8. ‘in My Youth’s Summer I Did Sing of One/ the Wandering Outlaw of His Own Dark Mind’ (Lord Byron). Examine Representations of Morbidity and/or Alienation in at Least Two Texts Written or Published in This Period.

8. ‘In my youth’s summer I did sing of One/ The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind’ (Lord Byron). Examine representations of morbidity and/or alienation in at least TWO texts written or published in this period. In this essay I intend to use, where appropriate, three definitions of alienation taken from the OED: social alienation- ‘the action of estranging, or a state of estrangement or affection’ functional alienation- ‘Diversion of anything to a different purpose ’ and mental alienation- ‘the withdrawal, loss or derangement of mental facilities; insanity’. The two texts I will be examining are Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Swift was born in a different country and more than a hundred years before Shelley yet they had some similarities. Swift never knew his alleged father, Shelley never knew her mother and both of them openly courted controversy throughout their lives. Swift held rather unusual beliefs for an Anglican minister, for example in a famed letter to Alexander Pope he wrote “I have ever hated all Nations professions and Communityes and all my love is ever towards individuals” (Wooley 606) and in a letter to Esther Johnson dated 23rd July 1711 he seemingly brags of helping to get a man accused of raping a prostitute hanged with what Brean Hammond calls a “flippancy… that borders on the spine chilling” (Hammond 56). Such controversial sentiments as this, not to mention A Modest Proposal, would have made Swift a rather alienated figure outside his close circle of friends. As Hammond has noted, Queen Anne ensuring his effective exile to Ireland started “pushing Swift further away from philosophical traditions and temperamental preferences expressed by his English friends” (ibid 162). Another factor in this was his increasing disillusionment with the literary industry, something I will discuss more fully later on. Shelley’s early years need no chronicling here, it is suffice to say that whilst she was writing Frankenstein in effective exile in Switzerland she too was socially alienated and all but estranged from her father. Thus it is fair to suggest that both these authors could fit my first definition of alienation; Swift’s sanity whilst writing Gulliver 's Travels has also been called into question begetting the aforementioned allusion to mental alienation. I intend to examine if and how these biographical factors embedded themselves into the two works. I will analyse the works in chronological order so that I may more clearly delineate the influences the Augustan mode, Sensibility and Romanticism had on them. So we begin with Gulliver, or more specifically we begin at Gulliver 's end. For as Michael Seidel points out, the:

hero’s homecoming (is) the most foreign and alienating experience of all. Gulliver returns home an exile, as detached from his land and time as the infamous Strudlbruggs or immortals (Seidel 75)

Gulliver’s role as a ‘hero’ is a disputed one, but it is hard to imagine a figure that represents social alienation more than Gulliver upon his return, shunning human company for that of horses. From a narratological standpoint, the reasons for his behaviour are sound enough. In stark contrast to the usual narrative structure of contemporary works of fiction, “Swift’s satire destabilizes the body and then the mind of its central character” so that by the time that Gulliver gets back from the land of the Houyhnhnms he “is not even certain what it is to be human” (Seidel 74). It is perfectly understandable after what he experienced for him to be “uncertain about the material reality around him” (ibid 75). At the end he personifies social alienation to such an extent that the reader wonders if he has in fact become mentally alienated, despite Gulliver in the introduction strongly disputing the notion that his travels are a “mere fiction out of my own brain” (GT 8). This leads us to one of the most contentious points in the critical analysis of Gulliver’s travels, the question of Gulliver’s sanity. It is a point on which I have already touched on briefly, and in the opinion of several critics as well as my own the answer depends on how you view the book as a whole and more specifically whether or not you consider it to be a ‘novel’. For the moment I will continue under the presumption that it is. Michael Seidel has suggested that Swift intended the entire book to be the ravings of a madman, literally Gulliver’s travels, a “hoax consisting of jumbled territorial letters inside the head of a traveller who may now be a lunatic, sojourning in Tribnia, by the natives called Langden” and that the narrative is full of “contradictions and inconsistencies” that Swift “allows Gulliver, contribut(ing) to the readers suspicion that the contractual truth of this fiction is really the delusionary nature of Gulliver’s adventures” (Seidel 79, 81). The caveat of this argument is Swift’s use of Sinon, the man who sold the Trojan horse to the Trojans, as a character reference for Gulliver because:

