"Romantic Visionary Narratives"

English professor Mike Theune sent this along -- what you do think?

I’m very interested in the ways Frankenstein interacts with other ideas, issues, and trends of its day, and I’m especially intrigued in the way the novel critiques certain paradigms of Romantic visionary transformation.

The stereotypical narrative of Romantic visionary transformation—versions of which may be found in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, two poets quoted at length in Frankenstein—a solitary individual, usually a man, who feels dejected—a little depressed, a bit down—goes out into nature and has his emotions renovated, his positive feeling restored, by the glorious and mysterious sights he sees. Large portions of Frankenstein seem to me spoofs on this kind of narrative. Very shortly after burning down De Lacey’s cottage, the Creature is cheered by a spring sunrise. Even while terrible things are happening to Victor, nature can calm him at times—he is transformed by the mountains, but, of course, the next day he again despairs. Victor even comes to realize that “…now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us.” What the novel powerfully shows is, as the Creature says to Victor, “How inconstant are your feelings,” and, as Victor says to himself, “How mutable are our feelings…”

In the place of the emotional instability of stereotypical Romantic visionary transformative moments, Shelley emphasizes the need for committed human connection and friendship. The Creature wants companionship. And throughout the novel, Victor’s ability to be transformed actually diminishes as he loses friends; he states, “…[O]ne by one my friends were snatched away—I was left desolate.” In the end, only Victor’s dreams can nourish him, and all those dreams have friends in them. Ultimately, according to Shelley, without friendship, trapped in the frozen emotions of revenge and despair, nature cannot bring relief. By the end of the novel, the signs nature gives are, themselves, all transformed, turned into nothing but frozen, chiseled indications merely of the ongoing hunt; Victor recounts, “Sometimes, indeed, he [the Creature] left marks in writing on the barks of the trees or cut in stone that guided me and instigated my fury.”

In “Tintern Abbey,” poet William Wordsworth writes of “a feeling, and a love” for nature “…[t]hat had no need of a remoter charm, / By thought supplied, or any interest / Unborrowed from the eye.” One of the major points of Frankenstein is to show that a feeling for nature in fact needs, is based on, the remoter charm, indeed the imperative, of friendship.