Frankenstein

The Bard Sequence explores Frankenstein with the help of Ben Bagocious (Bard Sequence), Kevin Doyle (Bard Sequence), Katherine Bergevin (Columbia University, Keats-Shelley Association of America), and Rosa Schneider (Bard Sequence, Urban Academy, Bronx). 

Key topics include sexuality, science and technology, shame, otherness, and exclusion. 

Transcript

Matthew Park 
Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. Welcome to the Bard Sequence Seminar Podcast. Today, it's Frankenstein.

And I'm Matt Park, director of the Bard Sequence. Today, I'll be your friendly moderator, and I'm joined by Katherine Bergeven, Rosa Schneider, Ben Begocius, and Kevin Doyle. Kevin, would you mind starting by briefly introducing yourself and then passing it on? 

Kevin
Sure, my name is Kevin Doyle, and I teach Bard Seminar at the Urban Assembly of Music and Art in downtown Brooklyn, and I'll pass it over to Rosa. 

Rosa
Thanks, Kevin. My name is Rosa Schneider. I taught the Bard Sequence Seminar in Orange, New Jersey at Orange High School. And I also went to Bard High School early college in Manhattan. I will send it over to Katherine. 

Katherine
Thanks Rosa. My name is Katherine Bergevin. I'm a PhD student at Columbia University's Department of English and Comparative Literature. I've taught courses on Jane Austen and other near contemporaries of Mary Shelley. So I'm excited to have a conversation dedicated to Frankenstein today. Ben, do you want to introduce yourself? 

Ben
Yeah, thank you, Catherine. My name is Dr. Ben Bagocious and I teach the Bard students courses at Thurgood Marshall Academy and IDEA Public Charter School in Washington D.C. Thank you.

Matt
Thanks Ben and thanks everybody. Before we go any further, full disclaimer, we are not here as experts who are going to tell you what Frankenstein is really about. Instead, we're going to talk about what Frankenstein is to us and why we value the text, or not. We are going to ground our readings of the text in evidence, but if we do a decent job, you should be walking away with this with more questions than answers. 

We are also not here to summarize the text for you, because whether it's a podcast or an essay, you should not spend your precious time giving your audience a literal summary of something that they need to read themselves. We're going to start off with one more round of introductions, this time to Frankenstein. Rosa? How did you meet Frankenstein? How does this meeting impact the way that you view or viewed the text? And do you like this text? 

Rosa
Yeah, thanks, Matt. Yeah, so I first read Frankenstein as a high schooler. And of course, I thought I knew the story. I thought I knew everything about it. I read it and I hated it. Absolutely 100% just hated it. It was, I thought it was boring. I didn't like that it didn't match up with my idea. And I thought Frankenstein talked too much, honestly. So I was not a fan. But then when I began teaching in the Sequence Seminar Program in fall of 2020, when we were online, I actually really ended up liking that. I really, and it became one of my favorite texts to teach in the Sequence Seminar. I thought it was a great text to read together as we were reading it on screen and diving into the language. And I thought it ended up being a really great text to explore questions, not only of science and technology and horror, but also of race. And it became a text that my students can really dive into and think about the George Floyd uprisings and the Black Lives Matter movement. I really like it in the end. 

Matt
Thanks, Rosa. Katherine, how did you meet Frankenstein? 

Katherine
So to be honest, I don't think I can remember how I met Frankenstein. In one sense, I feel like I've always known Frankenstein in terms of the imagery of the big green guy with the screws in his neck and the idea of a mad scientist and lightning flashing everywhere. I don't remember the first time I encountered that. And if I'm honest, I don't remember the first time I picked up the book, but I know I was in high school and that for me it was part of a general interest in the time period which really emerged for me when I was at that age.

