Ellen Moers "Female Gothic: The Monster's Mother" (1974)
** Homework Questions **
What is Moers's central argument?
460:
What is the Gothic? What is the Female Gothic?
461:
Explain: "At the time when literary Gothic was
born, religious fears were on the wane, giving way to that
vague paranoia of the modern spirit for which Gothic
mechanisms seem to have provided welcome therapy" (461).
462:
What does Moers mean when she says that Frankenstein
is a "birth myth"? What details in the novel contribute
to its status as a birth myth? (See also 470)
Explain the significance, according to Moers, of Mary
Shelley's experiences of motherhood.
463:
Why is the most interesting, powerful, and feminine
aspect of Shelley's novel "the motif of revulsion
against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and
flight surrounding birth and its consequences" (463)?
464-65:
Is it accurate, according to Moers, to say that Shelley
"was not so much an author in her own right as a transparent
medium through which passed the ideas of those around her"
(464-65)? Explain.
465:
How, according to Moers, is Victor Frankenstein different
from "traditional" Romantic overreachers?
467:
How significant, according to Moers, is the dream Shelley
has about her dead baby?
470:
What, according to Moers, is Mary Shelley's ultimate
accomplishment in Frankenstein?
Other Discussion Questions:
461:
What standard plot trajectory does Moers identify in Ann
Radcliffe's writings?
463:
In what ways, according to Moers, was Mary Shelley "a
unique case, in literature and in life" (463).
Where, according to Moers, is Frankenstein "most
interesting, most powerful, and most feminine" (463).
464:
What influences onFrankenstein does Moers
identify?
467-68:
In what ways, according to Moers, are Mary Shelley's
experiences as a woman both important and unusual?
468:
Moers calls the novel "a dramatization of the divided
self" (468). What does that mean?
469:
What, according to Moers, is the cause of what she calls
"the versatility of Mary Shelley's myth" (469)?
