New Boots

            On Monday morning during yoga it began to snow and I began to worry about it becoming slippery for my ride to Romantic Literature class, but it had stopped by the time I started song practice and so the road was clear when I headed out.

            What was left of the snow banks after the weekend rain had turned to long grey dead tuskless narwhals of ice.

            I was ten minutes early for class.

            I asked Professor Weisman if there was some official way of determining if books are scholarly. She said that with online articles there are links to follow if they have been refereed, but with books the best way to know is if they've been published by a university press. If it's not a university press but a major publisher like McClelland and Stewart it's probably still all right.

            Someone asked her if we have to read Thomas DeQuincey’s “The English Mail Coach” and she confirmed that. I commented that “The English Mail Coach” is the best prose of the course. The professor said that if I like that I should read De Quincey's "Suspiria de Profundis". That’s in my book as well.

            We began our study of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s part of the dark side of Romanticism like Coleridge’s "Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in which the imagination comes back to haunt you. Mary Shelley heard Coleridge read "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in her home when she was a child.

            Years later when she and Percy Shelley were visiting Lord Byron in Italy a ghost story writing contest was proposed. Mary finished hers first after being inspired by a nightmare about the dead being brought to life by lightning.

            Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is considered by many to have been the first feminist. Her father, the radical philosopher and novelist William Godwin, who wrote Inquiry Concerning Political Justice believed in the perfectibility of mankind. Victor Frankenstein wants to perfect life.

            Wollstonecraft died eleven days after giving birth to Mary. After growing up without a mother she wrote a novel about the motherless child that is Frankenstein’s monster.

            Percey Shelley was a great admirer of Mary’s father and he used to visit Godwin’s home to worship at his feet. He met Mary there when she returned from school at the age of 16. She was not only beautiful and the daughter of his hero, but she was also brilliant and well educated. Even though Percy was married, he and Mary eloped. A few years later, Percy’s wife, pregnant with the child of her lover, drowned herself at the age of twenty. This freed up Percy to wed Mary Godwin.

            Percy had access to some of his family’s money but he often generously paid off the debts of his friends, which put him in debt. On the run from creditors he went to the continent where he joined a community of British ex-patriots that moved around and included Lord Byron. When in Italy they were called “The Pisan Circle” and they were in Geneva when Mary wrote Frankenstein.

            In the novel she refracts difficult questions of Romanticism.

            We have to be careful about biographical reductionism. Wordsworth created a character of Wordsworth and Colridge created a character of Coleridge.

            There’s an afterlife of Frankenstein. Last year there was a worldwide celebration of the novel’s bicentenary and Professor Weisman was part of a conference at U of T. Everyone was given masks that were rendered of the monster and the organizers expected the audience to put on the masks for a group photo. She said it was horrible.

            The image of Frankenstein’s monster has captured the public since it was created and there is no slacking off.

            She asked us to offer our ideas of what Frankenstein is about and there were a wide variety of opinions. I offered two: It’s about perceived ugliness and the reaction to it and it could also be seen as a fable about child abandonment. The professor said all of these takes on the book are true.

            Frankenstein is written in an epistolary form, which is in the form of letters.

            The arctic explorer Robert Walton is the compositor of Frankenstein while his sister to whom he is writing his letters is the controller of the narrative. The story of Victor Frankenstein and his creature is contained within these letters. The letters remembered by Frankenstein are also contained in these letters.

            Robert Walton dreams of the great accomplishment of traversing the Arctic to arrive at the magnetic north pole, of which his sister disapproves. Walton is a failed poet who wants some kind of glory and greatness. Walton is a foil to Victor Frankenstein. Both are the embodiment of the Romantic longing of achieving the sublime but also for achieving fulfillment through individualized greatness which lets loose monstrous knowledge.

            Coleridge runs from his own imagination. The quest for knowledge goes awry and one spooks oneself.

            Walton is caught in the ice when he sees the creature and later rescues Victor. Walton has to turn back against the advice of Victor, but in doing so saves the lives of his crew. Victor takes no such responsible action.

            Frankenstein is of the genre of Gothic Fiction, which is co-extensive with Romanticism. Most gothic fiction includes mystery, horror and the supernatural.  Most of the landscapes are desolate or wild with ruined castles, winding staircases and dungeons. It updates medieval romance tropes with protagonists in danger from evil tyrants. There's a lot of bad, cheaply thrilling gothic literature because it’s hard to do well and easy to parody.

