicate with the other people who reject him for his ugly appearance by using biblical language. Surely, the creature possesses what Houriban means by hero qualities in this definition, even if Victor competes with the creature in these qualities or not.
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The online dictionary.com gives an accurate definition of the term “hero”: “a person who, in the opinion of others, has special achievements, abilities, or personal qualities and is regarded as a role model or ideal”. A hero in this definition distinctly possesses qualities that make the definition fully applicable to what qualities belonging to a hero the creature and Victor possess.
Mary Shelley portraits the two protagonists in such way that they share many features in common, and the reader can easily draw a comparison between them. The writer shows that people is born not entirely good or evil by protracting a hero’s and a villain’s qualities in two characters, as “nature can be the source of death as well as life. Good people do evil” (Lipking
330). The mere fact is that the creature possesses hero qualities as well as villain qualities. One of the creature’s hero qualities is power, he has control over language and speaks eloquently (a feature that distinguishes him from the others); the creature surreptitiously learns the language from the French family where he studies all sciences and knows history. The creature learns how to speak, read, and write from Felix’s’ lessons that he gives to Agatha at home, and the creature is even faster than Agatha in learning the language: “the monster turns himself into an arduous learner of human language – a key to human society – and yet discovers that his pain only intensifies with the increase of knowledge and that human beings are in fact monstrous as well”
(Chao 223).
The creature adopts the best and shortest way to understand the society that refuses him without knowing a reason (the creature has not seen his form yet). Language is the most important means of understanding and contact between members of society in all aspects of life, without language, people cannot be active and communicative. Once he learns to read, he reads the three books that he happily finds. By reading these three books (Milton’s Paradise Lost,
Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther), the creature realizes the
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fundamentals of virtue and vice that make him a different creature, a creature who knows the meaning of family cohesion, and passionate emotions. Since he secretly lives with De Lacey who teaches him everything, the creature decides to meet them:
These were the reflections of my hours of despondency and solitude; but when I
contemplated the virtues of the cottagers, their amiable and benevolent
dispositions, I persuaded myself that when they should become acquainted with
my admiration of their virtues they would compassionate me and overlook my
personal deformity. Could they turn from their door one, however monstrous, who
solicited their compassion and friendship? (Frankenstein 119)
As a hero, the creature smartly chooses the right person and time to show himself to a family that he loves and does not want to lose: “My heart beat quick; this was the hour and moment of trail, which would decide my hopes or realize my fears ... it was an excellent opportunity” (Frankenstein 121). The creature chooses the old blind father and, to better his feelings, he uses the words and even sentences that he has learned from the three books, and that makes the blind man accept him – the creature’s words are effective and reflective: “I am blind and cannot judge of your countenance, but there is something in your words which persuades me that you are sincere” (Frankenstein 123).
The creature regards language as “a royal road to the family’s disregard for his deformity” (Chao 224). Skilfully, the creature has control over his language – he is eloquent and succeeds to persuade the old man who does not (and cannot) judge by appearances.
Independently of the other features of a hero, the creature wisely deals with his appearance’s problem as protagonists do, but people refuse him and mistreat him.
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Surely, Frankenstein (1818) belongs to Gothic Fiction. In A Dictionary of Literary
Terms, Martin Gray shows that “works with a similarly obsessive, gloomy, violent and spine- chilling atmosphere, but not necessarily with a medieval setting, are also called Gothic: Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), for example” (129). As a matter of fact, Frankenstein and many novels have used gothic themes and, in addition to gloomy places and violent actions, these novels focus on the mysterious and the supernatural. While Gothic literature is an explosion of horror and fantastic stories, and supernatural forces, these forces reflect the dark side of human nature. It explains why, over the years, the features of the hero portrayal by the writers of Gothic
Literature vary with the different period and its characteristics. For example, the hero in the
Classical era is characterised by his physical qualities, such as muscular force that makes him different from the others, while the hero in modern times is one who overcomes all difficulties to be the ultimate winner. Certainly, the hero in Gothic literature is different from the hero in the previous periods and later, especially after the overlap of the Gothic and Romantic literature during the last decades of the 18th and the first of the 19th centuries. According to the character’s features and how the writer portraits a hero, the heroes in gothic literature may be divided into several types. The first one is the Byronic hero who first appeared in Byron’s semi- autobiographical epic narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818). This kind of hero is proud, statistic, isolated, stubborn in his revenge, and of an emotional character. This is how Atrara Stein has defined the Byronic hero:
…he is an unattainable ideal, a hero who inspires awe but cannot be emulated. At
the same time, he lacks social skills and an ability to relate to other people... he
can be arrogant, contemptuous of human beings, bad-tempered, overbearing, cold,
ruthless and emotionless (3).
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The second kind of hero in Gothic literature – sometimes assimilated with the Byronic hero – is the Satanic hero, whose outrageous actions make him a more interesting character than a positive one: “the satanic hero … is blatantly in league with the Devil. Or why not the Devil himself be such a hero?” (Le Givorden 164). In Byron’s poetry we find the first examples of first this hero, in the opening stanzas of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 1, where the hero is depicted as a young man, prematurely sated by sin, who wanders about in an attempt to escape society and his own memories. Conrad, the hero of The Corsair (1814), is even more isolated, darker, more complex in his history and inner conflict, and therefore more frightening and more compelling to the reader. The hero of Lara (also 1814) is a finished product; he reappears two years later, with variations in canto 3 of Childe Harold and again the following year as the hero of Byron’s poetic drama Manfred (Norton online).
The Promethean is the third type of hero who appears in Gothic literature. Prometheus is a hero of humankind from Greek mythology who revolts against Gods. In Classical Literature, writers use Prometheus as figure of rebellion against injustice. However, in the Renaissance and
Romantic Literature, Prometheus becomes a symbol of suffering and inspiration for humanity. In
Modern Literature, the image of Prometheus has changed as well as literature has changed. In his essay, On Pincher Martin, Samuel Hynes defines Prometheus as “an indestructible life worshipping identity whose very existence gives meaning to his suffering and whose suffering gives meaning to his existence” (130).
The Modern Prometheus is the famous subtitle of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece
Frankenstein. Shelley draws the plot of her novel from famous Greek Prometheus myth.
According to this mythological story, the Titan Prometheus creates mankind from clay, then
Prometheus dares to give the secret of life to humanity by stealing the fire from gods, and Zeus
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punishes Prometheus for making humans strong. Seemingly, Victor Frankenstein is the Modern
Prometheus, who creates the creature. Victor dares to give his creature the secret of life that belongs only to God, certainly life and death are due to God only, no one lives or dies without his knowledge.
Mary Shelley metaphorically borrows from the content of the myth of Prometheus the concept of moderation. According to the Promethean myth, Prometheus is punished by Zeus because of his giving the fire to the humans who use it for cooking their food and keeping warm, but they can also use it as a weapon to kill each other. That is why Zeus punishes Prometheus, because Zeus believes that gods only can correctly use the fire. Therefore, fire is considered as a modernizing trope that makes life easier but, at the same time, it may be dangerous to humanity.
Shelley compares the image of fire in the Promethean myth with the image of electricity and scientific development in the 19th century that is a double-edged sword, it makes life easier than before such as lighting houses, or it may be used to torture humans and to create deadly weapons. Of what is mentioned, it results that Victor Frankenstein is the modern Promethean hero, but that does not mean that the creature is also a hero, even if he shows has many features of the Byronic hero.
This term was widely used in Gothic literature. In the literature of the time, the Byronic heroes appeared as humans, vampires, and even monsters, and in all these kinds of character that he has impersonated, the Byronic hero carries the same traits. One of the most important participants in Shelley’s reading cycle, who contributed to the invention of horror stories in
Geneva, is Lord Byron. One night, Byron challenged each person present to write a horror story.
Byron clearly exerted a strong influence on the others, so it was naturally for Shelley to be influenced by Byron and use his concept “Byronic hero”. Jessica Groper gives the most
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important features of the Byronic hero by asserting that the Byronic hero is “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” (132).
In fact, these few words describe the most common traits of Byronic hero. In
Frankenstein, the creature has all these features. The madness of the creature notoriously lies within his request to his creator to create a female for him: “you must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being. This you alone can do and I demand it of you as a right which you must not refuse to concede”
(Frankenstein 134). The madness in this request is that the creature knows that he is the only one in this world and he is supernatural for all scales of value: to him, a companion means family and then a society of supernatural creatures. In fact, it is madness if the creature asks for a female companion, and it is madness if Victor agrees with him. After living alone for a long time without a companion and any support, and after the great disappointment in his rejection of the family whom he loves, the creature decides to take revenge on Victor. The creature does commit heinous crimes – he kills Victor’s brother William, he causes the execution of the servant girl
Justine for the murder of William, he murders Victor’s close friend Henry Cleval and Victor’s wife and great love Elizabeth. It is quite apparent that the nature and characteristics of the creature is not to murder innocent people, he is not “created” with these qualities, but he does that to take his revenge on Victor: “...feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom... [and] I bent my mind towards injury and death” (Frankenstein 127). There are contrasts and complementary characters in Shelley’s Frankenstein, and one of them is the Byronic hero – “the creature”. First and foremost, the creature is created from parts of dead humans in a way that makes him appear as a huge distorted man:
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His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his
hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these
luxuriance only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed
almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his
shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. (Frankenstein 43)
His hideous appearance (his face like the face of demons) does not prevent him from being kind. He loves to help the others and has genuine emotions and feelings towards the De
Lacey family. A person with his physical capacity and supernatural power does not treat people in the way that he treats them despite of the cruelty he suffers from them. Another contrast to the
Byronic hero is that he learns from De Lacey family how the relationship between family members of should be, the love of family, and the duty of a father to his children, but when the family decide to leave the house after their meeting with the creature, the creature vindictively burns their hut:
I fired the straw, and heath and the cottage was quickly enveloped by the flames,
which clung to it and licked it with their forked and destroying tongues ‘As soon
as I was convinced that no assistance could save any part of the habitation, I
quitted the scene and sought for refuge in the woods. (Frankenstein 128)
The contradictions in the novel on the one hand, and the contradictions within the characters of the novel on the other, give attractiveness to the Byronic hero and the novel itself.
Stefanie Krüger mentions in her essay entitled The Attraction of Gothic Villains in 19th-Century
Literature that the Byronic hero “is represented as a torn melancholic that, due to his mental disposition, cannot but commit villainous deeds. The same, says Brittnacher, accounts for the
Gothic villain: He is attractive because he is terrible and melancholic” (4). Shelley portraits the
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hero in her novel to simulate the scientific developments in Europe and the wars of conquests, and hires the hero to achieve the themes of the novel and to show attractiveness. In her book The
Female Romantics: Nineteenth-century Women Novelists and Byronism, Caroline Franklin emphasizes these qualities:
Mary Shelley adapted the Byronic hero to illustrate the autocratic heritage of
Bonapartism tainting European liberal and nationalist movements after the Treaty
of Vienna. Byron himself had led the way in identifying his own Gothic anti-
heroes with their author and both with Napoleon Bonaparte. Like many other
Romantic writers, Shelley conveyed fascination with Bonaparte even while
censuring his myth, through her ambivalent allegory of the modern Prometheus in
Frankenstein. (4)
The Byronic heroes in Frankenstein do not only process the traits of Byron himself, but they process the features of Napoleon Bonaparte: “Byron was an inspiration behind the two most popular Gothic villains in the nineteenth century: the aristocrat as vampire and the utopian projector, Victor Frankenstein, who unleashes a monster” (Frankenstein 36). In Frankenstein,
Shelley adopts many issues in her period, and one of these issues is that French Revolution. She compares the creature in her novel with the masses, “the forces” that are composed of thinkers behind the revolution, and the creature represents the crowds that are out of the control of their thinkers, just as the creature is uncontrolled by his creator.
Mary Shelley introduces two characters as Byronic heroes in Frankenstein: Victor
Frankenstein and his nameless creature. Both of them have different Byronic qualities, and one completes the other, they depend on each other, “they are one perfect Byronic hero”. What
Shelley actually shows is that it is difficult to determine a good and an evil character (Victor and
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the creature). Victor is a main character who appears as a kind-hearted human being, well- educated (he is a scientist), beneficial, and loving for his family and friends. Even his attempt at creating his creature seems noble: “I thought that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption” (Frankenstein 40). All these features make him appear as a Promethean or Byronic hero, but he has also faults which make him appear as villain.
As in the case of Victor, the creature has the qualities of a hero as well as the traits of a villain. Literature is in fact full of good and evil characters, struggling with each other in the same literary work. Readers and audiences can easily distinguish between them, heroes and villains. In Frankenstein, both Victor and his creature have the same features, and the features that Victor lacks, the creature possesses or vice versa. It is not easy for the reader to distinguish which character is a hero or a villain. Christopher describes both Victor and the creature as slaves to their impulses (190-191). This trait is more apparent in the creature whose reactions are violent because he is treated violently by other human beings: when he kills or hurts people he isn’t happy, his actions come as a response and he defends himself from being hurt. The motives make him separate from the world around him and even from his family and friends. It is apparently that impulses affect both Victor and the creature to the point of being corrupted.
Even their language is fascinated by literature: “the fact that the monster’s [the creature] language was as elegant as Victor’s, that he was acquainted with Milton’s Paradise Lost,
Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther” (Reinhardt 149). They turn to literature to find answers to their thoughts.
According to Levine, “the family is an aspect of self cannot survive bereft of its family”
(213), and Victor and the creature have strong feelings towards family. Even though Victor
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leaves his family and friends for a long time in order to achieve his egotistical work (knowing the secret of life), yet he feels that his life becomes meaningless after murders and death. The creature, on the other hand, doesn’t have a real family, but he feels the family’s sense and warmth in his stay with the De Laceys. Later, he requests from his “father” Victor to create a female to make a family with her, and he promises Victor that he will leave behind everything he knows and live with her separately. Actually, both characters at end of novel leave without their family: Victor loses his father, brother, and wife, while the creature loses his wife and his
“father” Victor.
All the previous definitions of a “hero” and “villain” are not enough to know who is the hero or the villain of the novel, and are insufficient to state whether the creature is either the hero or the villain of Frankenstein. Even the idea that a hero has a willingness to sacrifice himself for the other is insufficient to indicate who the hero is; the reason is that this feature can be performed by the hero and the villain alike – Victor and his creature sacrifice themselves at the end of novel. Victor sacrifices himself to avenge his family and to save the world from the supernatural creature he created:
I had saved a human being from destruction, and as recompense I now writhed
under the miserable pain of a wound which shattered the flesh and bone. The
feelings of kindness and gentleness which I had entertained but a few moments
before gave place to hellish rage and gnashing of teeth. Inflamed by pain, I vowed
eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind. (Frankenstein 130)
The creature sacrifices himself for a female and for Victor:
‘But soon,’ he [the creature] cried with sad and solemn enthusiasm, ‘I shall die,
and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct.
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I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing
flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into
the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it will not surely
think thus. Farewell.’ (Frankenstein 213)
Victor and the creature have similar features, and sometimes they complete each other.
As seen above, there have always been exceptions that come from a person who does not literally match the definition. Due to these exceptions, only the reader can distinguish who is the hero or the villain in the novel. One general definition of the “hero” that contains all the features already mentioned would be that a hero is someone who the reader considers to be a good character who inspires him and makes him want to interact with, while that a villain is someone the reader considers as evil and who generally is in conflict with the hero. So the hero or the villain in Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus is who the reader considers after going through the events in the novel.
3.3 Frankenstein's Creature as Victim-Offender
In society and in literature as well, there is a relationship (overlapping) between victims and offenders. This overlapping does not only mean that violent crimes be characterized by converting the roles of victims and offenders. In spite of the fact that the maturity of overlapping in the literature between victim and offender has been established on violence, there is another type of overlapping between victim and offender such as that among property victims and offenders or property offenders and victimization. The dynamic interchange between a would-be offender and a would-be victim is violence: “murder is the outcome of a dynamic interchange between an offender, victim, and, in many cases, bystanders” (Luckenbill 185). The boundary between a character being a victim or an offender is violence to save himself/herself from a
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victim to an offender “attack was the defense against attack, and the state of war between criminal and his victim made the sufferer a doer and converted criminals to victims” (Schafer 8).
The overlapping among victims and offenders means surely the overlapping between two sciences. Firstly, Victimology is the study of victimization, including the psychological effects on victims, relationships between victims and offenders, the interactions among victims and the criminal justice system. Secondly, Criminology is one of the branches of the science of human behaviour, a science that studies crime as a phenomenon in the life of the individual and in the life of the group, a study designed to describe, analyze and investigate the causes. In his article
Remarks on the Interaction of Perpetrator andVictim, Hans Von Hentig shows the interchange between two sciences, and he writes that
By separating in time the fatally “harmonizing” parties the formation of an
explosive social compound can be averted. Remaining would be a potential
perpetrator without a victim and a potential victim without a partner to whom he
or she could turn to be victimized. (309)
Some specialists indicate that the overlapping among victims and offenders shows the commonalities and differences between them, but to understand these features, the study of victims should be separated from that of offenders.
In literature, the images of victims have broadly changed through over time. The multiplicity in the presence of victims differently depends on the writer, and the period to which the writer belongs and how the writer reflects the problems of his society in his/her writings. The novelist Shelley was influenced by Romanticism and Gothicism in her portraying the victim –
“the creature” – in Frankenstein. As a matter of fact, Shelley shows her ability to create a multidenominational character by writing Frankenstein. These characters have been used as
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powerful tools to excite widely different opinions amongst readers. Unarguably, one of the most famous characters of Shelley’s works is the nameless creature in Frankenstein.