As Sinon protests his innocence he may well believe, like Gulliver, that his wretchedness supersedes his lie…and it is because Gulliver cannot and could not recognize the implications of the Sinon allusion that is so very powerful (ibid 81) Seidel justifies this analogy by relating it to Swift’s beliefs about the emerging genre of the novel, which can be partly inferred from his blame for the palace fire in Lilliput falling on “a maid of honour, who fell asleep while she was reading a romance” (GT 55). Swift’s satirical methods of narrative in both ‘A Tale of a Tub’ and ‘Gulliver 's Travels’ are traceable to the theory that “madness approached the very condition assumed as necessary for the modern form of the prose memoir or novel: the obsessive self-centredness of the narrator” implying that Gulliver’s total madness throughout is a consequence of his life in England before he left therefore positing his mental alienation as a symbolic parody of the first-person narrative (Seidel 80). I agree with Seidel’s argument to a certain degree, however I do not believe that he follows it to its logical conclusion. It is my opinion that with Gulliver 's Travels Swift wished to parody what has come to be known as the novel with what J. Paul Hunter has called a “negative…paradigm” and what Hammond labels an “anti-novel…ideologically opposed to the set of attitudes and beliefs that was fuelling the development of the genre” (Hunter 56, Hammond 166). He “saw that this new kind of writing was beginning to codify a ‘modern,’ significantly new way of perceiving the world”, took it’s defining traits and satirized them ruthlessly (Hunter 66). This means Swift functionally alienated the still youthful genre he was experimenting with, creating a self-deprecating work of prose fiction that “confounds the readerly satisfactions demanded by plot” (Hammond 192). He does this by constructing Gulliver in a “non-realist” way that lacks “autobiographically based consistency” turning his protagonist into “a satiric mouthpiece”, a symbol “that shifts inconsistently between a range of viewpoints according to satiric need” (ibid 167-8) all the while leading up to the complete mental and social alienation of his lead protagonist. The effect of this functional alienation of fiction into internal, self-aware satire is that it erodes the suspension of disbelief in the reader, preventing them from becoming too absorbed in the plot in a method similar to Bertolt Brecht’s ‘V-effect’. Through this alienation Gulliver 's Travels becomes at its heart symbolic of what Terry Castle refers to as the “corruptness… and degeneration” of the written word which is only ever “a material rendering of something ideal, the pure world of speech” (Castle 383). The corruptness of the written word is a visible theme throughout, the petty legislation of the Lilliputians is the source of most of their conflict; in contrast “the Brobdingnagians, in proportion to their greater magnanimity as a people, denigrate and restrict the influence of the text” and are a more peaceful people because of it (ibid 391). The Houyhnhnms have no method of writing and are the most utopian beings that Gulliver encounter; there is an obvious correlation between illiteracy and innocence in the text. The feeling that the functional alienation of the text can be associated “with unconscious forces, with underlying traumatized modes of perception” adds a further layer of mental isolation to the functional trope, although Swift’s “critique is not always logical; it is impelled by an energy that may remind us of the anxiety dream” and, all things considered, the concept of writing a novel with the sole purpose of parodying novels is a rather twisted one, though Swift’s admitted aim was to ‘vex the world’. (ibid 394). To recap, Gulliver’s obvious social alienation at the end of the novel is the culmination of a satirical narrative that defies contemporary conventions of fiction by making the narrator not so much a character as a satirical mouthpiece whose reliability deteriorates to the point of mental alienation from the reader; this functional alienation of the first person narrative serves to highlight what Swift believed was the morally degenerative effect of reading Romance’s, novels and indeed literature in general. Though the book is seminal in so many ways it seems unfair to categorize it, the use of satire to hint at the depravity of mankind is a distinctly Augustan feature. Frankenstein shares several salient characteristics with Gulliver’s Travels, not least the obvious social alienation endured as the novel progresses by the two main protagonists, Victor and the creature. There is also a strong link between mental and social alienation in the section leading up to and relating the creation of the monster. As Anne Winnet puts it, Victor behaves “as if in anticipation of all the alienations his creatures alienation will cause him to share, he cuts himself off from friends and family for the duration of the project ( Winnet 295). Christopher Nagle submits that “the utter isolation and loss of community” that Victor puts himself through whilst working at Ingolstadt leaves a “sense of profound alienation (that) is best considered a haunting” (Nagle 130). There is certainly a sense of foreboding in this part of the novel, and this can in part be seen as the after-effect of Victor’s rejection of “the suffocated realm of Sensibility” in which he was raised (ibid). The opening stages of Frankenstein are heavily influenced by notions of Sensibility, from Robert Walton’s “desire for the company of a man that can sympathize with me” to the description of Victor’s childhood home (Shelley 8). It is only when he leaves for University that we begin to see the aforementioned sense of mental and social alienation, which is represented by Victor’s rejection of sensibilious affectations. As Mary Poovey points out:

as long as domestic relationships govern an individual’s affections, his or her desire will turn outward as love. But when the individual loses or leaves the regulating influence of relationship with others, imaginative energy always threatens to turn back in on itself to ‘mark’ all external objects as its own” (Poovey 254)

This energy of imagination I will return to later, however the perils of becoming introverted are also strongly stressed in the novel. There is a clear point after Victor’s rejection of Sensibility when he begins to grow obsessed with his perverse desire to create a monster in his own likeness, in the words of Lee Sterrenburg Victor starts to respond “to obscure drives within” (Sterrenburg 152). This internalization of domestic affection and descent into depravity in the novel is Shelley’s way of portraying the dangers of excessive feeling that Sensibility encouraged, leading to “a decisive mutation in the circulation of literary sentiment and feeling” (Nagle 122). A repercussion of this is that “it is no longer of an issue of whether feeling will last, whether it will change; the issue is now what it will change into” so that any:

manifestations of feeling seen as potentially excessive cannot circulate without being infected by a peculiar kind of Gothicism, without feeling itself becoming freighted with monstrosity.” (ibid 123)

