.Frankenstein study of cultural studies .(ASSIGNMENT -SEM 2 ) PAPER 7

Name : Niyatiben A. Pathak

Roll No.25

Enrollment No.

Topic . Frankenstein study  of cultural studies .

Paper .5 romantic literature

Submitted to. Department of English MKNU.

 

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 Preface……

Culture refers to the cumulative  deposit of knowledge , experience, belief, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time , roles, spatial relations, concept of universe, and material object and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course  of generations through individual  and group striving.

         ‘ culture’ is the mode of producing meaning and ideas. This ‘mode’ is a negotiation over which meanings are valid. Elite culture control meanings because it control the terms of the debate and a culture is a way of life  of a group of people the behavior, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept. generally without thinking about them and that are passed along by communication and imitation from  one generation to the next.

              Culture studies looks at mass or popular culture and everyday life. popular  culture is the culture of masses. A culture study argue  that culture is about  the meanings of community or society  generates cultural  studies  believes that  the ‘culture’  of communities  includes various  aspects like: Economics , Spiritual, Ideological, Erotic, and Political.

               Culture is not natural thing. it is production and consumption of  culture.emphsis on discourse and textually are at  Centre to cultural  studies . It  believe that we  cannot ‘read’ cultural after only within the aesthetic realm.

“ Culture is the great help out of a present difficulty, culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know , or all the matter we most concern the best which may thought and compare to turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stoack nation and habits which we followed stonchelly but mechanically”.

Cultural  studies explores culture power and identity. in cultural studies , we analyze a wide variety of forms of cultural expression such as t.v., film, advertising, literature, atr, and video games. as well as we study social and  cultural practices like shopping and social justice movements.

             Culture  has two aspect: the know meanings and directions, which its member are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested. these are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture:  that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings  we use the word a whole way of life—the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning—the special processes of discover and creative effort”

                                                                                          # Raymond William

Cultural studies ……..

              Cultural studies is an innovative interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that investigates the ways in which  “culture” creates and transforms individuals experience , everyday life , social relations and power . research and teaching in the field explores the relation between culture understood as human expressive and symbolic activities and culture understood as distinctive way of life. combining the strengths of the social sciences and the humanities, cultural studies draws on methods and theories from literary studies, sociology, communications studies, history, cultural anthropology and economics. by working across  the boundaries among these fields, cultural studies addresses new question and problems of today world. rather than seeking answers that will hold for all time cultural studies develops flexible tools that adapt to this rapidly changing world.

Topic ….

1.Revolutionary births

a.       The creature as proletarian

b.      ’’ a race of devils”.

c.       From natural philosophy to cyborg

2.the Frankenpheme in popular culture: fiction, drama, film,television.

      a.the greatest horror story novel  ever written :

      b.Frankenstein on the stage :

    c. film Adaption .

introduction ……

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel written by English author Mary Shelley (1797–1851) that tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a grotesque but sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition of the novel was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20.Her name first appeared on the second edition, published in France in 1823.

Shelley travelled through Europe in 1814, journeying along the river Rhine in Germany with a stop in Gernsheim which is 17 kilometres (11 mi) away from Frankenstein Castle, where, two centuries before, an alchemist was engaged in experiments^. Later, she travelled in the region of Geneva (Switzerland)—where much of the story takes place—and the topic of galvanism and other similar occult ideas were themes of conversation among her companions, particularly her lover and future husband, Percy Shelley. Mary, Percy, Lord Byron and John Polidori decided to have a competition to see who could write the best horror story. After thinking for days, Shelley dreamt about a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he had made; her dream later evolved into the novel's story.  (wikipedia, 2018)

            In the novel Victor Frankenstein is the first character, who makes a cultural discourse and who occupies our attention, a character for whom his desire to create life is everything while to accept that life is not important. For him the creation ‘Monster’ is not his child and responsibility now. In below given quote we can see his hunger for knowledge and to create a life through that knowledge:

“The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine. Curiosity earnest research to learn the hidden laws of nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they were earliest sensation I can remember”

            Humanity which sees the moral or ethical consent of the novel and by this I also want to prove my point that why Marry Shelley wants to create a male monster? But by this regard I can say through observing all aspect the aspects of novel and its study that I have, and naturally this clear when its shows the power of men and in other hand the ugliness of the monster that she wants to show and also we can say in cultural studies of this novel that, “A message on the Irony and Danger in the Quest for power” cause the generation is what that creates or challenge.

