The extraordinary details of Mary Shelley’s life have informed many critical responses to her work; perhaps most significantly in the case of Ellen Moer’s seminal essay ‘Female Gothic’ (1985) which argues that Frankenstein is a ‘birth myth’ by a woman suffering neonatal depression (79). Although Shelley’s personal life does resonate with her text, in treating her work as a kind of unconscious therapy, as Schechet does in Narrative Fissures, or a direct representation of her familial circumstances as argued by Huet in Monstrous Imagination, it seems that we underestimate Shelley’s inventiveness and legitimacy as an author. In understanding Frankenstein, not as a byproduct of a depressed mind or ‘traumatised young girl’ (Milner 226) we might
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Frankenstein sutures body parts together, with ‘profane fingers’ (81) to somehow create a scientific wonder that is ‘supremely frightful’ (12). In the prologue, Mary Shelley makes an analogy between Frankenstein’s monster and the text as her own ‘hideous progeny’ (FR 344), one that pieces together influences of Romanticism, such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and works of Gothic fiction like The Monk (Chaplin 30). Shelley shapes and moulds these diverse and chaotic influences, unifying them into a coherent text that one reviewer, in The Quarterly Review (January 1818), said ‘appal[led] the mind’ and made ‘the flesh creep’ (379). However, it is telling that Mary Shelley is now considered as a ‘pioneer of the science fiction genre’ (MacArthur 2); Frankenstein not only falls into the tradition of origin stories, it also reinvents the concept as a creation myth for the nineteenth century.
In Paradise Lost, the ‘dark, shapeless substance’, that Mary writes about, is manifested in the form of chaos. In Milton’s epic, chaos is the ‘womb of nature’ holding the ‘dark materials’ (63) from which God creates the universe; it is the ‘formless mass’ (94), ‘material mould’ (94) and ‘first matter’ (150). Furthermore, the idea of a maternal chaos is established from the Invocation, where …show more content…
Saint Athanasius writes that the ‘Word of God’ is ‘Framer and Maker’; at the very moment of speech the verbalisation of the ‘Father’s Will’ is made reality (Jeffrey 276). In the eighteenth-century, philosophical considerations of the divine commands continued to use these established laws of the universe to argue God’s existence through the argument that ‘the harmony of the creation bespeaks to a divine artificer’ (Jeffrey 277). This was particularly true as a means of assimilating developing scientific thought into religious understanding of the universe:
The divine Word supplied the premiss for the Augustan ethos; in Newton and the divines, in Milton and Dennis and for the aestheticians, it remained the ultimate authority for assertions about the nature of reality. For by God’s fiat anarchy was dispelled, the jarring elements harmonised, due bounds prescribed, and all things given form (Battestin 79-80).
Therefore, in eighteenth century thought, God remains the restraining, ultimate power that appears in Paradise Lost. The laws of motion and universal gravitation set forth by Newton are also taken as part of God’s commands that harmonise and govern the cosmos. Thus, scientific reason and faith are conflated in Alexander Pope’s Epigraph to Newton:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God
Frankenstein sutures body parts together, with ‘profane fingers’ (81) to somehow create a scientific wonder that is ‘supremely frightful’ (12). In the prologue, Mary Shelley makes an analogy between Frankenstein’s monster and the text as her own ‘hideous progeny’ (FR 344), one that pieces together influences of Romanticism, such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and works of Gothic fiction like The Monk (Chaplin 30). Shelley shapes and moulds these diverse and chaotic influences, unifying them into a coherent text that one reviewer, in The Quarterly Review (January 1818), said ‘appal[led] the mind’ and made ‘the flesh creep’ (379). However, it is telling that Mary Shelley is now considered as a ‘pioneer of the science fiction genre’ (MacArthur 2); Frankenstein not only falls into the tradition of origin stories, it also reinvents the concept as a creation myth for the nineteenth century.
In Paradise Lost, the ‘dark, shapeless substance’, that Mary writes about, is manifested in the form of chaos. In Milton’s epic, chaos is the ‘womb of nature’ holding the ‘dark materials’ (63) from which God creates the universe; it is the ‘formless mass’ (94), ‘material mould’ (94) and ‘first matter’ (150). Furthermore, the idea of a maternal chaos is established from the Invocation, where …show more content…
Saint Athanasius writes that the ‘Word of God’ is ‘Framer and Maker’; at the very moment of speech the verbalisation of the ‘Father’s Will’ is made reality (Jeffrey 276). In the eighteenth-century, philosophical considerations of the divine commands continued to use these established laws of the universe to argue God’s existence through the argument that ‘the harmony of the creation bespeaks to a divine artificer’ (Jeffrey 277). This was particularly true as a means of assimilating developing scientific thought into religious understanding of the universe:
The divine Word supplied the premiss for the Augustan ethos; in Newton and the divines, in Milton and Dennis and for the aestheticians, it remained the ultimate authority for assertions about the nature of reality. For by God’s fiat anarchy was dispelled, the jarring elements harmonised, due bounds prescribed, and all things given form (Battestin 79-80).
Therefore, in eighteenth century thought, God remains the restraining, ultimate power that appears in Paradise Lost. The laws of motion and universal gravitation set forth by Newton are also taken as part of God’s commands that harmonise and govern the cosmos. Thus, scientific reason and faith are conflated in Alexander Pope’s Epigraph to Newton:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God