            Romanticism was a rebellion against the neoclassical obsession with manners and rectitude. Once the decorum is loosened it is not surprising that some of this release would be gothic. The gothic is a process of the author’s own mind.

            In the 19^th Century higher learning, science and knowledge were the preserve of men. There were no female professors.

            Victor Frankenstein has lots of knowledge. He was born with a great love of science and natural wonders. He dreams of finding the principle of life and then to use it to create life. He’s not interested in flesh and blood engagements. He wants the source. His imagination is too exalted to settle for the simple. Victor wanted to create a new species that would bless him as its creator. He also hoped that his achievements in animation of lifeless material would lead to the animation of the dead.

            The professor asked us what is the significance of this passage.

            I wrote that the passage is ironic in light of later events because he immediately gives up on both ideals as soon as he sees his creature in motion. He does not learn how to animate the dead and instead his abandonment of the monster causes it to begin killing Victor’s loved ones.

            Galvanism was a popular scientific idea of the Romantic era. Luigi Galvani had used electricity on dissected animals, causing their muscles to twitch. The idea of animal electricity excited the minds of many writers of the time and caused many to believe it might be possible to restore the dead to life with electricity.

            An important context for Romanticism was the explosion of scientific knowledge that came with the Industrial Revolution. The dark side of Romanticism was fuelled by the worry that the demystification of science and the natural world would render nature less majestic. The question was: how far can science go?

            Victor is interested in alchemy, which is the pseudo-science of transforming one thing into another via instruments such as the philosopher’s stone. He wants to exchange greatness for valueless science. Victor has a big ego. His approach to science is secretive. He does not want to share. Being secretive is contrary to science. The scientific ethic is to share knowledge and not to do rogue experiments. It ties in with the Romantic ideals of egality, fraternity and democracy.

            Victor circumvents the maternal but when he refuses to be father or mother to his creation it becomes frightened and then angry.

            The creature learns culture from the De Laceys but even these apparently loving people turn out to be a sham.

            The creature is the other.

            Percy Shelley defines the great principal of love as going out of one’s own nature.

            The De Laceys themselves are secluded.

            Victor acquires knowledge in secret while the creature gains knowledge that he cannot share. It teaches him his own seclusion.

            Pay attention to what the creature learns and the relation between knowledge, solace, responsibility and Victor’s responsibility. Several people die because of Victor’s culpability. His little brother is murdered; Justine is wrongly hanged for William’s murder. Victor does not come forward because of his guilt.

            After class I had a little over thirty minutes before Professor Weisman’s office hour and so I decided to ride down to Staples to buy a can of air. As I rode south on Queen’s Park there was a squall and the sun was shining at the same time.

            Lately at Staples there have been greeters just inside the store when I’ve walked in. A woman with a tablet hanging like a purse from a strap over her opposite shoulder led me to the air. Individual cans were $13 and change before tax and so it made sense to just buy the pack of four, which was $45.19 after tax and so I think I saved about $10.

            I rode back up to College, west to St George and then north to the Jackman Humanities building. Professor Weisman greeted me when I got to her door and said, “Come on in!” though I was already in. She asked how my creative writing class with Albert Moritz was going. I told her it was interesting but that it’s a lot of work to critique other people’s poems and that I work harder at it than the others in my group. I told her about the student who’d been so offended by my cultural insensitivity on one poem that she couldn’t critique the poem at all. The professor shook her head.

            I told her that in the beginning I’d wanted my essay on Frankenstein to be about child abandonment. She said I could definitely write about that. I added that once I’d started writing I found more meat on the idea of ugliness because I could easily tie it in with Romanticism and how new art forms always have to have elements made beautiful that previous forms would have considered ugly.

            We talked about the various elements of ugliness and beauty presented in Frankenstein. I pointed out that Victor's ideas of beauty seem morbid, such as the portrait of his mother in the agony of grief while kneeling beside her father's coffin and Victor's assessment that Justine in her solemnity as she was about to die was exquisitely beautiful. I declared, "They are a fucked up family!” If I’d thought about it I wouldn’t have said “fucked up” to the professor but she’s from Winnipeg and she was unphazed. “They are a fucked up family!" she agreed and went on to say why the Frankensteins are fucked up.