The creature is a dynamic and multidenominational character, and one of his effective roles in the novel is to provoke the reader. Many scholars, as Hans Von Hentig, Stephen Schafer, and Marvin Wolfgang have argued that “to a large extent, victims either were responsible for their own victimization or shared a relationship with those who victimized them” (Anderson 47).
Several theories have been used for explaining victimization, but all these theories suggest that the victims himself are only responsible for what happens to them. In fact, the creature is innately a victim, and his victimizers are Victor who creates him and the society that refuses him.
Shelley has portrayed the creature’s journey and fate to introduce him as a victim in her story. The victimization of the creature starts from his birthday, when the creature was born as an orphan child who is abandoned by his father. Victor creates his creature and relinquishes him.
Victor leaves his creature without the simplest and most important rights of the new birth in the nomenclature: the creature has not even been given a name. However, Victor uses many different negative terms such as “ogre” [“you are an ogre” (Frankenstein 131)] and “daemon” [“‘And do you dream?’ said the daemon” (Frankenstein 209)].
The namelessness of the creature means that Victor refuses to adopt his son and refuses any connection with him because the name would have meant that Victor claimed the creature as his own son. As we have already mentioned, the creature’s long journey of victimization has started since his birthday. When Victor creates his creation, he does not even stop to give him a name. Moreover, Victor creates him a hideous creature from parts of dead human bodies. Victor shapes him into so terrifying a being that he himself flees from him. Here is Victor’s description of the creature:
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His limbs were in proportion, and I [Victor] had selected his features as beautiful.
Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and
arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly
whiteness; but these luxuriance only formed a more horrid contrast with his
watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in
which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
(Frankenstein 43)
This deformity makes the creature an outcast of his creator and society: “formed into a hideous and gigantic creature, the monster [the creature] faces rejection and fear from his creator and society” (Coghill 62). The 8-foot-tall creature emphasizes the fact that the creature is unnatural and demonizes Victor still further: “Oh! No mortal could support the horror of that countenance” (Frankenstein 44). Home is the first place where children improve their features, behaviour and thinking. Family and especially parents play a great and an important role during the development of their children. It is important for them to be balanced in love-giving and guidance of the other family members. If the imbalance between love and guidance produces a child as unhealthy as Victor, the total absence of love and guidance produces children suffering from many problems as with the creature. Victor who receives a blindly love from his father, suffers from unhealthy characteristic, behaviour and thinking, “I remained for several years their only child. Much as they were attached to each other, they seemed to draw inexhaustible stores of affection from a very mine of love to bestow them upon me” (Frankenstein 19). Victor explains how his father's excessive love spoils his qualities:
My parents were possessed by the very spirit of kindness and indulgence. We felt
that they were not the tyrants to rule our lot according to their caprice ... When I
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mingled with other families I distinctly discerned how peculiarly fortunate my lot
was, and gratitude assisted the development of filial love (Frankenstein 23).
It is obvious that Victor lives a happy life with his family, and this kind of love doesn’t restrict him and makes him be a self-centred person. The role of the parents’ guidance in the family is very important to enhance the good qualities and discard the bad traits of their children.
Victor’s father gives his Victor a blind love, without guidance. The point of conversion in
Victor’s life is dependent on the opinion of Victor’s father on the book by Cornelius Agrippa which makes him feel enthusiastic about alchemy. Victor goes to his father in order to know more about this book, and his father’s response means that he knows about the contains of this book, but he does not tire himself to guide his beloved Victor: “‘Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash” (Frankenstein 24). Consequently,
Victor reads this book and becomes enthusiastic in alchemy. Victor explains that
“if, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me the
principle of Agrippa had been entirely exploded ... I certainly have thrown
Agrippa aside ... the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse
that let to my ruin” (Frankenstein 24-25).
Completely, a good parent gives love and guide to children when they lose their way.
Besides his parent, Elizabeth, his adopted sister has a great role in Victor’s life:
The saintly soul of Elizabeth shone like a shrine-dedicated lamp in our peaceful
home. Her sympathy was ours; her smile, her soft voice, the sweet glance of her
celestial eyes, were ever there to bless and animate us. She was the living spirit of
love to soften and attract... (Frankenstein 23-24)
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In addition to his family and Elizabeth, Victor has the good companionship of his boyhood friend Henry Clerval. Also, Victor’s high level of education has an influence on his characteristics. Despite of all these, Victor deviated from his proper course, he is too enthusiastic, and he believes that people only become famous for their modern achievement.
Victor forgets that it is significantly important to keep in mind that science is double-edged, and it offers sources and possible ways to improve life, but on the other hand, scientists must be wary of fame because it corrupts the minds: “knowledge is shown to be double-edged, its benefits and hazards depending upon the circumstances, and the spirit, in which it is pursued” (Baldick 45).
Victor possesses all the ingredients to be a normal human being but his perversion makes him create an ugly creature from which he fears and runs away from.
When children come into the world, they experience love from their parents, who take care of them and protect them from all abominations. From the very beginning, Shelley’s creature is prevented from family life, as the creature is born without father or mother. The first emotions that the creature faces are misery, panic, and fear in his creator’s eyes: “how can I
[Victor] describe my emotions at this catastrophe?” (Frankenstein 43) Love is the most important feeling in the people’s lives, and family is the first source of love. Of course, the absence of love makes people sad. By living without one of the parents, the creature victimizes Victor who has created him under these circumstances; he lives lonely and confronts the society. Actually, this theme has its roots in Shelley’s own experience: “Mary lost her mother within a few days after birth ... she was supposed to be her father’s lovely daughter and the source of his love. However, she failed this position and it was the maleficence she felt against her father” (Florescu 180).
It is important to understand that the creature has been made up of adult parts. However, the creature’s personality is that of a child, he can easily move from place to other. Regardless
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of his size, the creature is emotionally just a child. In the incipient months of his life he depends on himself to learn how to live his life and gains information about his surroundings. However he is abandoned and becomes a victim of the bad father. His persistence and a constant struggle is the mark that the creature is a victim trying to survive. Shelley’s Frankenstein examines the pursuance of knowledge within industrial age. The tragic example presents Victor as this scientist who uses science without morality. Shelley exemplifies disastrous desires of human to know about the secret of life.
The creature’s first interaction with another human being happens when he walks into the hut of a shepherd, the shepherd reaction is that he “shrieked loudly, and…ran across the fields with a speed of which his debilitated form hardly appeared capable” (Frankenstein 93). His other dealings with human beings are all very similar to what happens with the shepherd or maybe more exaggerated. The incredibly strong reaction of the people toward the creature is only based on his appearance, without making any kind of mistakes or crimes and without him uttering a single sentence: “but I had hardly placed my foot within the door before the children shrieked, and one of the women fainted. The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me, until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons” (Frankenstein
94). Only the blind man who gives the creature a chance to share with him, this opportunity has vanished when his children enter: “At that instant the cottage door was opened, and Felix, Safie, and Agatha entered. Who can describe their horror and consternation on beholding me? Agatha fainted, and Safie, unable to attend to her friend, rushed out of the cottage. Felix darted forward, and with supernatural force tore me from his father” (Frankenstein 123). Even with the girl who he saves from drowning, her boyfriend’s reaction is to shoot him and almost kills him.
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The aforementioned reactions of the human beings toward the creature are based on the outside appearances. By all odds, the creature is a victim of the society that deals with outside appearances only. This idea may be a reflection of Shelley’s age. Shelley criticizes the society that judges people according to their class or outward appearance regardless of their merits. In
Frankenstein, society plays a great role in evoking the monstrosity of the creature’s personality, it refuses him for his ugliness, and it physically and psychologically regards him as a monster.
The creature has external features that make him appear as a monster, but he has the internal qualities of a man: “my [the creature’s] soul glowed with love and humanity” (Frankenstein 87).
In addition to these features, the creature enjoys helping other, he provides the cottagers with food and wood for a fire, and he saves a little girl from drowning. After a violent reaction by the villagers, he risks his own life to rescue a little girl from drowning, but her friend automatically assumes that he was trying to kill the girl because of his deformity.
Despite of everything the creature has done, the community still treats him as a monster because of his outward appearance, and he surprisingly asks Victor: “why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?” (Frankenstein 119) Neither Victor nor anyone else considered the creature’s feelings. However, because of the society’s hostile reaction, the creature is forced to become a monster internally as well. It is the turning point in the creature’s transition from victim to villain. The creature tries to find companionship many times, but he is only met with fear and hostility. He eventually confirms them and acts accordingly. The creature’s last attempt at getting acceptance ends by refusing and thus it marks the start of his evil acts. It is remarkable that within society there are unwritten rules and traditions that have to be followed. Regarding the creature’s stature and shape, it is evident that the creature will hardly be accepted in the place where people live. According to human nature,
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people are afraid of extraordinary phenomena, for many centuries they have only believed in proven and traditional things. In Frankenstein, Shelley shows her society’s reactions toward modern science that is based on a new finding and knowledge.
It has been scientifically proven that victims and offenders are often the same individuals because victims are at a psychologically higher risk than non-victims in any situation. After injustice and unacceptability from society and their violent reactions, then the creature decides to avenge his creator. The creature moves from one horrid act to another, indulging in evil. First, he kills William. Then he frames Justine as the murderer and she is hanged for his crime. The fact is that the creature kills William, not for his refusing him nor his childhood, but because of Victor.
Both William and the creature are victims of Victor. The creature explains his desire to adopt
William because he wants someone to connect with him, he wants William as a companion “I
[the creature] could seize him and educate him as my companion and friend” (Frankenstein 131).
The creature kills William in response to his anger that is the result of Victor’s abandon. If
Victor had not left the creature on his birthday, the creature would not have felt feelings of revenge and anger, and would not have been forced to kill William. Therefore, Victor’s actions are indirectly the causative factors in the death of William and Justin. William describes the creature with gruesome words such as “ugly wretch” “hideous monster” and “ogre”, but just on his mentioning Victor’s name, the creature mercilessly kills him, and the creature is transformed from victim to offender by killing William: “Frankenstein! You belong then to my enemy- to him towards whom I have sworn eternal revenge; you shall be my first victim” (Frankenstein
131).
Furthermore, Shelley evidently uses the theme of Adam’s creation from Milton’s
Paradise Lost to show the similarity between Adam and the creature. According to Adam’s
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qualities in Paradise Lost, the creature compares himself with Adam. Adam is created by God and, since Adam feels alone and needs a companion, God creates Eve, Adam’s wife. God beautifully creates Adam and his wife, takes care of them as well as educates them. In contrast,
Victor creates his creature and abandons him, without help or a close person who would love him. In addition, Victor doesn’t love his creature, and he neither supports the creature nor fights for him. The creature is also neither given a chance to communicate with other not given the opportunity to share his life with a being of the same origin as well as of the same shape. The creature’s dream is the same as Adam’s dream. The creature asks his creator to create a female to share his life and aloneness: “you must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being” (Frankenstein 134). Victor initially accepts, but later he refuses his request.
As a result, the creature doesn’t kill for depriving Victor of this relationship; in contrast, he kills because Victor chooses to deprive him of this relationship. The creature promises to be with Victor on his wedding night. All evil acts that the creature does are associated in one way or others with Victor’s acts. Plausibly, the creature victimizes the corruption of science that is achieved by Victor when creates him whereas the creature’s knowledge increases to show him the true differences between him and everyone else. Victor’s knowledge creates the creature whilst the creature’s knowledge creates an upsetting situation because he realizes that he can’t be acceptable in society.
The creature is the victim of his creator and society: both hurt him psychologically and physically. In addition to his creator’s abandoning him without any kind of support and society’s repudiation, the creature suffers from abandon into the wilderness. It hurts him when he puts his hand in the fire, thinking it is harmless. He suffers a lot when he feels hunger and does not know
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how and what to eat. He painfully tortures from his deformity which coerces him to live in disguise, this hideousness makes his duty of learning be very difficult. His request for a female and Victor’s rejection make him feel he is a victim. Like a victim, he does his revenge to defend himself with the power and abilities he is given. By reading Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus, the reader will discover that Mary Shelley has portrayed her creature in a way that makes him be more villain than the victim.
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Chapter Four
The Roles of Monster in Frankenstein in Baghdad
4.0 Introduction
This chapter deals with the monster in one of the best-selling books written by Arabic writers today – Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) – translated into more than thirty languages. As a gothic novel written in post modernism literature, the monster is considered one of the most important elements and a stanchion of creativity in the novel.
The monster in Frankenstein in Baghdad is obviously an essential character in the novel’s storyline; the main events in the plot revolve around the monster’s creation and actions.
Saadawi intentionally presents the monster in such a manner so that he accomplishes his roles in the novel. The monster carries out several heinous acts of violence that are befitting of his roles.
However, the monster also possesses qualities that authorize to achieve the purpose of his representation in the novel.
The writer interpolates many roles in the character of the monster to portray various themes in Iraqi society after the America invasion. This chapter focuses on the revenger as the most prominent role of the monster in the novel, regardless of how the monster achieves his revenge. It shows the motives of the monster in carrying out his revenge according to several psychological theories of motivation. As a matter of fact, the monster’s roles are not limited to his actions. This chapter analyses how Saadawi authorizes his monster to accomplish his roles with regard to his different names, and confirms and innervates the role of onomastic in a literary work and how the names of characters carry any descriptive meaning or function simply as designators. However, the naming processes in which the writers convey their character’s role in
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a literary text clearly denote extra-linguistic entities as an act of reference. The monster in
Frankenstein in Baghdad has been given many names by other characters such as Alshesma,
Whatitsname, Frankenstein, Daniel, Criminal X, etc. Each name of the monster is related to theme or themes in the novel, and they can directly influence the interpretation of the literary work, and most importantly, help a reader to place the work within a frame of reference
4.1 Roles of Monster in Frankenstein in Baghdad
4.1.1Revenger
Frankenstein in Baghdad is rich in symbols that are connected to its main themes. The text acts as a composite image of many themes reflected by major and minor characters. Revenge is considered as one of the most prominent themes in Frankenstein in Baghdad, showing the frailty of the separating boundary between justice and crime. In this novel, winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and one of the novels short-listed for the Man Booker Prize,Ahmed Saadawi presents revenge in different forms, when the creature composed from the remains of explosions victims, leads a campaign of revenge against those who contributed to his killing, or rather killed the owners of his constituent parts. Revenge is commonly defined as an action toward perceived harm or wrongdoing, which is intended to inflict damage, injury, discomfort, or punishment, or as it is mentioned in the Merriam Webster Dictionary, “the act or an instance of responding to an injury with an injury, both sides were determined to get revenge for perceived wrongs and showed little interest in ending the feud”.
As a matter of fact, each definition of revenge in our culture reflects different reactions towards revenge. For example Erich Fromm defined revenge as “a spontaneous form of aggression; an explosion of destructive impulses that are activated by special circumstances usually perceived as threatening to survival” (272). He sees revenge as a spontaneous reaction of injustice acts that inflict
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on an individual or group; its “innate” intensity makes it incredibly destructive. According to a drive theory point of view, Breuer and Freud had the following to say about revenge:
The instinct of revenge, which is so powerful in the natural man and is disguised
rather than repressed by civilization, is nothing whatever but the excitation of a reflex
that has not been released. To defend oneself against injury in a fight and, in doing so,
to injure one’s opponent is the adequate and preformed psychical reflex. If it has been
carried out insufficiently or not at all, it is constantly released again by recollection,
and the ‘instinct of revenge’ comes into being as an irrational volitional impulse, just
as do all other ‘instincts’. (Breuer 205-206).
Revenge is described as “a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to; the more ought to law to weed it out. As for the first wrong, it doth but offend the law; but the revenge of that wrong putted the law out of office” (Bacon and Scott 19). It means to get retribution for wrongdoing done to someone from an aggressor. Instinctively humans have a feel and an action on the emotion of revenge. Indeed, there are the various distinctions between revenge and retribution. In his book Getting Even Revenge as a Form of Justice, Charles Barton has summarized them into two arguments “the first argument requires a civil authority which determines, by law, ... the second argument is that revenge is just an individual private expression emotion which has no morally worthwhile basis” (21).
In The Lex Talionis: On Vengeance, Nico Frijda confirmed that: “a desire for vengeance certainly is one of the most potent of human passions. It has been one of the major preoccupations in the world literature” (263). But Frijda has further given revenge the complete definition as:
an act designed to harm someone else, or some social group, in response to feeling
that oneself has been harmed by that person or group, whereby the act of harming that
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person or group is not [emphasis in original] designed to repair the harm, to stop it
from occurring or continuing in the immediate confrontation or to produce material
gain. (265-266)
Proficiently, Saadawi presents the endless cycle of violence in Iraq, especially in post- invasion Baghdad, in what is a profound exploration of the terrible logic of violence and vengeance.
All the events in the novel Frankenstein in Baghdad show revenge as the main theme, due to the struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed in Iraqi society before and after the American occupation.
