the creation of a pedagogy for the humanities in mary shelley’s frankenstein; or, the modern Promethean
by eric meljac, west texas a&m university
one of the most remarkable points i find in mary shelley’s frankenstein is when the monster, watching the peasants and their daily lives, stumbles upon books and reads these texts in an effort to become more “human”. .” the monster, a creation of scientific experimentation and not human by birth, seeks to become more human, more acceptable, and more understood. indeed, the questions he asks of himself are fundamental to the core of human self-understanding. she tells her, “my person was hideous and my stature gigantic. what does this mean? who I was? What was I? Where did I come from? What was my destiny? These questions kept repeating themselves, but I couldn’t solve them” (91). The most curious thing for me as I read these lines, and associate them with my position as an English instructor, is that these questions seem to affect university students as they grow, mature, discover, and become functional members of society. in fact, i am particularly amazed at how frankenstein’s monster could become an example for emerging college students who, quite lost in the modern university, might discover themselves and learn about their own humanity through meaningful study of the humanities . the monster, feeling less than human (and honestly he is) turns to the humanities to become a more functional member of European society. his self-education is an attempt to create a self. “who I am?” asks the creature. find some answers in reading the classics of literature. and, while critics question the notion of how well this reading actually humanizes the creature, I think it provides at least one example of how we can talk to our students about becoming educated and informed members of a modern and increasingly liberal society. more global. .
In “Teaching the Monster: Frankenstein and Critical Thinking,” Melissa Bloom Bissonette, drama teacher, discusses how she uses Frankenstein as an educational tool in creating critical thinking . Studying the effect of the frankenstein story on students (referring quite frequently both to the novel itself and to film adaptations of the text), bissonette discusses the natural sympathy students have for the monstrous creation of victor frankenstein. she notes that, “armed with kind-hearted native sympathy, students quickly find parallels in our world” (108). such an observation arouses my interest. obviously, the students connect with the story. It is that connection that I encourage us to explore in this essay. if students can find sympathy for the monster, perhaps they can also learn with and from the monster, and become not only better students, but also students who, in a world where this is constantly declining, are well versed in humanities.
You are reading: What books does the monster read in frankenstein
bissonette’s essay offers interest, but his study does not speak to the whole of my project. his concern is how to complicate students’ readings of frankenstein and overcome simple dichotomies and hasty generalizations. in his experience, students are quick to reduce the novel and the monster to an “this and that” analysis, rather than more complicated and probing analyses. still, his work shows me that the novel can really promote learning for the college student. the complications in the novel reinforce the need for critical thinking and, in my opinion, one can particularly look to what I call the “humanities part” of the novel for a broader human education.
I claim that students can learn to learn from the monster. what does that mean? I try to avoid the vague and the superfluous here. I care about the details and the lessons. in search of its humanity, the creature looks at particular texts, all of which have a keen critical eye. the monster reads milton’s paradise lost, parts of plutarch’s lives and goethe’s sorrows of young werther. while many critics examine the texts in terms of their relationship to different romantic literary movements, I am more concerned with the effects of these texts on the monster itself. What did he learn and how did he experience it? perhaps it is best to use the creature’s own words to show exactly how it learns from these books and how the books affect its hopeful humanity. creation says, “i learned from werter’s imagination despondency and sorrow: but plutarch taught me lofty thoughts; he raised me above the miserable sphere of my own reflections, to admire and love the heroes of past ages ”(91). he continues, “but paradise lost excited different and much deeper emotions” (92). Reading Milton’s masterpiece, the creature realizes his position as part of a creation: “Like Adam, he was apparently not linked by any other existent being; but his state was very different from mine in all other respects. a perfect creature had come out of the hands of god [. . .] but I was miserable, helpless and alone” (92). Now, although the monster is particularly concerned about reading Milton, reading him is not a total loss.
