Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies of Frankenstein

The story of Frankenstein was dreamt by Marry Shelly. Frankenstein is the monstrous protagonist. He is compared with modern Prometheus and Satan of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’. .Prometheus was the Greek mythological character. He has given Fire to humankind. And it was considered as his mistake. He was punished for his mistake by the God of Oracle. He was bound to the top of mountain. He was been wounded in such a way that his lever can be seen from it. And every day an Eagle come and eat his lever. Lever is a kind of organ in human body that develops again and again as a whole. So, the punishment is never ending punishment. The pain is unavoidable and constant.

Similarly, Frankenstein was aloof by the society. He has his own physical limitations with fierce face and gigantic structure. The limitations bound him. He has also suffering from pain of avoidance and neglectance. His loneliness mars the good will inside him. He himself is the invention of human   kind so his own self, his own being is his mistake and his life is punishment for him.

Satan is another heroic character o0f Paradise Lost. He was also once the angel of God’s kingdom. He tries to equal himself to the God. He was punished by God and sent to Hell. There he founded Beelzebub with whom he become friend. He revenged to the God by making Eve to eat forbidden fruit. Frankenstein also created by Victor. He tries to mix up with the human society, tries to equalize himself as human being. He was indirectly punished by the society with fear and angry looks, avoidance. People beat him. He has to run away to jungle to burn into the fire of loneliness and neglectance. He also takes revenge by becoming monstrous approach to the society and killing near and dear ones of Victor.

The novel mutated among the intellectuals as well as generalized people through various ways like movies, drama, visual arts, televisions, and all other cultural artefacts. The protagonist stands for the empowerment of common and supressed people. And from it Frankenfreme named popular culture derived. Both like its creator in an age of revolution. Frankenstein challenged the accepted ideas of its day. As it has become increasingly commodified by modern consumer culture, one wonders whether its original revolutionary spirit and its critique of scientific, philosophical political and gender issues have become obscured, or whether instead its continuing transformention attests to its essential oppositional nature.

“Frankenstein is a vital metaphor, peculiarly appropriate to a culture dominated by a consumer technology, neurotically obsessed with ‘getting in touch with’ its authentic self and frightened with what it is discovering.”

It presents black people. During those days industrialisation is the upcoming trend in the society. In America there were lots of Nigro people were brought from South Africa to serve the masters. And having black skin they have to tolerate many things. Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom’s cabin is the character who mirrors the socio-political culture of the time. Frankenstein is the character of working class people as those people were considered as monstrous. They were made workers by the industrialists only.

Marry Shelly lived during the time of great disruption. Monsters like the Creature are indeed paradoxical. On the one hand, they quest for their existence rnd on the other hand we feel secured that the society is enough strong to fight with such Creatures. It symbolises our own self and the social chains we are bound with. Our society is such where one has to follow certain values otherwise the person is considered antisocial.(enough strong to defeat inner/original self) In doing so we cheat ourselves and can’t able to express our original self( quest for existence). The Creature read three books on which his behavioural pattern based. According to Morton “the Creature’s literary education is radical” but the Creatur’s idealistic education does him little good, and he has no chanceof reforming society so that it will accept him. His self-education is his even more traguic second birth into an entire culture impossible for him to inhabit, however well he understands great writings about freedom.

It may be analyses as portrayal of different Races. The people with colonial mind set having bias towards the fair, white skin. They hate the black or whitish skin. For them the people with whitish or black skin are ugly. Frankenstein is described as yellow; the skin shed of Mongolian race. In the 17th century, people began to use the term ‘Races’ to relate to observable physical traits. Such use promoted hierarchies favourable to differing ethnic groups. There are three types of races:

1. Caucasian races (Aryans, Hamites, Semites)

2. Mongolian races (northern Mongolian, Chinese and Indo-Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Tibetan, Malayan, Polynesian, Maori, Micronesian, Eskimo, American Indian),

3 Negroid races (African, Hottentots, Melanesians/Papua, “Negrito”, Australian Aborigine, Dravidians, Sinhalese)

The white people were considered themselves superior and other races inferior. They made them slaves.  The industrialization increase the numbers of other races in United States’ population the people from Negroid Races are stronger in muscle power then Americans. Red Indians- the original natives of America are also physically strong then white or migrated English people. The society feared from them and enslaved them. Below is the given some numbers to elaborate the races in America from 1850 to 1900 A.D.

