The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France by Julia V. Douthwaite (review)

Julia Douthwaite’s illuminating study considers the literary production of the 1790s, a period still overlooked by literary history, to ask: how does a long-forgotten revolutionary literature relate to subsequent literary formations? This is an important question since, despite the immense impact of the French Revolution on the literary and political imagination, the revolutionary literature produced in situ died a quick death. To deal with this discrepancy Douthwaite adopts a two-pronged approach, tightly contextualizing materials from the period 1789–1803 and then providing a coda to each chapter tracing the impact of this material through to the present. The focus is on revolutionary fiction to the exclusion of plays, songs, and festivals (the more obvious revolutionary genres of choice). This restriction is amply justified, however, given the immense research effort involved — a close consideration of three hundred fictions — and by the challenge: there is no ‘novel’ of the French Revolution written during the French Revolution. But how does one relate revolutionary works that in many instances functioned as ‘media events’ to the more literary productions of canonical writers such as Balzac, Flaubert, Shelley, Dickens, or Wilde? Revolutionary literature is mostly bound by its historical situation and presupposes that the reader has intimate knowledge of key reference points (Douthwaite coins the term ‘new positivism’ (p. 5) to reflect the need to reconstruct a ‘literal’ understanding of the text, although the term ‘allegorical’ applies equally well to many of her readings). In contrast, nineteenth- and twentieth-century canonical literature is ostensibly ‘transhistorical’ (or at least can be read as such) and open to multiple interpretations. Douthwaite’s study straddles both these elements, capturing a residual allegorical imagination as it is destabilized by the lack of a clear moral/political message; in short, the moment in which literature becomes modern. Douthwaite’s approach works brilliantly in her account of a 1790s prototype of the Frankenstein story, and convincingly in her descriptions of a ‘Gothic Robespierre’, the Revolution’s ‘compassion fatigue’, and the role of prison memoirs (a revolutionary genre) in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities. More idiosyncratic are the suggested parallels between Robespierre and Dorian Gray or between the poissard genre and L. Frank Baum’s use of lowbrow stock characters in his feminist writings. The prevalence of (often fake) biography and autobiography in Douthwaite’s corpus is striking. This suggests that literature contributed to the process of depoliticization by constructing the isolated individual as an ideal reader, an ideal seemingly endorsed by Douthwaite herself when, in Chapter 4, she seeks to re-experience the Terror from the perspective of ‘an imagined average, politically moderate reader’ of newspapers (p. 160), whoever that might be. Douthwaite concludes by offering parallels between the French Revolution and contemporary events such as the Arab Spring. Such parallelisms, coupled with the book’s insistent forward tug, imply a predominantly discursive understanding of the French Revolution. But can there be a literary history of the French Revolution without a sociology either of literature or of the Revolution? To Douthwaite’s great credit, the recovery of this intriguing corpus raises more questions than any single book can hope to answer.