Scholarship Review Essay

• Due: Sunday, October 11
• Choose one of the articles: "Liberty, Equality, Monstrosity: Revolutionizing the Family in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein"
• Read the article closely and carefully, underlining key points and taking marginal notes. (You will likely need to read the article a few times!)
• Then prepare a 3-4 page double-spaced review of the article.
• Quote and explain the article's thesis statement.
• Analyze what critical approach(es) inform(s) the author's thesis and/or their means of supporting their thesis. (Examples of critical approaches are: feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, historical, etc.)
• Analyze how the author develops their evidence.
• Assess what makes the article successful and convincing.
• Explain how you might challenge and/or build on the article's argument.
• Reflect on what you learned from and/or what surprised you in the article.
• **Length: 3-4 double-spaced pages (using Times New Roman 12-point font)--not including your Works Cited page.
• **Length: 3-4 double-spaced pages (using Times New Roman 12-point font)--not including your Works Cited page.
• **You are encouraged to include quotes and close readings not only of the scholarly article but also of Frankenstein in your review.
• Notes
• useful to a republic: "myths of humanity's essential kinship, whereby citizens may be taught to regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the self-same earth."
• Consider "Anacharsis Cloots, who collected thirty-six representatives of le genre human--Prussian, English, Sicilian, Dutch, and Polish emigres, among others, and most scandalously an Arab and Chaldean, each dressed in national costume--who would embody the Revolutionary spirit of fraternity at the Feast of the Federation, on the anniversary of the Bastille's fall."
• Cloots transforms the Book of Revelation into the text of Revolution; his description of the Revolution as a new genesis depends on the resurrection of dead ideas of human(e) kinship, which has been buried and largely forgotten in the everyday practice of the politically elitist French church.
• Keep in mind Cloot's prophetic vision, now consider the effort of Mary Shelley's "modern Prometheus," Victor Frankenstein, who likewise seeks to form a new genre of humanity by modeling himself after mythological and biblical creators.
• Frankenstein, like Cloots, seeks to bring to life, in spectacular form, an ideal of le genre humain that transcends the bounds of the individual.
• Frankenstein's creation might be viewed as the literalization of this revolutionary metaphor, for he, like Cloots, would redeem humankind by reuniting the dead into a new social corporation with the words, "I am making the whole of creation new" (Revelation 21:5).
• Mary Wollstonecraft: "What then is to hinder man, at each epoch of civilization, from making a stand, and new modeling the materials, that have been hastily thrown into a rude mass?"
• THESIS:
• The ultimate failure of Cloot's and Frankenstein's attempts to remake the social body, I would like to suggest, has everything to do with the instability of the Revolutionary key word fraternité, which simultaneously connotes competing designations of the locus of social cohesiveness and responsibility.
• Taken in one sense, fraternité, indexes traditional striations of social order grounded upon family status and birthright
• In its revolutionary sense, fraternite suggests an equality based not upon a citizens' common subjection or filiation, but upon their constitutional or natural rights as members of le genre humain, a form of political solidarity or affiliation often at odds with literal kinship ties and the ideology of the private family.
• Cloots spectacle of le genre humain explicitly called into question traditional notions of blood kinship and national identity
• Cloots's response, "The only strangers I know of ware other species of animals," was greeted by a burst of laughter.
• This laughter might be read as a defensive denial of the terror elicited by Cloots's positing of an essential likeness between the Assembly members and their strange "brothers"
• Metaphorical brotherhood threatens to dissolve the naturalness of literal, descent-based concepts of kith, kin, and kind.
• This conflict of interests between blood relatives and monstrous others is central to Shelley's novel
• his call for inclusion within the Frankenstein and DeLacey families threatens the very definition of the closed family unit upon which traditional social structures are grounded.
• Frankenstein suggests that Victor's and the Revolution's ultimately self-destructive reconstructions of le genre humain result from mistranslations of fraternite that fail to realize the egalitarian spirit of the radical Christian or republican ethos.
• Recent analyses of Frankenstein have argued persuasively that the novel's depiction of a terrifying, man-made monster is a response to the overweening confidence of Enlightenment utopianism and to the Terror that destroyed many republicans' belief in the French Revolutionary project.