The fear is reflected in the Frankenstein. Here we can se Victor as master and Frankenstein as slave. According to Gayatri Chakravorthy Spivak the novel is the critic of empire and racism. 

“Frankenstein’s language of racism – the dark side of imperialism understood as social mission – combines with hysteria of masculism into the idiom of (the withdrawal of) sexual reproduction rather than subject constitution”

Today we are constantly confronted with new developments in fertility science and new philosophical conundrums that result from genetic engineering, in vitro fertilization, cloning and the prolongation of life by artificial means. According to cultural critic Laura Kranzler, Victor’s creation of life and modern sperm banks and artificial wombs show a ‘masculine desire to claim female (re)productivity’. Frankenstein and its warnings about the hubris of science will be with us in the future as science continues to question the borders between life and death, between ‘viability’ and ‘selective reduction’, between living and life support.

The experiment of Luigi Galvani, an Italian physician and physician discovered that electricity can be used for muscle contractions, were among the scientific topics discussed by Percy Shelly, Byron. Marry Shelly attended public demonstrations of the effect of electricity on animal and human bodies, living and dead. In the age of genetic engineering, biotechnology and cloning, the most far reaching industrialization of life forms to date, Frankenstein is more relevant than ever. Developments in science were increasingly critical to society during the Romantic period, when a paradigm shift occurred from science as natural philosophy to science as biology, a crucial ( and troubled) distinction in Frankenstein.

Presentation in popular culture:

A term used ‘Frankenphemes( Frankenstein phonemes)’ as elements of culture that are derived from Frankenstein. Either a separate work of art is inspired or some kernel is derived from Shelly’s novel and repeated another medium. Broadly defined, Frankenphemes demonstrate the novel’s presence in world cultures, as the encoding of race and clss in the 1824 Canning speech in Parliament, in today’s gobble debates such things as generally engineered foods, and of course in fiction and other media.

     The Great Horror Story Novel Ever Written:

“ the single greatest horror story novel ever written and the most widely influential in the genre”

The list of the inspired work as below.:

a)     The Ball-Tower’ by Herman Melwille

b)     The Future Eve a story of female monster by French author Villiers de L’Isle Adam

c). The Surgeon’s Experiment By American writer W. C. Marrow

d). A Thousand Deaths by Jack London

e). The Reanimator is the set of tales published in Home Brew magazine by H.P Lowercraft..’Herbert West : Reanimator’ movie from it. It initiate the splatter film genre.

f). The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

g). The Memories of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Theodore Roszek

h). Demons of Film Colony by Theodore Leberthone

      thre is surprizing amount of Frankenstein erotice, especially gay- and lesbian - oriented

     Frankenstein On the Stage

A.    Presumtion or The Fate of Frankenstein by Richard Brinsley Peake.

B.     Frankenstitch

C.     Frank-n- steam

D.    The Devil Among the Players

E.     The Man In Moon

F.      Frankenstein And His Bride

G.    The Rocky Horror Show as movie The Rockey Horror Picture Show

     Film Adaptions

                                                   i.            Frankenstein

                                                ii.            The Cabinate of Dr. CaligariBride Of Frankenstein

                                              iii.            Marry Shelly’s Frankenstein

                                              iv.            TRorticole Contre Frankesburg

                                                 v.            Frankenstein, el Vampiro y Compania

                                              vi.            Furankenshutain tai chitei kaiju Baragon

                                            vii.            The Cure of Frankenstein

                                         viii.            I was Teenage Frankenstein

                                              ix.            Young Frankenstein

                                                 x.            Fanny Hills Meets Dr.Erotico

                                              xi.            Andy Warhole’s Frankenstein

                                            xii.            Blade Runner

                                         xiii.            Blackenstein

                                          xiv.            Frankenstein Unbound

The cultural aspect of the novel by Marry Shelly hides many meanings in itself. They are still undermining by various methodologies of cultural studies. The social, political structure of any society can found relevance with the work as it is one of the classical work presenting the fear of the psychological disturbance. It was said that marry Shelly herself was suffered from the madness. An insecure mind can be feel such hallucinations and it reflected it the work.