in fact, all of its reading itself manifests a very pertinent lesson for teachers of higher education and beyond, as it is through this reading that the creature realizes its position in the world. Isn’t this what we ask of our students? Putting this question aside for the moment, I’d like to turn to Andrew Burkett’s wonderful essay “Mediating Monstrosity: Media, Information, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein“. In this essay, Burkett mentions that “the themes and structures of the text themselves generate, if not ask for [. . .] analysis, research and application” (583). this is an important observation. if we can teach our students these skills, and if we can use the styles of texts that the creature uses to “humanize themselves,” can we not develop and indeed “create” students who have a better understanding of the humanistic skills necessary to the innovation? critical thinkers? as burkett suggests, “having ‘continued to study and exercise [his] mind’ on paradise lost, the lives of plutarch and werter’s sorrows—not to mention victor’s own diary of his creation: the creature has become a wise and profoundly self-aware subject” (594). such wisdom and self-awareness seems to me to be precisely what we expect of our students. everyone has heard of the demise of the humanities, so I won’t have to address this here; Armed with this knowledge, however, might we not look to Frankenstein as an example of what we can do with literature and the humanities to give students a greater understanding of themselves as human beings, social, political and social? independent subjects in a largely democratic nation and world where self-awareness becomes an essential tool for negotiating an increasingly political climate? I think we can. And besides, I think we should.
Of course, not everyone agrees with my assessment of the humanities lesson in Mary Shelley’s masterpiece. while we disagree on fundamental levels, i admire maureen noelle mclane’s splendid essay “literate species: populations, ‘humanities’ and frankenstein“. For McLane, Shelley’s novel is one of “pedagogical failure” (1959). as she says, the novel exhibits “specifically a failure in the promise of the humanities, in letters as a path to humanization” (959). she continues, “the novel demonstrates, perhaps against itself, that the acquisition of ‘literary refinement’ fails to humanize the problematic body” (959). Rather than the humanities acting as the victor in Shelley’s novel, McLane seems to promote the advent of modern science as the victor. In fact, she mentions what she calls the “trick of the humanities” as a particular danger to Frankenstein’s monster. as she says, “in entertaining humanist fantasies, the monster forgets its bodily and nominally indeterminate condition: the community of letters presupposes a human community, and the humanities presuppose humans. the monster presupposes his potential humanity; in this he succumbs to the trickery of the humanities” (975). For Mclane, the humanities only allow the monster to realize his own marginality. he is a non-being, and by reading the humanities, by what mclane suggests, the monster only marginalizes himself further. In a very deep and difficult study, McLane suggests that Frankenstein is a novel that seems to promote the sciences over the humanities. because, it is through science that the monster gains its being; the humanities only complicate his situation and make him realize that he is in fact not human and, as a creation of science, simply not what he hopes to be.
although i admire mclane’s study, and in many ways can understand his thesis and evidence, i still think the lesson to be learned from the novel is that the humanities can immediately humanize a person who would otherwise , is inundated with a world that excommunicates the individual and forces conformity. Shelley promotes individual thought, and the knowledge of the monster gained from reading basic humanities texts allows him to understand, at least, his position in the world. this is what we expect of our students. Every essay assignment, every plot, is an opportunity to promote individuality and personal development. we insist on this in our classrooms, and our reading of frankenstein can help promote this in our students.
As educators, we value critical thinking. what the monster finds in reading him is precisely that. as the monster says, “[these books] produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings, which sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sank me into the lowest despondency” (91). While I’m sure McLane would argue that despondency shows the failure of the humanities to educate an individual (again, the “humanities ruse”), I would argue that this becomes evidence of completing the human individual. one cannot be completely and constantly affirmed.
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unlike mclane, I think the monster learns to be human. I suggest that this is a product of the study of the humanities. science and technology may represent progress, but the humanities teach how to feel, how to cope, how to experience life, and also how to nurture a compassionate imagination.