I think that Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, probably was a big part of why I got interested in that historical time in general. You know, it was a moment when society was changing a lot, people's attitudes towards the natural environment, towards the concept of human rights were changing tremendously, and at the same time, women still hadn't been afforded the kind of rights that they're still struggling to achieve now. And Mary Shelley was a really interesting person to me because she lived surrounded by all these male intellectuals who were very famous in their own time. And she kind of described herself almost as an observer. And in this text, we also see her creating the idea of a male scientist from this time period. And it's both a critique of his approach to learning and the world, but also, you know, I think we're encouraged to identify with Victor a lot. So for me, I guess I thought of it more as an introduction to the author and the world in which she lived, almost more than an introduction to the novel itself.  

Matt
Great. Thank you, Catherine. Ben, how did you meet Frankenstein? 

Ben
Oh, thank you. Yes, I read Frankenstein for the first time as a senior at Kenyon College. I was in a 19th century British fiction course with Dr. Jim Carson, and he was so passionate about all the books. And especially Frankenstein and just watching the fire in his eyes and the passion in his voice about this novel just inspired me to get excited about it myself. And we had a choice to write an essay about the various books in this unit we were studying and I chose to write about Frankenstein. And I just really enjoyed writing about it and returning to some of the passages we talked about in class and deepening what I could find in them and just getting really excited about developing my own ideas about what I thought was important in Frankenstein. 

Matt
Thanks, Ben. And Kevin, what was your first encounter like? 

Kevin
Sure. So my first encounter was in grad school. So it was interesting to come to it, similar to what Catherine had said after a lifetime of kind of just experiencing in terms of the popular culture imagery. I really liked it. I just love the language of it, like the really heightened emotions. I thought that like the creature really kind of exemplified a fundamental human experience of feeling kind of like exiled from life's feast and just like feeling like an outcast. We also read it in close conjunction with Paradise Lost, which I thought was interesting, kind of just seeing how Shelley just reworked different dynamics from that source text and played with the language. So I read it in the years after grad school, but this year was actually the first time I actually taught it in seminar. 

Matt
Thanks Kevin. Thanks for sharing your personal contexts with Frankenstein. Now we're going to do a bit of a deeper dive into the historical context. Rosa and Katherine have volunteered to do five or fewer minutes of context. We're going to dive into the background information on Frankenstein and where it came from. Not because the context completely determines what Frankenstein means, but because it can help us to discover some different and maybe even new ways of seeing the text. So I'm gonna go ahead and turn it over. Catherine, Rosa, take it away. 

Katherine
So as you guys may or may not know, as the listeners may or may not know, Frankenstein was first devised on a dark and stormy day in the early 19th century in the midst of a year that came to be known as the year without a summer. This wasn't something that Mary Shelley and her circle were aware of at the time, but historians and scientists have figured out that the reason the weather was so bad for the summer of 1816 was that a volcano had erupted really far away, I believe in Indonesia, and the ash cloud sort of just filled the skies even as far as Northern Europe, and they just basically were stuck inside. And it was dark all the time. And to amuse themselves, Mary Shelley and her circle of friends who included her, I don't think they were married yet, but her almost husband Percy Shelley, their friend Lord Byron and a few others. They decided to pass the time by composing frightening stories. And what Mary Shelley came up with was obviously the best offering, I would argue. And we still know that in the form of Frankenstein. Which leads me to the provocative question slash accusation I have for Rosa, which is that she says Frankenstein is one of her favorite books. In fact, she said to me recently that her whole life was about thinking about Frankenstein and exploring different interpretations of Frankenstein. But she also hates horror movies and she hates horror novels and she hates being scared. So Rosa, can you explain this to me? Or are you merely a hypocrite? 

Rosa
Wow, okay. Coming, coming there with some strong, strong words there, Catherine. I love it. Um, yes. So that is absolutely true. Um, it feels like everywhere I turn, there's like another Frankenstein version from like the sort of obvious, um, like Rina Sawayama's, uh, song Frankenstein, which is an incorrect version, right? She doesn't want to be the monster anymore. She doesn't want to be the monster and that she's calling it Frankenstein to more recent horror movies like Megan. The one about the living doll, where at the end, the living doll basically gives the creature's speech from the middle part. It's like, why did you make me? Why are you doing this? You made me this way. Now you have to live with consequences. So yeah, so it does feel like everything I see around me is a Frankenstein version. That's such an interesting question. Why do I love Frankenstein even though I hate horror? I think it's because the way Frankenstein does horror is just so different than what we've come to know as horror-qua-horror because it's about sort of building up the Gothic feeling, the Gothic atmosphere, and it's the invention of it was a dark and stormy night, and it was the invention of this creeping sense of dread and even the kind of murders that happen.