⁘⁘⁘Age of Revolution Modern Consumer culture Frankenstein is “a vital metaphor, peculiarly appropriate to CULTURE dominated by a consumer technology, neurotically obsessed with ‘getting in touch’ with its authentic self and frightened at what it is discovering. - George Levine From CNN descriptions of Saddam Hussein as an “American Created Frankenstein” to magazine articles that warn of genetically engineered “Franken-foods,” test-tube babies, and cloning. Age of Revolution Modern Consumer culture Frankenstein is “a vital metaphor, peculiarly appropriate to CULTURE dominated by a consumer technology, neurotically obsessed with ‘getting in touch’ with its authentic self and frightened at what it is discovering. - George Levine From CNN descriptions of Saddam Hussein as an “American Created Frankenstein” to magazine articles that warn of genetically engineered “Franken-foods,” test-tube babies, and cloning.

1)Revolutionary births :

                           Born like its creator in an age of revolution ,Frankenstein challenged accepted ideas of its day. As it has become increasingly commoditized by modern consumer culture , one wonders whether its original revolutionary spirit and its critique of scientific ,philosophical , political , and  gender issues have become obscured , or whether  instead its continuing transformation attests to its essential oppositional nature.

                  Today, as George Levine remarks, Frankenstein is,

“ A  vital metaphor , pecuniary appropriate to a culture  dominatedBy consumer technology , neurotically obsessed with ‘getting in Touch’ with its authentic self-frightened at what it is discovering”

                  Hardly a day goes by without our seeing an image or allusion to  Frankenstein , from CNN, description of Saddam Hussein as an “American – created Frankenstein”  to magazine articles that warm of genetically engineered “ Franken foods” test-tube babies and donning.

a) The Creature as proletarian :

                      Mary Shelley lived during times of great upheaval in Britain; not only was her own family fall of radical thinkers , but she also met many other such as Thomas Paine and William Blake.  Persy Shelley was thought of as a dangerous radical bent on labor reform and was spied upon by the government . In Frankenstein ,Mary Shelley’s own divisions between revolutionary ardor and fear of the  masses.

                     Who worried about the mob’s “excess of a virtuous feeling”, fearing its “sick destructiveness” many Shelley’s  creature is a political and moral paradox , both an innocent and a cold blooded murderer.

                    Monsters like the creature are indeed paradoxical. On the one hand they transgress against “ the establishment” ; if the monster survives he represents the defiance of death an image of survival , however disfigured . on the other hand we are reassured when we see that society can capture and destroy monsters.

                    Such dualism would explain the great number of Frankenstein amount movie that appeared during the cold war. But the creature’s rebellious nature is rooted far in the past. In the De Lacys shed he reads three  books, beginning with Paradise Lost . not only are the eternal questions about the ways of god and man in paradise  lost relevant to the creature’s predicament , but in Shelley’s time Milton’s epic poem was seen as timothy Morton puts it , as ,

“ A seminal  work  of republicanism and sublime that inspired

Many of  the romantics”

              The creature  next reads a volume from Plutarch’s lives , which in the early 19th  century was reads as,

“ A  classic republican text , admired in the Enlightenment by such writers as Rousseau”

               Goethe’s the sorrows of young whether , the creature’s third book , is the prototypical rebellious romantic novel. In short , says Morton ,

“the creature’s literary education is radical”

           But the creature’s idealistic education does him little good , and he has no chance of reforming society . his self-education is his even more tragic second birth into an entire culture impossible for him to inhabit , however well he  understand its great writings about freedom.

b) “A  Race of  devils”

                 Frankenstein may be analyzed in its portrayal of different “Races” .though the creature’s skin  is only described as yellow , it has been  constructed,

“ out of a cultural tradition of the threatening ‘other’- Whether troll or giant , gypsy or negro- from the Dark inner recess of xenophobic fear and loathing”

            Antislavery discourse had a powerful effect on the depiction of Africans in Shelley’s day , from gaudily  dressed exotics to naked objects of pity.

