Monstrosities: Religion, Identity and Belief
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2017, Vol 8, Issue 6
Abstract
In the summer of 1816, a young woman of nineteen eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to Geneva, Switzerland. There they passed the rainy summer evenings with Lord Byron, discussing philosophy and poetry, and experimenting with the telling of ghost stories. The young woman was Mary Shelley. And the “ghost story” she shared with the small Swiss Salon, finished in 1817 though published in 1818, would become the macabre classic, Frankenstein. In her Introduction to the third edition, written on 15 October 1831, she reflected of her struggle to compose an original idea for the imposing Salon. Life appeared to me too common-place an affair as regarded myself. I could not figure to myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever be my lot; but I was not confined to my own identity, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age, than my own sensations (Shelley [1817] 1998a, p. 6). After long hours spent peering into the “blank incapability of invention,” that “dull Nothing” which terrifies any author (Shelley [1817] 1998a, p. 8), she turned her thinking along “the mysterious fears of our nature,” in order to “awaken [a] thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart” (Shelley [1817] 1998a, p. 8). The relevance of Shelley’s Meisterwerk for this special edition reaches beyond the serendipity of its bicentenary. Its provenance and plot raise fundamental questions and problems for each of the topics which organize this special issue: religion, identity, belief and the practices of each. Shelley’s narration of her ghost-story’s origins reflects an instability within rigidity—a form-of-life too snug for the constellation of sentiments brewing in and all about her. This instability within the rigidities of form-of-life exemplified fundamental fissures in a nineteenth-century western imaginary along the axes of subject location: religion, identity, belief, and their practices. In her Introduction, the instability and the rigidity receive similes of attribution: “myself,” “my own identity,” “I,” “own,” “Life.” It was within this form-of-life which both produced the point of self-reflection and the desire to escape from it. The affective quality of an “awakening thrilling horror” was necessary in order to shock the latent instability from within the inherited rigid formations, loosing itself into fresh possibilities of being. And yet, as Victor Frankenstein would painfully discover, Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. The sun might shine, or the clouds might lower: but nothing could appear to me as it had done the day before (Shelley [1817] 1998b, p. 197).
Authors and Affiliations
Douglas J. Davies and Michael J. Thate
Keywords
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- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8060102
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