• Shelley's understanding of Victor as the "modern Prometheus" also draws upon pro-Revolutionary rhetoric, and thereby to suggest that his Promethean-Revolutionary aspiration oto re-create le genre humain may not, in and of itself, be the central object of the novel's critique.
• Both of those texts, like Frankenstein, describe the collection of individuals into a new "colossal form" of man charged by a Promethean flame, who challenges the integrity of older structures of human social order.
• this secular version of rebirth entails the denaturalization of traditional familial, religious, and political power structures
• Edmund Burke argued the conservative position ... which appropriates traditional family order to prove the naturalness of hereditary monarchy
• British republicans effectively reversed this polemic, arguing that the real political monster was the system of so-called natural inheritance.
• Wollstonecraft: the "perpetuation of property in our families," far from being natural, is the source of civic monstrosity.
• Wollstonecraft: "The mine must have a very limited range that thus confines its benevolence to such a narrow circle, which, with great propriety, may be included in the sordid calculations of blind self-love."
• William Godwin: hereditary systems and the false titles of feudalism were "a ferocious monster, devouring, wherever it came, all that the friend of humanity regards with attachment and love"
• Godwin, like Cain, would disavow the responsibility of being his brother's keeper, and in doing so uphold the impartial responsibilities of social fraternity.
• Victor's Ulyssean "voyage of discovery to the land of knowledge," his asexual construction of a creature without women's agency, has been frequently interpreted as a gynephobic attack on woman-centered family domesticity.
• Google: Gynephobia is an intense, irrational, and persistent fear of women that goes far beyond any actual threat.
• Readings of the novel as championing the "normal relations of family" ... subscribe to an (aristocratic) ethos of descent-based identity opposed by Shelley in Frankenstein
• Victor Frankenstein's construction of an abstract figure of humanity ... is less a symptom of gynephobia than a realization of Paine's conviction that "the unity of man; by which I mean that men are all of one degree, and consequently that all men are born equal, and with equal natural rights," will be obscured by an aristocracy-based ideology of blood, race, and heredity unless we can imagine that "posterity has been continued by creation instead of generation."
• Frankenstein consistently suggests that the private family might itself be considered the central locus of narcissism.
• Kate Ellis: "Shelley seems to suggest that, if the family is to be a viable institution for the transmission of domestic affection from one generation to the next, it must redefine that precious commodity in such a way that it can extend to 'outsiders' and become hardy enough to survive in the outside world."
• I would like to suggest that the domestic insularity that defines familial happiness might also be the very cause of that family's self-destruction.
• my notes: beginning to sound the opposite of "everyone who isn't us is an enemy"
• Victor Frankenstein similarly recounts an early life structured by the family as "remarkably secluded and domestic; and this had given me invincible repugnance to new countenances."
• "I loved my brothers, Elizabeth, Clerval; these were 'old familiar faces;' but I believed myself totally unfitted for the company of strangers."
• Mary Shelley suggests that the modern Prometheus's freedom is bound by his family's blind self-love
• Henry Clerval finds that his "own mind was all the possession that he prized, beautiful and majestic thoughts the only wealth he coveted--daring as the eagle and as free, common laws could not be applied to him; and while you gazed on him you felt his soul's spark was more divine--more truly stolen from Apollo's sacred fire, than the glimmering ember that animates other men"
• Safie, another former the novel's Promethean characters bound and chained by familial tyranny, runs away from a home headed by a Turkish father who would have her "immured within the walls of a haram, allowed only to occupy herself with puerile amusements," hoping instead "to aspire to higher powers of intellect, and an independence of spirit" in the state of relative freedom offered by republican Geneva, "where women were allowed to take a rank in society"
• Far from being antithetical to familial order, incest (as Freud would later note) is the drive par excellence through which "the members of a family hold together permanently and become incapable of contact with strangers."
• This conflict between metaphorical and literal designations of kinship is most forcibly brought home in the narrative offered by Frankenstein's creature, the figural embodiment of the republican Revolution's aspiration toward a new form of social federation.
