Frankenstein's Dream

This collection offers five outstanding Romanticists focusing on the nightmarish sleep into which Victor Frankenstein falls after seeing his creature take its first breaths in Mary Shelley's original novel of 1818. That dream, the dark side of Frankenstein's glorious daydreams about the future of humanity after his experiment, has been explored by several critics already, mostly on psychoanalytic and feminist grounds. Despite these rich interpretations, though, several dimensions—and some later adaptations—of that dream remain unexplained. These essays address those unresolved issues by dealing with several rarely explored aspects or echoes of Frankenstein's dream: its "abjection" of unresolved and interwoven ideological conflicts; the cultural links it reveals between sentimentality and sadism; the inescapable connection between "creation" and parody; the relationship between patriarchal societies and the fecal ejection of its actual foundations; and the ways in which Frankenstein on film echoes the movements and dissolves between images that overwhelm Victor at his most pre-conscious moment in the novel. Each of these new explorations also relates these parts of the dream to much wider contexts, not only in the novel itself, but in the history of modern Western culture.