Throughout the major events in the novel, the theme of revenge is expressed in the actions of the main character, the monster Alshesma, who “was a composite of victims seeking to avenge their deaths so they could rest in peace. He was created to obtain revenge on their behalf” (Frankenstein in
Baghdad 130). The idea of vengeance in Saadawi’s novel is due to the fact that the Arab concept of vengeance is a strong cultural force especially in Iraqi society: “if a man takes revenge after 40 years, he was in hurry”. Needless to say, this proverb elucidates the power of this desire to take revenge:
“in many cultures, taking revenge is regarded as a genuine and legitimate moral option for victims of injustice. Indeed, there are many situations in which, even if it is not the only option, in the view of the society in question it is the only morally acceptable option” (Barton 1).
Frankenstein in Baghdad is more than an extended metaphor for the physical horrors in Iraq after U.S. occupation. Saadawi presents his hero Alshesma as a metaphor of both the horror and the precarious nature of Iraq’s politics. He shows the monster as a personality reflecting the reality of
Iraq and the endless circle of violence. The monster represents all Iraqis with their different nationalities, religions and even their sectarian affiliations in one religion. The nameless monster mirrors the conflicts of all Iraqis. Saadawi asserts this idea in his interview “[the monster] is made up
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of parts taken from Iraqis of different races, sects and ethnicities, [therefore it] represents the complete Iraqi individual. In other words, the ‘what’s-its-name’ is a rare example of the melting pot of identities.” (Najjar)
The novel is considered as a black humour, intense and surreal novel depicting Iraq in the wake of the America invasion by using the character who presents all sects of Iraqi people. The monster (Alshesma) has been made up of the impossible mix that had never been achieved in past, he is the first true Iraqi citizen. “Whatitsname” presents people from various backgrounds, ethnicities, tribes, races, and social classes. To depict his fabulous monster, Saadawi intelligently uses elements of gothic literature. As a gothic novel, Frankenstein in Baghdad has impressed the readers and fired their imagination. It is a dedicated story of horror, fantastic, and the “darker” supernatural forces, those forces which represent the “dark side” of the irrational human nature its and destructive desires. Through Saadawi’s monster, all these elements of the gothic are combined in order to reflect the reality of violence in Iraqi society after the fall of Baghdad and the outbreak of sectarian strife between the people of one nation. As a gothic writer, Saadawi uses such features as dangerous situations, fears, threats, killing, sadness, and dealings with corpses. He depicts all these by creating a monster who conveys symbolic significances, “an unknown or imaginary animal, often described in poems or mythological stories, as mermaids, sphinx, griffons, harpies, centaurs and hags, all with metaphorical and symbolic significance” (121), as Tonelli suggests.
The most interesting element in Saadawi’s novel is his presentation of the monster, who is neither docile, nor obedient to his “junk peddler” father, nor the “monster” he appears to be. Saadawi allows the monster the opportunity to tell his roles in his own voice, when he shows himself to be an exceptional creature, possessed of a deep-rooted pain deriving from the fact that he is, in fact, a true
Iraqi citizen: “He’s killing all, all the criminals who committed crimes against him” (Frankenstein in
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Baghdad 132), and declares that he has the “prophetic mission” to be revenger and avenger to those of whose parts his body is made from. So, the epistemological function of What’s-its-name is that of a revenger and avenger.
In different periods of literature’s history, the monster is related to different symbols in society to emphasize the importance of tradition and to support the principles of society as well as to criticize them. In the case of Frankenstein in Baghdad, Saadawi utilizes a man-made monster, which is invented to be read as well as to criticize the Iraqi society in the period between 2005 up to 2010, to become a mirror of its life and to make people aware of it. Another feature of the monster is that the monster’s body is a cultural body, as Jeffrey J. Cohen claims in Monster Culture (Seven Theses):
The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroad, as an embodiment of a certain
cultural moment of time, a feeling, and place. The monster’s body quite literary
incorporates fear, desire, anxiety and fantasy ... The monstrous body is pure culture. A
construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrous is
etymologically “that which reveals,” “that which warns,” a glyph that seeks a
hierophant. Like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something other than itself:
it is always a displacement, always inhabits the gap between the time of upheaval that
created it and the moment into which it is received, to be born again. (4)
As the monster’s body is made up of parts taken from Iraqis of different races, sects, and ethnicities, he represents the Iraqi people: he is a melting pot of all Iraqi individuals. His body appropriately sums up the Cohen’s thesis that “the monster’s body is a cultural body”, which includes body parts of victims who belong to different ethnicities and races, each of which viewing the other as its enemy. Therefore, the Iraqi Frankenstein appears as a killing machine that reflects the condensed symbol of Iraq’s current ideology – everyone killing everyone, killing culture in order to
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achieve justice, retribution, revenge, avenge, and punishment, due to the fact that justice to one race or sect means injustice to others; in other words, the cycle of killing and violence can only end by ending of monster himself. The monster in Frankenstein in Baghdad is obviously an essential character in the storyline. The entire plot revolves around the monster’s creation and his actions.
Giving this fact, it is easy to see why the reader may have such strong desire to clearly define
Whatisitsname’s role in the novel. The monster embodies various functions roles, and the most prominent one is that of the revenger. It is a fact that the violent acts of emotion can reveal the purpose of the monster as well as the role he plays in either developing or resolving the many conflicts within Frankenstein in Baghdad. The importance of the monster in Saadawi’s novel is not to criticise the society through his appearance but chiefly through his speech and deeds. He is not supposed to shock people because of his deformed and superior body, but because of his reflection of the imperfect society. Thomas Scott Cason introduces his monster role in his essay, “Creature
Features”:
Monstrosity and the Construction of Human Identity in the Testament of Solomon,
where he indicates that: Monsters do not exist outside of the spectrum of human
identity but are in fact a radicalized form of human identity. […] Monsters are like
men in the sense that their aim is to dominate others. […] Fittingly, it is this relentless
hunger for hostility that distinguishes monster from man. (266)
Indeed, the desire to revenge is a universal phenomenon among human and non-human primates across all ages and cultures. and it is directly tied to human moral intuitions and subjective notions of justice and deservingness. Saadawi shows a different concept of revenge ‘all parts revenge for one part’ by presenting monster who combines from various parts of many victims. Based on that the monster declares his revenge as a noble mission, “he was in a noble mission”, (Frankenstein in
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Baghdad 132), to show the central issues of revenge such as morality, justice, and deservingness.
The monster tells Hadi about morality and justice in his acts against the killers of his body: “The
Whatitsname had been planning something completely different, instead of getting involved in fights with people who weren’t his enemies in the first place” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 132).
According to Frijda’s definition of revenge, there are two important features of revenge which have been applied by the monster in Frankenstein in Baghdad. The first one is that he is a response to harmful or disrespectful treatment. A second important feature of taking revenge is that he is appropriate and equitable, at least from the avenger’s perspective: “he’s killing them all, all the criminals who committed crimes against them [...] He’ll decompose and die” (Frankenstein in
Baghdad 132). In broad terms, revenge can be defined as retaliation that is often more severe than the original offense, and that revenge often goes beyond restoring a former status. For example, the monster’s decision to kill Abu Zaidoun, the Baathist who pursues and chases in cold blood the men lagging and fleeing from military service, reflects the right meaning of revenge that is often more severe than the original offense. Abu Zaidoun does not directly kill Daniel, but he does his duty and what his leaders command, just for law enforcement. Therefore, Abu Zaidoun for one reason or another sends young men to the front; some of them get killed, and some of them return to their family, but the reaction of the monster toward Abu Zaidoun is more severe than Abu Zaidoun’s doing: “he had killed Abu Zaidoun to avenge Daniel Tadros” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 132).
The human mind fills with plot of revenge and attempts to achieve it “a behavioural norm ... deeply rooted and profoundly important to human life” (Seton 77). Generally, there are three ways through which an avenger can achieve revenge: dishonourable revenge, premeditated honourable revenge, and unplanned agitated revenge. According to the desire and motive of revenge, an avenger
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utilizes a model of it, “the infliction of harm in righteous response to perceived harm or injustice”
(Stuckless and Goranson 803).
As a matter of fact, Whatitsname, by succeeding in his revenge, reflects the three-frame image of violence, and each one interacts with another. The first frame of violence is presented by his body which in the beginning consists of the parts of the innocent victims of bombings in Al-
Batawin where all the different religions and sects live together, and this means that the monster represents all the Iraqis in their revenge against each other on the pretext of achieving one of the three justices (God’s, law’s, and street’s Justice), therefore the violence has become manifest among numbers of one sect. The second frame starts when Alshesma declares that: “I was careful about the pieces of flesh that were used to repair my body. I made sure my assistants didn’t bring any flesh that was illegitimate” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 156). Thus, he deviates from his aims because he revenges and avenges for the victims and criminals that his body is made up of. Saadawi explains on the cover of his novel Frankenstein in Baghdad (the Arabic copy) the main goal of his horrid creature: “quickly he got up to carry out a reprisal and revenge of the criminals who killed the parts that make him up”. The presence of criminals parts in the monster’s body makes him kill criminals and innocents together: “In other words, ‘Whatitsname’ is the fictional representation of the process of everyone killing everyone. This character is the visual representation of the larger crisis, rather than the solution” (Najjar, 2016).
Alshesma has many followers such as Saddam’s Magician, who tells him that “there is no purely innocent people and none who are fully criminals” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 225), and all his followers with their subordination, have had an effect on Alshesma’s decisions. Saadawi shows that sectarian violence will continue until Alshesma kills himself because he has made up his body from parts of his victims. All these lead to the third frame: the writer portraits Alshesma as the first
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sponsor of violence in Iraq. The monster represents the Iraqi citizen who says that he rejects violence and actually considers the monster to be his saviour from the other sects: “Frankenstein in Baghdad shows how people go mad, supporting shedding blood for the sake of shedding blood” (Jani 327)
4.1.1.1 Monster's Motive of Revenge
In his book Psychology: Concepts and Applications, Jeffrey S. Nevid has defined motivation as follows:
The term motivation refers to factors that activate, direct, and sustain goal-directed
behaviour... Motives are the “whys” of behaviour – the needs or wants that drive
behaviour and explain what we do. In fact, we don’t actually observe a motive; rather,
we infer that one exists based on the behaviour we observe. (287)
Motivation is very essential in all aspects of life. It can be also considered as “a set of processes that stimulate, direct and maintain human behaviour towards achieving a particular goal”
(Cesare and Sadri 30). It is important to acknowledge that most often motivation is not used as the general term, but as the motivation of something specific, such as revenge. The motives of revenge vary in society according to cultures and social environments and as to the extent that they condone revenge. Moreover, the motive of revenge and retaliation, which is in the foreground at the earlier stage, is still present at the later one (Freud 39). Revenge as one of the most popular aspects of life, has many theories that define and classify its advantages or disadvantages. There are many theories which attempt to explain the nature of the motivations of revenge. These motivational theories have developed in the literature that approaches motivation through different perspectives over the years.
Nonetheless, most theories, at least, are partially true, and all help to explain the behaviour of certain people at certain times. However, the motive varies over time and depends on the circumstances. It is important to emphasize that these various theories are not conclusive.
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Motivational theories are usually divided into three groups by taking into consideration different approaches: Content theories attempt to explain those specific things, which actually motivate the individuals on the basis of their needs (such as the ones of Maslow and McGregor).
These theories are concerned with identifying the people’s acts and their relative strengths, and the goals they pursue in order to satisfy their acts. Content theories place emphasis on what motivates.
Process theories attempt to distinguish the relationship among the dynamic variables, which attitudinize motivations. These theories are more concerned with how behaviour is approached, directed and sustained. Process theories place emphasis on the actual process of act (such as the ones of Vroom and Locke). Consolidation theories emphasize the connection between an individual’s behaviour and certain specific results (such as the ones of Thorndike and Skinner).
The expectancy theory of motivation (Victor H. Vroom (1964)) is a cognitive process theory of motivation which is based on the idea that people believe there are relationships between the effort they put, the performance they achieve from that effort, and the rewards they receive from their effort and performance. In other words, people will be motivated if they believe that strong efforts will lead to good performance and good performance will lead to desired rewards. In their book Essential of Management An International Perspectives, Harold Koontz and Hienze Weihrich recapitalize Expectancy Theory in this paragraph:
in general detail, Vroom’s theory is the people’s motivation towards doing anything
will be determined the value they place on the outcomes of their efforts (whether
positive or negative), multiplied by the confidence they have their efforts will
materially aid in achieving a goal. in other words, Vroom makes the point that
motivation is a product of the anticipated worth that an individual places on a goal
and the chance he/ she sees of achieving that goal. (293)
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According to the contents of the Expectancy Theory, both the creator – Hadi Al-Atak, the
“scrap seller” – and his creature, “the monster”, have motivations that act in a specific behaviour to achieve their goal. The motivations of the junk peddler Hadi to create his a golem “monster” from torn pieces of the victims’ bodies is the result of what he suffers after losing his business partner
Nahem Abdaki, who is killed in the explosion in Al Karada area: “Nahem had already been dead for several months – from a car bomb that had exploded in front of the of religious party in Karrada, killing also some of the passers by Nahem’s house” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 24). He invents his work as the creator, as the self-made artist from forgotten and abandoned parts in the alleys and dark corners, and between the ruins and mud after the explosions. Hadi is shocked when he goes to the mortuary in order to take Nahem’s corpse:
Hadi had gone to mortuary to collect the body because Nahem didn’t have any family
other than his wife and young daughter. Hadi was shocked to see that the bodies of
explosion victims were all mixed up together and to hear the mortuary worker tell him
to put a body together and carry it off – take this leg and this arm and so on
(Frankenstein in Baghdad 221-222).
His motivations for collecting human body parts and stitching them together to create a corpse, as he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them a proper burial: “I wanted to hand him over to the forensics department, because it was a complete corpse that had been left in the streets like trash. It’s a human being, guys, a person” (Frankenstein in
Baghdad 27).
According to the expectancy theory of motivation, Hadi acts in a certain way, stitching human body parts, because he is motivated to select this specific behaviour over other behaviours
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due to what he expects: the result of that selected behaviour will be to give proper burial to these parts.
Without any doubt, Frankenstein in Baghdad is a Gothic novel that includes gothic elements, the most prominent of which is the monster and the creation of the monster that reflects the fear and horror which flourish in Iraqi society:
the term “Gothic” has also been extended to a type of fiction which lacks the exotic
setting of the earlier romances, but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom and
terror, presents events that are uncanny or macabre or melodramatically violent, and
often deals with aberrant psychological states. (Abrams and Harphan 123)
Spooky places, mystery, and suspense: these are all elements of a gothic novel. Saadawi’s
Frankenstein in Baghdad contains many components of a Gothic novel. Saadawi employs the elements of a supernatural event, a hallucinatory fantasy, overwrought emotion, and metonymy of gloom which classify Frankenstein in Baghdad as a Gothic novel. The atmosphere is dark and full of horror and mystery. In Chapter two, Hadi perfectly describes the atmosphere of stitching the last parts of the corpse:
The rest of the shed was dominated by a massive corpse – the body of a naked man,
with viscous liquids, light in colour, oozing from parts of it. There was only a little
blood – some small dried patches on the arms and legs, some grazes and bruises
around the shoulders and neck. It was hard to say what colour the skin was –it didn’t
have a uniform colour. Hadi moved ... the nose should have been was badly
disfigured, as if a wild animal had bitten a chunk out of it. (Frankenstein in Baghdad
26)
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Saadawi goes into great detail when explaining the condition of the corpse, he ends his ugly and strange work. Hadi experiences the sublime effects on readers by using Gothic terror:
… error thus creates an intangible atmosphere of spiritual psychic dread, a certain
superstitious shudder at the other world. Horror resorts to a cruder presentation of the
macabre: by an exact portrayal of the physically horrible and revolting, against a far
more terrible background of spiritual gloom and despair. Horror appeals to sheer
dread and repulsion, by brooding upon the gloomy and the sinister, and lacerates the
nerves by establishing actual cutaneous contact with the supernatural (Varma 131).
According to the fundamentals of Expectancy Theory of motivations, that Hadī al-Attāk – a scrawny, alcoholic bric-a-brac merchant who decides to collect the body parts of people who have been killed in terrorist attacks and stitch them together as a corpse – there are noble motivations that produce an honourable result, a “monster”. The essence of the theory is that the motivation to choose a particular behaviour is determined by the desire for the result. But there is something fundamental in this theory – the process of recognizing how an individual deals with motivational elements, and this has been accurately done by Hadī al-Attāk.
The creature, which is later called Frankenstein by the journalist, likes an employee who materializes Vroom’s Expectancy Theory to achieve his goal. Expectancy Theory is based on “three key elements: expectancy, instrumentality, and valence” (Lunenburg 2). Expectancy theory refers to a person who has different expectations and levels of confidence about what the person is doing. The monster is motivated to degree that he believes that his revenge will lead to something acceptable:
“with the help of God and heaven, I will take revenge on all the criminals. I will finally bring about justice on earth, and there will no longer be a need to wait in agony for justice to come, in heaven or after death” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 143). Frankenstein in Baghdad shows characteristics of the
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gothic monster. Devetak mentions that gothic stories involve around “hunted, ghosts, monsters, and undead” (622). Certainly, Saadawi uses elements of the gothic to reflect “corporeal vulnerability”
(Butler 19) of all victims of violence in Iraq. Saadawi presents his nameless monster to exhibit the voice of contemporary fears of society and what sort of fear monstrosity highlight exactly. In the non-sequence method, Saadawi narrates the events of his novel to expose the level of violence in
Iraqi society from 2005 to 2010 and the reason of the creation of his monster. Thence, Saadawi conveys one violent event in more than one angle to confirm the intensity of violence.
