Since Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is a parody of the gothic novel, it does not seem just to define it as gothic and evaluate as part of the gothic genre. However, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is clearly of the gothic genre, mirroring many of the characteristics of the novels of Anne Radcliffe, novels that in parody Jane Austen's heroine Catherine reads voraciously.
In his book, Anne Radcliffe and the Conservative Gothic, David Durant points to characteristics of Radcliffe's conservatism that can certainly be applied to Shelley's Frankenstein. For instance, there is the sentimental pattern in which the life of the heroine/hero follows the archetype of the fall from innocence. Having left the safe, hierarchical, reasonable, loving world of the family, the hero of Shelley's novel falls into a chaotic and irrational world of the isolated. Thus, Frankenstein follow the philophically tradition thought in which Victor's romantic ideals disintegrate into the perverse and irrational. And, the irrational is monstrous, not romantically beautiful. Clearly, it is because of his romanticized imagination and emotion, that the villain-hero Victor Frankenstein becomes, himself, the monster rather than his creature.
The terros of Frankenstein are not the spooky passageways and ghosts, but as Durant states, "the winds of change, dissolution, and chaos": ideas as conservative as the "fall from innocence."
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