2018 is the year that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein turns 200. What could possibly be the connection between one of the core works of the Gothic canon and the #MeToo campaign? Allow me to begin with a little story.
It was a fittingly dark and dreary day, typical of Finnish autumns. My Gothic fiction students and I began our discussion on Frankenstein. As it usually happens in such cases, people enter the discussion with certain preconceptions, only to see them shattered. That’s a good thing. As an educator, you want people (yourself included) to discover something new. We had talked about most of the usual elements touched upon by literary criticism. We’d discussed about the connection between Frankenstein and identity, aspects of ethnicity and “race”, morality, nature and the sublime, and others.