I mean, they're bad, they're horrific, but they're not, you know, they're not SAW level, right? There's something in that kind of horror that I appreciate, the kind of atmospheric, the kind of, what I call the thinking horror that I like. And that what it does, and the kind of horror that I do actually like is social horror. And I think that's what Frankenstein at its best really does. To me, what's not scary is this lumbering creature with the strength of fifty men and can jump over creeks, can jump over mountains and can crush a man in his hands. That's not what's scary to me. What's scary to me is the fact that he's not accepted, the fact that he's driven to all of these things by the hatred of men. And Kevin, I definitely want to talk about the Paradise Lost connection because I think that's a really interesting connection.

So I think it opens the door to the kind of social horror that I do like, like Get Out, for example, which I think is a great version of Frankenstein by Jordan Peele. So I like the kind of atmosphere, to recap, I like the atmosphere, I like the creeping sense of dread, I like the kind of questions it raises. And I think the reason why it works for me and why most new horror doesn't is like a lack of kind of grisly details, of a lack of like jump scares, a lack, you know, taking, taking delight in each part of the violation. Um, that doesn't really happen in Frankenstein. So I think it's a good introduction to horror. Um, and we, Catherine, we talked a little bit about this in our meeting about how kids who are raised on that diet that I hate of the slasher horror, the thriller horror, the, how many, how many body parts can you find in a bag horror that my kids absolutely loved at Orange, actually do like it because you can see sort of the roots of it without actually seeing it. 

Matt
Thanks, Rosa. Thanks, Catherine. Anything else to add? I don't want to cut you short. 

Katherine
One thing I would add is that you do technically get body parts in a bag in Frankenstein. I get your point. 

Rosa
You know, you're right. You're right. I sit corrected. You do get, you literally get body parts in a bag, but at least you don't see how they get there. Maybe. 

Katherine
There's, I guess, two things I would quickly throw in. One, just for the sort of base horror connection. One interesting piece of historical context that contemporary readers may not know about is that people were very afraid in this time period that after they died, their bodies would be stolen and sold to people like Victor Frankenstein for scientific experiments. There were a lot of scandals associated with this. There were scandals where people were afraid individuals were even being plucked off the street and murdered, so they could become subjects for scientific research. So I think there would have been a little bit of that kind of, not slash or horror, but that there is a little bit of like primal fear of a contemporary news item that was freaking everyone out at the time. But the other thing I would add is I think this novel is very psychologically convincing in a lot of ways. And it's very tragic and part of the horror is just how Victor becomes trapped inside of his own mind and if he is unable to bring himself to connect to other people and I think that's something that a lot of people can identify with to some extent and it's a novel that really calls upon you to ask like what would I do in his situation, how would I deal with this and it can become really scary to think about the fact that we might not know the answer to that question.

Rosa
Yeah, that's one of the things that my classes love to debate and I want to pose that question to all of you guys, maybe now, maybe later. Is Frankenstein a tragedy or is Frankenstein a horror?

Matt
Thanks, Rosa. Let's get into that in the next section here because I'm going to ask everyone what their take is and you can all either jump in on that or not. I just want to say personally that if I needed to carry several body parts, I would most likely use a bag. I feel like a box is going to be very unwieldy and like bag is probably the way to go as long as it's big enough. But enough of that. Let's get into it. I'm going to throw it to Ben. Ben, what's your take on Frankenstein? How do you see this text? Why does it matter to you? And if you know, you can either jump in on kind of how you kind of classify it or not. What's your take, Ben? 

