It's funny, I never really thought about how much Frankenstein is about the failure of friendship.
It seems as if it is a book about friendship, and alienation, and how they are somewhat juxtaposed, or that friendship is some sort of remedy to alienation.
But let's look at it, shall we? Justine is the perfect example of the failed friendship. There she is, looking to please the family, looking to do what society wants, and for this she perishes.
What about Victor, creating the monster to keep him company? We can see where that led. And Robert Walton, so excited to be friends with Victor.
It's actually entering into friendship with Victor that is the kiss of death for so many of his companions, and the monster says as much. Leading the reader to conclude that some people were meant to be alone, ultimately.
Why do we only choose to see the good in friendship, anyway? Why don't we see the opportunities for pain, for cruelty, for loss of self? Everyone is so quick to see the good in friendship, and the way only love will end up hurting. I think it's not unlike the way so much psychological analysis points fingers at parents, but not siblings. Think of the siblings as the friends -- they do damage, too.
I see Mary Shelley's novel as an exploration of the dark side, not of the self, but of the friend.
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The loneliness of the friend figure can also be viewed in contrast with the friendless. While it is tragic to suffer as a friend, certainly, it is certainly more poignant to be friendless, no? Think of these passages from Death in Venice:
ReplyDelete"A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man." Huh? What about that?
And what about this tragedy, that of the man alone with a trap forged by both self and society, the man who "must go on wanting what he wanted yesterday"?
The thinking man is perhaps most susceptible to the influence of the landscape...as Mann writes,
"the sun beguiles our attention from things of the intellect to fix it on things of the sense."
Ultimately, both your first two posts, Bailey, can be viewed more productively when we look not only at the tragedy of friendship gone wrong, and not only at the culpability of the landscape, but also at these themes, manifested so beautifully in the works of Mann, Kundera, Dostoevsky and Marquez:
ReplyDelete1. To walk is to live, to think, to breathe. Everyone walks in these books. It is very European to walk -- where are our small-scale American cities, the walkable ones?
2. Everything is a plague. Death is a plague. Love is a plague. Loneliness is a blight on all our houses.
I can't help but agree with your comments, Randomness (if it is okay to use a shortened version of your name) because the way the speaker in "White Nights" converses with the buildings is the ultimate in
ReplyDelete1. importance of landscape
2. loneliness as plague
3. friendship as doomed -- you are better off with a building as your soulmate
But then, Dostoevsky seems to say, with his famous "moment of happiness" passage, that one moment with a true friend, like Nastenka, is worth a lifetime of solitary confinement talking to buildings. Doesn't he?
Let's look at Camus here, at the opening lines of The Stranger:
"Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure."
Here we have all the poignant solitude of Mann's thinking man, he whose thoughts are relatively inarticulate, and the surreal quality of Marquez, where at night women sing and bats feed off your blood.
Camus captures the landscape of solitude best, perhaps.
Speaking of bleeding, I just read Edna O'Brien's
BYRON IN LOVE. Wow -- that's really got a great "buckets of blood" moment, where the doctors are fighting over the cause of Byron's demise, and their answer is "apply the leeches! Bleed him again!"
I also just read Alison Bechdel's
FUN HOME,
where the title refers to a funeral home, and there is much made of the fluid replacement system that goes on there. Reminds me I should reread The Loved One -- Evelyn Waugh is really good.
I agree with both Skippy and Randomness and would just like to add that in a book I just read,
ReplyDeletePRIDE AND PREJUDICE,
you can see the way glib social interaction, of the sophisticated and agile kind, is its own sentence.
I don't know, you guys, it's really in Salinger's masterpiece that we see the role of the landscape, as Bailey wrote in her first post, and then failed friendship, as she reflects here in her post on Shelley's work.
ReplyDeleteEveryone fails Holden except for the landscape. Its predictable shifting, its patterned behavior, is ultimately the only constant Holden can rely on.
Think about it. Central Park as a character...the carousel, the ducks, the fixed location.
ReplyDeleteIn Ethan Frome's world, it's what the people do in the landscape that causes the disruption; there are many ways the landscape, particularly in its pristine snow, is not guilty. That's why I'm not sure I can agree with Bailey when she says that the fault is in the situation; the situation is delightfully fixed, and while complex, essentially predicatable. It's the actions of the individuals in the landscape that is unpredictable and therefore problematic.