“What is a Monster? (According to Frankenstein)” Peter Brooks

1. “What is a Monster? (According to Frankenstein)”Peter Brooks Prepared by: Dr. Kay Picart

2. Aim: • To discuss Brooks’ various characterizations of monstrosity • To discuss how the monstrous body is often envisaged in film and dance

3. Monstrosity • “The outcome or product of curiousity or epistemophilia pushed to an extreme that results—as in the story of Oedipus—in confusion, blindness, and exile.” (218)

4. Monstrosity--2 • It cannot be located in “any of the taxonomic schemes devised by the human mind to understand and to order nature.” (218)

5. Monstrosity--3 • It is an “excess of signification, a strange byproduct or leftover of the process of making meaning.” (218)

6. Monstrosity--4 • It is an “imaginary being who comes to life in language and, once having done so, cannot be eliminated from language.” (218)

7. Questions: • Are monsters specifically gendered, raced or classed in Frankenstein? • In cinematic depictions of the Frankenstein myth, are monsters raced, gendered or classed?

8. Evolving Replies According to Brooks • A monster is a woman seeking to escape the feminine condition into recognition by the fraternity. (218) • A monster eludes gender definition. (219)

9. Question: • How is the monstrous body represented in comedic horror versions like Young Frankenstein and The Rocky Horror Picture Show?

10. Concluding Remarks: • “In Frankenstein, language is marked by the body, by the process of embodiment. We have not so much a mark on the body as the mark of the body: the capacity of language to create a body, one that in turn calls into question the language that we use to classify and control bodies.” (220) • Question: What implications re. bodily categorization follow from these remarks?