Gothic Romances and the Modern Humanities

Abstract

One of the cultural institutions that Foucauldian reception study takes to explain a work’s reception is the experimental sciences, whose vast expansion and enhanced influence after World War II moved American criticism to question the traditional assumption that the mad scientists, terrible monsters, divided selves, innocent victims, decaying castles, and other conventions made gothic horror fiction a minor genre. The revaluation of Frankenstein illustrates this change.

Frankenstein is an immature production, overburdened with literary baggage, by a gifted young person living in literate company. The monster is an unassimilated amalgam of bookish ogres: Caliban, Milton’s Satan, travel-book giants. The novel cannot make up its mind whether this creature is an obscene freak or a lonely and generous savage with a cruelly unrequited yearning for love. The book is, in parallel ways, politically confused in its view of conquered peoples. That it laid itself open to vulgar adaptations onstage and elsewhere should not be put at Mary Shelley’s door.

Claude Rawson New York Times Book Review, p. 11 October 11, 2001