• Happy families are all alike; familiality breeds contempt for any unfamiliar faces, Shelley suggests, laying the groundwork for a republican critique of classism and racism
• The creature's narrative hinges upon his failed attempt to be adopted within the hearth and hearts of the DeLacey family
• Shelley's description of the DeLacey hut comes closer than any other familial arrangement depicted in the novel to the ideal of a nonhierarchical domestic space.
• The supreme irony is that Victor's attempt to form a revolutionary "new species" or genre humain, a new social order free from the conservatism of familial reproduction, has resulted in a monstrous translation of the very same ties that previously constricted him.
• Far from creating a new fraternal order, Frankenstein's behavior toward "his child" unwittingly reproduces the same structures of paternal proscription that had earlier opposed Victor's claim to be a person in his own right.
• Pulled between the ties of metaphorical kinship to the creature and literal kinship to his family, Victor finds himself in a double bind
• "I created a rational creature, and was bound towards him, to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty; but there was another still paramount to that. My duties towards my fellow-creatures had greater claims to my attention"
• Victor never comes to a full understanding of what Justine's unloving mother had recognized earlier, "that the deaths of her favourites was a judgment from heaven to chastise her partiality"
• after the dying Frankenstein denies that any "new ties" or "fresh affections" could ever be as familial as his dead sister and brothers, seems to signify the defeat of republican fraternite by private family interests.
• what is Frankenstein's monstrously failed re-creation of le genre humain itself--but the horrifying traces of the very absence of fraternity, the narrative relations compensatory to fraternal relations that do not exist?
• quoted from Barruel: Diminish, reject that love of the country, and mankind will once more learn to know and love each other as men.
• However successful the Revolution may have been in overturning age-old systems of aristocratic and monarchical rule, its extension of family love into an ethos of national patriotism brought about not a fraternal (let alone sororally) egalitarian state free of conflict, but rather a reign of nationalistic vainglory separated from, yet intrinsically coexistent with, the "private" realm of narcissistic family love henceforth regarded as the only potential locus of utopian security.
• Wollstonecraft: "What has hitherto been the political perfection of the world? In the two most celebrated nations [France and England] it has only been a polish of manners, an extension of that family love, which is rather the effect of sympathy and selfish passions, than reasonable humanity."
• Essay: Title - "Victor Frankestein, Cersei Lannister, and Myself: Hirsch's Essay on Fraternité"
• On November 5, 2024, I did not invite all my friends over to watch our country elect our first woman president. I had learned my lesson eight years earlier. Instead, I sat at home alone and watched the election results, wondering how much longer Benjamin Franklin's famous reply to Elizabeth Willing Powel would hold: "A republic, if you can keep it." When the results became clear, my outlook on the future turned inward. The side that had won had campaigned on concentration camps and mass deportation and would unlikely be restrained by any voices of reasons that might have existed in the first administration. I understood this would be a dark period for our country, and my only thoughts became, how would I make sure my family weathered the upcoming storm? I no longer looked to our founding fathers for inspiration; I only cared about those closest to me. My motto going forward would come from Cersei Lannister, not Benjamin Franklin: "Fuck everyone who isn't us." You would not find me on the corner at 72nd and Dodge street, protesting the inhumane treatment of our fellow creatures. Instead, I resigned to putting my head down and enrolling blocks up the street, for a degree in English literature.
• I know that everyone views her as the villain, for murder and incest, but Cersei Lannister has always been somewhat of a hero for me. She is someone who unabashedly puts her family above all else. In that respect, I have always thought of Cersei Lannister as who I want to be in life. Which makes David Hirsch's article, "Liberty, Equality, Monstrosity: Revolutionizing the Family in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" so personally challenging. Hirsch's thesis explains "[t]he ultimate failure of ... Frankenstein's attempt[] to remake the social body ... has everything to do with the instability of the Revolutionary key word fraternité, which simultaneously connotes competing designations of the locus of social cohesiveness and responsibility." Hirsch explains these competing designations. "Taken in one sense, fraternité indexes traditional structures of social order grounded upon family status and birthright" but "[i]n its revolutionary sense, fraternité suggests an equality based not upon citizens' common subjection or filiation, but upon their constitutional or natural rights as members of le genre humain, a form of political solidarity or affiliation often at odds with literal kinship ties and the ideology of the private family." In this view, literal brotherhood is the enemy of the figurative brotherhood of man. To Hirsch, my rejection of the Revolutionary fraternité in favor of the traditional structures of social order would put me in the unenviable company of Victor Frankenstein.