             Victor could be read as guilty slave master .interestingly, one of Mary Shelley’s letters mentions of an allusion to Frankenstein made on the floor of parliament by  Foreign secretary George cunning (1770-1827) ; speaking on march 16,1824. On the subject of proposed ameliorations of slave conditions in the West Indies :

“ To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical Strengths , in the maturity of his physical passion,  But in the infancy of his instructed reason would Be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid Fiction of a recent romance”

         

                But Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes the novel as a critique of empire and racism , pointing out that,

“ Social  engineering should not be based upon pure ,Theoretical , or natural – scientific reason alone…..”

     Frankenstein’s ,

“ Language of racism- the dark side of imperials Understood  as social mission combines  with the Hysteria of macule into the idiom of sexual Reproduction rather than subject constitution”

          The novel is “ written from the perspective of a narrator from below”

C) From Natural Philosophy to cyborg

                Today , in an age of genetic engineering , biotechnology , and cloning the most far reaching industrialization  of life forms to date Frankenstein is more relevant than ever.

                Development in science were increasingly critical to study during the romantic period , when a paradigm shift occurred from science as natural philosophy to science as biology , a crucial distinction in Frankenstein . as described in Frankenstein : penetrating the secrets of nature , an exhibit mounted in 2002 by the national library of medicine , mary Shelley attended public demonstrations of the effect of electricity on animal and human bodies , living and dead.

                  The experiment of Luigi Galvani (1737 – 98) , an Italian physicist and physician who discovered that he could use electricity to include muscle contractions , were among the scientific topics discussed in the Geneva Villa by Percy Shelly , Byron and Polidori.

                According to cultural critic Laura Kranzler , victor’s  creation of life and modern sperm banks and artifial wombs show a “ masculine  desire to claim female reproductively”.

                Frankenstein and its warnings about the hubris of science will be with us in the farture as science continues to question the  borders between life  and death between “viability” and “selective reduction” between living and life support.

2} The Frankenstein in popular culture : Fiction , Drama , Film , Television

         

               Broadly defined frankenphenes  demonstrate the extent of the novel’s presence in worlds cultures, as the encoding  of race and class in the 1824 canning speech in parliament in today’s global debates about such things as genetically engineered foods , and of course in fiction and other media.

              We end with a quick look at some of the thousands of retellings , parodies ,  and other selected frankenphenes as they have appeared in popular fiction , drama , film , and television.

A ) The Greatest Horror Story novel written

                         Frankenstein’s fictions peter hailing , editor of the indispensable Frankenstein  omnibus has called Frankenstein ,

“ the single greatest horror story novel ever written and the most widely influential in its genre”

           In renaissance Italy , a scientist constructs a mechanical man to ring the hours on a bell in a tall tower , but it turns instead upon its creator. American writer W.C.Morrow published “ The Surgeon’s experiment “ in the Argonaut in 1887 , in which an experimenter  revives a headless  corpse by attaching a mental head ;  there was a large cancellation of subscriptions in response . Frankenstein inspired the set of tales published in home brew magazine called “ the reanimator” (1921-22) by H.P.Lovercraft which later became a cult classic movie “ Herbert West : Reanimator”(1986) the saga of a young experimenter barred from medical school , who  practices unholy arts on the corpses of human beings and reptiles.

              There is surprisingly amount of Frankenstein inspired erotica , especially gay – and lesbian – oriented. Finally , there are the unclassifiable , such as Theodore Leberthon’s “ Demons of the film colony “, a strange reminiscence of  afternoon the Hollywood journalist spent with Boris Karloff and bela Lugosi published in  Weird Tales in 1932.

B) Frankenstein on the stage

               From his debut on the stage , the creature has generally  been made more horrific , and victor  has been assigned less blame most stage and screen versions are quite melodramatic , tending to eliminate minor  characters and  the entire frame structure in order to focus upon murder and mayhem.

            On the 19th  century stage the creature was composite of frightening makeup and human qualities . he could even appear clownish , recalling  Shakespeare’s caliban .

           Mary Shelly herself attended the play and pronounced it authentic . but this ‘serious’ drama immediately inspired parodies first with  Frankenstein in 1823 a burlesque featuring a tailor , who as the “needle Prometheus”, sews a body out of nine corpses.

          A play called the man in the moon was  very popular in London during 1847 ; its script was hamlet with the addition of a new act in which the creature arises from hell through a trap  door and signs and drinks with the ghost . in more modern times Frankenstein has been a staple of many stages. Frankenstein and his bride was performed at a club called strip city in los angels in the late 1950s.

