During my time as an undergraduate at Lebanon Valley College, I took an independent study on early Gothic literature. Throughout this course, I was continually confronted with prejudices against the Gothic as being incapable of offering any academic merit. This was particularly the case during the time in which the works were written—having been seen as terrorist writing meant to simply excite the senses rather than communicate any high intellectual notions. Yet, even in scholarship written in the past decade, I came across several scholars who maintained these beliefs—perhaps not as blatantly, but they were apparent nonetheless. One of the more disruptive ways that this prejudice presented itself was through the further categorization of the Gothic into categories of male and female. The male Gothic was built up around The Monk, while the female Gothic was founded based on The Mysteries of Udolpho. In my final paper, I explored several Gothic works from the Romantic period, including these two, in order to break down the categories of male and female Gothic and prove once and for all that these categories hinder our ability to understand the complexities of the Gothic genre. So, when we first formulated this Woodchipper experiment around Gothic works, I was extremely excited! First and foremost, my goal was to use Woodchipper to prove that my thesis was correct.

The first run that I would like to highlight uses Udolpho and The Monk. In this run, we can see divergences between the two texts. One obvious point where Udolpho breaks away from The Monk is with the category of nature. This makes sense since Udolpho features pages upon pages of sublime descriptions of Emily’s several journeys through mountains and valleys. Udolpho also pulls more strongly toward the “Sentiment” category featuring the words “mind,” “heart,” “tears,” “grief,” and “seemed.” This, once again, is to be expected since Udolpho is the primary female Gothic text from which the ideas of sentiment and suspicion (“seemed”) arise as key facets of the genre. The Monk holds back from this, sharing a stronger pull with Udolpho toward “felt,” “made,” “conduct,” received,” and “heart.” Although my group has generally agreed that this category is indeterminable, some of these words concern actions and subjectivity—“felt,” “received,” and “heart.” Since the Gothic genre in general has been associated with interiority and subjectivity, we can perhaps see this category as picking up on these characteristics.

The next run that I would like to highlight features two female authors. I was particularly pleased with this run since it showed a clear divergence between Udolpho and Frankenstein. Naturally, I would suppose these two texts to be somewhat opposed to each other since Udolpho features no true supernatural element (a typical characteristic of female Gothic), while Frankenstein clearly has an unnatural being—a “monster”—as one of its main protagonists (a typical characteristic of male Gothic). I definitely felt like Woodchipper was behind my conclusion that the categories of male and female Gothic fail to live up to their names when analyzed closely. Although the texts do align in some areas, the clear pull toward “Spiritual” for Frankenstein and the clear pulls toward “Indeterminable/Subjectivity(?)” and “Sentiment” for Udolpho reaffirms the tendency of female texts to work against a clear-cut categorization of female Gothic.

 

The third run that I am presenting here featured three Romantic Gothic works by male authors: The Monk, The Vampyre, and Caleb Williams. Although the general splash pattern appears to be similar between The Monk and Caleb Williams (The Vampyre was way too short to get any definitive pattern), each work demonstrates a stronger pull than the other in one of the two main directions. Caleb Williams pulls stronger toward “man,” “crime,” “murder,” “justice,” and “innocent” (“Crime”) than The Monk. Considering the content of Caleb Williams, this makes sense. Although male Gothic, Ambrosio’s greatest crime in The Monk is rape, not murder. On the other hand, The Monk pulls more strongly toward our “Indeterminable” category, though Caleb Williams does have an outlier the furthest toward this category. However, overall, Woodchipper still notes a divergence between texts within the male Gothic, just like it did within the female Gothic.

In order to better see how the male and female authors align with one another, I decided to use the four primary male/female Gothic texts that I have been focusing on in the same run. As we can see, the patterns appear to be relatively in line with one another with only a few outliers. For me, I saw this as proof of the inability for the male/female Gothic distinction to hold up when texts are examined. All four texts show a strong pull toward “man,” “life,” “nature,” “character,” and “mind” which could be called the “Sublime Reflection” topic and could easily be associated with the Gothic’s concern with interiority. A second strong pull comes from the topic “make,” “give,” “leave,” “time,” and “hope.” This topic is another indeterminable category. Yet, one could perhaps associate this with subjectivity and interiority as well, since the word “I” can feasibly stand in front of all of these words except for time. The passages that follow this trajectory somewhat lend themselves to this conclusion featuring moments of resolve by the characters in which they express their steadfastness in their decisions (ex. “Leave me! Your entreaties are in vain!” [The Monk] and “I have given a solemn promise . . . to observe a solemn injuction” [Udolpho]). In any case, the alignment of these texts helps to reaffirm my premise that the male Gothic and female Gothic are unstable categories that fall apart upon close examination.

Overall, I would claim that Woodchipper was able to reaffirm my statement that strategies used to delineate between the male and female Gothic do not uphold themselves when placed under scrutiny. Although there were many problems faced when encountering Woodchipper, such as the inability to look under clusters of nodes and the inability to decide which topics pop up during runs, I was still able to provide some tentative evidence for my initial claim. While there is much room in my conclusion for debate, I found the results from Woodchipper to be very helpful. With further study, I believe that Woodchipper could be used to disprove without a doubt the fallibility of the categories of male and female Gothic.

