Introduction
Gothic literature embraces many forms and themes, and as such presents a challenge for anyone attempting to circumscribe it. However, the genre is primarily concerned with the creepy and the macabre; Gothic literature seeks to terrify and is capacious enough to include ghosts, castles, werewolves, and unnamed terrors that lurk in the male psyche. Often obsessed by the past, it often explores the fear that gigantic, primeval forces and urges still are present and active in the human mind, and that, unchecked, they would sweep society away.
Many Gothic narratives display certain persistent themes and the presence of conventional undertakings. For instance, the supernatural impinges upon over half of Gothic novels, most often in the form of a restless ghost, frequently of a murdered man, woman, or child. Other supposedly supernatural elements such as magic, possession, vampirism, and witchcraft, as well as, in the cases of certain authors, the appearance of real ghosts, are commonly utilized in the tradition. Many traditional Gothic novels combine the terror of the supernatural with the terror of the ancient. They are often set in a dark physical or moral environment. Periods of history such as the Babylonian, Anglo-Saxon, Roman, Egyptian, and medieval, with their crumbling castles and degenerate aristocrats, are dark territories of the human mind and implicitly invite analogical connections to be made with the repression and disorientation of the present. The landscapes in Gothic narratives reflect the minds of protagonists and are symbolic of their longing both to transcend their present position and to transcend constricting social and physical reality. Nature is itself often amoral or unfriendly, for frequently characters are. Nature, in whichever form or manifestation it takes, is frequently erratic and unperturbed by the terrible things that happen to a condemned character. While nature may be symbolically calm or raging, it always presents a paradigm that is horrific. Even when nature is portrayed as beautifully sublime, when its alpine, hill, valley, and lake scenery are described, it serves to undermine tranquility of mind and concern for order, proportion, and harmony.
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The Influence of Gothic Elements
“Frankenstein” is considered one of the first novels to use Gothic elements effectively. But what are those elements that prop up the story? How do they enhance the novel’s themes and atmosphere? Before I go on, the main Gothic elements in “Frankenstein” are the monstrous, the theme of excessive or uncontrollable passion, the uncanny, and the motif of the individual against a landscape. This kind of text usually associates emotions with landscapes.
Feelings resembling fear more than anything else are often the elements that qualify the supernatural in Gothic texts for the characters involved in the narrative. The fear is also induced or awakened by the remote setting of the action, which includes landscapes and closed-off cities as well as the darkness of a laboratory. This is an important part of the setting of “Frankenstein”: first the eerie, then the uncanny, but also grotesque experiments that terrify Walton before he even gets to know the man who performs them. But the narrative explains why fear is involved, which is not the purpose of more contemporary horror. The exploration of fear proper sets in and emerges as an investigation of vocalized emotion coming from the characters as indexers of the uncanny. The Gothic text shows strong references to emotion and its streaming but often finds itself showing a mix of rebellion, anger, sadness, and non-expression or boredom when it comes to speaking of feeling. There are emotive passages in which the creature finally speaks and curses his fate, but what strikes us the most, as readers, is the realization of the non-humanity, the otherness of this “monster.” Despite his passed-through feelings that are expressed, such as love for the cottagers or hatred for his creator, the fact of them being felt by him is what makes them other rather than their quality or intensity or actual referent. And this ever-present quality of being continuously and obsessively (and therefore, imaginatively evil) is the uncanny to us. But is the non-human feeling it more than the feelings themselves or their inauthenticity? Not their hypocrisy (he really feels love and compassion) but their passage through the body and soul of the outsized creature.
Themes of Isolation and Monstrosity
The dominant themes of the story include the negative effects that alienation has on both the alienated people and society's response to the extent of one's monstrosity. Isolation is found in the form of Victor Frankenstein as an encapsulation of experiences of loss, whereas his creature is alienated in his distinct being. The creature is the visual and psychological depiction of these consequences, continuing to suffer from displacement and a lack of understanding stemming from his unclassifiable being. Themes of isolation are presented in various forms where people are viewed negatively when they are alienated, and where isolation leads individuals to sadistic behavior, either consciously or unconsciously.
The concept of monstrosity is portrayed through the beastly appearance and notable ugliness of the creature; however, the narrative explores monstrosity profoundly. Although the beast conjures uneasy reactions as he is a grotesque, bald humanoid figure, many readers and characters within the narrative view him as a worthy and moral being. The narrative distances itself from superficial appearance in labeling monstrosity. If the beast possesses no animalistic or animal-like visual traits or features, why is he labeled a monster by so many beings both in the narrative and among the audience? The creature is considered monstrous because society labels him as such; the unseen demeanor people identify within him is what is actually inhuman or monstrous about this beast.
Narrative Techniques in Frankenstein
On the narrative level, Frankenstein shows the securing of multiple points of view of its characters, sometimes within the stories that develop across others. The frame starts with several letters from an Arctic captain to his sister. These letters give the first point of view of an observer of the events, as the captain reports on news received from other people. The structure of the narrative allows it to be both told and shown at the same time, so that the captain often expresses complicated and multiple sympathies for the creatures and the victims described. This often leads to deliberate ambiguity in the novel, not constituting a conventional form of suspense as it will not be resolved within the narrative. The numerous letters, if carefully read, suggest a means of constituting and reconstituting a human history given over to the ambiguities that develop from the subject. The captain is himself a reader of the narratives presented by others in his own, and the end of the novel is, therefore, something of a conundrum. For his correspondents set out, at some length, the above problems and he passes judgment on them through gestures of a damaged heroism.
A. argues that Frankenstein is a "probably unique novel in being told in strictly (if imperfectly) chronological order by a series of narrators, but also in a variety of forms with all the variety of numerous orthodox narrative methods: letters, direct speech, and different kinds of immediate first-person remembrance." As the novel progresses, the number of narrators and the focus on particular narrators diminishes so that the meeting of characters is reflected in the text. This lessening of narrators highlights the voice of the "original". Walton expresses: "The narrators who actually tell part of the story, we have seen, tend temporarily to devalue this story by situating their own, or Frankenstein's, experience in some personal or irrelevant context. But within the narrative, this bias becomes justified by a movement from telling to showing, from a story of which anything at all can be said, to an objective description, a photograph, which is so exact and complete that only spite or credulity can question it."
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