“Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It’s a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people’s minds. I’m talking about your language, of course, because it allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else’s mind, and they can attempt to do the same to you, without either of you having to perform surgery” (Mark Pagel).
A few days ago while shifting through all interwebs have to offer, I came across a video of Mark Pagel talking about language at TED. The name of the talk was “How language transformed humanity” and he began with the quote above. This video, or at least its premise, interested me because one of the things that stood out in Frankenstein was the use of language. Not the use of language as in how its written but the use of language in it’s narrative.
The monster first describes his encounter with language in Chapter 4 of Volume 2:
“By degrees I made a discovery of still greater moment. I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds.”
Language to the monster becomes an important part of the process of humanity. Having the monster speak, and speak eloquently, is a way by which Shelly can humanize the monster; language is a process by which we differ our advanced species from others. To De Lacey, who cannot see his hideous figure, language is the only way of communicating. And to him, the monster appears normal.
Language also shows up in how Felix and Safie cannot communicate because of their lack of speaking the same language as well as the monster only understanding the French. In the TED talk, Pagel tells the story of the Tower of Babel from the bible:
According to that story, early humans developed the conceit that, by using their language to work together, they could build a tower that would take them all the way to heaven. Now God, angered at this attempt to usurp his power, destroyed the tower, and then to ensure that it would never be rebuilt, he scattered the people by giving them different languages — confused them by giving them different languages.
What do you think about Shelly’s use of language in the narrative?
