Mediation’s Sleight of Hand: The Two Vectors of the Gothic in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Abstract

JONATHAN CRIMMINS Mediation’s Sleight ofHand: The Two Vectors ofthe Gothic in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein RANKENSTEIN ADVANCES BIPEDALLY, OSCILLATING IN TONE---- ONE FANJl tastically optimistic step followed by one of deep despair—an ambula­ tion that mirrors the novel’s thematic oppositions, announced, for instance, when the creature wonders about fire, “How strange, I thought, that the same cause should produce such opposite effects!”1 Or about humans, “Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?” (89). The foundational readings of George Levine and Mary Poovey argue that with Frankenstein Shelley criticizes the Prome­ thean ambitions ofher contemporaries. Poovey writes that Shelley portrays Promethean desire “not as neutral or benevolent but as quintessentially egotistical,” and concludes that, for Shelley, the imagination is “an appetite that can and must be regulated—specifically, by the give-and-take of do­ mestic relationships.”2 Both Poovey and Levine contrast romantic values with sentimental values and position the Gothic in the mode of critique. Recently, however, Frances Ferguson seconded William St. Clair’s sugges­ tion that Percy Shelley’s anonymous review of Frankenstein “be taken as an authoritative statement of what [Percy] and Mary Shelley regarded as the meaning and message of the work.”3 The review places blame not on 1. Mary Shelley, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, vol. 1, Frankenstein, ed. Nora Crook (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), 77. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 2. Poovey. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 123. Levine, “ The Ambiguous Heritage ofFrankenstein,” in The Endurance ofFrankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, eds. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley, Los An­ geles, and London: University of California Press, 1979), 3—30. 3. St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 358. Ferguson writes, “Frankenstein, in other words, is less a novel about charac­ ter than about the effects of society on character,” in “Generationalizing: Romantic Social SiR, 52 (Winter 2013) 561 562 JONATHAN CRIMMINS the Promethean hero but on the arbitrariness of sentimental attachments, claiming that “[T]oo often in society, those who are best qualified to be its benefactors and its ornaments, are branded by some accident with scorn, and changed, by neglect and solitude of heart, into a scourge and a curse.”4 Thus, for Percy Shelley, Frankenstein faults not romantic egoism but rather the cloistered judgments of the sentimental. These contrary readings lend credence to Lawrence Lipking’s attribution of a moral ambivalence to the novel. He writes, “Should Walton give up his dreams? Should nature be left alone? Is ambition the source of evil? The novel firmly answers Yes and No.”5 But rather than a moral ambivalence, here, I argue that in Franken­ stein Shelley sets a Gothicized sentimental against a Gothicized romantic in a double-directional critique. She critiques the utopian spirit in the genres of both the romantic and the sentimental by Gothicizing her two heroes, treating both Frankenstein and his creature as the fallen angels of con­ flicting value systems and setting the two against each other as antagonists/’ Forms and the Case of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 8, no. i (2010): no. 4. Quoted in St. Clair, Reading Nation, 358. 5. Lipking, “Frankenstein, The True Story; or, Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques,” in Franken­ stein, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: Norton, 1996), 330. 6. Jerrold Hogle argues that the Gothic is that “by which Romantic texts are most thor­ oughly haunted” and proposes that we think of the Gothic as “a sort ofdark Romanticism,” in “The Gothic-Romantic Relationship: Underground Histories in ‘The Eve of St. Agnes,’ ” European Romantic Review 14, no. 2 (2003): 210. For Janet Todd the Gothic haunts not the Romantic but the sentimental, acting (to repurpose Hogle’s term) as a sort ofdark Sentimen­ tal (The Sign of Angellica [London: Virago Press, 1989I). Todd uses the metaphor of mutual containment to describe a similar mixture of genres in Ann Radcliffe’s novels: “The...