Ben
I am really interested in Frankenstein from a sexuality studies angle. And the 1800s when Mary Shelley wrote this novel was a time period in which sexuality as an identity was beginning to take shape in conversations across politics, religion, science and elsewhere. And the conversations tended to establish heterosexuality as the norm and to ostracize any deviation from this as monstrous. And hence homosexuality was increasingly associated with horror, monstrousness, evil. I read the creature, the so-called monster as representing Victor Frankenstein's queer or non-normative sexual desires. And Victor calls the creature, quote, his own spirit, his own vampire let loose that he finds threatening to his sense of self and which he feels he must keep secret from others. So I'm really interested in when other scholars read this novel, they consider panic and threat, the typical response to queerness or non-normative sexual desires. Nearly all men in the novel respond to Victor Frankenstein's and the creature's queerness with something a scholar called Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called homosexual panic or the fear of associating with the non-heteronormative. And so my interpretation though, I take it this conversation in a little bit different direction. And I see Shelley offering a calmer response to queerness through the character of Robert Walton. 

So instead of panicking about Victor Frankenstein's queerness and the creature's queerness. Robert Walton actually just sits down and listens to them. He never panics. He never interrupts their story. He doesn't panic about homosexuality or queer desire, but he just listens to stories about non-normative sexual desire. So I see him not as responding to queerness with homosexual panic, but instead with homosexual call.

And I read Walton as Mary Shelley's quiet correction of homosexual panic at its historical inception. So queerness is fundamentally, as the creature tells Walton, an expression of, quote, "excellent qualities and the majesty of goodness." And Robert Walton, I read his Arctic discovery as this noble language for queerness that he gains through his patience to sit through the novel and listen. Thanks. 

Matt
Anyone who feels a connection to something Ben is saying, why don't you just go ahead and jump in and add yours on next? 

Katherine
I might jump in, because the things that we're talking about really twig with my take on the novel. And I think the idea of the connection between Victor and the creature representing kind of a queer relation or standing in for a form of desire that, I mean, like Victor himself can't quite assimilate and that the world around them definitely can't really assimilate is really fascinating. Partly because we do have examples throughout the text of very strong like male-male intimacy, for instance, between Victor and Clerval that are not kind of demonized or put it or remove in this way. And you know, one can read, I think, the Victor-Clerval relationship for instance, as being queer or just as being platonic. But what really fascinates me about the book in some ways is Mary Shelley's role or the role of the text, which we know is all inscribed by a male frame narrator to his sister who is then gonna be sitting back and reading it almost as an observer. We have this case where a female observer looking at intimacy between men. And in some ways, to me, I feel like the creature can represent almost a desire that Mary Shelley herself might be experiencing to build those kinds of connections for which she's excluded. I mean, I don't want to be too literal, but I think it's really fascinating how multiple different gender identities can be seen within the creature and we can think of exclusion through these different lenses, but things that the author said in her letters and memoirs about how she would sit and listen to these men who she had in her life, like her husband and his friend Byron, sit and talk for hours and hours about scientific and philosophical questions. They never asked her anything. And it's like she couldn't get a word in edgewise. And so there's also that sense of her observing these intimacies between men that she couldn't quite infiltrate or come between. 

And I'd also throw in Mary Shelley had friends who were involved in queer relationships, like Lord Byron had male lovers throughout his life. So this was something she would, she had people in her life that she respected and loved who had same-sex relationships. So I think a queer reading isn't something we're like imposing from the 21st century on the text at all. So that's kind of to agree with and expand on everything Ben said. 

Ben
Thank you Katherine. 