            It included songs such as “oh what a beautiful mourning” and “ ohoul of my dream”. And the rocky horror show with Richard O’Brien , first performed at the royal court theatre upstairs in London in 1973, the revived far too many times and filmed as the rocky horror picture show directed by Jim Sharman (1975).

          In it brad and janet have pledged their love but most encounter the rapacious frank-n-furter . a transvestite from the planet transsexual in the galaxy Transylvania , who has created a perfect male lover  rocky  horror , to replace his former lover Eddie . After numerous seduction . frank-n-furter  is eventually killed when the servants revolted by the hunchback Riff Raff. If it were not for VH1 I love the to s series we might all be able to forget wichiepoo and frank-n-furter .

C) Film Adaptations

             In the Frankenstein omnibus the 1931 James Whale film Frankenstein . the most famous of all adaptation . it was loosely based on the novel with the addition of new element including the placing of a criminal brain into the monster’s body.

         The 1st film version of Frankenstein . however, was produced by Thomas Edison in 1910 , a one-reel tinted silent. Albert Lavalley explain ,

“ the blindness of the range expressed toward the Monster and his half human incomprehension of It thus recaptures much of the bleak horror of the Book . its indictment of society , and its picture of Man’s troubled consciousness”

              Though Branagh tries to stick to Mary Shelley’s plot , tree-fourth of the way through , the film diverges widely from the novel and seems most interested in the love affair between victor and Elizabeth.

      And now, just for fun we offer a quick survey of a few other film version of Mary Shelly’s classic.

·        I was a teenage Frankenstein – U.S.A  directed by Herbert l.stock 1957. A British doctor  descended from Frankenstein  visits the united states as a university lecture and lives in a house with labs and alligators for organ disposal ; he uses young men far parts . the creature kills the doctor’s mistress and other on campus.

·        Torticola Contre frankensburg – France directed by Paul Paviot 1952 Lorelei , a girl forced by poverty to live with her uncle at todenwald castle meets a talking cat , a man with a cat’s brain , and a monster called Torticola whom the doctor has made  from corpses.

D)Television Adaptations

               Frankenstein has surfaced in hundreds of television adaptations including night gallery , the Addams family , the monsters , star trek : the next generation , Scooby-doo , Frankenstein and the impossible Alvin and the chipmunks , the Simpsons wishbone , and so on notable television creatures have included bosvenson , randy quaid , david warner and Ian Holm . perhaps the most authentic television version was  Frankenstein :  the true story , with script writing by Christopher Isherwood and acting by James Mason , Jane Seymour , Micheal Sarrazin and Tom Baker.ein – U.S.A  directed by Herbert l.stock 1957. A British doctor  descended from Frankenstein  visits the united states as a university lecture and lives in a house with labs and alligators for organ disposal ; he uses young men far parts . the creature kills the doctor’s mistress and other on campus. (nayar, Paperback – April 20, 2011)

  The Frankenstein in Popular Culture:

• Fiction,Drama,Film,Television ,games,comic book ,magazine, act…

• Cultural sign in Frankenstein made to be a Frankentheme and the heart of the novel irony. How the Victor creates a way of live, and how the Frankenstein throws any as a orphan and suffering from society’s cruelness. Even Victor’s reliance upon defensive idealization represents one the major narcissistic feature of his. He repeatedly makes one statement about his childhood that; • “No human being could have childhood passed a happier than me”

  The First Theatrical Presentation based on Frankenstein was Presumption or The Fate of Frankenstein by Richard Brinsley Peake, Performed at the English Opera House in London in the Summer of 1823. In Drama Creature has generally been made Horrific, and Victor has been assigned less blame. On 19th Century Stage, the Creature was a composite of frightening makeup and human qualities.

  Films ….In Frankenstein Omnibus, reader can study the screenplay for the 1931 by James Whale film Frankenstein, the most famous of all adaption.

Representations of Frankenstein

The genesis of Frankenstein is well known, thank to the author’s introduction published in the third edition (1831) when Mary Shelley revealed to be the ‘creator’ of this extraordinary novel. Therefore, I am not lingering on details about Frankenstein’s birth. Instead, I would like to draw attention to the frontispiece of the 1831 edition published by H. Colburn and R. Bentley, the first being illustrated and the first giving a visual representation of the creature and its creator. It is an engraving which depicts the moment the creature becomes conscious and Victor Frankenstein escapes from it, as the excerpt beneath reads: “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 … I rushed out of the room” (M. Shelley, 56).

