Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights as Gothic Novels
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Central Department of English
Abstract
This thesis work is a study of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte from the viewpoint of the use of gothic elements. Even if these novels differ in their subject matters, they resemble in the way they tend to implicate about the gothic traits. Frankenstein presents an act of reviving an already dead body and creating an anarchic as well as horrific situation, and similarly, Wuthering Heights presents an intensified condition of physical torture and mental agony embedded with a mysterious moment of ghostly presence. Frankenstein tends to foster traits of modern gothic; description of the act based on modern laboratory platform experimenting the immortality of the mortal being as an obsession to challenge the natural phenomena. Wuthering Heights, in contrary to Frankenstein, tends to follow the flow of conventional gothic implication presenting major characters' confrontation with ghost, and defiance and violation of the socio-familial orthodoxy.
Even if the contexts are different, both novels reveal the similar traits of gothic, like the double nature of major characters, projection of implication of the feminist gothic, challenge to the socio-cultural phenomena or challenge to the universal truth of death with hypothetical experimentation of science and technology