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Religion in Frankenstein: Dialectics of Authority

August 30, 2019

academia, criticism, frankenstein, Gothic, religion

Note: the following article on religion in Frankenstein is a modified excerpt (pp. 110-111) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which is available for free from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, presentations, etc. feel free to visit the relevant page on the main Home for Fiction website.

You can also find an article about religion in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and another about religion on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Religion in Frankenstein: A Secular or Religious World?

In the context of Frankenstein, a story replete with moral dilemmas and dichotomies based on otherness, it is perhaps not surprising to discover a multitude of religiously charged temporal dichotomies.

Punter and Byron argue that Victor, although a modern Prometheus (as the subtitle of the novel underlines), lives in “a notably secular world with no gods against whom to rebel, and … his search is conceived of in scientific terms” (2004, 199).

religion in Frankenstein — Religion in *Frankenstein* is a matter of understanding the dialectics of authority involved in the story

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Can Good Writing Be Taught?

August 23, 2019

Writing

excellence, literature, writing

One of the key themes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is to which extent our morality is a product of our environment. Are you born bad, or do you become? This might sound like an irrelevant point for our topic – can good writing be taught? – but in fact it’s directly relevant.

The reason? Instead of asking, can good writing be taught, we can rephrase the question and wonder: Are you born a good writer, or can you become one?

Want yet a third reformulation of the same question? Is good writing a matter of talent or skill (that can be practiced and taught)?

Obviously enough, this is a critical thing to know. If good writing cannot be taught – in other words, if you are only born a good writer – then you either have it or you don’t. In such a framework, someone who is not born with the talent, cannot be a good author.

If this sounds a bit too peculiar, and you resist it, your instincts are right. However, the opposite isn’t quite true either. There is such a thing as talent in writing, though probably not in the way you expect. Ah, how wonderful… There are never any simple answers, are there?

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Fate Leads the Willing; the Unwilling it Drags: Meaning and Significance

August 17, 2019

Philosophy

change, fate, injustice, meaning, subjectivity

What a wonderful thing to say, right? Fate leads the willing; the unwilling it drags. You might have also seen some variation of it, such as Fate leads the willing and drags along the reluctant. Originally this was written by the Roman poet Seneca – ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt, if you want the Latin version.

There have been many interpretations of this short quote. After all, this is the way art operates.

For some, Seneca’s words describe something stoic, making you “suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune“.

Others perhaps might see something optimistic in it. I’ve seen at least one person having tattooed “Fate Leads the Willing” on their arm – indeed in Latin.

My personal opinion differs from both these approaches. I subscribe to neither utter stoicism nor manic optimism.

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