In her introduction to the 1831 edition of the text, Shelley describes the process of Frankenstein and authorship in a curious yet telling fashion: “I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper” (264). “are rooted in imperial and colonial anxieties and draw upon and engage with, consciously or not, notions of Otherness… However, both these books - very different from each other in many ways - also situate this engagement differently along the axis of emotion and reason” (91).
Works of Gothic fiction embody this state of Otherness through emphasising the criminal and deviant form of the monster, which, according to Halberstam, “announces itself (de-monstrates) as the place of corruption” (2).Īs a form of psychological and moral decay, the use of the grotesque body as a nexus of deviancy and degeneracy is evident in both texts and their respective Gothic monsters: the re-animated terror of Victor Frankenstein’s begotten scientific misdeeds, a dreadful spectacle stitched together from lumpen human body parts and the cruel, despicable figure of Mr Hyde, the dark, physical transformation and realisation of Dr Jekyll’s inner savage and animalistic fury, the by-product of sublimated rage, perverse desire and Victorian repression. Both texts employ the Gothic monster as an archetypal villain however, they diverge in their characterisation of Gothic monstrosity and how the ‘Otherness’ of each villain is personified. Let’s take two seminal Gothic texts as our examples: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. The Gothic monster can then be understood as personifying both the evolution/degeneration of the self or ‘the soul,’ where this dialectical struggle is fully realised through the grotesque and deformed corporeal body. In turn, this period of rapid societal change became representative of larger anxieties, fears, and repressed emotions within Victorian England, stemming from an overwhelming sense of “uncertainty due to the decline of religious certitude, which grew with every new scientific discovery” (Schneider 2).įor Halberstam, “Victorian monsters produced and were produced by an emergent conception of the self as a body which enveloped a soul, as a body, indeed, enthralled to its soul” (2). (2)ĭuring the Victorian era, notions of modern subjectivity and the self were undergoing a radical paradigmatic shift, as developments in contentious issues of race, class, gender, and politics threatened to upset the traditional status quo. Accordingly, they are used to draw boundaries between the ‘I’ and the ‘not I’. Monstrous bodies represent the strangeness of others and thus help to structure the self and the group the self belongs to. Oppositional: the self receives acknowledgement of its own ontological corporeality through ongoing tension with the Other as an entirely distinct subject, one that is dissimilar, strange, exotic and alien to its own sense of personal and social identity.Īppositional: the self also relies on the Other to constitute the essential and superficial characteristics of the self-image through a relationship of inner-difference, which in turn, validates the reality and existence of the self as a distinct entity. In this view, the phenomenological relationship of the modern subject or self to ‘the Other’ can be understood in two distinct ways: Halberstam details how this tradition of profound ‘Otherness’ has its origins in the Gothic monsters of the nineteenth century, where representations of monstrosity served to metaphorise “modern subjectivity as a balancing act between inside / outside, female / male, body / mind, native / foreign, proletarian/aristocrat” (1).
#My introduction to gothic literature summary skin
In the introduction to Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), Jack Halberstam notes that the Gothic novel produces symbols for “interpretive mayhem in the body of the monster” (3), and specifically focuses on explorations of ‘Otherness’ by using “the body of the monster to produce race, class, gender, and sexuality within narratives about the relation between subjectivities and certain bodies” (6).