Revisiting Bernard Rose's Frankenstein: Ugliness and Exclusion

Mary Shelley’s attempt to present what Ellen Moers labels as a ‘female gothic’ seems to endorse rigid notions of beauty: the transgression of socially approbated ideals of beauty leads to textual disposal in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Frankenstein’s desertion of the creation, for insta...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of comparative literature & aesthetics 2021-04, Vol.44 (1), p.120-127
Main Author: Sharma, Mridula
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aesthetics
Allegory
Ambiguity
Apathy
Beauty
British & Irish literature
Consciousness
English literature
Exegesis & hermeneutics
Females
Folklore
Literary characters
Literary criticism
Literary devices
Morality
Motion picture criticism
Motion pictures
Narrative structure
Narratives
Narratology
Novels
Personal appearance
Plot (Narrative)
Rose, Bernard
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797-1851)
Social conditions & trends
Subtitles & subtitling
Text analysis
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Summary:Mary Shelley’s attempt to present what Ellen Moers labels as a ‘female gothic’ seems to endorse rigid notions of beauty: the transgression of socially approbated ideals of beauty leads to textual disposal in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Frankenstein’s desertion of the creation, for instance, testifies to the writer’s conscious effort to portray the beautiful and the ugly within the ambit of societal expectations of physical attractiveness. It is interesting to study the representation of the narrative in cinema because the transposition of Mary Shelley’s description into characters played by actors in reality is further influenced by the director’s perceptions of the textual reading as well as his presumptions of beauty. Bernard Rose’s film titled, Frankenstein (2015), appropriates the original text for public consumption: the monster’s initial corporeal beauty is transformed into supposed hideousness due to Frankenstein’s attempt to further augment his creation’s physical strength. The insertion of the monster’s Oedipal desire for Elizabeth supplements the investigation in the element of romance that is somewhat governed by the internalisation of conventional ideas of beauty. This paper endeavours to critique the contrast between the textual and cinematic portrayal of Frankenstein’s monster by examining the duality in the promotion of beauty in Rose’s film and contrasting it with the narrative space within Mary Shelley’s 1818 edition.
ISSN:0252-8169