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Essay on Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus boldly dedicated to “WILLIAM GODWIN, Author of Political Justice, Caleb Williams, &c.” may be read as a critique of her father's pronouncement. Shelley's corporeally indeterminate but eccentrically literate monster asks us to consider whether literature–taken in all its bearings–was or is indeed a useful “line of demarcation between” human and animal. The fate of the monster suggests that proficiency in “the art of language”, as he calls it, may not ensure one's position as a member of the “human kingdom.” Shelley shows us how a literary education, so crucial to Godwinian perfectibility, presupposes not merely an educable subject but a human being. Read through Godwin's dictum, the trajectory of Frankenstein's creature offers a parable of pedagogic failure specifically a failure in the promise of the humanities, in letters as a route to humanization. In assuming language and literature as domains available to him, the monster succumbs to the ruse of the humanities the belief that “intellectual and literary refinement,” in Godwin's terms, might be the route to his humanization.
The novel demonstrates, perhaps against itself, that acquisition of “literary refinement” fails to humanize the problematic body–the ever-unnamed monster. The monster thus introduces and embodies an anthropological problem which literature fails to resolve and yet which literature displaffis. (Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, Esther H. Schor, 1993)
Just as the monster's being launches a critique of “human being” and “nativity,” his intellectual history–“the progress of my intellect” as he calls it–complicates anthropomorphic accounts of mind and educability. Frankenstein concerns itself with the education of its figures (and its readers) is a critical truism: with his exposure to Goethe, Milton, Plutarch, and Volney's Ruins of Empires, the creature receives a highly specified course inflected by concerns both revolutionary and romantic.........
