Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: re-conceptualizing the politics of recognition Public Deposited
- Last Modified
- March 21, 2019
- Creator
-
Knight, Amber
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Political Science
- Abstract
- Patchen Markell critiques the political pursuit of recognition in the book Bound by Recognition. In this thesis, I respond directly to Markell's critique in order to rethink, rather than abandon, the political pursuit of recognition through a textual interpretation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I read Frankenstein as an exemplary tale of the struggle for identity recognition, wherein Victor Frankenstein's Creature-- his famous Monster-- attempts to un-monster himself by demanding that others recognize his positively affirmed self-identity as a kind and feeling friend. Ultimately, the tragedy of Frankenstein is that the Creature cannot see himself as anything other than a monster--he is never afforded the recognition he desperately desires. Contra Markell, however, I argue that the Creature's pursuit of recognition fails because he cannot single-handedly overcome the asymmetrical power relations that underlie the social construction of identity, and that are reinforced through the construction of his identity as monster.
- Date of publication
- August 2009
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Advisor
- Lienesch, Michael
- Language
- Access
- Open access
- Parents:
This work has no parents.
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