In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the Creature in itself is not what is the most terrifying. Indeed, in her dream and in the novel afterwards, if Doctor Frankenstein is afraid at the sight of his creature, it is also its coming to life which creates fear: how can an amount of bones, skin, muscles- a dead body- actually ' come to life'. Does it have a soul or at least, a conscience of itself? The very question, here, is: where does life come from? This must be the essential questioning of mankind. Even stronger than our wish to know what comes after life, is our curiosity about where we come from. We want to know where we come from, where conscience appears, and where it all starts. The fear of what we see plays a part in fantastic literature, but it is not the main factor: the unknown has a much greater power. As a matter of fact, it creates a terror which is rather felt than directly perceived by sight or otherwise. Of course, our five senses participate in this perception of fear but we can only catch a glimpse at the unknown, otherwise it would be called horror.
[...] We must also notice that Mary Shelley's statement “What terrified me will terrify others” was made in the preface to Frankenstein and deals with the fact that the idea of the story came to her mind after a dreadful dream at night. She also explains the importance of dreams in general: her writings, when she was a young girl, were mere imitations but her dreams were “refuges” and “dearest pleasures”. If she wrote imitations, it was because she had models of fantastic stories, where “soon a gate swung back, a step was heard, the door of the chamber opened, [ ] the shape was lost the shadow of a castle's walls”. [...]
[...] Halpyn Fraser chooses his fate, he takes the lane in the forest which will bring him death and he seems to know it, however, his curiosity prevails like that of Mr Knoppert. And we, too, hope that he will take this path because the other one, which is quite reassuring, has not interest for us. We are curious to see what is at the end of the obscure path, even if this is death. This impulsive need to know is what brings fear once we have a glance at the answer. [...]
[...] We are terrified by what is not rational because it doesn't belong to our world and suggests the existence of something beyond. As a matter of fact, Mary Shelley's statement in the preface to Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus finds its explanation in the fact that fear is common to mankind and can thus be recreated for all in the expression of what terrifies us most: the unknown. Prometheus in the full title of Shelley's novel had been punished for stealing fire from the gods: maybe we aren't afraid of what we could discover beyond rationality but rather of the consequences of this potential discovery. [...]
[...] Why does Mary Shelley state that, in a word, fear as a common origin? Certainly because it results from our education and above all as education is a cultural fact and thus can't be considered as universal from our natural fear of what is unknown, unseen and misunderstood. If our nature has so much to do with our feelings and especially our feeling of fear, it has to do with the fact that it involves our senses, the five of them. [...]
[...] When Mary Shelley writes that “what terrified [her] will terrify others”, we must not forget that it is because of her writing skills and not only because of the story that she made of her novel an unforgettable one. To explain this importance of the production in fantastic stories, we will take the example of Lovecraft's The Festival. We are not really afraid when reading it: the characters are seen from the outside and seldom can we enter the protagonist's mind. [...]
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