How revolutionary is the revolution in The Matrix? It would seem not very. According to the end of the film, Neo intends to reenter the matrix, teaching the people there to break free of the rules and boundaries of the world in which they live. However, the possibility of completely freeing everyone from the matrix and of taking down the big bad AI seems to be impossible. Well, let me rephrase that. It is not impossible. However, it would most likely result in the deaths of millions of people. In fact, Morpheus himself alludes to this fact when he apologizes to Neo for pulling him from the Matrix, stating that he has a rule wherein he normally does not release people over a certain age from the matrix since it gives too great a shock to their system. Since we can assume that Neo is in his late twenties, perhaps early thirties in this film, the age limit on who can be saved seems to be relatively low. If he directly attacked the matrix, he would risk killing millions. So, which is better—leaving people in the matrix, living false, but probably relatively contented lives, or releasing them into a cold, harsh world with no sunlight and most likely not enough resources to support them? The Matrix, while alluding to the presence of a reality, does not really make that reality a viable option for the majority of humanity. If they are freed, people will just be substituting one “prison” for another. This “revolution” seems to be doomed from the start.

One of the most curious aspects of our “troubled” view of technology is the multiplicity of ways in which we choose to deal with our concerns. Most obviously in cinema, we see films such as Terminator in which a cyborg that looks exactly like a human tyrannizes Sarah Connor and murders people left and right. The Terminator, of course, represents the future of technology where humans are on the run from their own creations. Our feelings toward technology are ones of regret. We crossed a line somewhere along the way and inadvertently heralded in our own destruction. On the other side of the coin, we see films such as Blade Runner where replicants that look, feel, and bleed just like other humans are enslaved by humans and hunted down when they go rogue. Rick Deckard ultimately comes to the conclusion that some replicants, (ex. Rachael) are worth saving. We are also left wondering whether or not Deckard himself is a replicant. Why this great disparity between points of view? In one instance, we see ourselves making technology the Other. It is something that must be contained and conquered in order for us to stay on top. It threatens to take us over. On the other hand, we see technology become abjected—the replicants are both human and not human—making us wonder: what does it mean to be human? The replicants are a threat to society, but we are meant to see this perspective as unjust. We feel pity for Roy Batty when he communicates the fate of his existence as a living, breathing entity that can think, feel, and experience life, but who was enslaved and asked to do terrible things. Was it merely the fact of his creation that made him inhuman? Ultimately these stories become reflexive, causing us to look back at ourselves and how we define ourselves as humans and how we define technology.

Frankenstein contains aspects of both of these types of films. This book is not simply a horror story warning people about the dangers of technological advancements, it is a reflection on the way we define monstrosity. Although Victor believes his creation to be a daemon from the instance he sees its eye move, he is making a definitive claim based on the process by which he brought the monster into being and his physical appearance. It is not the wretch that is implicitly monstrous, it is the actions of Victor who irresponsibly pieced him together, brought him to life, and abandoned him, failing to take responsibility for his actions, that are monstrous. In this way, the monster represents Frankenstein’s abject fears. The daemon embodies what he sees to be himself and the work of his own hands and what he clearly wants to see as something that is definitively Other, not him that he can conquer. The wretch necessarily becomes a monster because, for Frankenstein; the creature embodies his own ties to monstrosity and must be conquered. Thus, he labels the creature based on his own need to make the wretch his Other.

When Justine describes the murderer of William, she labels him a “monster” and “the devil himself” (66). In this, she is not referring to a man with a horrible deformity; rather she is basing these judgments on the action committed. The wretch himself only becomes truly monstrous once he has committed deeds that go against the grain of humanity. When the wretch realizes that Frankenstein will not make him a companion, he gives himself over to revenge much like any human would when faced with such circumstances. At the end of the tale, he describes his monstrous actions as a choice: “Evil thenceforth became my good. Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly chosen” (188). We see from his narrative that the wretch is initially gentle. He does not even kill animals for food until provoked by Frankenstein’s insensitivity and refusal to understand. Victor constantly runs away from the thing he has created because it is a reminder of his own monstrous deeds in creating an ugly being unfit for society. The wretch has high aspirations, longing to abide by the laws of virtue, but he is denied the ability to overcome his label as a monster due to his unconformity. Appearance prevents his becoming like Rachael and condemns him to act like the Terminator.

As a result, Frankenstein exposes two aspects of how we term monstrosity: 1) a perversion, physical nonconformity and 2) a decision to engage in actions that go against the grain of appropriate societal behavior, active nonconformity. Haunted by the first, the wretch is forced to engage in the latter. This, in turn, causes us to reflect back on the man who made the monster and recognize his own participation in monstrous behavior in abandoning his creation and running away from his responsibility until no one is left but Ernest. We feel sympathy for Frankenstein’s monster because he was abandoned and left to his own devices. He tried to be good, but was met with repulsion by society. The deeds he commits are clearly terrible, but they can be seen also as a cry for help from one who has been denied the ability to demonstrate his ability to function appropriately within society, and thereby save himself from being deemed a monster.