CULTURAL STUDIES

TOPIC   :             “CULTURAL STUDIES IN PRACTICE:

                                                FRANKENSTEIN”

NAME     :            BHALIYA UMA H.

ROLL  NO :         01

SEM -2:               M.A. PART-1

BATCH:               2010-2011

                                                                                     

SUBMITTED TO:  DR. DILIP BARAD.

Department of English, Bhavnagar University.

“CULTURAL STUDIES IN PRACTICE:       FRANKENSTEIN”

Mary shelley’s novel has morphed into countless forms in both highbrow and popular culture, including the visual arts, fiction and nonfiction, stage plays, film, television, advertising, clothing, jewelry, toys, key chains, coffee mugs, games, Halloween costumes, comic books, jokes, cartoons, pornography, academic study, fan clubs, web sites, and even food. Shelley’s creation teaches us not to underestimate the power of youth culture.

1.    REVOLUTIONARY BIRTHS

Born like its creator in an age of revolution, Frankenstein challenged accepted ideas of its day. As it has become increasingly commodified 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, peculiarly appropriate to a culture dominated by a consumer technology, neurotically obsessed with “getting in touch” with its authentic self and frightened at what it is discovering”. Hardly a day goes by without our seeing an image or allusion to Frankenstein, from can descriptions of saddam Hussein as an “American-created Frankenstein” to magazine articles that warn of genetically engineered “Franken-foods,” test-tube babies, and cloning. Below we examine the political and scientific issues of the novel.

A.   THE CREATURE AS PROLETARIAN

We recall from earlier chapters that Mary Shelley lived during times of great upheaval in Britain; not only was her own family full of radical thinkers, but she also met many others such as Thomas Paine and William Blake. Percy Shelley was thought of as a dangerous radical bent on labor reform and was spied upon by the government. In Frankenstein, what Johanna m.smith calls the “alternation between fear of vengeful revolution and sympathy for the suffering poor” illuminates Mary Shelley’s own divisions between revolutionary ardor and fear of the masses. Like her father, who worried about the mob’s excess of a virtuous feeling,” fearing its “sick destructiveness”, Mary 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-as-mutant movies that appeared during the cold war. But the creature’s rebellious nature is rooted far in the past.

Monster 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 the sublime that inspired many of the romantics.” The creature next reads a volume from Plutarch’s lives, which in the early nineteenth century was read as “a classic republican text, admired in the enlightenment by such writers as Rousseau.” Goethe’s the sorrows of young weather, 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 so that it will accept him. His self-education is his even more tragic second birth into an entire culture impossible for him to inhabit, however well he understands 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 recesses of xenophobic fear and loathing,” as h.l.malchow remarks.

Though the abolitionists wished to portray the black man or woman as brother or sister, they also created an image of the vein, victor could be read as guilty slave master. Interestingly, one of Mary Shelley’s letters mentions an allusion to Frankenstein made on the floor of parliament by foreign secretary george conning, speaking on march 16, 1824, on the the subject of proposed ameliorations of slave conditions in the west indies: “to turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength, in the maturity of his physical passion, but in the infancy of his uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance”. 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 imperialism understood as social mission-combines with the hysteria of masculism 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 farreching industrialization of life forms to date, Frankenstein is more relevant than ever. Development in science were increadingly critical to society during the romantic period, when a paradingm shift occurred from science as natural philosophy to science as biology, a crucial distinction in Frankenstein.

  Today we are constantly confronted with new developments in fertility science and new philosophical conundrums that result from science and new philosophical conundrums that result from genetic engineering, in vitro fertilization, cloning, and the prolongation of life by artificial means. Couples taking fertility treatment sometimes have to face the difficult choice of “selective reduction” or the possible adverse results of multiple, premature births. People wonder, has science gone too far? According to cultural critic laura kranzler, victor’s creation  of life  and  modern spernm banks and artificial wombs show a “masculine desire to claim female  productivity” Frankenstein  and  its  warnings about  the hubris of science will be with us in the future as science  continues to question the borders between  life and death, between life  and death, between “viability” and “selective reduction,” between living and support.

2.     THE FRANKENPHEME IN POPULAR CULTURE: FICTION, DRAMA, FILM, TELEVISION.

In the routledge literary sourcebook on Frankenstein, timothy Morton uses term Frankenphemes, drawn from phonemes and graphemes, as “elements of culture that are derived from Frankenstein. “Either a separate work of art is inspired, or some kernel is derived from Shelly’s novel and repeated in another medium. Broadly defined, frankenphemes demonstrate the extent of the novel’s presence in world 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 frankenphemes a s they have appeared in popular fiction, drama, film, and television.

