From Paradise Lost to Frank-N-Furter: The Creature Lives as an elaborated in Cultural Studies in practice.

Topic: From Paradise Lost to Frank-N-Furter: The Creature Lives as an elaborated in Cultural Studies in practice

Name: Patel Kinjal

Paper Name: The Cultural Studies

Paper No: 8

Roll No: 16

STD: M.A. 1 

SEM: 2

Submitted to:  S.B Gardi Department of English Maharaja Krishnkumarsinhji Bhavnagar University (Gujarat- India)

What is Culture?

                ‘Culture’ is the mode of producing meaning and ideas. This ‘mode’ is a negotiation over which meanings are valid. Elite culture controls meanings because it controls the terms of the debate.

               Culture studies looks at mass or popular culture and everyday life. Popular culture is the culture of masses. A cultural study argues that culture is about the meanings of community or society generates. Cultural studies believe that the ‘Culture’ of communities includes various aspects: Economic, Spiritual, Ideological, Erotic and Political. Culture is not a natural thing. It is production and consumption of culture. Emphasis on discourse and textuality are at centre to cultural studies. It believes that we cannot ‘read’ cultural after facts only within the aesthetic realm.

                     Stuart Hall’s work has been a trendsetter in Cultural Studies and inaugurates the field in Britain. Hall’s essay of ‘Encoding and Decoding’ set the scene for cultural studies of the media. The essay argued about meaning within the texts- songs, paintings, and T.V soaps takes help of codes to organize. ‘Culture’ which makes a society is “a cultured society”.

Cultural Studies is an academic field of critical theory and literary criticism initially introduced by British academics in 1964 and subsequently adopted by allied academics throughout the world. Characteristically interdisciplinary, cultural studies is an academic discipline aiding cultural researchers who theorize about the forces from which the whole of humankind construct their daily lives. Cultural Studies is not a unified theory, but a diverse field of study encompassing many different approaches, methods and academic perspectives. Distinct from the breadth, objective and methodology of cultural anthropology and ethnic studies, cultural studies is focused upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture and its historical foundations, conflicts and defining traits. Researchers concentrate on how a particular medium or message relates to ideology, social class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality and/or gender, rather than providing an encyclopedic identification, categorization or definition of a particular culture or area of the world.

History

The term was used by Richard Hoggart in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS. It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director.

What is Cultural Studies?

Cultural studies is an innovative interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that investigates the ways in which “culture” creates and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power. Research and teaching in the field explores the relations between culture understood as human expressive and symbolic activities, and cultures understood as distinctive ways of life. Combining the strengths of the social sciences and the humanities, cultural studies draws on methods and theories from literary studies, sociology, communications studies, history, cultural anthropology, and economics. By working across the boundaries among these fields, a cultural study addresses new questions and problems of today’s world. Rather than seeking answers that will hold for all time, cultural studies develops flexible tools that adapt to this rapidly changing world.

Mary Shelley’s novel has morphed into countless forms in both highbrows and popular culture. Her creation teaches us not to underestimate the power of youth culture.

  

 

 Here I explain that her novel has included various things in various ways.
  Revolutionary Births:

                   Born like its creator in an age of revolution, Frankenstein challenged accepted ideas of its day. As it has became increasingly co-modified by modern consumer culture, one wonders whether its original revolutionary spirit and critique of scientific, philosophical, political, and gender issues have become obscured, or whether instead its continuing transformation attests to oppositional nature. Today, as George Levine remarks, Frankenstein is “a vital metaphor, pecuniary appropriate to a culture dominated by a consumer technology,     neurotically obsessed with ‘getting in touch’ with its authentic self frightened at what it is discovering”. Hardly a day goes by without our seeing an image or allusion to Frankenstein, from CNN, descriptions of Saddam Hussein as an “American- created Frankenstein” to magazine articles that warm of genetically engineered “Franken-foods,” test-tube babies, and cloning.

The Creature as Proletarian:

Mary Shelley lived during time of great upheaval in Britain, not only was her own family full of radical thinkers, but she also met many others such as Thomas Paine and William Blake. Percy Shelley was thought of as dangerous radical bent on labor reform and was spied upon by the government. In Frankenstein Mary Shelley’s own divisions are between ardor and fear of the masses. Like her father, who worried about the mob’s “excess of a virtuous feeling,” fearing its “sick destructiveness”. Mary Shelley’s Creature is a political and moral paradox, both an innocent and a cold-blooded murdered.

