Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-03T15:10:19.193Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 3 - Literate species: populations, “humanities,” and the specific failure of literature in Frankenstein

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Maureen N. McLane
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

When one is studying man, what can be more exact or more rigorous than to recognize human properties in him?

Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method

… I began the creation of a human being.

Victor Frankenstein

In his 1797 essay “Of an Early Taste for Reading,” William Godwin announced that “Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms.” Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus – boldly dedicated to “WILLIAM GODWIN, Author of Political Justice, Caleb Williams, &c.” – may be read as a critique of her father's pronouncement. Shelley's corporeally indeterminate but eccentrically literate monster asks us to consider whether literature – taken in all its bearings – was or is indeed a useful “line of demarcation between” human and animal. The fate of the monster suggests that proficiency in “the art of language” (110), as he calls it, may not ensure one's position as a member of the “human kingdom.” Shelley shows us how a literary education, so crucial to Godwinian perfectibility, presupposes not merely an educable subject but a human being. Read through Godwin's dictum, the trajectory of Frankenstein's creature offers a parable of pedagogic failure – specifically a failure in the promise of the humanities, in letters as a route to humanization. The novel demonstrates, perhaps against itself, that acquisition of “literary refinement” fails to humanize the problematic body – the ever-unnamed monster.

Type
Chapter
Information
Romanticism and the Human Sciences
Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species
, pp. 84 - 108
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×