Monstrosity In Barbara Claire Freeman's Frankenstein

958 Words4 Pages
Barbara Claire Freeman's Frankenstein With Kant: A theory of Monstrosity or the Monstrosity of Theory1 critique's on Kant's theory on sublimation and monstrosity. She manifests a contrast between Kant's emphasis on the sublime which stands for the aesthetics and “boundlessness of an object”, and Frankenstein's monster which represent the horror and “catastrophe” that Kant forbids for a state of sublime. The atmosphere that Mary Shelley conveys the Monster in includes elements of a “sublime landscape” in Kant's theory such as high mountains, lightning flashes, wild storms and so forth as expressed by Freeman. She makes the distinction of a beautiful metaphor while claiming “Nature's sublime and dazzling lightning flash destroys the beautiful and oak and in so doing foretells the future's shape: the lightning destroys the tree as the monster will destroy Victor and his family”. Frankenstein is a time-enduring novel including a criticism of visual aesthetics as…show more content…
5 For Cottom, the creation is the result of one man's ambitions but also a symptom of the broader impulse to represent or create within a language or medium that can never accommodate its referent. Frankenstein’s monster images the monstrous nature of representation... The size of the monster magnifies a faulty relationship between the inside and the outside of his body as well as a lack of harmony on the surface of his body. His features are related to each other by a contiguity without any substantial ground, for they either contrast too much or too little and are not even distinguishable as external features from the muscles and arteries that also appear on the

    More about Monstrosity In Barbara Claire Freeman's Frankenstein

      Open Document