When Frankenstein was first published in 1818, many commentators remarked upon its unpolished style, the clear Godwinian influence (already acknowledged in the frontispiece’s dedication), and its disturbing political, ethical, atheistic, and gothic subject matter. An anonymous reviewer for the Edinburgh Magazine classified “the monstrous conceptions” within Frankenstein as “the consequences of the wild and irregular theories of the age,” now ascribed with an “air of reality” because of its connection to “the favourite projects and passions of the times.” Although most critics interpret these “wild and irregular theories” as an oblique reference to voguish sciences — such as electricity, galvanism, Polar expeditions, magnetism, vivisection, and evolutionary theories — the use of “passions” within the reviewer’s framework allows for a gloss on the medical circumstances of Frankenstein’s narrative. Similarly, in his unsigned Preface to the 1818 edition, P. B. Shelley writes that the novel “affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield,” thereby creating intricate links to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conceptions of hysteria, where the term for the medical disorder was used interchangeably with “passions of the mind.” This talk examines how the symptoms of hysteria and its attendant psychoses are displayed by Victor Frankenstein as the story unfolds, thus turning Frankenstein into both a literary and medical confession.

Michelle Witen is a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of Basel’s Department of English. Her monograph, James Joyce and Absolute Music (Bloomsbury 2018), examines Joyce’s incorporation of musical structure across his opus. Her other recent publications include a chapter on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in the Edinburgh Companion to Eliot and the Arts (EUP 2016); an exploration of 19th-century medical discourses in “From Passion to Mania: Frankenstein as a Tale of Hysteria”; and Shakespeare and Space: Theatrical Explorations of the Spatial Paradigm (Palgrave 2016, ed. with Ina Habermann). Her research interests include 19th- and 20th-century literature, particularly within the contexts of music, interdisciplinarity, and intermediality. Currently, she is co-editing a volume on Modernism in Wonderland, an issue on Joyce and the Non-Human for the James Joyce Quarterly, and writing her Habilitation project on 19^th-century periodicals.