Amusing, but probably How Not to Do It

I certainly got a chuckle out of Germaine Greer arguing that, yes sirree, Mary Shelley did indeed write Frankenstein.  Granted, I'm somewhat fonder of the novel than Greer is, but I incline towards the position that Frankenstein is a great idea, not a great work of fiction.  (Dracula is in the same boat.) Its primary recommendation for survey courses is that a) it addresses a number of topical issues in b) a relatively short space and c) in a form most students enjoy reading.  But you really can't argue authorship from quality--Homer nods, etcetera etcetera etcetera--and in that sense, Greer reverses her subject's strategy instead of refuting it.  With any luck, someone will drag out Charles Robinson or Donald Reiman to raise the pesky issue of *gasp* the manuscript evidence.  (Those of you with NASSR-L access can just check out the archives, where Robinson and Reiman do their best--and I fall prey to a fit of bad temper.) 

In any event, while I may have blinkers on, I confess that I just don't see Frankenstein's homoeroticism.  Perhaps I should have sent away for the appropriate decoder ring.   There's certainly some highly sentimental language flourishing around Frankenstein's relationship with his buddy Clerval, but nothing approaching the David-and-Jonathanisms--literally--of Jane Porter's The Scottish Chiefs (1810):

    Edwin, who stood near at this rite of generous enthusiasm, softly whispered to Wallace as he turned towards his troops; "But amongst all these brothers, cease not to remember that Edwin was your first.  Ah, my beloved general, what Jonathan was to David I would be to thee!"

   Wallace looked on him with penetrating tenderness, his heart was suddenly wrung by a recollection which the words of Edwin had recalled.  "But thy love, Edwin! passes not the love of woman!"--"But it equals it," replied he; "what has been done for thee, I would do; only love me as David did Jonathan, and I shall be the happiest of the happy."  "Be happy then, my dear boy," answered Wallace, "for all that ever beat in human heart for friend or brother, lives in my heart for thee."  (186)

And various other speeches in like vein, as well as sundry weepings, hugs, and so forth.  Between the lachrymosity and the sentimentality, I was expecting Edwin to be a woman in disguise.  (Since the novel has a woman wandering around in a suit of armor, in good romance fashion, my expectation was not as odd as it might seem at first glance.)

UPDATE: The author responds to Greer, but seems not to have noticed that far from being "continuously in print for nearly two centuries," Frankenstein's publication history in the 19th c. is in fact extremely spotty; for the numbers-crunching, see William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 364-67.   

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

The suggestion that Mary Shelley didn't write Frankenstein isn't worth addressing; the argument from lack of quality is not really any better than the argument from quality. But I did think that Greer's suggestion that the tension in the novel was from the "nameless female dread [...] of gestating a monster" was quite good. Mary Shelley explicitly equates the book to the monster to her child in her 1831 introduction: "And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper." I was going to write about that in detail if the Valve was going to do something about Frankenstein; I suppose that I shouldn't even try to think that anything can now be said about the work that hasn't already been said.

[sharon]

I dunno - if someone's main argument is that book X is 'too good' for author Y to have written it, then pointing out that the book isn't in fact very good seems a reasonable way to undermine the argument without wasting too much time over it. And it's been a while since Germaine gave me this much entertainment.

[Anthony]

i think that frankenstien is one of the great novels of corperality, adn the problem is that most texts that deal with the implications of the flesh, tend to be claimed by queer theroists, dracula as well as fact.

[Susan Tyler Hitchcock]

If Lauritsen or anyone else wants homoeroticism Frankenstein-style, he should get out his copy (or DVD or video) of Isherwood and Bachardy's FRANKENSTEIN: THE TRUE STORY -- so titled much to the authors' chagrin. Now that's the tale of the monster made by man in man's own idealistic image...until fickle man scorns his beautiful monster, who grows ugly in return. I comment on this and many other Frankensteins in my forthcoming book, FRANKENSTEIN: A CULTURAL HISTORY, due out from Norton in October 2007.
-- Susan Tyler Hitchcock

[Sigivald]

I recall reading, in a 300-level English class, a bit of criticism by Gayatri Spivak claiming that Frankenstein was a homoerotic work.

It was the worst piece of tripe (the criticism) I'd ever been forced to read. Bare assertion piled upon bare assertion; an obvious case of creating whatever one searches for.

I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now.