               Monster like the creature are indeed paradoxical. On the one hand, they transgress against “the establishment” if the Monster survives he represents the defiance of death, an image of survival, however disfigured. Society can capture and destroy monsters. Such dualism, would explain the great number of Frankenstein as mutant movies that appeared during the Cold War. But the Creature’s rebellion nature is rooted far in the past. In the De Lacy’s shed he reads there three books, beginning with Paradise Lost. Not only are the eternal questions about the ways of God and man in Paradise Lost relevant to the Creature’s predicament, but in Shelley’s time Milton’s epic poem was seen, as Timothy Morton puts it, as “a seminal work of republicanism and the sublime that inspired many of the Romantics. “ The Creature next reads a volume from Plutarch Lives, which in the early 19^th century was read as “a classic republican text, admired in the Enlightenment by such writers as Rousseau. “ Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the Creature’s third book, is the prototypical rebellious Romantic novel. “The Creature’s literary education is radical”. But the creature’s idealistic education does him little good, and he has no chance of reforming society. His self-education is and has even more tragic second birth into an entire culture impossible for him to inhabit, however well he understands its great writing about freedom.

“A Race of Devils”   Frankenstein may be analyzed in its portrayal if different, “races”. Though the Creature’s skin is only described as yellow, it has been constructed “out of a cultural tradition of the threatening ‘Other’- whether troll or giant, gypsy or Negro- from the dark inner recesses of xenophobic fear and loathing.”  Antislavery in Shelley’s day was from gaudily dressed exotics to naked objects of pity.

  Victor could be read as guilty slave master. Interestingly, one of Mary Shelley’s letters mentions an allusion to Frankenstein made on the floor of Parliament by Foreign Secretary George Canning, speaking on March 16, 1824, on the subject of proposed ameliorations of slave conditions in the West Indies: “To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength, in the maturity of his physical passion, but in the infancy of his uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance”. But Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes the novel as a critique of empire and racism pointing out that “social engineering should not be based upon pure, theoretical, or natural scientific reason alone”. Frankenstein’s “language of racism the dark side of imperialism understood as social mission- combines with the hysteria of mascullsm into the idiom of sexual reproduction rather than subject-constitution. “ The novel is written from the perspective of a narrator from below.”

From Natural Philosophy to Cyborg:  

Today’s age is the age of genetic engineering, biotechnology, and cloning, the most far reaching industrialization of life. Frankenstein is more relevant than to ever. Developments in were science increasingly critical to society during the Romantic period. As described in Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature; an exhibit mounted in 2002 by National Library of Medicine, Mary Shelley attended public demonstrations of the effect of electricity on animal and human bodies, living and dead. The experiments of Luigi Galvani, an Italian physicist and physician who discovered that he could use electricity to induce muscle contractions, were among the scientific topics discussed in the Geneva villa by Percy Shelley, Byron, and Polidori.

     According to cultural critic Laura Kranzler, Victor’s creation of life and modern sperm banks and artificial wombs show a “masculine desire to claim female (re)productivity” Frankenstein and its, warning about the hubris of science will be with us in the future as science continues to question the borders between life and death, between “viability” and “selective reduction,” between living and life support.

2. The Frankenpheme in Popular Culture: Fiction, Drama, Film, Television

Broadly defined, Frankenpheme demonstrate the extent of the novel’s presence in world cultures, as the encoding of race and class in the 1824 Canning speech in Parliament, in today’s global debates about such things as genetically engineered foods, and of course in fiction and other media. We end with a quick look at some of the thousands of fretellings, parodies, and other selected Frankenpheme as they have appeared in popular fiction, drama, film, and television. 

a.   “The Greatest Horror Story Novel Written”: Frankenstein’s Fictions Peter Haining editor of the indispensable Frankenstein Omnibus, has called Frankenstein “the single greatest horror story novel ever written and the most widely influential in its genre.” In Renaissance Italy, a scientist constructs a mechanical man to ring the hours on a bell in a tall tower, but it turns instead upon its creator.