For instance, the opening explosion in the first page of novel narrates in different angles as a reaction of more than one character for cruel explosion, Hadī al-Attāk gives more details in the description of the scene when he describes the mixed smell of grilled bodies and burned tires that sniff after explosion, while the other angle describes the explosion as a stormy sound of accident that awakens Mahmood Swadi from his sleep. In the descriptive style of “the method of describing” that uses to help a reader to form images in their minds about the thing being described, Saadawi portraits and describes the events to let readers draw a clear image on what is happening. Precisely, Saadawi uses re-descriptive style to give more details about violence scenes, but he re-describes by using different angles of view of different characters, such as in the scene of the explosion on the opposite side of the Hotel Sudair. This bombing car that melts Hassib Mohammed Jaafar’s body (the guard of the hotel) is described three times from different angles. First, Hadi’s angle of view in place of the explosion:
When he was twenty yards past the gate, Hadi saw the garbage truck race past
him toward the gate almost knocking him over [...] Hadi, together with his sack
and dinner, was lifted off the ground ... he sailed through the air, turned a
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somersault, landed hard on the asphalt. Maybe a minute passed he realized what
happened. (Frankenstein in Baghdad 31)
Second, from the view angle of Mahmoud Swadi and his colleagues:
Everyone fell back from the blast. They were battered by a gust of dust and
pebbles. It took them a minute to realize they hadn’t been hit. Without thinking,
they ran to the other side of the street. On the asphalt beyond the median they saw
a body. They went up to it, and Mahmoud touched it with his hand. The body
suddenly moved. They lifted the man to his feet, and Mahmoud recognized him at
once. It was Hadi the junk dealer. (Frankenstein in Baghdad 51)
Third, what Hassib Mohammed Jaafar has seen in no more than one second:
The car exploded and Hasib Mohammed Jafaar noticed on himself, who pursued
the explosion ... he saw man with a white linen bag swam in the air and fell far
from the place of explosion [...] (Frankenstein in Baghdad 36)
This sequence of events in the novel which is narrated by more than one narrator, every narrator rephrases the event from his place, but at the same time of the event. This method enables the writer to show the scene of explosion in a three-dimensional image in the mind of the readers, and is called the “multiple perspectives” method. As Maria Maghere explains that:
telling a story from multiple perspectives is one of the most common ways to
create a multiple narrative. This strategy can include either changing narrator or
point of view to explain a single incident from multiple perspectives, or it can
include using multiple narrators to provide fragments of the same story.
Saadawi potentially uses this method – multiple-perspectivity – to demonstrate that the different viewpoints contribute to the comprehensive meaning of the novel and force the reader
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“into the much closer scrutiny of the text” (Hutchinson, 35). The monster made up of different parts of the victims of violence is the metaphor of fears and anxieties. This monster has different expectations and levels of confidence about revenge. Because he is an Iraqi made up of different races, his concept of revenge is different “he’s killing them all, all the criminals who committed crimes against him” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 132).
The second factor in the expectancy theory is instrumental with the monster to achieve his “desire for revenge”. Whatitsname declares that his noble mission is to exact revenge on murders, criminals, and terrorists who kill victims from whom his body is made up and, according to the definition of revenge, “the attempt, at some cost or risk to oneself, to impose suffering upon those who have made one suffer, because they have made one suffer” (Elster
862). The main purpose of revenge is to hurt or destroy those things or people who were hurt in the past not to get hurt again, and that is what the monster mentions: “he’s killing them all, all the criminals who committed crimes against him” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 132), and Hadi confirms that
But Hadi adhered to a more imaginative formula—that the Whatitsname was
made up of the body parts of people who had been killed, plus the soul of another
victim, and had been given the name of yet another victim. He was a composite of
victims seeking to avenge their deaths so they could rest in peace. He was created
to obtain revenge on their behalf. (BF 130)
Daniel or Dennie as the old woman Elishva calls the monster, chooses this behaviour to restore the justice which the government fails to achieve for the people. The monster justifies his behaviour, “killing for revenge”, for many reasons: First, he considers himself as the response to the appeal of poor and needy “I am the answer to the call of the poor” (Frankenstein in Baghdad
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142). Second, he imposes himself as a savoir for the Iraqi people because he represents them all:
“I am the answer to their call for an end to injustice and for revenge on the guilty” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 143). Third, the monster sees himself as a ruler to achieve justice: “with the help of
God and heaven, I will take revenge on all the criminals. I will finally bring about justice on earth” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 142). Baghdad’s Frankenstein realizes the function of revenge as it is mentioned in The Benefits, Costs, and Paradox of Revenge by Karina Schumann and
Michael Ross:
… first, the mere possibility of revenge deters potential transgressors. Individuals
with reputations for being vengeful are less likely to be victimized because the
potential costs are high. Second, if a transgression does occur, revenge deters
further harm by penalizing wrongdoing. Finally, revenge fosters cooperation by
preventing individuals from taking advantage of the work carried out by others
(free riding). (1165)
According to the third assumption of the expectancy theory of motivations, the value of the rewards is highly positive, the monster gains valence when he fulfils the functions of revenge and becomes the saviour for all Iraqis: for example, in the Sunni areas, he becomes the saviour from the oppressor of Shiite, while in the Shiites areas he becomes a rescuer from the Sunni oppressor: “in Sadr City they spoke of him as wahhabi, in Adamiya as a Shiite extremist.”
(Frankenstein in Baghdad 268)
Another important theory that explores the acts of revenge motivations of the monster in
Frankenstein in Baghdad is the Cognitive Evaluation Theory. The cognitive evaluation theory proposes by Deci and Ryan in 1985, is a theory in psychology designed to explain the effects of
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external consequences on internal motivation. Micheal Kent has defined the Cognitive
Evaluation Theory as:
Cognitive evaluation theory, is a theory dealing with the effect of extrinsic
rewards on intrinsic motivation. It assumes that intrinsically motivated behaviour
is affected by a person’s innate need to feel competent and self-determination in
dealing with the environment. (123)
According to the Cognitive Evaluation Theory of motivations, the effects of an event on the motivational process are determined by its psychological meaning for the individual. In fact,
Deci and Ryan have designed their theory with four propositions to show how various factors enhance intrinsic motivations. The first proposition is that:
The external events relevant to the initiation or regulation of behaviour will affect
a person’s intrinsic motivation to the extent that they influence the perceived
locus of causality for that behaviour. Events that promote a more external
perceived locus of causality will undermine intrinsic motivation, whereas those
that promote a more internal perceived locus of causality will enhance intrinsic
motivation. (Deci and Ryan 62)
According to the first proposition, there are two conditions through which an individual’s interest in particular activities can happen. An individual is doing something because he/she likes doing it, and he/she is now under pressure. The other condition makes an individual like it more and more because he is more interested in it, then an individual’s interest in the activities will increase. What has occurred with the monster’s motivation for revenge is in harmony with first proposition of Cognitive Evaluation Theory. The motivation of revenge is born with the birth of the monster himself, he finds it as a duty because he likes it and appears that he is a lonely justice
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in Iraq: “in fact there is a moral and humanitarian obligation to back me, to bring about justice in this world, which has been totally ravaged by greed, ambition, megalomania, and insatiable bloodlust” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 143)”. In Frankenstein in Baghdad, Saadawi presents revenge in a new assumption that can be called “the endless revenge”. As mentioned, the monster is made up of the parts of the victims’ body, he promises to take revenge for his parts.
The monster’s every limb and organ are crying for revenge, every part of his body melts or fades away by achieving its vengeful or if he is late in doing it:
Whenever you [the monster] kill someone, that account is closed. In other words,
the person who was seeking revenge has had his wish fulfilled, and the body part
that came from him starts to melt. It looks like there’s a time factor. If you exact
revenge for all the victims ahead of the deadline, then your body will hold
together for a while and start to dissolve only later, but if you too long, when you
come to your last assignment you’ll have only the body part of the last person to
be avenged. (Frankenstein in Baghdad 149)
Therefore he needs replacement parts, so to complete his own mission creep; he or his own assistants acquire them from other victim’s body. The wanted list has expanded to an extent that it is difficult to accomplish, which calls for the continuation of the circle of endless revenge:
My list of people to seek revenge on grew long as my old body parts fell off and
my assistants added parts from my new victims, until one night I realized that
under these circumstances I would face an open-ended list of targets that would
never end (Frankenstein in Baghdad 153).
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The monster is forced to do that because he is under pressure of revenge (his own mission creep), so his preoccupation with his revenge will increase murdering and violence, in the sense of the first proposition in the cognitive evaluation theory.
The second proposition of Cognitive Evaluation Theory:
External events will affect a person’s intrinsic motivation for an optimally
challenging activity to the extent that they influence the person’s perceived
competence, within the context of some self-determination. Events that promote
greater perceived competence will enhance intrinsic motivation, whereas those
that diminish perceived competence will decrease intrinsic motivation. (Deci and
Ryan 63)
In this proposition, Deci and Ryan deal with the way a person’s interest in activities will be influenced by the others’ opinions and show how much he/she believes in these activities.
Violence in the literary texts reflects the same form of violence that may be found in the real world, but with the possibility of changing the means if necessary to achieve the goal of presenting this violence in the literary text. Violence is widely present in literature because writers and their readers want to know the real causes of the violence in society. Franzak and
Noll broaden the concept of violence in literature and explain that “violence [in a text], like violence in our world, is multifaceted. It functions at different levels, is perpetuated by different motivations, and is experienced in a variety of ways” (663). Realistically, Frankenstein in
Baghdad presents the events in Baghdad that begin in 2005, exactly a few months before the
Iraqi civil war 2006-2007. Saadawi writes Frankenstein in Baghdad in 2013 and he concentrates on the violence that occurs after falling of Baghdad and the U.S occupation of Iraq. By multiple respectivity and flashback methods, Saadawi interprets the main themes of the novel through the
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main and secondary characters. Actually, the novel abounds in main and secondary characters, despite the space allotted to them, but they have an important role in presenting main events and themes.
The monster or ‘Frankenstein’ – as Baher Saidi the owner of a newspaper ‘The Truth’ calls him: “Frankenstein in Baghdad, Saidi shouted, a big smile on his face” (Frankenstein in
Baghdad 139) – requires constant replacements of his parts in order to continue his mission. On the other hand, these spare parts fall as a result of confrontations or the victims’ death, while the replacement of the parts means increasing the number of wanted persons in the monster’s list of justice which adds to the cycle of violence or endless revenge he is involved in. The essence of
Baghdadi Frankenstein’s mission is that he wants to take revenge on everybody that has murdered a person whose body parts have now been combined into him, but the path of his motivation for revenge is influenced by others because of “the conformity”. In their book Social
Psychology Alive, Steven Breckler, James Olson and Elizabeth Wiggins have defined the concept
“conformity” as:
the most general concept [that] refers to any change in behaviour caused by
another person or group; the individual acted in some way because of influence
from others. Note that conformity is limited to changes in behaviour caused by
other people; it does not refer to effects of other people on internal concepts like
attitudes or beliefs... Conformity encompasses compliance and obedience because
it refers to any behaviour that occurs as a result of others’ influence – no matter
what the nature of the influence. (307)
As stated in the second proposition of the cognitive evaluation theory, that person’s attitude can be influenced by another person’s opinion. “Conformity”, the monster’s attitude towards the
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murders’ “mission creep”, is influenced by his six assistants’ opinions and beliefs. The monster – or the criminal X, as the authority calls him – follows the parts of his body to know the criminals and achieve his mission: every part of his body has led him to its murder. After each patching or replacement for his body, the monster wakes up with new feelings and missions: “standing up, I felt a surge of vitality and new sensations, as if I had awoken from a deep sleep. Strange faces appeared around me, and I forgot what I had been planning to do in the morning” (Frankenstein in Baghdad
152). He has fans and followers (the six assistants) who come from different orientations, and they are divided into groups according to their importance.
The most significant group is made up of three persons. The most important one is “The
Magician”: “I [the monster] have a number of assistants who live with me. They have banded together around me over the past three months. The most important one is an old man called “the
Magician” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 144). The Magician, who has come from the west bank of the
River Tigris from the Al-Batawin neighbourhood and works as part of the special wizards team of the former regime present, does much to protect Iraq from the Americans. The function of the
Magician is, as the monster himself mentions in his recording, “to make sure it’s safe for me to move around inside Dora and out into other parts of Baghdad. He does this with dedication and selflessness because he says that I represent vengeance against anyone who has wronged him” (Frankenstein in
Baghdad 145). The second most important person among his aides is “The Sophist”: “the second most important of my assistants is the Sophist, as he calls himself. He’s good at explaining ideas, promoting the good ones, polishing them, and making them more powerful. He’s good at doing the same for bad ideas too, so he’s a man who’s as dangerous as dynamite” (Frankenstein in Baghdad
145). The third person in this group is “The Enemy”, as the monster calls him because he works as a counter-terrorism officer: “the third most important person is the one I call the Enemy – because he’s
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an officer in the counterterrorism unit. He provides me with a living example of what the enemy looks like and how the enemy thinks and believes” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 146).
The second group, which is of less importance, contains three madmen. The young madman, who “thinks I’m the model citizen that the Iraqi state has failed to produce, at least since the days of
King Faisel I” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 146); the old madman, who “thinks I’m an instrument of mass destruction that presage the coming of the saviour that all the world’s religions have predicated.
I’m the one who will annihilate people who have lost their way and go astray” (Frankenstein in
Baghdad 147); and the eldest madman, who “thinks I am the savoir and that in the coming days he will acquire some aspects of my immortality and his name will be engraved next to mine in any ...”
(Frankenstein in Baghdad 147). The monster is very wary of the illegitimate pieces that patch his body because these pieces belonging to criminals make his mission unclear – as he says, with a sense of confusion: “I was careful about the pieces of flesh that were used to repair my body. I made sure my assistants didn’t bring any flesh that was illegitimate” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 156). He is unsure how to distinguish a criminal from a victim, and how to be sure whether those spare parts come from legitimate sources or not.
His assistants exert a significant influence on the monster’s mission. In a futile debate among his assistants, one of them asks, “how criminal someone is?” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 156), but in reply to this question the Magician answers: “Each of us has a measure of criminality” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 156). Despite the satisfaction of the monster that in each person there is a proportion of criminality, he finds the justification in killing an innocent man and take spare parts from him: “I turned into criminal who kills innocent people” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 161). The reason of this justification has resulted from his assistant’s belief which tortures him:
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the Sophist would say I’ve realized the Magician’s vision and turned into a criminal
who kills innocent people. He’d say the Magician has pushed me in that direction
with of the djinn he had enlisted to influence my thinking. The Magician would speak
more calmly, explaining that I was responding to the impulses of my criminal body
parts... (Frankenstein in Baghdad 161)
Distinctly, the change in the beliefs of the monster has completely altered the goal of his mission which he announces at the beginning of the recording: “with the help of God and of heaven,
I will take revenge on all the criminals” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 143). As these beliefs are not so different from those of militias and terrorists, the monster no longer cares who returns this part or that, because “there are no innocents who are completely innocent or criminals who are completely criminal” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 214). Thus he deviates from his aims because he revenges for victims and criminals that his body consists of. The existence of criminals’ parts in the monster’s body makes him kill criminals and innocents alike: “In other words, ‘Whatitsname’ is the fictional representation of the process of everyone killing everyone. This character is the visual representation of the larger crisis, rather than the solution” (Najjar).
The monster’s followers are: an old man, who uses the monster as a tool to take his revenge; the Sophist who hates the Magician and later he is the cause of his killing; the young, the old, and the eldest madman who have great numbers of followers. All these followers with their subordination have more or less influenced the monster’s decisions. Saadawi shows that sectarian violence will continue until the monster kills himself because his body is made up from parts of his victims. The author portraits the monster as the first sponsor of violence in Iraq: the monster represents the Iraqis who say that they reject violence and actually consider him to be their saviour from the other sects.
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The third proposition of Cognitive Evaluation Theory designates three types of circumstances that influenced a person’s interest in particular activities:
Events relevant to the initiation and regulation of behaviour have three potential
aspects, each with a functional significance. The informational aspect facilitates an
internal perceived locus of causality and perceived competence, thus enhancing
intrinsic motivation. The controlling aspect facilitates an external perceived locus of
causality, thus undermining intrinsic motivation and promoting extrinsic compliance
or defiance. The motivating aspect facilitates perceived incompetence, thus
undermining intrinsic motivation and promoting a motivation. The relative salience of
these three aspects to a person determines the functional significance of the event.
(Deci and Ryan 65)
The first kind of these circumstances is the “informational aspect”, and it makes persons feel they are doing their mission because they like to do it and are good at it, increasing their interest in these activities. The monster declares his “informational aspects”, and that he is made up of a phenomenal combination that makes him the creator of revenge: “he was a composite of victims seeking to avenge their deaths so they could rest in peace” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 130). In an interview, Saadawi mentions that “Alshesma is made up of parts taken from Iraqis of different races, sects and ethnicities, [because the monster] represents the complete Iraqi individual, [and he is] trying to bring together all of the elements of the Iraqi experience” (Najjar). The monster confidently clarifies that he is “the wrath of God” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 152), that his mission is “a noble mission” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 132), and certainly, his purpose is to achieve justice in Iraq. In addition to his physical aspect, the monster has superhuman strength and is impervious to bullets but he is also rotting and decomposing with every step he takes.
