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Julia V. Douthwaite The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France . Julia V. Douthwaite. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. vii+317.

2014; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 112; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/677199

1545-6951

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska,

Renaissance Literature and Culture

Previous articleNext article FreeJulia V. Douthwaite The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France. Julia V. Douthwaite. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. vii+317.Katarzyna BartoszyńskaKatarzyna BartoszyńskaBilkent University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe relationship between history and literary history is a complex one. Often, the two disciplines are seen as separate, with different aims and distinct approaches and techniques. Simultaneously, however, many would agree that print and visual culture not only reflect but also inflect and shape the events of their times, particularly in our current media-saturated world. But how this works, exactly, is a separate question, one that falls in the interstices of historical and literary studies. Julia Douthwaite’s latest book confronts this problem head-on, examining specific events in the history of the French Revolution, such as the Women’s March on Versailles, or the execution of the King Louis XVI, and illuminating the shifting relationship between the events themselves, their coverage in the press, and their literary representations, both at the time and in the years following. A deft combination of the resources of historical and literary scholarship, the book is an ambitious effort to think about how history is made and the metamorphosis of its cultural and political legacies.Douthwaite focuses on the relatively short period between the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and Robespierre’s execution in 1794, with an eye to the afterlife of these emblematic moments extending through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and even to our own time. Her book, she writes, aspires “to show how fiction, and, to a lesser extent, its allies in the visual arts (book illustration and caricature) helped to make those moments into an indispensable part of French, English, and in some cases, American culture” (2). She describes her work as contributing to “the historical sociology of concept formation” (13), examining how the cultural mediation of various events served to frame them in particular ways and how those framings shifted and evolved over time. Each chapter focuses on a specific event or issue, providing exhaustive contextualization in both journalistic and literary accounts of the time, and sketches out the development of those themes in later works, culminating in a reading of the “revolutionary” content of texts from the later part of the nineteenth century. It is not always clear to what extent Douthwaite is synthesizing prior critical readings as opposed to offering new interpretations; in other words, one is uncertain whether the interpretations yielded by her hybrid literary-historical approach have obvious advantages over prior studies of these texts. But the book’s focus is arguably to demonstrate how history and literary criticism could be more effectively integrated, and in this it is quite successful.Douthwaite’s prose is engaging, and despite the astonishing volume of the material she investigates, her engagement with it resists generalization, offering close readings of intricate details. The discussion of particular scenes in various texts beautifully teases out the multiple valences of meaning at play, connecting them to sociocultural discourses of the time in a mutually informative way. In the second chapter, for instance, she discusses a moment of heightened tension in a novel about an automaton, suggesting that it can be read both in terms of religious superstition and in relation to anxieties about aristocrats ferreting away their jewels, thereby highlighting the multiplicity of meanings of that work as well as the way that literature can be a supple vessel for the simultaneous articulation of a broad constellation of contemporary concerns. At times, one almost wishes for a more sweeping, general account; the depth can be somewhat disorienting. But this is a testament to the author’s admirably staunch commitment to respecting the ambiguities of her material and is partly counterbalanced by Douthwaite’s helpful habit of clearly signposting the steps of the argument in explicit terms.The first chapter examines the Women’s March on Versailles of 1789, illuminating the gender and class dynamics that underpin the vacillating portrayals of the women involved. The coda somewhat surprisingly traces this imagery of assertive female warriors through the nineteenth-century women’s suffrage movement and into the writing of the American novelist L. Frank Baum. Discussing the feminist overtures of Baum’s regular newspaper column, “Our Landlady,” which ran from 1890 to 1891, Douthwaite ponders why he chose to cast female insurrection in farcical terms in his Marvelous Land of Oz of 1904. Her conclusion, “that the author mocked female politicos quite simply because they were good game” (57), may seem weak to some, but I found it refreshingly honest; a perceptive commentary on the vagaries of human nature and the dangers of overly myopic historical reading.The second chapter centers around the titular Frankenstein of 1790, Douthwaite’s astonishing discovery of a novella by François-Félix Nogaret about an inventor named Frankenstein (or rather, Wak-wik-vauk-on-son-frankénsteïn) and a machine-man that he builds. Unraveling the text’s multiple layers of signification, she begins by discussing debates of the time concerning new laws related to the rights of inventors and discourses surrounding automata. Although one might expect some overlap with Douthwaite’s previous book, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (2002), given that text’s focus on ideas about the perfectibility of man that circulated in revolutionary times, few of those arguments are revisited here. But it is in no way a flaw of the book to have left this pleasurable exercise for the reader. Moving from Nogaret’s story to Mary Shelley’s by way of Condorcet, Doppet, and E. T. A. Hoffman, the chapter concludes with a regrettably brief consideration of how the differences between Nogaret and Shelley’s texts can help us unpack the process of modernity’s rise, gesturing toward a promising avenue for future research.The third chapter considers two different phases of the representation of Louis XVI: after his failed attempt at escape in 1791, and after his execution in 1793. Douthwaite underlines a particularly interesting shift after Varennes, as various people took the liberty of appropriating the king’s voice to serve their own purposes. Discussing the way the king was increasingly represented as a swine, she describes the rather macabre practice of memorializing the revolution with a banquet whose centerpiece was a pig’s head (over time, this was replaced with a calf’s head). The reader is rewarded with the tidbit that “when French statesmen—such as former presidents Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Jacques Chirac, both of whom made a point of it—mention their penchant for calf’s head, it is not just an allusion to their earthy tastes or fondness for regional cooking (le terroir) but also refers to their staunch commitment to republican values inherited from the Revolution” (120). Examining accounts of the king’s death and final words, she traces their corresponding legacies, arguing that the diverse images of mourning disseminated in the aftermath defy clear-cut interpretation.The final chapter strives to understand what it was like to be alive during the Terror by examining newspaper accounts day by day. Treating the Terror as both a set of state-sponsored actions and policy decisions and as an aesthetic concept that created and fostered a certain mood in the general public, Douthwaite provides close readings of journalistic accounts, noting how they combine reportage, polemic, and melodrama. She then shifts to examinations of literary and biographical works, focusing on representations of Robespierre and emerging portrayals of the criminal mind, concluding with a reading of two later nineteenth-century works on the Terror, Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881).The conclusion briefly discusses the book’s methodology, particularly the choice to present the material in concentric circles blossoming into the present. As Douthwaite explains, the book is meant not only to present her interpretations but also to model a process of interpretation, “to provide readers with tools to develop their own skills for revolutionary reading so that they might identify other analogies going forward” (228). Indeed, one of the pleasures of the book is the way that it humanizes historical study. Wry asides on the realities of archival work lend a wonderful warmth to the text—“Nogaret’s Miroir is the only book I know that tells readers to rip out its pages and give them away. Perhaps that is why there are so few copies in existence today” (82)—and provide intriguing insight into the process of historical research. Occasional references to recent works demonstrate both the pervasiveness of the tropes discussed and the applicability of her approach to material from any time period. She offers, in closing, a few more examples from very recent history, drawing on contemporary fiction and film as well as advertising, and briefly discussing documentary imagery of the Arab Spring of 2011. The recent launch of the French Revolution Digital Archive (http://frda.stanford.edu/), a partnership between Stanford and the Bibliothèque national de France, allows readers to explore some of the material discussed in the text on their own, and current events in Ukraine demonstrate that, as Douthwaite puts it, that “the revolutionary spirit is still going strong” (238). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 112, Number 2November 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/677199 Views: 230Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.