            I told her about some of the books I’ve been using for research and wondered if they were considered scholarly. She looked up Gretchen Henderson's Ugliness: a Cultural History and saw that it was published by University of Chicago Press and so that was fine. I asked her about Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness and she seemed to know it as she exclaimed, “Absolutely!”

            She warned me not to go overboard with my secondary sources in a ten-page essay.

            She talked about the theory in the 19^th Century that a child was a tabula rasa or blank slate at birth. She said the creature was parented by culture and he read Paradise Lost, which talks about Satan as the hero.

            I sang her the epigraph for Ugliness: a Cultural History, which is a quote from Frank Zappa: “What is the ugliest part of your body? Some say it’s your nose, some say it’s your toes, but I think it’s your mind”. She thought that was great.

            It was a good meeting.

            I stopped at Loblaws on the way home where I bought three bags of black sable grapes. I also splurged $7.99 for strawberry-rhubarb pie.

            When I got home there was mail from OSAP asking me for another document. They wanted the signed declaration and consent form, but I decided to take care of that the next day.

            I went out in the hall to get my bike and hang it up when my upstairs neighbour David came in. He told me he had a pair of boots for me. I went upstairs and he had enough quality shoes to open a store. He said he got them from work. He works at the Portlands operating a crane and other heavy machinery. He said he’s been working there for twenty-three years and they often get items that the employees can take home like a large box of shoes. He offered me several pairs of shoes but I only wanted black and so he gave me a pair of Blondo Dalton waterproof boots. I said I’d try them on and bring them back if they didn’t fit but he said to just give them to someone else if I can’t use them. That’s what he always says when he gives me stuff. He also gave me a three-litre jug of vegetable oil and a bike computer still in the package. It looks like it’s basically a speedometer but I don’t really won’t any more stuff on my bike so maybe I’ll donate it to Bike Pirates.

            David says he’s wanted to retire because he’s put in his full time but his boss asked him to stay on a little longer. I asked what he plans to do when he retires and he says he’ll go back to Ethiopia where he still has farmland.

            I tried on the boots and they fit perfectly. They look pretty good too. Blondo is a Canadian brand.

            That night I had a piece of chicken and a potato with gravy and watched an episode of Rawhide.

            Gil and Rowdy come across the smouldering rubble of a house on the prairie and outside they find a very attractive woman named Jenny. She explains that her parents died of a mysterious illness and she decided that what they had might be contagious and so she burned the cabin down with them in it. She joins the cattle drive until they get to Silver Springs and has no problem working as a drover. Rowdy of course falls in love with her and asks Gil to put in a good word for him. He tells her Rowdy is a good man but she says, “He’s a good boy” and begins to flirt with Gil. The next day Jenny rides off the trail and Dave follows her. He had been overly aggressive with Jenny during a dance the night before and Gil had to cut in to keep Rowdy from rushing in. This time he catches up with Jenny and makes her get off her horse. Dave tries to sexually assault her when a man from behind a tree shoots and kills him. Blake, the man with the rifle approaches Jenny. When they kiss it becomes obvious they are lovers. Two other men, Blake’s brothers Jeb and Kid emerge. After Jenny tells Blake that the drovers will be meeting the paymaster outside of Silver Springs, Blake sends her back to the trail drive. That night while the other men are sleeping, Rowdy is on night herd duty and Jenny comes to see him. She coaxes him off his horse and they begin to kiss. She says, "Let's go over by the trees". While they are kissing by the trees Rowdy gets knocked out from behind. When he wakes up he is taken as a hostage into the drovers’ camp. Blake tells the drovers that they will continue the drive as normal to outside of Silver Springs where they will meet the paymaster and then he, his brothers and Jenny will take the money and be on their way. If anyone tries anything Rowdy and Gil will be killed. On the way Gil talks with Kid and sows the seeds of distrust. He points out that Blake might decide to keep all the money for him and Jenny and leaves his brothers behind. When they get the money Blake wants it put in his saddlebag and they’ll divvy it up later but Kid and Jeb protest. They begin to struggle and while they are distracted that’s Gil’s chance to overpower Blake. The other drovers follow his lead and the brothers are soon captured. Jenny pulls a gun but as Rowdy approaches her she can't bring herself to pull the trigger.

            Jenny was played by Gloria Talbott, who in the 50s was a scream queen in monster movies such as “The Daughter of Dr Jekyll" “I Married a Monster from Outer Space".

            Blake was played by Jack Lord, later to become the star of Hawaii 50.