So it is that Victor is led through Sensibility by Gothicism and Romanticism to a dysfunctional alienation of reproduction, the novel’s central act. There are homo-erotic allusions in the creation scene which I do not have time to discuss in detail because as Poovey highlights there is “ a veritable catalog of deviance-homosexuality, miscegenation, bestiality, necrophilia” not to mention the undertone of the masturbatory enjoyment that Victor takes in his work all contribute to make that scene a fairly comprehensive list of sexually unacceptable practices in the 19th century. Thus the creature is created by a dysfunctional alienation of reproduction deriving from the pseudo-sexual depravity of Frankenstein’s mental alienation under socially abhorrent conditions and is doomed to never feel another’s affection. The creature personifies alienation which is perhaps one of the major contributing factors to its monstrousness. Another major contributing factor is its physical appearance, so horrible that everyone who beholds is moved to fear or anger; “No sympathy may I ever find” he laments (189). Because of the way that Shelley “realistically details the stages by which the creature is driven to act out its symbolic nature from its point of view, the reader is compelled to identify with its anguish and frustration” (Poovey 259). Thus the only people who ever feel any sympathy for the creature are the meta-narrator Robert Walton, who cannot bear to look at him, and the reader. The implication of this is that the creature’s monstrosity is only ever faced and accepted through the text, as Peter Brooks notes:
Monsterism comes rather to be contextualized; the text remains as an indelible record of the monstrous, an emblem of languages murderous lack of transcendent reference. (Brooks 220)
The mention of languages is a reference to the creature’s eloquent and persuasive ability to speak, however this skill ultimately proves useless in rectifying it’s social alienation. This analogy of Frankenstein could be seen as a refutation of my earlier observation of the depraved connotations of the written word that Swift imbues Gulliver’s Travels with. Whereas in Gulliver literature is represented as a dysfunctional alienation of the purest form of communication, the spoken word, in Frankenstein oral communication becomes irrelevant and the only way that the monster does not undergo complete narratological alienation is through the empathy his story elicits in its written form. In this manner Frankenstein emerges from the constraints of Sensibility and reaches an uneasy alliance between Gothicism and Romanticism in which nature becomes perverted through the egoistic, self-indulging imagination of Victor Frankenstein yet the reader can still identify “most strongly with the product (and the victim) of Frankenstein’s transgression: the objectified imagination, helpless and alone” (Poovey 259). The creature is saved from total alienation through the power of the imagination. In conclusion there are strong links between representations of mental and social alienation in both of these works, due to the necessity of a reliable narrator and a more conventional plot the mental alienation of the characters in Frankenstein is less pronounced than in the case of Lemuel Gulliver. Nonetheless Gulliver has the honour of transcending the normal limitations of a character by guiding the reader through the functionally alienated text that he inhabits towards a greater satirical good. The unspoken condemnation of the written word that Swift expresses in this functional estrangement is trumped however by Shelley’s novel’s central and functionally perverted act of alienation which creates a creature that is alienation personified, an alienation that can only be rescued through the written word.

Bibliography
Bersani, Leo “Sociality and Sexuality” Critical inquiry 26.4 (summer 2000)
Brooks, Peter- ‘Godlike Science/ Unhallowed arts: Language, nature and Monstrosity’ in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel ed. By George Levine. University of California Press, 1979
Castle, Terry-‘A Deconstructionist perspective: Why the Houyhnhnms Don’t write: Swift, Satire, and the fear of the Text’ in Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism: Gulliver 's travels ed. By Christopher Fox: Bedford Books New York 1995
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Hammond, Brean-Jonathan Swift. Irish Academic Press-Dublin 2010
Hunter, J. Paul-‘Gulliver’s travels and the novel’ in The Genres of Gulliver 's Travels ed. Frederik N. Smith: Associated University Presses 1990
Nagle, Christopher C-Sexuality and the culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic era. Palgrave Macmillan New York 2007
Poovey, Mary-‘The Lady and the Monster’ in Frankenstein-A Norton Critical edition ed. J. Paul Hunter. University of Chicago.1996
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Sterrenburg, Lee-‘Mary Shelley’s Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein‘ in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel ed. By George Levine. University of California Press, 1979
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Wooley, David (ed.) The correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D Vol. 2 Frankfurt-On-Main: Peter Lang, 2007

Bibliography: Bersani, Leo “Sociality and Sexuality” Critical inquiry 26.4 (summer 2000) Brooks, Peter- ‘Godlike Science/ Unhallowed arts: Language, nature and Monstrosity’ in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel ed Wedel, T.O-“On the philosophical background of Gulliver’s Travels” Studies in Philogy 23 (1926):434-50 Winnet, Susan- ‘Coming Unstrung’ in Frankenstein-A Norton Critical edition ed Wooley, David (ed.) The correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D Vol. 2 Frankfurt-On-Main: Peter Lang, 2007