Books, like movies and music, is often categorized into genres.
Genre is as aspect of literary analysis that, depending on how you’re thinking of it, can be either extremely enlightening or completely useless. The genre of Frankenstein is a handy example of both sides of this relationship.
On one hand, genre is a marketing mechanism more than anything else. Book sellers want to know the genre of any book so that they can sell it, because book buyers want to know whether they’re going to like a book before they invest the time in reading it. On a slightly less cynical note, libraries also categorize books by genre to help readers find new books. If you go to a library and say “I’m looking for something like 1984” and the library worker might say “try Brave New World or Erewhon or We or The Hunger Games or Divergent or V for Vendetta or The Handmaid’s Tale or The Giver or Station Eleven.” At that point you might ask them to stop please, and back away slowly.
But the library worker can offer you those choices because all of those novels are in the same genre, broadly speaking. They are all dystopias. And we categorize books into genres to help readers find something they are likely to enjoy. That’s how and why Amazon and Netflix organize according to genres too.
But genre is also useful as a critical tool, for exactly the same reasons. Genre tropes and conventions help readers and writers both know what to expect. We get pleasure from reading books that meet our expectations, and we get a different kind of pleasure from reading books that subvert our expectations in surprising ways. But a book can neither meet nor subvert your expectations if you have none. So understanding genre can help you to understand what a novel is doing, when it is being surprising and when it is being conventional. Non only can that help you understand the book on an intellectual and critical level, it can also mean that you enjoy it more.
So, what is the genre of Frankenstein, and why do we care?
Multiple Genres
Like a lot of the most interesting works of art, Frankenstein arguably belongs to more than one genre. It’s this complexity that makes it so worth reading and re-reading. Here are some of the ways we might categorize the genre of Frankenstein:
Romantic Novel
Mountains and the splendour of nature are hallmarks of Romantic literature and art.
Frankenstein is arguably a Romantic novel. That isn’t a romance novel (if there’s a love story at the centre of Frankenstein, it’s not a very satisfying one), but a Romantic novel; that is a novel that is representative of the Romantic Era. Sometimes it is characterized as part of the “Shelley circle”, which is to say Percy Shelley and his friends, most of whom had core ideas in common. If Frankenstein is a Romantic novel we would expect it to emphasize and valorize individuality, personal genius, revolution, rejection of convention, and emotional depth.
Gothic Novel
Frankenstein is arguably a Gothic novel. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe is the quintessential Gothic novel, and we may think of the genre as the dark inversion of the Romantic. If Frankenstein is a Gothic novel we would expect it to deal with the same issues as Romantic novels, but to explore the dark or horrific side. The central experience of Romanticism is the sublime—the encounter with that compared with which all else seems small. But if the Romantic sensibility is that the sublime is both humbling and uplifting, in Gothic sensibilities the sublime is overwhelming and terrifying. If Frankenstein is a Gothic novel we would expect to find dark secrets, horrible mysteries, and crimes against God and nature.
Science Fiction
Frankenstein is often called the first science fiction novel. In the most basic sense Science Fiction is a genre where the plot or setting is driven by scientific advancement. The barest necessity for science fiction is a world that is different from our own, and that the difference is caused by human ingenuity. Often, however, Science Fiction explores the possibilities of scientific advancement and their advantages and disadvantages. In Science Fiction it is often the case that the science not only generates the setting or the plot, it also reflects, in metaphorical or exaggerated terms, the anxieties, fixations, or hopes of the author and the readers. So stories of aliens are metaphorical of globalization or colonization. If Frankenstein is Science Fiction we would expect it to be grounded in plausible scientific reality, and/or to explore the human effects of science as the author understands them.
Anything scary might qualify a book as in the “horror” genre.
Horror
Perhaps Frankenstein is a horror novel. All it would really require to meet this genre’s conventions is to be frightening.
Novel of Ideas
Frankenstein is sometimes called a Novel of Ideas. In some ways this is the opposite of a Gothic novel, in that a Gothic novel speaks to the emotions and seeks to move its readers with strong emotions. A Novel of Ideas, by contrast, appeals to the intellect and to the reason. If Frankenstein is a Novel of Ideas we would expect to see a lot of philosophical discussion and reflection, either by the characters or by the narrator, on the ideas behind the plot and characters in the novel.
Epistolary Novel
Frankenstein also possibly an epistolary novel. An epistolary novel is a novel written in the form of letters. While we don’t often think of Frankenstein as an epistolary, it does begin with letters written by Robert Walton to his sister. Since these letters are the frame narrative for the rest of the story, technically we should understand the entire novel as being written by Robert Walton in a letter to Margaret Seville. Interestingly, Frankenstein may be the most popular eighteenth-century epistolary novel, despite barely qualifying as one. The other epistolary novel that has maintained enormous popularity since it was written, incidentally, is Bram Stoker’s Dracula.