Rosa
Yeah, I wanted to pick up and expand on that idea of exclusion. But before I did that, I just wanted to say that isn't a reading I kind of had thought about, but I can 100% get behind, particularly because the quote-unquote heterosexual relationship between Elizabeth and Victor is just so empty. You know, that he loves her because she reminds him of an animal when that part at the very beginning that he loves her and adores her just like an animal would and that he loves her from childhood and that's not really kind of fleshed out at all. When my students and I read that, it was just like, they were just like, why are we reading this? This is disgusting. That's a full other thing. But yeah, the idea of exclusion and the kind of lens of exclusion is something that I'm really very interested in. One of the things that my first students brought up to me and when we read it in 2020, and then particularly as we kind of continued, is this idea, right, of the fact that the creature is at first, you know, eventually this changes, but at first excluded only for the way that he looks. And that's something that he can't help. And that horrible moment when he meets the blind man in the forest that first time, he falls in love with him, or not falls in love with him, but he's really excited to like finally talk to someone who will only judge him on the content of his character and the content of his speech. And then the moment, seeing comes into it, it's over, right? Everyone treats him like a monster, everyone assumes violence, and basically reacts with violence. And my students who were coming off the George Floyd uprising and the years of Black Lives Matter is like, this is us. The police, the carceral state look at us and react to us in this way, in the same way. For things that we haven't done, for things that we haven't even said.

And that kind of just like continues, right? No matter what the creature does, he's always kind of pushed to the sidelines. That horrible moment when he saves the little girl, right, from drowning in the book, and then he's thanked with a bullet. And then that's the kind of impetus, not his like evil brain, not his, you know, evil nature. That's what drives him to kind of do all of the bad things. And that moment, interestingly enough, taken out of all of the movie versions. All of the movie versions see that moment as the most humanizing moment in the whole text, and they replace it with the creature killing the little girl instead of saving her. 

Matt
Thanks, Rosa. Kevin, I wanna make sure you get in here. What do you think? 

Kevin
Sure, I would definitely also echo the idea of exclusion. One quote I came up with, I was looking through quotes earlier, and I got this one from The Creature where he's first encountering Victor, and he says, "everywhere I see bliss from which I alone am irrevocably excluded." And to me, that really powerfully conveys just a fundamental human experience of just being left out, not included in something. And I think that really resonates with my students. Because one thing I think about is, you know, we see this huge spike in teenage depression in the last 10 years. And one hypothesis is that young people are spending so much time on, you know, Instagram or TikTok, looking at these highly curated idealized versions of everyone else's life. So it seems similar to the creature. It seems like everyone else is in paradise. And they're kind of like left out. So I think it really, the idea of exclusion, I think is really important. It really captures a fundamental human experience that this book conveys just so powerfully. 

Matt
Thanks, Kevin. Does anyone else want to add anything else? Something that you have on the top of your mind that you haven't gotten to say yet?

Ben
Just share something really quickly about this idea of feeling left out. The creature feeling, as Kevin brought up, feeling left out in the social and spiritual world of the novel. And then Katherine and Rosa's idea about Mary Shelley feeling left out of various different conversations and experiences as a woman who was not allowed to get like a formal education, pursue maybe the professions that men could pursue. It's interesting that Robert Walton is the only character who does maintain a relationship with a woman for the entire novel in the form of his sister. So the creature and Victor Frankenstein slowly sort of kill off like the women in their lives and they they're more excluding women from the from the world and those two men turn insane they start hallucinating they get into deep depression and the one guy who's the most spiritually, mentally stable guy is the one who maintains a relationship with a woman and not as his wife it's not in a sexual way it's just in the just world of sharing ideas. He's writing to his sister about what he's seeing and experiencing as he sails across the Arctic. So I think Shelley's study of men is this feminist's perspective to say that, okay, men, you can have your male-only establishments of religion and education and science and medicine, but the ideas you generate are going to be hallucinations and are not going to be healthy for your social, spiritual, emotional, physical well-being unless you have women enter this conversation. And we learn right away, I think the first word of the entire novel is "To." It's a relation, a man reaching out to a woman to maintain that communication and Robert Walton is the only one who's willing to do that. I mean, he's the only one who doesn't go crazy at the end.

Katherine
On rereading the novel in anticipation of recording this podcast, reading the creature's description of his desire for a wife, this was the first time that I realized how much he sounds like an incel, to go down a whole other rabbit hole, but the language was so unfortunately familiar and reticent of these kinds of misogynist discourses that now kind of flourish online in recent years.

