11/7/2023 0 Comments Genius frankenstein annotations(2) In Nancy Yousef's more expansive analysis of Romantic selfhood, the 'dark truth' such wanderers reveal is the problematic nature of autonomy itself, which key Romantic texts critique as troubled, unproductive, and ultimately 'monstrous'. (1) For Botting, such marginalized interiority is consistent with Romanticism's larger preoccupation with what he calls 'heroes in the Gothic mould: gloomy, isolated and sovereign, they are wanderers, outcasts, and rebels condemned to roam the borders of social worlds, bearers of a dark truth or horrible knowledge, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner'. The individual in question stands at the edges of society and rarely finds a path back into the social fold'. Indeed, Fred Botting has argued that it is precisely the turn toward an interiorized and often pathologically isolated selfhood that defines the 'Romantic' phase of the Gothic novel in general: 'It is at the level of the individual that Romantic-Gothic writing takes its bearings. But spatial/geographical isolation can also signal varieties of psychological and social alienation within Gothic texts, particularly those from the Romantic period, in which Frankenstein is canonically situated. Isolated physical settings-prisons, dungeons, monastic cloisters, remote castles, secret laboratories-have of course played a frequent role in creating the 'atmosphere' of numerous Gothic novels and in sustaining their plots by allowing the Gothic villain a convenient, if temporary, freedom from detection. The potentially chilling aspects of isolation have long been recognized as central motifs in the Gothic novelistic tradition in general and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in particular.
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