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One of the most remarkable features in the novel is Saadawi’s use of supernatural elements.
As the supernatural is one of the features of Gothic Literature, writers use it to create a struggle within the plot that helps them to portray the social struggle of their time within the literary work.
But, the forms of supernatural elements differ from time to time depending on when and where the story is set and context in which it is written. The recipients must take into account that the supernatural elements in the Gothic story reflect the anxieties and fear within the society in which the story is written: “its function as a medium for social satire” (Rudwin 448). Frankenstein in
Baghdad contains supernatural elements to reflect different kinds of fear and anxieties: “[...] all the security incidents and the tragedies we’re seeing stem from one thing –fear. The people on the bridge died because they were frightened of dying. Every day we’re dying from the same fear of dying”
(Frankenstein in Baghdad 123).
The second kind of circumstance in the third proposition of the cognitive evaluation theory is called “controlling aspects”: it means that the persons feel they are accomplishing their mission because others want them to do it. Saadawi portrays his monster from the perspective of the incarnation and transmigration of souls, borrowed from the heritage of Islam, Christianity, and other religious cultures. According to Islamic heritage, the spirit of the young Muslim Hasim Mohammed
Jaafar is embodied in that assembly from parts of victims’ bodies in a Jewish ruined house. To the
Christian mother Elishva, the monster impersonates her son Daniel who returns from war with the intercession of Saint Korkis. Also, the “Golem Legend” of Jewish culture is present in the image of
Saadawi’s monster. The Golem has been described by Elie Wiesel as “the most fascinating creature in Jewish lore and fantasy” (12). Thus, Saadawi creates his monster from an Islamic soul embodied it in a body made up of parts of Iraqi victims belonging to different races, sects, and ethnicities, and who appears as a Christian person at a Jewish ruined house. The controlling aspects of the monster in
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Frankenstein in Baghdad result from several motives for revenge, including physical motives – every part of the monster’s body asks him to take revenge against its murderer or whoever caused its killing: “Whatitsname was made up of the body parts of people who had been killed, plus the soul of another victim, and had been given the name of yet another victim ... created to obtain revenge on their behalf” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 130).
Each reparation and restoration of his body brings about the effects of the new parts on his thoughts and mind, so he gets up with new plans and intentions after every reparation: “standing up,
I felt a surge of vitality and new sensation, as if I had awoken from a deep sleep. Strange faces appeared around me, and I forget what I had been planning to do in the morning” (Frankenstein in
Baghdad 152). Even the smallest part of his body guides him to its murderer. For example, the finger of the saint who repairs the body of the monster guides him to the gang that kills the saint: “the saint’s fingers pushed open doors, showing me the way. I found them sitting on the ground”
(Frankenstein in Baghdad 152). Damage inflicted on some parts of the monster’s body during combat confrontations and the melting of other after achieving its revenge necessitate the continued need for spare parts that in turn motives him to increase in revenge and killing:
“Whenever you kill someone, that account is closed, the Magician said. In other
words, the person who was seeking revenge has had his wish fulfilled, and the body
part that came from him starts to melt ...” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 146)
“My list of people to seek revenge on grew longer is my old body parts fell off and
my assistants added parts from my new victims, until one night I realized that under
these circumstances I would face an open ended list targets that would never end ”
(Frankenstein in Baghdad 153).
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On other hand, the controlling aspects of the monster are mainly affected by the psychological aspects of the monster himself. The monster finds out that he has special characteristics that enable him to be the first Iraqi citizen: “I’m the model citizen that the Iraqi state has failed to produce” (Frankenstein in Baghdad146). These qualities make him believe that he is
“the wrath of God” sent in a noble “prophetic mission” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 139). He reveals the motives of his revenge “mission” when speaking to the recording device in which he set out his goals, tasks, and reasons for his existence: “... I’m the answer to the call of the poor. I’m a savoir, the one they were waiting for ... I’m the answer of the call for an end to injustice and for revenge on the guilty” (Frankenstein in Baghdad142-143).
The “motivating aspects”, the third circumstance of the third proposition in the cognitive evaluation theory of motivations, leads persons to think that they are doing their mission beyond their control, and this decreases their interest in it. This aspect has conspicuously affected the motives of the monster. The thing which the monster is unable to deal with is the spare parts that repair his body. Initially, the processes of restoration and placement of spare parts in the monster’s body are done by his close assistants. Spare parts are more important than the process of replacement because the new parts directly affect the monster’s mission; in other words, the coordinates and paths of the monster’s mission are altered by the parts used in the monster’s body. For that reason, the source of flesh and spare parts is very important to maintain the essence of the mission. Therefore, the monster is very worried and warned about the flesh and spare parts which will be used in his body: “I was careful about the pieces of flesh that were used to repair my body. I made sure my assistants didn’t bring any flesh that was illegitimate”
(Frankenstein in Baghdad 156).
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The monster does not appear to be just a frantic murderer who seeks revenge for all the victims who have a share in his body, but his vision and the vision of his top assistants are not devoid of philosophical perceptions that are compatible with the concepts of religions. This vision is formulated and matured by his six of the assistants. The most important group of his assistants is concerned with the professional aspects, and therefore they propose practical solutions to the operational problems. These three are the Magician, the Sophist and the Enemy).
Philosophical and intellectual aspects are dealt with by the three lesser assistants – the young madman, the old madman and the eldest madman. These visions are often of a religious nature adapted to the requirements of the volatile conditions of occupation and the resulting social fluctuations. The young madman considers the monster as “the model citizen that the Iraqi state has failed to produce, at least since the days of King Faisal” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 146), due to the fact that the body of monster stitched by Hadi AlAtak from various parts of victims of explosions is the map on which humanity will read the features of the emergence and development of the Iraqi community structure. Or even, as the monster explains, the idea of the old madman in which the monster is “an instrument of mass destruction that presages the coming of the saviour that all the world’s religions have predicted” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 147). The eldest madman believes the monster is “the saviour and that in coming days he will acquire some aspect of my immorality and his name will be engraved next mine in any chronicle of this difficult and decisive phase in the history of this country and the world” (Frankenstein in
Baghdad 147). Although the composition of the monster is snitched from the remains of many victims of different races, religions, and sects, his role in his short life is limited to take revenge for each victim who has a part in his body from the killer or killers, and thus his body fades and melts with every act of vengeance. But if the part or parts belong to a criminal, what the monster
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does is take the revenge of the owner of this part, so this makes the monster more careful about the parts which are brought by his assistants: “I was careful about the pieces of flesh that were used to repair my body. I made sure my assistants didn’t bring any flesh that was illegitimate – in other words, the flesh of criminals” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 156).
The differing beliefs of the monster’s assistants lead to draw the foggy image of the criminals and victims, as this is evident by the Magician’s question: “but who’s to say how criminal someone is?” The different views of his assistants in answering this question lead to the beginning of a sterile conflict among them and they gradually transfer the monster’s body from a body containing victims’ parts into a body composed of criminals’ parts. The paths and orientations have been changed in the monster’s mind because of the parts of the last restoration:
“they had used parts from a terrorist ... maybe that was why I wasn’t in a good mood and felt confused and flustered” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 157). These new motivating aspects are the response to the criminal tendencies in the flesh of the criminal, from which the body of the monster is restored. The monster has been prompted by the criminal tendency to kill an innocent man for the restoration of his body: “I raised my revolver and aimed at the innocent old man. He was definitely innocent” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 161). He intentionally kills innocent people in order to survive and thus develops his villainous inclinations: “I’ve realized the Magician’s vision and tuned into a criminal who kills innocent people” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 161). The main purpose and prophetic mission have changed because of the change of spare parts that are the guiding force for achieving his goal to kill the killer or killers of his parts. The relationship of the monster with its parts resembles that of iron and magnet relationship: iron is magnetized to a magnet or the magnet is magnetized to iron and this magnetic relationship interprets the revenge
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of monster for people whose parts his body owns. Therefore, his motivating aspects become confused, he does not know to whom he kills and why:
Whatitsname was now at a loss for what to do. he knew his mission was
essentially to kill, to kill new people every day, but he no longer had a clear idea
who should be killed and why. The flesh of innocents, of which he was initially
composed, had been replaced by new flesh, that of his own victims and
criminals...” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 200)
The two groups of assistants ironically represent the Iraqi society which has the main roles to exact violence in Iraq, and Saadawi classifies them into six persons, every one representing a sect or strata of Iraqi society. Saadawi cynically portrays his monster as a tool of violence in Iraqi society. The monster represents the endless cycle of violence when the dismembered parts of victims and criminals overlap in his body: “in his mind he still had a long list of the people he was supposed to kill [...] because the criminals and victims were entangled in a way that was more complicated than ever before. There are no innocents who are completely innocents or criminals who are completely criminal.” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 214) and reflecting the phenomenon of indiscriminate killing that is rampant in Iraq at that time.
The fourth proposition of the cognitive evaluation theory is greatly similar to the third proposition: a person’s thoughts, beliefs, desires, emotions, etc. can affect a person’s mission in a similar way as the circumstances which are covered in the third proposition:
Intrapersonal events differ in their qualitative aspects and, like external events can
have varied functional significances. Internally informational events facilitate
self-determined functioning and maintain or enhance intrinsic motivation.
Internally controlling events are experienced as pressure toward specific
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outcomes and undermine intrinsic motivation. Internally motivating events make
salient one’s incompetence and also undermine intrinsic motivation. (Deci and
Ryan, 107)
In addition to the motives resulting from the influence of his extrinsic and intrinsic motivations, the monster has other extrinsic motivations that have affected his functions, and these extrinsic motives are represented by astrologers and magicians who work in the Tracking and Pursuit Department, and they are considered as other fantastical manifestations in
Frankenstein in Baghdad. Saadawi touches off the reality by showing the great role of magic and astrology in political and security issues. On the political side, magicians and astrologers in the
Tracking and Pursuit Department have a worthy role in the life of political men and decision- makers in Iraq after occupation:
With his eccentric assistants, he drafted predictions about explosions on the
streets of Baghdad, picked up rumours and analyzed them, provided confidential
advice to politicians who were thinking about forming alliances for coming
elections or thinking about entering into business partnership”. (Frankenstein in
Baghdad 210)
The novel highlights the highest fantastical qualities in the most common question of the
Iraqi politicians: “how to interpret some dream ... when and how will I die? ... should I order an armour-plated car” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 210). It reflects the dominance of superstition in a structure of the Arabic intellectuals, although developing and with a scientific potential. On the security side, sophisticated monitoring devices cannot reveal the location of the Frankenstein object, whereas the junior astrologer “succeeded that night in making a connection with the spirit of the monster ... he felt he was superior to his superior” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 213). Using
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red sand, he gets into contact with the family of Hasib Jaafar who was killed, and his soul was sheltered in the body combined from various parts in the courtyard of the house of Hadi al-Atak.
In accordance with his success in connection with the monster, the junior astrologer uses the monster to achieve his goal.
This new extrinsic motivation gives the junior astrologer total control on the monster; he leads him by remote control – the “red sand” – to the extent that the monster cannot remember from where he comes and where he goes: “he [the monster] realized he didn’t remember how his feet had brought him there [...]” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 214). In spite of all these, he is always on an eternal mission: “in his mind he still had a long list of the people he was supposed to kill” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 214). The junior astrologer employs the monster to kill the senior astrologer, his declared enemy. This is how he explains the situation to the monster: “He failed to kill you that day with the car bomb, and now he’s using you [the monster] to kill me.
It’s a battle between me and him, and he’s using you against me” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 257).
Factually, the roles of the senior and the junior magician in the monster’s mission in the novel reflect their roles in Iraqi society because the monster represents all sects of Iraqi society, considering that they do not represent the role of magic in the reality of Iraqi society.
As a matter of fact, Saadawi takes his time relating his fantastic story to the reality. His awareness of the genre allows him to dexterously cross the border between the real and the unreal. Saadawi can craft his fantastic narrative to expose reality and explore what it means. He, as many fantastic authors, tries to fill the space between the real and the unreal by creating the means by which he can break the barriers between the two, due to the fact that the border between the real and the unreal is not only the ground of the fantasy literature but, its access to
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reality: “The fantastic is a spectral presence, suspended between being and nothingness. It takes the real and breaks it” (Jackson 20).
The various devices of fantasy exist to break the border between real and unreal.
However, one of the more powerful tools in the fantasy is the authors’ toolbox, so that to cross the border between realities they use the device of magic realism, whose very presence punctures the membrane between worlds. As Mathew Stretcher has defined Magic Realism “what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe” (267),
Saadawi utilizes Magic Realism, by which magical elements are mingled into realistic atmosphere in order to access a deeper understanding of Iraqi reality. Saadawi has used these elements to explain occurrences which are presented in a straightforward manner which allows the “real” and the “fantastic” to be accepted in the same stream thought.
Saadawi, as a magic realist, brings a spark of life to the imagination which in turn excites the mind of the reader. Magic Realism is a fusion of dream and realism an amalgamation of realism and fantasy, and a form of expression that is reality mixed with several fantastic elements regarded as normal by both the reader and the characters. In spite of all the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and in addition to the features of enormity in the monster’s shape, “it was horrible job” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 26), and an unmatched being:
This man who could take bullets without dying or bleeding, how horribly ugly
would he be? How would he be arrested if he wasn’t afraid of death or of gunfire?
Did he really have extraordinary powers? Would he breathe fire at his men and
burn them to ashes? Or did he have hidden wings to take off and fly away from
his pursuers? Would he suddenly disappear before their eyes as if he had never
existed? (Frankenstein in Baghdad 125);
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This nameless being, “The One Who Has No Name” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 125), the monster achieves his premeditated honourable revenge to represent the volition of the people to get rid of the havoc of violence and the sectarian war that resulted from their fear of the other.
4.1. 2. Abbreviated Descriptive Names
There is a complex and difficult relationship between literary persons and their own identity. An identity is closely and intimately related to the names and name – a designation given to them by themselves or by the people surrounding them. In his study of personality, the
American psychologist Gordon Allport has mentioned in his book Pattern and Growth in
Personality that a person’s name is the central point around which persons organize their personality, that is why it so important to them (63). Another American psychologist, Kenneth L.
Dion has stated that the parents’ choice of name for their child will have an effect on the development of the personality of the child (247). Allport’s and Dion’s studies really give the basics for thinking that a person will be totally different if his/her parents have given him/her a different name than his real name. Helleland and Wikstrøm stated in their article “Personal
Names and Identity in Literary Contexts”that:
Personal names and place names are some of the most important tools of the
author in the creation of credible characters placed in a literary universe that gives
the impression of being authentic. The names in the novel generally will convey
important information on many different aspects of the persons – family history,
social setting, environment, self-image, personal ambitions, social status, and
relationships between the characters. The list is more or less never-ending. (278)
Names have numerous different functions in real life, and all of these can be transferred to literature. The main condition for the reader to share the feelings with a literary work is that a
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reader is able to reach to the characters of the novel, their personality, and actions. Therefore a literary work may be an appropriate starting point for the study of the process of naming and the motives behind it, particularly when it is found in the psychological, realistic and/or all kinds of novels. The process of naming as it described by the French theorist Michel Grimaud, is “a deeply social, psychological, and linguistic act” (19). According to Grimaud’s description of the process of naming, socially the choice of name is influenced by social belonging, psychologically it is related to emotion that has been reflected by the name, and linguistically names have different stylistic values which change based on different languages and geographical areas. In Aristotle’s Poetics, Dr. Raghukul Tilak mentions that about more 300 years B.C, Aristotle underlined – in his Poetics, part IX – the importance of names in literature:
[…] poetry tends to express the universal [...]. By the universal I mean how a
person of a certain type on occasion speak or act, according to the law of
probability or necessity; and it is this universality at which poetry aims in the
names she attaches to the personages. [...] the poet first constructs the plot on the
lines of probability, and then inserts characteristic names. (32)
Furthermore, the name of a character in a literary work can be used as a term of ethics, teleology, values, ideology, culture, and attitudes of varying aspects of life: “It is not surprising that theorists pay so much attention to naming in fiction since proper names are the nodal points through which actions and descriptions are interconnected” (Nesselroth 133). In literature, authors can use a character’s name to realize numerous purposes like encoding a central feature of a particular character’s signification, indicating crucial thematic motifs and even ideological toning in a particular literary work.
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Due to the fact that a character’s name in any literary work can be seen as one of its polarizations because of the different considerations that reflect social attitudes, political experience, and ideological senses from different points of view, a literary proper name can be considered as a name that contains in itself the map of character’s destiny or the motivations of the subsequent development of the storyline. In fact, the character’s name has meaning that reflects the character’s actions, speech, moral attitudes and so on. In his article “Meaningful
Literary Names”, Luca Manini states that:
the meaningful name somehow contrasts two meanings. On the one hand, as a
proper noun the name pretends to be semantically empty by definition (apart from
having a purely referential, indexical function). On the other hand, it acquires a
specific semantic substance as a comment on the character's personality. In other
words, the playful ambiguity hinges on the name's ambivalent status as a proper
noun and/or as a common noun. (164)
Notwithstanding that names convey important information on many different aspects persons, family, social, and so on, it has been considered as a “sign” by the founding fathers of semiotics, Ferdinand de Saussure and C. S. Peirce. In his seminal treaty Course in General
Linguistics, Saussure defines the “sign” as follows:
I propose to retain the word sign [signe] to designate the whole and to replace
concept and sound-image respectively by signified [signifre] and signifier
[signifiant]; the last two terms have the advantage of indicating the opposition
that separates them from each other and from the whole of which they are parts.