A.   “THE GREATEST HORROR STORY NOVEL EVER WRITTEN”

Frankenstein’s fictions peter haining, editor of the indispensable Frankenstein omnibus, has called Frankenstein “the single greatest horror story novel ever written and the most widely influential in its genure”. Apparently the first writer to attempt a straightforward short tale inspired by Frankenstein was herman Melville, whose story “the bell-tower” was published in putnam’s monthly magazine in 1855.

The first story about a female monster is French author Villiers de lisle Adam’s “the future eve”, an 1886 novelette not translated into English until fifty years later.

 American writer w.c.morrow published “the surgeon’s experiment” in the Argonaut in 1887, in which an experimenter revives a headless corpse corse by attaching a mental head; there was a large cancellation of subscriptions in response. Two years later, a British journalist published a tale in reverse in Cornhill magazine: a disembodied head is kept alive with electricity. Jack London’s early story, “a thousand deaths”, is a gruesome science fiction tale of a scientist who stays at sea on his laboratory ship, repeatedly killing then reviving his son, until the son has enough and kills his father. Frankenstein inspired the set of tales published in home brew magazine called ”the reanimator” by h.p.lovercraft, which later become a cult classic movie, “Herbert west:”reanimator”, the sage of a young experimenter, barred from medical school, who practices unholy arts on the corpses of human beings and reptiles. “The reanimator” helped intiate the “splatter film” genre. There have been numerous illustrated editions of Frankenstein for children, from full-scale reprinting to comic books, as well as politicized versions, such as Mikhail bulgakov’s  satire on Stalinist Russia, the master and margarita, and Theodore roszak’s ecofeminist novel the memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein. There is suprising amount of Frankenstein-inspired erotica, especially gay-and lesbian-oriented. Finally, there are the unclassifiables, such as Theodore leberthon’s “demons of the film colony,”a strange reminiscence of an 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 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. No dramatist would want to try for all of the complexities of the novel. In stage, the creature are used. On the nineteenth century stage, the creature was a composite of frightening makeup and human qualities. He could even appear clownish, recalling Shakespeare’s Caliban.

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 and subsequently revived many time. Mary Shelley herself attended the play and pronounced it authentic. But this “serious” dreama immediately inspired parodies, first with frankenstitch in 1823, a burlesque featuring a tailor, who as the “needle Prometheus,” sews a body out of nine corpses. Later that year opened franke-n-steam, in which a student foolishly revives the corpse of a bailiff. The devil among the players opened at the opera glass in London in October of 1826, with a line-up featuring Frankenstein, Faust, and the vampire. 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 sings and drinks with the ghost.

C.   FILM ADAPTATIONS

 In the Frankenstein omnibus, readers can study the screenplay for the 1931 James whale film Frankenstein, the most famous of all adaptations. It was loosely based on the novel with the addition of new elements, including the placing of a criminal brain into the monster’s body. The first version of Frankenstein, however, was produced by Thomas Edison in 1910, a one-reel tinted silent. The early films, including this one, were able to move away from the melodrama and clumsy moralism of the stage productions and focus on more dreamlike and bizarre episodes that have more to do with the novel’s themes of creation. Early German films that were heavily influenced by this Frankenstein were the cabinet of dr.caligari, the golem, and metropolis.

Whale’s Frankenstein and especially boris Karloff’s performance have had the greatest influence on subsequent portrayals, and the changes whale made to the story have also struck his grunting creature has been dumbed down from Shelley’s novel victor is called “Henry” Frankenstein-noble though a bit mad an assistant named fritz is added, who is responsible for getting the criminal brain; and there is added, who is responsible for getting the criminal brain; and there is a happy ending with “Henry” saved. The criminal brain reflects the biological determinism popular among Americans in the early decades of the twentieth century. People considered heredity rather than environment, economic systems, or education to be the critical factor in problems of social unrest, immigration, unemployment and crime and they reproduction of groups judged to have sound genetic background and to prevent those who did not.

 Mary Shelley discussing her novel with Percy and Byron. She is played by Elsa lanchester who also plays the female creature, with her darting black eyes and Queen Nefertiti hair. Unlike the first whale film, his one tends toward comedy, parody, and satire rather than pure horror.

The Frankenstein film that billed itself as most true to the novel is Kenneth branagh’s 1994 Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” starring branagh as victor Robert de niro as the creature and Helena Bonham carter as Elizabeth. Though branagh tries to stick to Mary Shelley’s plot three fourths of the way through. The film diverges wildly from the novel and seems most interested in the love affair between victor and Elizabeth.