I’m sure many will have seen the furore stirred up in social media, particularly among Gothicists, by the Sun’s article on Frankenstein, which screams, ‘SNOWFLAKE students claim Frankenstein’s monster was a misunderstood victim with feelings’. I don’t think it’s altogether true to reply, as some (understandably) have done, that the sympathy with the creature is the whole point of the novel (see here). Mary Shelley’s greatness lies in setting up a cluster of questions and arguments, not in didactically pushing one viewpoint.
Frankenstein itself is ambivalent. The sympathy for the monster is crucial. The claims for recognition and human rights (something the Sun clearly wants to undermine) are central. Yet the monster is a cruel and cold-blooded killer; his crime all the worse because he is sentient, cultivated to an extent, and shares the potential for nobility of human beings. But he has been unjustly exiled from all community and social life and his rebellion is justified. (The Sun isn’t notably a fan of just revolt.)
I haven’t read all of Prof. Groom’s new introduction (which is quoted from in the article). It’s almost certainly quoted in a way that distorts its meaning. He seems to be saying that students may be one-sided in their ‘sentimental’ response and to have missed the crucial ambivalence. That’s what academia is for—to restore the complexities that either/or thinking wants to efface. Yet the students’ sympathy is not untrue to the book either and their concern for rights—rights which the Sun isn’t noted for endorsing—is not to be dismissed lightly. David Barnett in the Guardian defends the need for such empathy in our atomised, asocial world.
Sun journalists probably know that the novel shows sympathy to the creature—they’re well-educated, just cynical and manipulative and contemptuous of their readers. They have had a privileged education and earn high salaries. They serve and often belong to the very elite that they are so fond of casting as monsters—that is, the real elite, those who have wealth and power, not those deemed elite just because they have had the opportunity to cultivate knowledge. The article is based on an article in The Times which is slightly more subtle, though still announcing its contempt for young people (or ‘millennials’). The Times, of course, has always been the voice of the ruling classes; they can’t even aim at the fake demotic credentials of the Sun.
The Sun article is in a wider context of right-wing attacks on students, on academics, on expertise itself. But, as quite a few social media commentators have pointed out, it takes on extra significance at this moment when university staff are striking—a strike motivated in part by a resistance to those forces which seek to degrade academic life.
There are those who read Frankenstein as a counter-Enlightenment tract, warning against the hubris of science and progress. I would say that it’s more a novel that explores the consequences of an Enlightenment project that (as the philosopher Jürgen Habermas claims) had halted. I argue here that ‘the Modern Prometheus’ of Shelley’s subtitle is a Prometheus whose pursuit of knowledge has become distorted by capitalism and who no longer serves human ends. That project is in urgent need of defence from the new counter-Enlightenment which scorns critical thinking and progressive politics, hurls insults at academia and ‘experts’, and lies behind the destruction of universities that strikers are fighting against at this very moment.
I first read Daphne du Maurier’s haunting Gothic Romances in my early teens. In my thirties I did an evening class in Female Gothic run by the pioneering Avril Horner and Sue Zloznik. This featured Rebecca among other exciting texts. They then encouraged me to do a part-time MA at Salford University, which included a module on women’s writing run by Avril; Rebecca was again included.