(67)
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“sign” as “the combination of ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’” (Saussure 15). On the other hand, according to Peirce,
“A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in
some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that
person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I
call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands
for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have
sometimes called the ground of the representation” (2: 228).
In Peirce’s semiotics, as a phenomenological enterprise, all signs are classified into three groups; the first group includes ‘qualisign, sinsign and legisign’, the second group includes ‘icon, index and symbol’ and the third group includes ‘rheme, dicent and delome or argument’.
In literature, a sign is interpreted as icon when it brings something to the mind of a reader because of the physical similarities to the thing signified. The sound of the name often triggers an idea and it may be thematically relevant. Moreover, the sounds of names also support lexical meanings and morphological forms. Names create an expectation that the person knows something or should know something about the referents; moreover the indexical function of names helps readers to catalyze their curiosity and lead them forward in their reading.
As iconical and indexical associations, names in literature are especially appropriate to arouse symbolic association. Actually, a symbolism of names is considered as one of the most important symbols in literary works, when authors choose a name for their works, they want to label and suggest something. A literary name is an art-type in itself, it reflects many thoughts that represent reality, and, as a result, the name in literature can’t be classified in the same manner as a name based on historical etymologies. Maybe, an author has been influenced by historical and
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linguistic developments to bring literary names, but motives and unpredictable patterns behind names in literature are indefinite and different from author to other, and from time to time. There are many factors such as history, culture, and language which have determined the authors to utilize the names of certain individuals, events or places in the interpretation of a literary work.
According to these factors, a literary name can be considered as being scientific in its using, as it has implications and meanings which reflect the power behind the name, and belongs to the artistic domain of literature: “any literary study analyses a work of art and must therefore emphasize the artistic functions of language more than its form”. (Smith 10)
The motives behind the use of a particular name or group of names in a text can prove essential to fully understand and interpret the motives of that text. Thus, the study and analysis of the name system used to manifest the hidden meanings, purposes, and themes of the context in any single work to create a framework that can support the creation and use of such onomastic system helps the author to develop and state the text’s goals: “literary onomastic helps to stress the utilitarian aspect of literature” (Ashley 199). Names are used for a specific purpose. These purposes vary according to the work, the author and the style of writing, but the real meanings and implications available for an author to work with are potentially limitless. Any name encountered within a text is so placed for a reason, yet it can only be fully interpreted when considered within the narrative context.
Accordingly, the names of characters in any literary works have a specific role and aims to fulfil. The author decides the pasts, fates and relationships of every character and the author has complete freedom to choose the characters’ names to best suit their personality and role within the text.
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The aspect of onomastic meanings or roles of the monster in Frankenstein in Baghdad shows entirely the exact roles and characteristics of the monster to the readers. The monster’s names that are given by other characters in the novel can be used as devices to indicate the variety of literary purposes: to emphasize a certain aspect of society which Saadawi is writing on, or even the more traditional method of naming with the express intent of identifying a certain trait or expectation of the monster’s personality.
In Frankenstein in Baghdad, the monster is not given a name; however, the author does use a number of terms to describe the monster throughout the novel, including “Alshesma”,
“Frankenstein”, “Daniel”, “Criminal X”, “Savior” or “Rescuer”. All these terms have been called by other characters to justify and infect the hidden meanings and roles behind these names and to show how these meanings relate to the themes of the novel itself. Saadawi often makes use of the strong connection between these names of the monster and the feeling of personal identity as an element in their thematic structure; besides, the names of the monster are used as a means to control, as they manipulate or degrade other characters.
As a matter of fact, the names of the monster are a component of the unprocessed stuff that constructs the plot and is their key constituents. On the other hand, in addition to their important function of conferring aesthetic to the text, they attach to the consistency and aesthetics of the novel. The monster’s names highlight a fancied space and encourage the reader to proceed through it as a participant, they can be examined as a discursive scheme as they are instrumental in the texture of the narrative: to plot, portrayal, and standpoint. The names of the monster play a very central and important role in the novel, they are linguistic and semantics signs that play a vital role in the overall of the linguistic structure of the novel.
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4.1.2.1 Alshesma or Whatitsname
As it has mentioned above, in Peirce’s semiotics, as a phenomenological enterprise, all signs are classified into three groups; the first group includes “qualisign, sinsign and legisign”, the second group includes “icon, index and symbol” and the third group includes “rheme, dicent and delome or argument”. Our study doesn’t intend to explain all the signs in the novel and how they combine and constitute other signs. It is to show how Peirce’s semiotics can offer important methodological tools to study and analyse the character (the monster) in the novel.
Saadawi presents his monster without a name he is known by, but throughout the novel his being gains several names such as “Alshesma” which is considered as the first name of the monster, given by his creator Hadi Al Attak. The word “Alshesma” has a special status in the
Arabic language (Iraqi dialect) as opposed to common nouns. “Alshesma” expresses the ambiguity and confusion about the person or thing that is named or, sometimes, the unwillingness to pronounce its name or identify it. Jonathan Wright, who has translated the novel from Arabic to English, converts “Alshesma” into “Whatitsname” which means “one who has no name”. The monster’s name (Alshesma) can be used artistically to achieve a number of goals like decoding the monster’s personality and showing his significance, framing crucial thematic motifs, ideological toning as well as showing Saadawi’s view on different issues in Iraqi society.
Alshesma is considered as one of polarization’s elements and a key device in the moral exemplum motif seen in the novel. It has expressions of experiences, attitudes, and senses, and it is a way it engages in a linguistic analysis with social, political and ideological considerations predominating at various points. Hadi al-Attak, the hardware and materials dealer, creates
Alshesma by assembling the scattered remains of the many Baghdad blasts. He gathers the remains of the bodies and stitches them together in a rude way: “I [Hadi] made it complete so it
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wouldn’t be treated as trash, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 27). The face of “Alshesma” and his shape change constantly with the change and replacement of the body parts and parts of its hybrid body.
As a matter of fact, Alshesma reflects Peirce’s classification of a sign. As mentioned above, there are “various orders of relations between semiotics and literature” (Santaella 63).
The typology of signs that is suggested by Pierce presents significant issues as a paradigm for understanding, and Jane Fisette confirms that “the semiotic movements taking place at the heart of the literary works” (77). A character name in any literary work is a sign, according to Peirce, who divides a sign into three categories – icons, indexes, and symbols – according to the way a sign represents its object:
An analysis of the essence of a sign ... leads to a proof that every sign is
determined by its object, either first, by partaking in the characters of the object,
when I call the sign an Icon; secondly, by being really and in its individual
existence connected with the individual object, when I call the sign an Index;
thirdly, by more or less approximate certainty that it will be interpreted as
denoting the object, in consequence of a habit (which term I use as including a
natural disposition), when I call the sign a Symbol. (Hoopes 251)
Actually, Peirce’s semiotics significantly contributes to the formulation of a modern cognitive tactic that can also be used to explain the process of literary signification. Peirce’s classification of signs gives a basis for the literary analysis; any literary text has an iconic nature which can be explained in terms of the instrumentations throughout the literary text:
“manipulates the iconic potential of language and embodies meaning in the words themselves.
This manipulation transfigures conventionality into motivated senses that emerge at the surface
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of the words. It is under the power of analogies, at the core of iconicity” (Santaella 62). Iconicity is an important feature of the names of all literary characters, and emphasizes on the establishment of correlation between “form” and “meaning”.
Meanwhile, Alshesma as a name of the monster in the novel can be an iconic sign because he is a very definite sense partakes of the life of its object. This mythical superhero is a strange object. His body is bulletproof and his death is impossible except by eliminating all the killers – a spirit in which the hundreds of lives that have been lost in the streets of Baghdad in the years of terrorism and violence documented in the novel converge. The myth of the “Alshesma” swells and grows as large as the disasters in Iraq. Saadawi conforms that on the tongue of his hero:
Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds –
ethnicities, tribes, races, and social classes –I represent the impossible mix that
never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true Iraqi citizen. (Frankenstein in
Baghdad 147)
Therefore, the body of the monster is composed from various Iraqi factions with the possibility of continuously changing with the change of parts from time to time, thus, according to Peirce’s theory of sings, Saadawi represents Alshesma as the icon of the true Iraqi citizen.
In the plot of a literary work, characterization appears when the character shows the social role. Therefore, this characterization is the psychological side of the character and appears when the character comes to its development through the plot in the novel. The pattern of the character’s action is influenced by the traits of the character that change throughout the character’s struggle in the story. The monster’s proper names in Frankenstein in Baghdad can be considered as a source of the indexical sign in the novel, and create an expectation that a person
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knows something or should know something about the referents; the names function as a sign that carries the concept or idea in reader’s mind and refer to the pointed object. This indexical sign shows the causalities relation in a broader meaning. Indeed, the indexical sign basically refers to the object that it indicates by virtue of being really affected by that object.
In many cases, the indexical sign is based on causality, that is, the link and the relationship between the sign and its subject matter are causally linked. Factually, the indexical sign of Alshesma is based on the subject of everyone killing everyone. It refers to the culture of killing in order to achieve justice, retribution, revenge, and punishment, due to the fact that justice to one race or sect means injustice to others. After the absence of justice and the destitution of access to it, the first Iraqi citizen (Alshesma) finds himself as the person who brings the lost justice:
These unseen sinews, rusty from rare use, have finally stirred. The sinews of a
law that isn’t always on the alert. The prayers of the victims and their families
came together for once and gave those sinews a powerful impetus. The innards of
the darkness moved and gave birth to me. I am the answer to their call for an end
to injustice and for revenge on the guilty. (Frankenstein in Baghdad 142-143).
The different kinds of fear and anxieties in Iraqi society – “... all the security incidents and the tragedies we’re seeing stem from one thing – fear. The people on the bridge died because they were frightened of dying. Every day we’re dying from the same fear of dying”
(Frankenstein in Baghdad123) – install Alshesma as savoir or rescuer. The Alshesma in Shiite or
Sunni areas is their savoir from each other, and even terrorists are sometimes considered him one of their supporters, the killing machine that promises to kill those who contribute in killing any part of his body “he’s killing them all, all the criminals who committed crimes against him”
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(Frankenstein in Baghdad 132). He ends only with the end of all Iraqis because it represents the cycle of violence that surrounds all Iraqis from 2005 to 2010.
The different motivations of his assistants who present various strata of Iraqi society make Alshesma a criminal who kills the innocents. Saadawi utilizes Alshesma as the bogey whose name brings fear and horror for people and indicates to the killing machine. Saadawi focuses on the ability of fear when it is implied to make the most powerful monster. The monster doesn’t actually exist on the ground, but it represents people who turn to monsters because of fear of the unknown, the fear that leads Iraqi society to suffer the consequences of major political and historical events as a perpetual victim and cannot respond, and to create from his illusions and fantasies a meaning for the state of incoherence in which everyone immerses. Indeed, the indexical function of Alshesma is the monster that turns into a killing machine and a futile destruction and his images have inflated to high levels:
“Fear of the Whatsitsname continued to spread. In Sadr City they spoke of him as
a Wahhabi, in Adamiya as a Shiite extremist. The Iraqi government described him
as an agent of foreign powers, while the spokesman for the U.S. State Department
said he was an ingenious man whose aim was to undermine the American project
in Iraq.” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 268)
The third way in which a sign can be understood as signifying is in virtue of some convention or law that connects it to its object. Peirce’s own description of a symbol is as: “a sign which refers to the object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the symbol to be interpreted as referring to its object” (Goble 37).
A symbol appears in s literary work in a number of different ways to suggest various things.
Most commonly, a symbol can present itself in the name of a character or the character himself/
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herself; a symbol in literature means the use of a concrete object to present abstract ideas.
Furthermore, symbols in a literary work carry more than a literal meaning and therefore represents something significant to the understanding of the meaning of a work of literature. In other words, symbols always have a literal (concrete) meaning and a figurative (abstract) meaning.
This strange mixture of the spirit of Hassib Mohammed Jaafar and the bodies that belong to the different spectrums of the Iraqi society refers to the nature of the identity represented by the Alshsema. Alshesma does not carry a specific identity, he represents the collective identity of the Iraqi victims and the spirit of twenty-one-years-old Hasib Mohamed Jaafar who worked at the Novotel hotel, and was killed in an explosion caused by a Sudanese suicide bomber driving a truck stolen from Bagdad municipality. The process of creation of the monster passes through roles and rituals, each with its own effects on the main role of Alshesma – “the killing in the streets would stop” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 153) – and is entrusted with a metaphysical vision:
These unseen sinews, rusty from rare use, have finally stirred. The sinews of a
law that isn’t always on the alert. The prayers of the victims and their families
came together for once and gave those sinews a powerful impetus. The innards of
the darkness moved and gave birth to me. (Frankenstein in Baghdad 143)
Alshesma represents all the Iraqis who fight in defense of themselves once and for their holy sites once again, so they expand the cycle of violence, because what is defended by a sect is considered aggression by another sect. The renewal of the body parts of the monster and the process of constant replacement is a symbol of the expansion of the cycle of violence in the streets of Baghdad, leading to the many victims of innocent people. It is a process in which
Alshesma has become a double-edged sword in the heart of Iraqi society: one edge killing people
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for reasons that have turned from his noble mission, the second edge avenging the owners of the spare parts used in the restoration of his body: “he’s killing them all, all the criminals who committed crimes against him” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 132). The killing of criminals means the consumption of spare parts and it consequently results in an increased number of murders:
my list of people to seek revenge on grew longer as my old body parts fell off and
my assistants added parts from my new victims, until one night I realized that
under these circumstances I would face an open-ended list of targets that never
end ... [thus, the killing is increasing as well as victims] the killing in the streets
would stop, cutting off my supply of victims and allowing me to melt away”
(Frankenstein in Baghdad 153).
In addition to the pivotal character in the novel, Saadawi confirms the symbolism of
Alshesma in the introduction of the idea of overlapping and hybrid identity by starting the events of the story in a place without a specific identity. The main place where most of the events gyrate around is the Bataween neighbourhood in the heart of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, with all that this neighbourhood represents – a mixed population with diverse national and sectarian affiliations.
There are Christians, Shiites, and Sunnis, and there are various orientations and tendencies such as Arabism, Islamism, leftism, and others. Saadawi uses a symbolic way to show the clear conflict between Abu Anmar, owner of Orouba Hotel and Faraj the realtor, the new owner of the same hotel, but with a new name, “Grand Prophet Hotel”.
It is clear that the conflict here is the struggle to create a new identity in Iraq. The first name, “Orouba”, clearly refers to the national dimension, and the other to the Islamic dimension of this identity. Faraj changes the signboard of Orouba hotel after Abu Anmar went bankrupt and left Baghdad soon after:
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Ten minutes after Abu Anmar had left, Faraj removed the Orouba Hotel sign. He
threw it on the ground and trod on it, then called on one of his young workers to take
it to the sign writer and have him remove the name Orouba, or “Arabness” and
rewrite it with the name Grand Prophet Hotel. He was confident he would succeed
where Abu Anmar had failed. (Frankenstein in Baghdad 233)
At the end of the novel, the writer confirms the failure of Faraj in his ambition, and the disappearance of identities, and the loss of his dream. The explosion shook the whole area and destroyed one of the pillars of the building and made it is unfit to live in: “since Faraj had taken dawn the sign outside, the hotel hadn’t had a name. It was no longer the Orouba Hotel, and it hadn’t yet become the Grand Prophet Hotel, as Faraj had been planning to call it”. (Frankenstein in Baghdad 280)
The symbolism of the building and the connection with the Alshesma refers to the meaning of identity and its loss. So, the place has remained nameless and his owner doesn’t want to reform and take care of it to become the shelter of the ghostly character who doesn’t have a specific identity. The spatial dimension of the novel overlaps with the temporal dimension which is represented by the memory of the place, and indicates multiple levels of identity of place.
Hadi Al-Atak had used the Jewish Ruin to assemble the body of Alshesma, but the compound identity of the place refers to the cumulative composition of the Iraqi identity. It is a composite identity of components and successive historical stages. These ingredients have left their mark on the place that is full of symbols that refer to it, including the sign that refers to the wall-hanging paper containing the Throne Verse. Alshesma has removed it because of its age and because it was torn. The Whatitsname looked at the Throne Verse on the far wall of the room. He needed to do something: [...] he took a few steps toward it and pulled at the cardboard
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edge. The other corners that were pasted to the wall came off too” (Frankenstein in Baghdad
129). Then, there appeared a gypsum icon of the Virgin Mary, referring to the Christian component that forms part of the Iraqi social and historical fabric: “a plaster statue of the Virgin
Mary, her arms spread in the gesture of peace and with faded touches of colour on her long dress” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 189). This icon is shattered by the police during their interrogation with Hadi al-Atak, in an implicit reference to the displacement of the Christian component and the pressures they suffer: “one of the assistants went into the room and hit the statue in the wall niche several times with butt of his pistol, knocking the Virgin’s head off”
(Frankenstein in Baghdad 192)
In the next day, after removing the remnants of the broken Virgin’s icon, Hadi discovers a candlestick that reminds the reader of the identity of the place, which was called “The Jewish
Ruin” in another reference to the Jewish component in the memory and identity of Iraq: “He pulled out smashed parts of the icon, then looked at the hole that the statue had left in the wall ... reveal a dark wooden plank two foot high and a foot wide [...] Hadi soon realized was Hebrew”
(Frankenstein in Baghdad 205).
