Mary Wrote Frankenstein, Okay?

Ever feel like grabbing a broomstick and smacking a criminally misguided schlub on the head until he stops being a waste of good carbon?

Me too! The schlub in question is John Lauritsen, whose recent book The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein claims:

Frankenstein is a great work, which has consistently been underrated and misinterpreted.

The real author of Frankenstein is Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his second wife, Mary.

Male love is a central theme of Frankenstein.

Er—wrong, wrong, and wrong. What eclipsing stupidity!

I mean, male love? This is what happens when you mask identity politics as literary criticism. It ends up being dubious on one front and deliriously unhinged on the other.

Quoth Camille Paglia:

There are serious questions here that feminists who have turned Mary Shelley into a saint need to address. This is very exciting stuff that will infuriate scholars who cannot accept that Mary was a second-rate writer.

Begging the question much? Frankenstein is a second-rate novel. It’s remarkable not for the prose but for the ideas; for being a modern legend about the ambiguous horror of creation. Not to mention that contemporary theory allows you to claim the prescence of whatever elements strike your fancy within a text without having to rewrite history. Death of the Author is just a figure of speech, you know.

(This all triply ironic considering that Mary’s mom wrote the seminal Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Plus ça change, dahlins!)

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http://www.rubberpaw.com honest knave

Honestly, can you trust an article which says,

"Literature courses in the US are oddly skewed towards novels because few undergraduates are required to read any poetry."

That is a terrible tautology. And if that's the best argument against Frankenstein which this person can muster, forget it. Mary Shelley may not have been a scintillating stylist, but style is only one way to measure a work. How can Greer honestly argue that Frankenstein would have been a better book if Dr. F. had killed the monster immediately? This isn't realism, you know.
http://firasd.org Firas

Ha yeah, Greer's line about undergrad poetry in the US is unwarranted. But it's a knock against Lauritsen's education, not Shelley's talent—the only reason Greer and I are taking such cudgels to Frankenstein is in defense of Mary S.' claim to authorship. So even without Greer's article I'd have followed Paglia's quote with something like, "Frankenstein is a second-rate novel. QED."

I'll admit that this is a fairly backhanded way of asserting someone's literary cred, and that Lauritsen's house of cards can be collapsed without disputing the novel's place in the canon (as someone says in the Metafilter thread, "Nobody has ever accused P. B. Shelley's own attempts at fiction of anything resembling literary greatness.")

The reason I bring up 'Death of the Author' is that all the hand-wringing about the narrator's gender (says Greer, "The driving impulse of this incoherent tale is a nameless female dread, the dread of gestating a monster"), besides being boringly sexist is also a needless exercise in the intentional fallacy. That is to say, if you really wanted to explore Frankenstein from the angle of of male (even gay) love, you could easily do so without going for historical revisionism.

I'd agree that killing the monster misses the whole point—that the, ah, 'psychological' tension between creator and created (and the moral questions thus raised) is the juiciest theme in the novel.
Anonymous

hi im reading frankenstein at moment i am 13 and not realy in to reading. i fort it would be easy but its rubbish

Firas Durri