(no subject)
Mar. 20th, 2008 03:09 amI'm not quite sure what I make of Frankenstein, ten minutes after finishing it. It would make more sense for her to have written it in 1830--what had even happened by '17, a miscarriage, Shelley's assumption that he was dying and his laudanum use, cruel words from Godwin? How horribly had all of that played out, emotionally? Or is this foreboding, prophecy?
Shelley's in Victor, especially the Victor Walton sees, but he's just as much in Clerval--and so often in the narrative voice. And the novel isn't exactly a reading of Paradise Lost. In no viable sense is God Victor, even if Victor is in some ways God.
God + win might explain something of the connection she finds, maybe the choice of Victor as a name, too (Victor Cazire and Fitzvictor? Please.). It's a real stretch to see much of Shelley in Victor's negative qualities, though not the kind of stretch Mary couldn't have made. Her situation wasn't ideal. But what bleeds into what, here? There's Mary in the monster, some Harriet too, the madwoman in Shelley's attic. But the cases against mother and father and husband and self and God are all mixed so much together as to not be exactly any of those anymore.
Fragments of this are intact in Blood Meridian, though with all the High Romantic sentiment stomped flat. All through Moby-Dick or directly? This would make Alastor the ancestor of Meridian too--but of course, of course it is.