So I think you're really onto something Ben, about this text being, I think in some ways, like a very biting critique of shallow, now to use this overused term, narcissism. But I think she is kind of diagnosing a problem with the attempt to form these like social bonds that are all about kind of trading women as property and not forming like more holistic social networks.

Matt
I don't want to go down the rabbit hole and give them more attention than they deserve, but can you just briefly define for the audience what an incel is? What are you referring to? 

Katherine
Oh, yeah. I mean, unfortunately, I assume most people would know, but incel is a short form for the term quote unquote involuntary celibate or involuntary celibacy. And there are unfortunately communities of mostly young men online who, I think probably in the throes of depression or other serious problems that they don't have access to other kinds of healthy support to deal with, you know, it's possible for them to get sucked into these Reddit-based or other like, probably not Reddit anymore because they've been cracked down on by internet communities that are all about talking about their own self-loathing and attributing all their negative experiences of feeling excluded to the fact that like women today are too stuck up and, you know, don't want to have relationships with them. It's about men blaming their unhappiness on women. 

Matt
Thanks, Catherine. Rosa, I'll give you the last word, and then we're going to move on. 

Rosa
Oh, sorry. I was just going to say, ironically, like Frankenstein, invented by a woman. And so just a fun, horrible fact. No, but I was also just going to say, just briefly, I totally agree with Katherine and Ben. I think this is a really great take. And also the fact, right, that we keep saying, oh, the creature and the Frankenstein are like two sides of the same coin. So of course they would sort of have the same idea about women, right, and about their relationship.

Matt
Thanks everybody. So that's the big picture. Now we're going to zoom in. It's time for some close reading. So we're going to pick a passage from the text, zoom in on it and tell us why you chose this passage, why you think it's interesting. Sometimes you need to read a text really closely and sometimes by zooming in, even to the level of a single word, a single sentence, phrase, passage, we can discover some new things about the texts. So what did you all choose to zoom in on? What are you gonna close read today? 

Rosa
So I have two and I'll let you guys decide which one is more interesting. So the first one I have is actually kind of ironically going along with a lot of what we were talking about, which is the preface of the novel where Mary Shelley kind of like stakes her claim about what kind of genre this is. And then the other is the first part of Chapter Three from Volume Two, which is the monster's kind of first recollection of life. So which one would you guys think is more interesting?

Ben
Um, the second one. 

Rosa
What you don't want to hear my take about how Mary Shelley is actually Nicki Minaj? Okay. I understand. That's, no that's fine. So this is um chapter three volume two, um the very first section of that ."So it is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original area of my being All the events of that period appear confused and indistinct. A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me and I saw, felt, heard and smelt at the same time, and it was indeed a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses. By degrees I remember a stronger light pressed upon my nerves so that I was obliged to shut my eyes. Darkness then came over me and troubled me, but hardly had I felt this when, by opening my eyes as I now suppose,
The light poured in on me again. I walked and I believed." So I'll just stop there. 

So I love this passage for kind of a multiplicity of reasons. The first is how do you describe things that you don't have the words for? This is a narrative, right? So he's going back in time to when he was first awoken. And it's just so interesting to me to be like, how do you describe opening your eyes and seeing the world around you if you don't know what the world around you is. So kind of the language of that and the kind of tracing of the sort of coming into knowledge, coming to being is just really, really fascinating to me. And I really, really love it. I think it's a great description and it's a great way to jump into close reading, especially for students who aren't as confident with it.  I like to do an exercise where I asked them to describe their own rooms, but not use any kind of common nouns. And then they are just like, how do I do that? That's really cool. 

The other reason why I really like it is I love comparing it to Victor's version of events, where he describes kind of the monster's. Well, he doesn't really even describe the monster's awakening, right? He's just like, it awoke and it attacked me and I'm the worst person in the world. It's all kind of solipsistically focused on him and his opinions. So kind of putting, you know, putting those together and kind of showing that each story has a separate side is also just like something that I'm really fascinated by. 