   American writer W.C.Morrow published “The Surgeon’s Experiment,” in The Argonaut in 1887, in which an experimenter revives a headless corpse by attaching a metal head; there was a large cancellation of subscriptions in response. There is a surprising amount of Frankenstein inspired erotica, especially gay and lesbian oriented. Finally, there are the unclassifiable such as Theodore Leberthon’s “Demons of the Film Colony, a strange reminiscence of an afternoon the Hollywood journalist spent with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, published in Weir Tales in 1932.

b.   Frankenstein on the Stage From his debut on the stage, the Creature has generally been made more horrific, and Victor has been assigned less blame. On the 19^th century stage, the Creature was a composite of frightening makeup and human qualities. He could even appear clownish recalling Shakespeare’s Caliban. A play called The Man in the Moon was very popular in London during 1847; its script was Hamlet with the addition of a new act in which the Creature arises from Hell through a trap door and sings and drinks with the Ghost.     

        In more modern times Frankenstein has been a staple of many stages. Frankenstein and His Bride were performed at a club called Strip City in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. It included songs such as “Oh, What a Beautiful Mourning” and “Ghoul of My Dreams.” The Rocky Horror Show with Richard O’Brien, first performed at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in London in 1973, then revived far too many times and filmed as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, directed by Jim Sharman (1975). In it Brad and Janet have pledged their love but must encounter the rapacious Fran-N-Furter, a transvestite from the planet Transsexual in galaxy Transylvania, who has created a perfect male lover, Rocky Horror, to replace his former lover Eddie. After numerous seductions, Frank-N-Furter is eventually killed when the servants revolt, led by the hunchback Riff Raff. If it were not VH1’s/ Love the 70s series we might all be able to forget Witchiepoo and Frank-N-Furter.

c. Film Adaptations

   Film Adaptation knows this Frankenstein Omnibus, the 1931, James Whale film Frankenstein is the most famous of the all adaptation. It was best on the novel with the addition of some new elements. In it a criminal’s brain is placed into the Monster’s body. The first film version of Frankenstein, however, was produced by Thomas Edison in 1910, a one-reel tinted silent. Frankenstein had the greatest influence. The changes well made to the story have stuck to Shelley’s novel; Victor is called Henry Frankenstein who is represented as noble but a bit mad. An assistance called Fritz is added and also he is made responsible for getting the criminal’s brain. This movie gives happy ending with Henry saved.

    In Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein 1935, the original frame structure is back. It begins with Mary Shelley discussing her novel with Percy and Byron. In this movie the creature is portrait as an innocent monster that kills when provoked.

  The Frankenstein film that billed itself as most true to the novel is Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” starring Branagh as Victor, Robert De Niro as the Creature, and Helena Bonham- Carter as Elizabeth. Though Branagh tries to stick to Mary Shelley’s plot, three-fourths of the way through, the film diverges wildly from the novel and seems most interested in the love affair between victor and Elizabeth.

d. Television Adaptations

Frankenstein has surfaced in hundreds of television adaptations, including Night Gallery, The Addams Family, The Munsters, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Scooby-Doo, Frankenstein Jr. and the Impossible, Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Simpsons, Wishbone, and so on. Notable television Creatures has included Bo Svenson, Randy Quaid, David Warner, and Ian Holm. Perhaps the most authentic television version was Frankenstein: The True Story, with script writing by Christopher Isherwood and acting by James Mason, Jane Seymour, Michael Sarrazin, David McCallum, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Agnes Moorehead, and Tom Baker. 

                              And now, just for fun, I offer a quick survey of a few other film versions of Mary Shelley’s classic:

1.    Frankenstein, Vampiro y Compania (Frankenstein, the Vampire and Company). Mexico, directed by Benito Alazraki. Loosely based on about and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). Frankenstein’s creature and Dracula have it out, which is fitting, since they were born on the same night, Shelley with her Creature, and Polidori with the first vampire story.

2.  I was a Teenage Frankenstein. U.S.A. directed by Herbert L. Strock, 1957. A British doctor descended from Frankenstein visits the United States as a university lecturer and lives in a house with labs and alligators for organ disposal; he uses young men for parts. The creature kills the doctor’s mistress and other on campus.

3.  Blade runner, U.S.A., directed by Ridley Scott, 1982. One of the most successful films of the 1980s and the forerunner of the Terminator, Alien, and the Matrix films, Blade Runner was an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). the film portrays the struggle between bosses and workers as do the themes of Frankenstein.

Conclusion:

Mary Shelley’s creature has been widely accepted in popular culture. The countless forms of creature and innumerable number of films show its popularity. The films made in various cultures represent the monster in different ways. The monster is one but its cultural forms according to its shaping in different culture are different. Some directed represents the monster as an innocent creature harmful when provoked where as some presents the monster as a horrible giant spreading terror.

Sources: Net and Reference Book      Words: 2,556