Monsters and Poets

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.

The eyes lift after it and find the moon.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.

Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

How I would like to believe in tenderness—

The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,

Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen very far.*

--Sylvia Plath, “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” in Ariel

O voice once heard

Delightfully, Increase and multiply,

Now death to hear! for what can I increase

or multiply, but curses on my head?**

--John Milton, Paradise LostBook X, 729-732

I love how Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar reinterpret Frankenstein through the lens of Victor as a (shocked!) Eve who is overwhelmed by his own desperation as he attempts to alternately to ignore, flee or fight against his newly revealed nature as the second sex; as the fallen, doomed as he is to this particular “horror story of Maternity.” (226)

What is also interesting about reading Victor as Eve through the lens of Paradise Lostis that there is more to it than a simple overlay of character. Moving beyond the parallels between Victor and Eve, we can consider the “elaborate, gothic psychodrama of her family history” (227) including Mary Shelley’s habit of reading on her mother’s grave (where she also met her lover, thus combining books, death and sex in a otherworldly, ideological lust). Then Gilbert and Gubar take it a step farther to pose the idea that the creature was not born of science, but of books. I am especially interested in this idea—that the “ instruments of life” could in fact be read as, literally, literary works. (238) How can we play with this concept? Has the creature (and Mary) been parented by books, or can we take this out to a notion of the creature himself parenting the novel? Maybe that’s far fetched, but if we consider the assemblage of disparate narrative parts (Walton, Victor, the creature) can we revisit the creation of literary life? Does one person/creature’s story usurp the other, even as one builds upon the other in the formation of a story larger than any one character? The Spivak article speaks to this idea somewhat in its notion of imperialism, of taking something new—something foreign—and attempting (expecting?) it to conform to a specific notion of the whole, being British society and culture, I presume. Perhaps we should add empire and country to the descending layers of story already present.

However, having taken the image of sex intersecting with death which creates the “Monstrous Eve,” we have an ideal platform to consider the sublime. Kant writes that something, “may, to be sure, appear in its form to be contrapurposive for our power of judgment, unsuitable for our faculty of presentation, and as it were doing violence to our imagination, but is nevertheless judged all the more sublime for that.” (NACT 431) Additionally, consider the term “ negative pleasure” in this passage: “Since the mind is not merely attracted to the object but is also always reciprocally repelled by it, the satisfaction in the sublime does not so much contain positive pleasure as it does admiration or respect, i.e., it deserves to become negative pleasure. “ (431)

Where beauty (to me) seems entangled in notions of both the “agreeable” and the “good,” (417) the sublime appeals not to taste but to feeling and addresses issues of “power” and “dominion” over nature (438), which are central issues in Frankenstein. What is interesting to consider if we view the novel in light of Kant, is can the story be sublime and not at all in the realm of beautiful, while the novel, as a work of art, is beautiful? If we call Mary Shelley “genius” by Kant’s terms, and her art is inspired and, thus, beautiful, does that pull itself into Percy Bysse Shelley’s commentary on poetry and his definition of genius: “The Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when change and time shall have added one more superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity of genius.” (605)

Finally, I like Sydney’s notion of, if not genius, the role of the poet, which seems to fit aptly into Mary Shelley’s life as a writer and addresses the idea of creating new legends and new stories, which, despite all the ways Frankenstein can be tied back to Milton, Dante, and Shelley’s own life, feels liberating and less an explanation of the art of our history, but a challenge to create the art of the future: “Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature as the heroes, demigods, Cyclopes, chimeras, furies and the like.” (257)

See everyone in class.

*I looked up “The Moon and the Yew Tree” in Arielbecause it was referenced in the Gilbert and Gubar excerpt. (230) I thought the poem spoke so well to Shelley and her complicated relationship with her mother that I share a longer excerpt here just for fun. It doesn’t actually have anything to do with my response. Or maybe it does. Either way.

**Same with the Milton. Just messing around with my books.