Consider, for example, the following lines spoken by Frankenstein’s monster; In these lines I think we get an idea of what the monster really learns when studying humanities:
As I read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar, but at the same time strangely different from the beings I read about and whose conversation I listened to. I sympathized with them and understood them in part, but my mind was not formed; he depended on none and was not related to any. “the path of my departure was free”, and there was no one who lamented my annihilation. (91)
The effects of these lines are, of course, mixed. At the same time there is the experience of education and the emotional trigger of brutal sadness. of course the monster stands alone, almost entirely a scientific creation. such is the mclane trigger; she would argue that the humanities fail the monster because they pity him. still, this is what I see as valuable in the monster’s growth as a thinker, one with a sympathetic imagination. despite this “humanities ruse” I think the monster actually gains a rational, emotional, critical thinking mind, which I think anyone in the humanities would argue is one of the most direct goals of the study of the arts. the monster says, “I read of men concerned with public affairs, ruling or slaughtering his kind. I felt the greatest ardor for virtue arise in me, and the abhorrence for vice, as soon as I understood the meaning of those terms, relative as they were, as I applied them, to pleasure and pain only” (92). it cannot be argued that the monster is not learning human emotion. in fact, he develops a compassionate imagination, a compassionate imagination that gives him knowledge to contemplate the very nature that afflicts him.
His brief (and rather incomplete) humanities course allows the monster to understand his own position in the world, a position he tries to establish by observing the peasants to no avail. After gaining language and reading (which many critics cite as a hole in Shelley’s story, how does he learn to read this creation without a tutorial?), the monster is finally able to decipher the documents that speak of his creation. reminding the reader of the diary he finds in the pocket of what is now his clothes, he says:
I had neglected them at first; but now that I was able to decipher the characters in which they were written, I began to study them diligently. it was your [here he speaks to victor frankenstein] diary of the four months that preceded my creation. [. . .] in them everything that refers to my damn origin is related; all the detail of that series of repugnant circumstances that produced it is put on view; the most minute description of my hateful and loathsome person is given, in a language that paints your own horrors and makes mine indelible. (92-3)
now armed with knowledge, the monster becomes able to colloquially “put the pieces together” of his quasi-humanity and understand his mind and spirit, just as those who study the humanities do by reading wordsworth’s “prelude”, For studying Picasso’s “blue period,” navigating the life histories of saints in search of religion, or any multitude of liberal arts and humanities exams.
once again, armed with this knowledge, the monster says in a short, powerful sentence, “I got sick while reading” (93).
How else but through study could the monster learn to have a gut reaction to the words on a page? this transformation, from pure tactile experience to complex critical thinking, comes as a result of a humanities pedagogy. by learning from books, from the arts, the monster learns enough to detest himself in a completely different way. he sees his spirit, his mind. he learns to appreciate and loathe his creation.
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This is the teaching moment. By bringing this back to the classroom, much like Bissonette does, students can see that through reading these classics, the monster gains ability. mature from pure beast to critical thinker. he passes from the realm of bodily experience to mental configuration. The humanities, such as those exhibited by Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe, give the monster the ability to reflect on its existence in a whole new way, and if we can show our students that these few pages, just four or more, of the work of Shelley reveal how the humanities can transform the mind, we can envision a pedagogy that helps us nurture critical thinking and a compassionate imagination in the minds and spirits of our students. this is how we can create a humanities pedagogy with frankenstein. urging our students to follow the example of the monster will lead them to question their own place in the world, and this is the lesson of the humanities. How students use that knowledge is a lesson for another day, time, and essay, but clearly, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein provides evidence that the humanities are not lost, not a ruse, and certainly essential. for mature intellectual growth.
works cited
bissonette, melissa bloom. “Teaching the Monster: Frankenstein and Critical Thinking”. university literature, vol. 37, no. 3, Summer 2010, pp. 106-20.
burkett, andrew. “Mediating the Monstrosity: Media, Information, and the Frankenstein of Mary Shelley”. studies in romanticism, vol. 51, no. 4, Winter 2012, pgs. 579-605.
mclane, maureen noelle. “Literate Species: Populations, ‘Humanities,’ and Frankenstein“. heh, vol. 63, no. 4, Winter 1996, pp. 959-88.
shelley, mary. frankenstein. dover, 2014.
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