Who am I?
Margaret Walton
Sister of Robert Walton to whom the whole of Frankenstein is written, implying Mary SHelley envisions the audience as domestic, English, and feminine. Margaret is a lamp sitting home on a table, a gendered role within the novel, while men go out and do things.
"He was not as the other traveller seemed to be, a savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island, but an European."
Robert Walton
Where is the university Victor attended?
Ingolstadt
Politeness
Literature as something aesthetic to elevate oneself. Lit should be withdraw from social themes or civic life. Politeness offers a defense of art as separate from public life; lit as something to make you feel a certain way, not for shared knowledge, hierarchical - ALSO, can interrogate the failed promise of democratic inclusion or "formal equality"
Bildungsroman
The coming-of-age novel, very important for Frankenstein because there are two coming-of-age stories nested together, Victor's and the Creatures. Victor's shows how a "typical" person might come of age, the Creature shows how all coming-of-ages are not equal
Mary Shelley
Author of Frankenstein, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, a famous suffragist who died in childbirth, and William Godwin, a famous gadfly and radical. Published anonymously at first because she was writing a subject not considered feminine. Had already lost two babies when she wrote Frankenstein and was having a public affair with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
"Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful."
The creature
Who is convicted of the murder of Victor's brother William?
Justine Moritz
Formal Universality
From BA, the imagined assumption through print capitalism that opportunity, access, and knowledge are equal for everyone and received similarly by all, textually marked by standardization or the typical.
Negated by the the recalcitrant social difference, particularly in Frankenstein.
Epistolary novels
Novels written in the form of letters conveying horizontal relationships between writers and readers
English: letters
Latin: epistula
Bible: epistles
The Miller
A tradesman from Canterbury Tales, his tale is important because it interrupts the hierarchy of speakers, is "rude," or less educated/polished, but still has literary value. His tale offers new possibilities for social connections and is full of vulgar humor.
"but my dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free."
Mary Shelley in her introduction to Frankenstein
What does Victor throw in the ocean after he leaves the small island?
A basket with body parts from the female monster that he tries to create
Diffusion
Marked textually by plain language, direct address to readers often about the public function of literature. Contains realism where the world outside is similar to the world inside the novel, often published anonymously to show that the work belongs to the public, not the individual author.
Print capitalism
Novels and newspapers in the vernacular, aided the shift from sacred to secular through standardization of language and with characters who show what it means to be typical. It creates national community through reading or community in anonymity; as old certainties (religious and dynastic) declined, print capitalism became the new way for people to link fraternity, power, and time together meaningfully.
Safie
She is the daughter of a Christian Arab woman and a Turkish merchant in the subplot involving the De Lacey family, whom the creature observes and tries to befriend. Safie's arrival provides the creature with an opportunity to learn about language, culture, and human relationships. Her presence adds depth to the themes of identity, assimilation, and exclusion/inclusion.
"Homogenous, empty time" (also briefly explain what this means)
Anderson quoting German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940): time is empty because of the absence of preexisting, transcendent religious meaning and homogenous because vertical social hierarchy disappears and no particular moment is special. It characterizes modern time with movements away from predestination, apocalypse, and redemption by averring that all moments are the same. Time that makes progress, is open to the future and surprise!
With what is Walton obsessed?
Separate spheres
An ideology of public and private spheres in which men work for money in the public sphere and women work to support men in the private sphere. Note that industrialization gendered labor: men do productive labor, women to reproduction labor and social reproduction in the home - this is important for understanding Mary Shelley's depictions of women.
Tabula rasa
A blank slate, or literally, "a white paper." An important concept as it pertains to the Creature's development from almost nothing, no language, no relations, no socializing. Also important because Mary Shelley's father William Godwin was a proponent of tabula rasa, in that we were born empty and society fills us in AND perpetuates inequalities.
William Manning
Manning's main claim his "The Key of Liberty" (1798) from Michael Warner is that the claims of diffusion are at odds with the social organization of letters and print! The means of literature, meaning publishers of books and newspapers, are not in the hands of virtuous citizens, but are in the hands of society's enemies organized around market-dependent interests.
"Unselfconscious coherence" (also briefly explain what this means)
Benedict Anderson. Things are the way they are because that's the way they are; God wills them so. If your father is a baker, you will be a baker; if the king or clergy say something, it is presumed to come from God and so unquestionable. This changed with the decline of sacral languages, European exploration, and the rise in individual consciousness facilitated by print capitalism.
How does Victor's mother die?
Scarlet fever
Recalcitrant social difference
Michael Warner brought up this concept. Compared to Anderson's "formal equality," it marks the limits of a national community's idea of inclusivity. Those or that which is defiant of authority and refuses the typical. In particular, the creature is a figure that reflects internal differences and inequalities that structure national communities. He is a social group of one that is unable to participate in the life of the nation.
Meanwhile
Characteristic of modernity, coined by Anderson as a hallmark of the shift to print capitalism and a marker of simultaneity: many things are happening all at once