hey! i saw your 'studies' tag and was curious: what are you focusing on in your studies & in your thesis? :)
Hey! I hope you don’t mind my publishing this, but this is about the third time I’ve been ask that question this week so I’d really love to just talk about it for a bit if people really are curious at all to know!! I’m enrolled in my thesis course now, so I’m just about to finish my master’s studies in American & English literature!! The plan is to go onto my PhD next and that is a little terrifying but mostly exciting as all heck!!!
I’m writing my thesis on the Romantic tradition of sympathy and its function in Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like all the great thinkers of her century, Mary Wollstonecraft, her mother, was neck-deep in the 18th century ethical dilemma of moral sentiments. It’s a bit hard to explain quickly (or without boring people to death), but the concept of sympathy was deeply radical to the Romantics. It was borne out of social revolt, out of the cry for revolution, and the abolition of sociopolitical infrastructures (slavery, monarchies, patriarchy, etc) which generated suffering. Like the 18th century concept of the Sublime, though, Sympathy was a force of nature. It wasn’t pity, it wasn’t a swell of emotion, it was an experience that rattled the subject to their core. It was a direct challenge to power structures: what does it mean to sympathize with women, with slaves, with the disabled, with the socially disenfranchised? How can one sympathize with civilization’s victims and not inevitably seek to burn civilization to the ground and begin anew? These schools of thought inspired a schism in enthics between thinkers like Burke and thinkers like Paine, Wollstonecraft, and Godwin. When you consider the historical context of these questions, though, this shit gets fuckin’ crazy!! These conversations were at play when France’s revolution converted to Terror!! The abandonment of any sovereignty for civilization sent the heads of aristocrats rolling off their necks!! the stakes were high!!
Then Mary Bombshell Shelley enters the scene. She writes Frankenstein, right, and that shit wasn’t just a passing fancy she came up with on a vacation with her husband and a few friends. The novella demanded endless thought and tireless work. But when we see how often Shelley invokes the word ‘sympathy’, when we examine the three-narrative structure of the text, her novella basically reads like the Inception of Moral Sentiments. We have characters vying for sympathy, we have sympathies within sympathies, we have compassion as the instrument by which ethical frameworks, narratives, and voices are enacted, allowed, and disrupted. Mary Wollstonecraft was literally called a whore and a parasite for asking: what if we sympathized with women? What if we re-framed our concepts of the Natural in such a way that gender inequality is seen as a fracture from The Order of Things and not a preservation of it? Then her daughter bursts into the scene and cranks that shit up to a hundred with a monster!!!
….okay, I’m losing my head a bit here. This stuff gets me going. When I get to a PhD level, I really want to focus on Gothic Horror as a literary tradition. I think horror is and has always been the cite of the most profound, most problematic societal anxieties- it’s why the horrific unconditionally involves the disenfranchised in one form or another. We see it in horror films today, we see it in Blade Runner and Silence of the Lambs just as much as we see it in Dracula, Dorian Gray, and Jane Eyre. So, um … long story short that’s what I wanna focus on as far as studies go!!