In a similar reference, a car bomb in the middle of the neighbourhood has left a deep hole. This crater reveals part of the historical wall of the Abbasid Baghdad, “the wall that had appeared in the middle of the pool of water from the burst sewage and drinking water pipes.
Some claimed it was part of the wall of Abbasid Baghdad and was the most important discovery in Islamic archaeology” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 265-266).
These three strata, which symbolize the continuation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, clearly show the constituent levels and stages that influence the formation of Iraqi national
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identity in its historical aspect. The three icons are objective equations for the idea of hybridization and national identity.
Truthfully, a sign can also be defined as anything that can be used to stand for something else, but understanding how signs function is somewhat complicated, because, for Peirce and semioticians, there are always “others” involved. For example, Peirce defined a sign as
“something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” (Noth 42). In his book A Theory of Semiotics, Umberto Eco has added that:
Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is
everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else.
This something else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be
somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands for it. Thus semiotics is in
principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If
something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the
truth; it cannot be used “to tell” at all. (7)
A sign can also be defined as anything that can be used to stand for something else, but understanding how signs function is somewhat complicated. In Frankenstein in Baghdad, the monster has important roles by which Saadawi conveys a truthful picture of the reality of Iraqi society. The maturity of these roles is shown by his names. Saadawi utilizes Alshesma as the sign that signifies the true Iraqi citizen as the icon, the object who represents the killing machine
– “everyone kills everyone” – as the index, and symbolically the slough and loss of Iraqi identity.
4.1.2.2 Frankenstein
However, it is worth remembering that giving names in literary works is a very effective method of characterization, and one of the most effective methods of process naming is
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‘intertextuality’. This term is especially popularized by Julia Kristeva to signify the different ways in which a literary work is empirically made of other texts. Intertextuality as a term was first coined in Julia Kristeva’s Word, Dialogue and Novel (1966) and then in The Bounded Text
(1966). The term intertextuality is defined as “the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text.
Intertextual figures include: allusion, quotation, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche and parody” (Hallo 608). It is one of the literary devices that form the interrelationships between
“anterior and posterior texts” and breeds related appreciative in separate works. In other words, intertextuality means borrowed ideas, senses, characters, themes etc., from other texts regardless of the other’s belonging to written or any other kind of artistic work.
Graham Allen, in his book Intertextuality: The New Critical Idiom, asserts that,
Intertextuality is one of the most commonly used and misused terms in
contemporary critical vocabulary. ‘An Intertextual Study of [...] or ‘Intertextuality
and [...] are such commonplace constructions in the titles of critical works that
one might be forgiven for assuming that intertextuality is a term that is generally
understood and provides a stable set of critical procedures for interpretation.
Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth. The term is defined so variously
that it is, currently, akin to such terms as ‘the Imagination’, ‘history’, or
‘Postmodernism’: terms which are, to employ a phrase from the work of the US
critic Harold Bloom, underdetermined in meaning and over determined in
figuration. (1-2)
One might find the origin of intertextuality in Aristotle’s theory of imitation that explains the idea that all art is an imitation. Plato also, mentions that the great role of imitation alone is appreciated to the artistic value. T. S. Eliot states the conception of intertextuality means every
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text is related to other texts and these relations are essential as well as constitutive for the generation of the text’s meanings:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his
appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You
cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among
the dead. (3)
Mikhail Bakhtin, is another founder of intertextuality, he demonstrates that the meanings of every words or utterance depend on a list of important things such as the speaker’s relation to other, and other people’s words or utterance’s based on a specific culture in a specific time and place: “the life of the word is contained in its transfer from one mouth to another, from one context to another, from one social collective to another” (Bakhtin 201). He formulates the idea that every text has a dialogical relationship with other text and this relationship is determined by a doubly-oriented discourse as a result of a connection between generic qualities of a text.
In his book Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction, Leitch mentions that
“every text is inter text” (59). Therefore an inter-text is “a text between other texts” (Plett 5).
Thus, intertextual analysis entails that the reader/interpreter has to follow the intertextual echoes in a text to contract the text’s meanings. A text deducts its meaning not from the author’s text but from its relation to other texts; meanings become something that are in the network of the textual link and can be found between an “anterior text” and all the other texts – “posterior texts” – to which the text refers and relates. Nevertheless, the reader/interpreter doesn’t get a stable meaning of a text because the meaning is produced from unabridged gaps between the texts and shifting and elusive meaning has always belonged to these gaps.
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Certainly, there are different kinds of intertextuality. It is difficult to sum all types because of the variety of intertextuality’s type, overlapping among intertextuality’s types, and intertextuality that exists at all levels of language. Robert S. Miola, in his article “Seven Types of
Intertextuality” divided intertextuality’s types into three categories, each category containing many other kinds of intertextuality:
[category I:] comprises specific books or texts mediated directly through the
author. Revision, translation, quotation, allusion, sources, conventionally
understood, an author’s earlier work – all belong here [...] Category II contains
traditions. An originary text radiates its presence through numberless
intermediaries and indirect routes – through commentaries, adaptations,
translations, and reifications in other works. It exists in combination with other
originary texts [...] category III, in the age of intertextual écriture, this last
category consists of what any audience brings to a text rather than what the author
put in. The focus moves from texts and traditions to the circulation of cultural
discourses. (14-23)
Intertextuality in literature varies from intertextuality in other artistical works: in literature a text refers to a second text by title, scene, character or storyline and even sentence, and it may refer to a different category of text such as media. This kind of intertextuality makes the comparison between the reader’s understandings of the text (which borrows from other text) outside of the book, and its existence inside of the book.
Intertextuality is one technique frequently used in the postmodern period. Saadawi is considered as one of the Arabic writers who utilizes intertextuality as one of the postmodern literary devices. He practices this technique in order to convey one of the most important themes
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in postmodern literature – “violence”. Saadawi applies many kinds of intertextuality in his novel, but the study focuses on the intertextuality of the name of his monster from the famous adaptation film of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus “he [Hadi]’s stolen his story from Robert De Niro Film [1994]” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 26)
Undeniably, in order to portray his monster, Saadawi resorts to two kinds of intertextuality: “translation” and “source”. According to Robert S. Miola’s division, the translation type of intertextuality is considered the second type of first category in which the author “transfers”, “carries across”, a text into a different language, recreates it anew: “the later text explicitly claims the identity of the original, its chief project an etiological journey to itself, or to a version of itself” (Miola 16). Of course, Frankenstein’s name that is borrowed by Saadawi belongs to English text, so Saadawi translated the source text from English into Arabic language and reemployed it in his novel.
Regarding 'source' the second type of intertextuality that uses to portrait the character of the monster in Frankenstein in Bagdad. In his essay, Miola has classified this type as the fourth type of the first category: “Source texts provide plot, character, idea, language, or style to later texts. The author’s reading and remembering direct the transaction” (32). In relation to Miola’s subdivision of ‘source’, Saadawi’s intertextuality of the monster’s name is “source proximate”. It enables the authors to borrow different items like: a character, a language, a style, and an idea from another text “The source proximate. This is the most familiar and frequently studied kind of intertextuality, that of sources and texts. The source functions as the book on-the-desk; the author honours, reshapes, steals, ransacks, and plunders” (Miola 19).
The word Frankenstein becomes as a sign to the monster has created by his creator Victor in Shelley’s Frankenstein. Saadawi mentions the famous adaptation film of Shelley’s
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Frankenstein and the name of actor Robert De Niro to indicate that the Frankenstein is referring to the monster. Thus, Saadawi employs this name but in the Arabic original he uses
“intertextuality,” choosing “Frankenstein” from the old famous text and using it in the new text.
Truly, “Frankenstein” gains new functions that are indubitably different from old ones. In an interview, Saadawi mentioned the reasons behind his bringing up the name of Frankenstein from
English literature:
I have used Frankenstein from an entirely western literary perspective, linked to a
set of ideas related to scientist and the creation of a new human being related to
the 19th century, and prepared to employ them in a completely different
environment, where the individual is referring to something else and referring to
Arabic society, particularly Iraqi society.
Saadawi used intertextuality by selecting Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in two elements of his novel: the title, Frankenstein in Baghdad and one of the names of his monster. Firstly, regarding the title of his novel, we should underline that the title of a literary work has no longer a single function, which is to distinguish this work from the other, but it coexists with other functions whose analysis and conditions are varied and characterized by a great complexity that has increased over time: “title of artworks are often integral parts of them, constitutive of what such works are, plausibly essential properties of them” (Wilsmore 403). Here the title of the novel has achieved the descriptive function, become it is the main key to the arrival of the textual world, and lighted its dark nook in the novel when Saadawi confirms that the Frankenstein in his novel is described by the monster and not by Al-Atak. Saidi asks Mohmoud to write a story of anything about Al-Atak’s creature:
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Two days later Mahmoud gave Saidi an article headlined “Urban Legends from
the Streets of Iraq.” Saidi liked it immediately. When Mahmoud did the layout for
the magazine, he illustrated the article with a large photo of Robert De Niro from
the film of Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein. Mahmoud wasn’t happy when he got a
copy of the issue, especially when he saw that his headline had been
changed.(Frankenstein in Baghdad 139)
In keeping with the above, the word Frankenstein becomes as sign to the monster as created by his father Victor in Shelley’s Frankenstein. Thus, Saadawi employs this name but in the Arabic version. In fact, there are many reasons that encouraged Saadawi to borrow the name of his monster from Shelley’s Frankenstein. In this case, Victor Frankenstein creates his monster without a name but, over the years, Frankenstein identified with the name of the monster. The way in which Victor creates the monster and his various roles inspired Saadawi to use this name, frequently associated with fear, violence, isolation, replacement and restoration. Saadawi believes that the intertextuality of “Frankenstein” can be considered as one of the three images of violence in Iraq, which reflect the reality of Iraqi society during the American occupation.
The creation of the monster in Shelley's Frankenstein inspires the screenwriter Saadawi to capitalize this idea and employ it for creating his monster from the parts of victims of killing in the Iraqi street: “the Whatitsname was made up of the body parts of people who had been killed, plus the soul of another victim seeking to avenge their deaths so they could rest in peace”
(Frankenstein in Baghdad 130). Saadawi’s monster is created from different sects and religions to represent all Iraqi citizens: “because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse background – ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes – I represent the important mix that never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true citizen” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 146-147).
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The change of Iraqi society after the occupation has been represented by using the parts of illegal victims in the renewable body of the monster that shifts the monster into the criminal, the monster “turned into a criminal who kills innocent people” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 161).
The novel underlines the variety of perspective of the Frankenstein in Iraqi society: he is the saviour in an area and the terrorist in another, and his being composed from criminals’ parts are attributed to widening the endless cycle of killing. Thus, Shelley’s Frankenstein is created to let readers know about a certain period of time, the nineteenth century intellectual Europe.
Saadawi’s Frankenstein has performed a great role in reflecting the social environment of the Iraqi citizens during the first years of the American intervention. According to the novel,
Iraqi Frankenstein represents Iraqi society from 2003 to 2010, and Saadawi confirms this idea when he uses the quotation from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein on the first page of his novel:
“Yet I ask you not to spare me; listen to me; then, if you can, and if you will, destroy the work of your hands”. (Frankenstein 96)
4.1.2.3 Daniel
Saadawi employs the monster’s names in the novel as descriptive names that emanate from literary, cultural and religious heritage. Saadawi skilfully reflects the religious heritage of
Iraqi society by using Daniel as the descriptive name of the monster. Indeed, Daniel jointly derives from the Christianity and Islam: “‘GET UP, DANIEL, Elishva shouted. “Get up Danny.
Come along my boy” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 53). The novel discusses the idea of the savoir in
Islam and Christianity. The second quotation from St George’s story at the introduction of the novel is evidence of the secular inheritance of Daniel’s name:
The king ordered that the saint be placed in the olive press until his fresh was torn
pieces and he died. They then threw him out the city, but the Lord Jesus gathered
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the pieces together and brought him back to life, and he went back into the city.
(epigraph to Frankenstein in Baghdad)
In this quotation there are a number of indications, notably the mobilization of the religious heritage of the side of the human heritage in the confrontation between the two poles of the duo (good and evil). To support this idea, Saadawi uses intertextuality with the religious heritage in the subject of the return of the saviour to life to do justice in the world. The subject of the savoir is a common theme among many sects and religions, especially Christianity and Islam.
The second name that is given to the monster by old Christian Elishva is her son’s name,
Daniel – her son who had disappeared more than 20 years before, in the Iran-Iraq war. Saadawi insists on the relationship of the old woman Elishva (mother of Daniel) and St. George the
Martyr and his picture in the house – one of the secrets of her life revealed only to the darkness of the night when it falls on the sleeping city. In the frame of the picture – her argument is wrapped in cuffs and blame because he did not meet her promise to reveal the fate of her son
Daniel, who had been lost in the war for twenty years, and she had buried his clothes and personal belongings in an empty coffin. But her heart rejects this fact “because her heart told her son was not dead” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 62).
After the ritual of the long sacred debate between the old woman and the saint that takes place every night, Daniel has returned by way of St George to his city with the vast difference between Lord Jesus who has restored the saint and Hadi who has composed the new copy of
Daniel.
In Frankenstein in Baghdad, Hadi achieves his creation from different parts of victims who belong to different religions and sects.To support this meaning, the old Christian Elishva allocates him “white shirt, an old green sweater, and a pair of jeans” (Frankenstein in Baghdad
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54). This refers to the diversity of his affiliations and the multiplicity of his orientations because clothes can show a class and way of human’s life. With the creation of a new human being of
Hassib’s soul with the body that Hadi Al-Atak has sewn and repaired, the new creature has to look for an identity and take over a centre of operations in a focal location that would make it easier to move to the surrounding areas. Perhaps the voice of the old mother of Daniel, to the ear of the new creature who is still in the house of the Al-Atak, while she is scarring her missing son in the war, lights the way to the new creature to find the solution to these two issues, and has awakened the desire to borrow the identity of the missing son despite the lack of similarity between them. The gap caused by the collapse of part of the separation wall between the old house of Elishva and Hadi Al-Atak’s house forms the gateway between the world of illusion and the world of truth.
Like St George and Shelley’smonster, Daniel, the monster has Supernatural qualities that enable him to achieve his mission in such a way as he is not affected by bullets penetrating his body: “there are reports about criminals who don’t die when they are shot […] the bullet goes into the criminals head or body” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 77-78), and as Umm Raghad and her daughters describe him: “it’s body was sticky, as if it was smeared with blood or tomato juice
[…] the bullets just went through its body. It didn’t stop running” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 86), and Umm Salim adds that “She saw a strange-looking person in a faded army jacket […] it was the most horrible thing she had ever seen” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 86). Hadi adds that the monster (Daniel) is “made up of the body parts of people who had been killed, plus the soul of another victim, and had been given the name of yet another victim” (Frankenstein in Baghdad
130).
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Furthermore, Saadawi chooses “Daniel” as his monster’s name anticipating the irreducible elements of magic realism novels. In his book, Ordinary enchantments: Magical realism and the
Remystification of Narrative, Wendy Faris describes the irreducible elements “that cannot be exploited in natural law as formulated in western empiric discourse based on logic, knowledge, or inherited belief” (7). Saadawi frames the picture of the martyr George by the second question in the threshold of the novel in order to convey the meaning that is mentioned by Giles Morgan’s book St. George: Knight, Martyr, Patron, Saint and Dragonslayer: “As Christian martyr, St
George was said to have been tortured to death (several times!), only to be resurrected by God, and his story is often linked with concepts of renewal, re-birth, and revival” (10). In the form of picture St George on the wall that always has conversations with Elishva, St George is the answer to her hope that Daniel would return.
There are many figures in the name of Daniel that Saadawi borrows from the traditional hero. According to The Book of Daniel, E. W. Heaton suggests that “if the writer did borrow the name from an ancient hero, it is likely that he took over some of the ideas associated with it in tradition” (27). Saadawi’s borrowing of Daniel name from the Biblical figure confirms Heaton’s suggestion. The name Daniel means “‘God is my Judge’ and [he] is the hero of the biblical Book of Daniel” (Noegel and Wheeler 74). Daniel is considered as a righteous and wise hero of the
Old Testament whose decisions save the lives of many. In this sense, Saadawi seemingly depicts his monster “Daniel” with some features of Biblical figure.
In addition to his supernatural characteristics, he declares that he is in a noble and
“prophetic mission” (Frankenstein in Baghdad 139). Besides, assuming the qualities of noble and apostolic mission relative to the term of prophet Daniel, and the qualities of the martyr George in terms of re-creation, the monster would be able to take avenge the victims, including Umm
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Daniel. Saadawi emphasizes this idea when Elishva doesn’t care about the difference between her son and new Daniel
She still knew this man didn’t look much like Daniel […] Daniel was wearing the
same clothes […] he looked almost like him. The old woman had had that in
mind. Given that her sight was definitely weak, when she came back into the
sitting room she would see only what she wanted to see. (Frankenstein in
Baghdad 54-55)
So the face of the saint in the picture warns the new Daniel, and the latter heard and understood it before starting in the new game, it emphasis the role of the Biblical figures of
Daniel and St George in determining his future role:
You have to be careful, it said.
The Saint lips really were moving.