Von Holst, Theodor. Frontispiece to Frankenstein 1831. Digital image. Wikimedia Commons. Web. 24 Apr. 2016.

The author of the engraving is Theodor Von Holst, a British painter who studied at the Royal Academy of Arts and gained a reputation as illustrator of the supernatural, above all for illustrating Goethe’s Faust. The engraving shows a mighty body in close-up, with proportioned limbs but a hideous look, the right arm and the left leg whose “skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath” (Shelley, 56), and a dislocated head. Next to him a skull, other human bones and an open book. In the background, a man in the dark with a frightened face in the act of leaving the room. The room contains scientific equipment, such as electric terminals and a bell jar, and some skulls on the library in the background. The scene is a faithful reproduction of the ‘animation’ moment of the creature described in the fifth chapter of Shelley’s novel.

According to Scott J. Juengel, Shelley’s masterpiece is a novel permeated with representation-recognition matters. In his Face, Figure, Physiognomics: Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and the Moving Image, Juengel offers an in depth analysis that may suggest interesting connections among the frontispiece, its author and the historical background. Juengel states that the visual element is the most relevant aspect to delineate the relationship between the creator and his creature “[Shelley’s work] being consumed with problems of representation, recognition and resemblance” (357). Indeed, the moment that Juengel names as “moment of recognition, of revulsion” (356) is the episode which originated Shelley’s novel and through which the whole narration develops; the same one illustrated in the frontispiece. The creature is seen as “an object of representation” (367) and recognition which is not only individual: it is a process of recognition-representation that involves the anxieties of an era. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the progress of science was a pivotal topic: we get to know this from Mary Shelley’s introduction, when she tells us of her lover’s and friend’s interest and discussions about scientific matters. Man questioned and investigated the mysteries of life and death; Galvanism seemed to reveal the possibility to infuse life in dead bodies through ‘animal electricity’; physiognomy studied the proportions of the human body – and of face traits in particular – stating that external physical features reflected, and somehow predetermined, man’s personality. Juengel underlines how physiognomy influenced Victor’s delineation of the Creature: the encounter of Victor Frankenstein with the creature is defined as an “encounter with the radically other” (Juengel, 356) which is strongly based on a physiognomic determinism. Physiognomy is, indeed, central in Mary Shelley’s novel and in her life as well. As far as the frontispiece is concerned, while on the one hand it was a common practice – until mid-nineteenth century – to commission book illustration to engravers, or artists in general, on the other hand there may be something interesting about the identity of the man who made that very engraving.

From natural philosophy to cyber..

Today , in 21 century an age of genetic engireeing ,biotechnology, and cloning , the most far –fatched industrialization of life forms to date , Frankenstein is more relevant than ever. Result of genetic engeering is that like . … surrogate mother, tes-tube baby, cloning.

Conclusion……..

  • Mary Shelley’s Sci-Fi adventure, thriller and dramatize the novel in that one can do the thing which challenging the God’s creation, the cultural sign and its major aspects. In this novel we come across with mythical story or we can say culture tale like “Prometheus”, “Narcissus” and “Paradise lost”. Mary Shelley has presented very fruitfully and with appropriate facts. Her novel has morphed into countless forms in both height brow and popular culture. Her creation teaches us not to underestimate the power of youth culture. It is truly captivating powerful novel that analyzes ‘Monstrosity’ with regard to ‘humanity’. However without a sound understanding of the context, in which the text was written one couldn’t completely comprehend the themes, ideas and references did not present nor can the apparent link between monstrosity and humanity be completely.

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Works Cited

wikipedia. (2018, march 30). frankenstein. (W. contributors, Ed.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein .

 

nayar, p. k. (Paperback – April 20, 2011). Introduction To Cultural Studies. Paperback.

wikipedia. (2018, march 30). frankenstein. (W. contributors, Ed.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein .

http://ranjanvelari201416.blogspot.in/2015/03/study-of-frankenstein-in-light-of.htmlhttps://frankensteinandthefantastic.blogspot.in/