• To introduce the idea of the figurative brotherhood of man, Hirsch uses a historical approach with a story of Anarcharsis Cloots, "who collected thirty-six representatives of le genre humain," representatives of diverse ethnic and national groups, dressed in traditional garb, in a spectacle of multiculturalism intended to represent brotherhood. It "called into question traditional notions of blood kinship and national identity," and when members of the assembly protested these "strangers," Cloots argued "The only strangers I know of are other species of animals." But this "[m]etophorical brotherhood threatens to dissolve the naturalness of literal, descent-based concepts of kith, kin, and kind." Hirsch points out this conflict is shown in Frankenstein "between blood relatives and monstrous others."
• Towards dissolving the naturalness of blood relatives, Hirsch cites a number of different arguments. According to Wollstonecraft, "the perpetuation of property in our families ... is the source of civic monstrosity," and that "benevolence to such a narrow circle" is "blind self-love." William Godwin argues in favor of a family indifferent viewpoint and "would disavow the responsibility of being his [literal] brother's keeper, and in doing so uphold the impartial responsibilities of social fraternity." This argument says essentially that loving one's family means also not loving one's neighbor. The only way a person can love their neighbor is by giving no blind-self love or partiality toward their family. Hirsch cites a feminist approach from Kate Ellis who argues that "if family is to be a viable institution for the transmission of domestic affection from one generation to the next, it must redefine that precious commodity in such a way that it can extend to 'outsiders' and become hardy enough to survive in the world outside." Hirsch finds all of these ideas relevant in Frankenstein, where the novel "consistently suggests that the private family might itself be considered the central locus of narcissism." Going an additional step, Hirsch argues that "the domestic insularity that defines familial happiness might also be the very cause of the family's self-destruction."
• To support this argument, Hirsch points to Victor's domestic insularity, which gave him "invincible repugnance to new countenances." Victor notes he "loved [his] brothers, Elizabeth, [and] Clerval" but believed himself "totally unfitted for the company of strangers" (73). To explain further, Hirsch uses a psychoanalysis approach, explaining Freud's view that incest promotes familial order where the "family hold[s] together permanently and become incapable of contact with strangers." Hirsch explains that "familiality breeds contempt for any unfamiliar faces." If Victor was not so predisposed to only interacting with his family, perhaps he would have not been so quick to judge his creation as a monster and abandon him. Ultimately, the Frankenstein family is destroyed by its inability to pursue the Revolutionary sense of fraternité.
• Reading Frankenstein, I found it very easy to criticize Victor for his treatment toward the Creature. I had never imagined, however, critiquing the Frankenstein family as the cause of this gothic tragedy. This criticism hits far closer to home. More than anyone else, I do aim to be my literal brother's keeper. When faced with the existential concern of a second Trump presidency, I did not commit myself to being my metaphorical brother's keeper. I did not go out on the streets, as Alex Pretti or Renee Good did, and do everything I could do to oppose this evil. I did the exact opposite. I knew bad things were coming, and I resigned myself to only considering what the best way forward was for me and my family. And in that sense, Hirsch has held up a mirror in front of me and I see Victor Frankenstein. Although to be fair, as someone who Cersei Lannister before, perhaps I knew who I was all along.
• Outline
1. Introduction
2. Thesis
3. Evidence 1 - (Critical Approach: Historical -- Cloots)
4. Evidence 2 - (Historical -- Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Socrates)
5. Evidence 3 - (Critical Approach: feminism -- Revolutionary Family)
6. Evidence 4 - (Critical Approach: psychoanalysis -- Family and Contempt)
7. Evidence 5 - (Critical Approach: Marx -- Monsters)
8. Evidence 6 - (Abbe Barruel)
9. Closing - Return to Franklin
• Ignore
• CUT: Hirsch also suggests that the structure of the Frankenstein family essentially pushes "Frankenstein to look elsewhere for creative possibility and freedom." The same is true for Walton on his arctic sea voyages.