“she’s hapless old woman. If you harm her or make her sad, I [the saint] swear I’ll
plunge this lance in your throat. (Frankenstein in Baghdad 56)
In the implementation of the commandments of the saint, Abu Zaydun is killed by the monster, although no part of his victims is formed in the body of the monster, his death is indirectly requested by the saint. Maybe the second reason is to associate his name with the name of one of the victims (Daniel Tadros Moshe).
Respectively, the new Daniel kills the four beggars, Ubo Zaidun and then kills the officer in the brothel. Then the murder began to recur at a rate “one or two such crimes every day”
(Frankenstein in Baghdad 112). In the beginning, his mission seemed to be similar to the mission of the prophet Daniel and St. George, but as time goes on, changing the course of the
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mission would change the name of the monster from Daniel to Frankenstein as terrifying as
Frankenstein in the famous film by Robert De Niro.
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Chapter Five
Conclusion and Recommendations
5.0 Overview
In spite of the long period of time that has elapsed since monster first appeared in English and Arabic literature, monsters still have both remarkable and effective roles in their literary texts. The roles of monster that have been created over the centuries by their writers are an indicative of the fears and the needs of societies for these monsters, thus they are modified and developed to reflect social anxieties.
The analysis of the roles of the monsters in the two novels "Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus '' (1818) by Mary Shelley (English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer) and ''Frankenstein in Baghdad'' (2013) (Arabic Fiction) by Ahmed
Saadawi (Iraqi novelist, poet and screenwriter) expounds that the monsters in two novel have been used as a mirror of warning to the collective fears and they inform and reflect the way people understood their world in Mary's and Saadawi's society in a specific moment in history.
5.1 Findings
Shelley portraits her monster as existentially unsheltered human that comes with three- dimensional character intertwined to posit her society's problems in her writing. In Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, all the features of humans and animals can be seen in the character of monster that has obliterated all the boundaries between these discrete categories. But in the nativity of the matter, Shelley re-draws back the boundaries between human and animal by employing the idea of uniqueness and superiority of human being through the process of creating
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of the monster and his actions in the novel. To portrait the creature in the novel, on one hand,
Shelley clearly uses all of typical ideas about the rarity of human's dominance such as he is mainly composed of human body parts, his intellectuality, his rapidly learning language, and his rationality, all these features point to the monster being human. Emphasizing that has mentioned above, Shelley philosophically shows his uniqueness and superiority as human who challenge the compulsive conditions for the development of the self and overcoming adversity, although having a psychological or physical impacts, on other hand.
In addition to an appearance essentially has prominent role to portrait each character as well as the development of the story, physical appearance features help to define the character's kind and his/ her role in literary work. As a writer who is greatly impacted by Gothic and being one of its pillar, Shelley dramatically uses a hideous appearance trait in creation her monster in order to confer a clear picture of the problems of the European community in general and her society in particular. The monster's appearance gives confirmation that society instinctively dismisses outsiders; society certainly refuses them if they have a hideous appearance.
The role of monster as human expresses Shelley's strong expostulation against her society's dealing with foreigner and racism. Shelley's monster deals with the ideologies of empathy and understanding in British society that are embodied by considering people who belong to different social norms as strange, uncivil and even horrifying. The unjustified anxiety and fear from the anonym people lead to believe that people from diverse countries as a different species and they belong to other race. As a matter of fact, Shelley's attempts to appear a real image of a foreigner by showing her monster as the foreigner and developed character who has ability to acclimate with culture different from his own, and even more, his ability to surpass those closest than him to this culture i.e. Arabian Lady.
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While many themes are skillfully presented in Frankenstein, nonetheless revenge is considered as the most paramount theme. In addition to Shelley's employing her novel and especially her monster to illustrate the effects of endless cycle of revenge, she effectively and efficiently conveys the consequences of blind revenge in societies. In the due of fact, Gothic has used the theme of revenge in much its earlier literature, so Shelley professionally borrows this theme from genre that she writes in. The circle of revenge is formed by Victor "the creator" and his monster "the creature", who feel revenge on each other. In point of fact, the two central characters justify their actions in getting revenge on one another; it is what made the theme of revenge more exciting than others.
Shelley uses her monster in Frankenstein to survey the complexity of revenge and its motivations. To achieve this role of the monster, Shelley portraits him as character that interacts with revenge equation by representing both poles of it; First, monster who has a desire to settle with his creator, and the second, monster whom creator wants to settle his accounts with him.
The study pensively defines that the revenge in the novel is not an innate desire: revenge is the result of many other motives such as ambitionand rejection.
In Frankenstein, Shelley scrutinizes a many aspects of ambition which embody in three main characters; Victor Frankenstein, his creature 'monster' and Robert Walton. The only eighteen years old writer consciously and intentionally approaches her three characters in a manner that reflects the different aspects and repercussions of blind ambition. With regard to the monster' ambition, the monster as has been characterized, reflects a duality as one of important aspects of ambition in the storyline. Duality has emerged from the appearance of his grotesque, but he insists on communicating with the community that rejects him strongly even if he has human's features, on one hand. On the other hand, a duality may be the result of his composition
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from different dead-persons pieces belong to different people which means variety in ambition as a sign of the varying humankind's ambition. In all probabilities, the monster underlines this idea when he has compared himself to both Adam and Satan in Paradise Lost. The monster concisely declares that his revenge is determined by his ambition and refusing his ambition means starting his revenge.
Based on rejection as another motive of revenge, Shelley’s masterpiece makes a reconnaissance of rejection theme. In fact, Shelley elucidates sufferings of loneliness and loss in her own life by exploration the feelings of the monster that is severely neglected and abused by the society. Shelley so beautifully shows the consequences of abandoning of her monster, rejecting of society, and living in isolation due to the physical appearance that has not made by monster's hands. So, physical appearance of the monster is the barrier between him and society.
After continuous failing to find someone sympathizing with his feelings and cheering his gloom, the monster decides to start his revenge journey on his god and society. In her novel, Shelley obviously uses the monster to demonstrate that frustration and destruction of society are caused by social rejection for other.
In Frankenstein, Shelley so beautifully presents her monster which forces the readers to question whether the true hero and villain of the text is indeed the monster. Shelley constitutes her monster with hero traits as well as villain traits. Through the events of story, the monster transcends the boundaries between these opposing qualities to give a clear image of his role in this aspect. The analysis has rationally justified why Shelley's monster lies in ambiguous area between heroes and villains characteristics to confirm the idea of people is born not entirely good or evil. Shelley masterfully uses irony to show how easily monster can be human and how
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quickly even best human turn to monster. Her monster impersonates the concept of "blank slates" and it is only filled by the role of parents and society to be good or bad.
Actually, Shelley presents her monster to confirm the idea of how Utopia turns up into
Dystopia. As human beings, all know that a utopia is essentially a perfect world. Of course, people continually protect the perfectness of their world, when the protecting of perfect world has gone wrong, and then a conflict will arise to lead to imperfect world 'Dystopia'. In
Frankenstein, the monster previously plays the very important role to show Shelley's idea on
Utopia and Dystopia world. Shelley expresses that the element of anxiety which is such an essential factor of the social perception of new discoveries of science at the very beginning of the modern age. The dystopian anxiety of technological growth has appeared and a new technology means Utopia that turns up into Dystopia and vice versa. In her novel, the monster's role represents a new technology "Utopian element" that misuses and turns up into "Dystopia".
One of important roles of the monster in Frankenstein, he can be seen as a true victim. The monster represents the victimized and abused object of two species human and non- human. As a figure of victimized and abused human, he is a symbol of oppressed people of human victimized by accidents or fate such as congenital deformity and hereditary diseases due to parental neglect, technology and scientific experimentation, and mistreatment and misunderstood in their society. In addition to that he is a figure for victimized object of all non-human, the monster represents as apt symbol of victim that human devastate to perpetuate human species.
In fact, the monster's actions in Frankenstein are a metaphor of the role of freedom of oppressed violence that embodies the extent to which a man tends to violence when he feels oppressed and abandoned. Shelley confirms this idea in two ways. On one hand, the monster's actions demonstrate the reasons of violence are due of two types of sufferings namely physical
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and emotional sufferings. On other hand, the internally sufferings are more effect that physical one. Shelley wants to convey a message that if the individual is exposed to both types of violence from the family and society, the individual acts as a monster or more. This means freedom in violence and revenge that leads to destroy societies.
Regarding to the monster in Frankenstein in Baghdad is obviously an essential character in the storyline. The entire plot revolves around the monster’s creation and actions. Saadawi utilizes a man-made monster, which is invented to be read as well as to criticize the Iraqi society in the period between 2005 up to 2010, to become a mirror of Iraqi society life and to make people aware of it. Revenge is considered as one of the most prominent themes in Frankenstein in
Baghdad, showing the frailty of the separating boundary between justice and crime. Saadawi presents revenge in different forms, when the creature composed from the remains of explosions victims, when he leads a campaign of revenge against those who contributed to his killing, or rather killed the owners of his constituent parts.
Facilely, Saadawi presents the endless cycle of violence in Iraq, especially in post-invasion
Baghdad, in what is a profound exploration of the terrible logic of violence and vengeance. All the events in the novel Frankenstein in Baghdad show revenge as the main theme, due to the struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed in Iraqi society before and after the American occupation. According to the monster's composition method and his components, the monster represents all Iraqis with their different nationalities, religions and even their sectarian affiliations in one religion. The monster mirrors the conflicts of all Iraqis in the period between
2005 up to 2010.
Therefore, the monster defines himself as "a true Iraqi citizen" and declares that he has the
“prophetic mission” to be revenger to those of whose parts of his body is made from. Every part
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of his body melts and need to change after getting it revenge. Matching up with the Arabic concept of vengeance 'taking revenge is regarded as a genuine and legitimate moral option for victims of injustice', the monster becomes killing machine that reflects symbol of Iraq’s ideology in that time – everyone killing everyone in order to survive. Saddawi's monster represents all
Iraqi people because they all contribute in composition of such monster. In Frankenstein in
Baghdad, Saadawi presents his monster as a murderer, victim and executioner in order to criticize Iraqi society and Arabic society after Arab spring.
Furthermore, Saadawi presents his monster without a name he is known by, but throughout the novel his being gains several names. Saadawi skillfully and indirectly gives his monster different names to justify the numerous different functions in the novel. The monster's names can be seen as one of its polarizations because of the different considerations that reflect social attitudes, political experience, and ideological senses from different points of view. In fact, the monster’s names have meanings that replicate the character’s actions, speech, moral attitudes and so on. .
The aspects of onomastic meanings redo the roles of the monster in Frankenstein in
Baghdad; they show entirely the exact roles and characteristics of the monster to the readers. The monster’s names that are given by other characters in the novel can be used as devices to indicate the variety of literary purposes: to emphasize a certain aspect of society which Saadawi is writing on, or even the more traditional method of naming with the express intent of identifying a certain trait or expectation of the monster’s personality. Saadawi names his monster several names in order to convey specific purposes. Each name has separately purpose, and simultaneously, all names have a common goal they have to achieve.
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“Alshesma” or as translated into English “Whatitsname” is a local Iraqi term meaning who does not know his real name or 'one who has no name' or. Saadawi represents Alshesma as the icon of the true Iraqi citizen and it can be considered as a source of the indexical sign in the novel. As a consequence, the name functions as a sign that carries the concept or idea in reader’s mind and refers to the specific purpose. This name is associated with the culture of killing in order to achieve justice, revenge, and punishment, due to the fact that the justice to one race or sect means injustice or punishment to others. The different kinds of fear and anxieties in Iraqi society reproduce the idea of Alshesma as a savior or revenger.
The Alshesma in Shiite or Sunni areas is their savior from each other, and even terrorists are sometimes considered him one of their supporters, the killing machine that promises to kill those who contribute in killing any part of his body, ends only with the end of all Iraqis because it represents the cycle of violence that surrounds all Iraqis from 2005 to 2010. The different motivations of his assistants who present various strata of Iraqi society make Alshesma a criminal who kills the innocents. Saadawi utilizes Alshesma as the bogey whose name brings fear and horror for people and indicates to the killing machine. Saadawi explains how the ability of fear is implied to make the most powerful monster. The monster doesn’t actually exist on the ground, but it represents people who turn to monsters because of fear of the unknown, the fear that leads Iraqi society to suffer the consequences of major political and historical events as a perpetual victim and cannot respond, and to create from his illusions and fantasies a meaning for the state of incoherence in which everyone immerses.
The word 'Frankenstein' becomes as a sign to the nameless monster has created by his creator Victor Frankenstein in Shelley’s Frankenstein. By an intertextuality technique, Saadawi borrows this name because of it's associating with fear, violence, and isolation. In addition to the
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name, the creation of the monster in Shelley's Frankenstein inspires the screenwriter Saadawi to capitalize this idea and employ for creating his monster from the parts of victims of killing in the
Iraqi streets. Saadawi’s Frankenstein has performed a great role in reflecting "violence" as the main theme in the novel.
The study shows that the significance of the use the name of Frankenstein, at first glance, to refer the reader to the negative connotations that have become associated with the negative mention of him as a terrible monster and evil creature. Notwithstanding, the monster in
Frankenstein in Baghdad is differed from what he is in Shelley's Frankenstein, ascertaining the purpose for which he is found. At the beginning, Saadawi presents the violence and sectarian strife in Iraqi society that lead to the endless cycle of violence as a monster activates for a noble mission 'retribution from criminals and revenge for victims'; however, the revenge proves that it is like a miraculous antidote that heals evils in society and transforms the monster from a savior to a thug.
Saadawi employs the scenes of Elisha's talking with Saint in the novel as descriptive scenes that emanate from literary, cultural and religious heritage; he skillfully summons to
Elishva's house by listening to her prayers to the Saint George then the monster reincarnates
Daniel's character to begin his campaign against the criminals. Indeed, Saadawi signalizes to the religious heritage of all sects of Iraqi society in his novel, he intentionally emphasizes the subject of the savior is a common theme among many sects and religions, especially Christianity and
Islam. Regarding to Jewish religious heritage in Iraq, Saadawi intelligibly indicates to the appearance of the Jewish candlestick in the place of painting in the Jewish ruins after a long time and the alternating of religious symbols as a sign of participating Jewish sect in the birth of the monster (savior) in the Jewish ruins as well as is an allusion that the savior represents all the
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sects of Iraqi society; therefore, transforming the savior into a criminal is the responsibility of all segments of Iraqi society in one way or another.
Despite the resemblance in the name and the idea of creating the monster in the two novels, however, the role of each monster in each novel is completely different from the other depending on the time that the novel is written, themes, setting, and how the writers evoke a sensation of horror and terror in its readers by presenting the evil side or sometime good side in the form of a monster as it has mentioned in chapter three and four.Last but not least, the monster is attractive to both English and Arabic writers namely Shelley and Saadawi, and despite the difference in context, themes, setting the monsters play major roles in the two novels.
5.2. Recommendations for Future Research
Since the inception of monster in the literature, their forms and roles have received much attention. This study, which examines the role of monster in two novel Frankenstein; or, The
Modern Prometheus and Frankenstein in Baghdad, provides a broad and the supporting literature review will serve as a resource for conservation professionals interested in the literature in general, and its monsters in particular. The research that has been undertaken for this thesis has highlighted a number of topics on which further research would be beneficial.
Recommendations and suggestions have been presented based on the data collection and analysis:
More generally, these basic findings are consistent with research showing that
several topics where information is lacking are highlighted in the literature review.
Whilst some of these are addressed by the research in this thesis, others remain. In
particular, there is a lack of observational studies of the characteristics of the
monsters in every era in the English literature. Therefore, future research should be
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conducted in more realistic settings to look for trends in the correlation of monsters
in literature with problems of writer's society in specific time and place.
The findings of this study can be understood as analyzing the concept of monstrosity
as a cultural construct in literature. Future investigations are necessary to prove the
kinds of conclusions that can be drawn from this study in science and art, and the
ways in which the monster has been shaped, used, and interpreted as metaphor by
scientists and artists in order to depict otherness, hybridization, and threat to
hegemonic order in the world.
In Mary Shelley’s case, her monster is related to herself and her society problems,
and whether, or not, her monster could live up to current days and inspire anxieties of
different societies because of the ideas and themes in the novel. Further research
might compare, for example, the immortalization of literary work from the
nineteenth century to the present day and the disappearance of literary works in
current time, in spite of its date of writing, it did not pass the exceeding the number
of fingers in one hand.
In Saadawi's case, these findings provide additional information about monster's
ability to create both fascination and fear, and represent political, social, cultural and
economic differences within societies as well as allow societies to express their
anxieties, fears and desires in a safe environment free from social restraints. The
broad implication of the present research is that the study of monsters within Arabic
literature should be strategically undertaken because it gives insight on the culture
they are situated in.
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5.3 Suggested Topics for Future Researchers
The study critically analyses the roles of monster in two novels, it shows the reasons of appearance of such monsters in the two novels, and the sort of reactions of society in each novel.
Since the study did not shed light on many things such as language, style and techniques used in both novels, there are many topics proposed to researchers that are important to study such as:
Comprehending the Civil War in Iraqi Society: in Frankenstein in Baghdad By
Ahmed Saadawi
Circular Narrative Structure in the Work of Ahmed Saadawi "Frankenstein in
Baghdad"
A Study of the Similarities and Differences Between Frankenstein; Or, The Modern
and Frankenstein in Baghdad
Saadawi's Dream-Representations: Image and Character Beyond Mimesis in
Frankenstein in Baghdad
ALSSAFY 182
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