Katherine
I just wanted to point out that the scene in which the creature first awakes and describes his
experience of encountering his senses for the first time. And I can't remember if he got to the part where he looks into the pool and sees his reflection. But these are also allusions to the birth of Eve in Paradise Lost by John Milton. And there are also these references throughout the text to the apple having already been eaten, you know, in terms of murders having been committed. I can't remember if it's the creature or Victor who uses that phrase, but it's in reference to sort of this chain of like, cyclical violence that has begun. So that might be another, I don't want to put this in terms of like, points on the letterboard, but if we're doing a reading of the creature as someone who's excluded based on some kind of gender, sexuality, outsider status, I think the many references associating him to Eve from Paradise Lost and of course the Bible are also really interesting to think about. So thanks for drawing our attention to that section, Rosa.

Matt
Katherine, what'd you pick? 

Katherine
I picked a section from later on, which is at the very end of volume three, chapter one. This is Victor preparing us for the news of Clerval's death, essentially in his narration. And it's partly an excerpt from the poem, "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" by William Wordsworth. I'll read them and then it was a short paragraph that follows it. And I think it's really interesting because here we see Victor's perception of how he and Clerval are different. His soul overflowed with ardent affections and his friendship was of that devoted and wondrous nature that the worldly minded teach us to look for only in the imagination. He was so ardent, such a wonderful friend. He was the kind of person we're told only exists like in imagination. He was like too good to be true almost. His friend who's now lost to him.

But even human sympathies were not sufficient to satisfy his eager mind. The scenery of external nature, which others regard only with admiration, he loved with ardor. So, Clerval is just the greatest possible appreciator of nature. He has some kind of almost, we've been using the word spiritual a little, spiritual or sublime, overflowing sense of love of the natural world that most people can't even approach because they lack his sort of depth of emotion. And so he quotes this poem by Wordsworth where he changes the pronouns from first person to a third person so that they're describing him, Clerval, instead of I, who was the original narrator of the poem. The sounding cataract haunted him like a passion, the tall rock, the mountain and the deep and gloomy wood, their colors and their forms were then to him an appetite. A feeling and a love that had no need of a remoter charm. By thought supplied, or any interest Unborrowed from the eye. So this poem is suggesting that in the face of an incredibly overwhelmingly beautiful landscape, you don't even need the imagination. The natural world is supplying enough for you to feel emotionally satisfied in viewing it. 

But then Victor continues, and where does he now exist? Is this gentle and lovely being lost forever? Has this mind so replete with ideas, imaginations, fanciful and magnificent, which formed a world whose existence depended on the life of its creator, has this mind perished? Does it now exist only in my memory? No, it is not thus. Your forms have divinely wrought and beaming with beauty has decayed, but your spirit still visits and consoles your unhappy friend.

So I think it's really interesting here to think about what Victor means by spirit. As we might imagine, does Victor really believe the spirits of his dead friends and family are coming to him and supporting him and providing for him on his journeys in pursuit of the creature? Or is he saying that the world within his mind is so important that for him to have a clear memory of his friend is as good as his friend still being alive? Like this to me is Victor trying to exercise this power over life and death still, even just through the power of his imagination. And to me, it's really interesting because he says the great thing about his friend was he was so emotionally sensitive. He didn't really need imagination because he appreciated the real world so much. Victor is sort of telling us here by implication what defines him as a person is that he's so internally focused and so imaginative. It's as though his friend were still with him even though he's passed away because his image of him and his own mind is so vivid. But this is also where Victor's sanity starts to really come into question because it's not fully clear if he is aware he's engaging just with the imagination of his friend or if he really believes the spirit is there or if in the world of this text, the spirits are a presence that has some kind of genuine existence outside of his imaginative world.

Matt
Thanks, Catherine. Kevin?

Kevin
So the quote I chose, it's from chapter three. It's when M. Waldman is kind of just speechifying to Victor, kind of launches Victor on his path of like scientific pursuit, giving up on alchemy. And so the quote is, The ancient teachers of the science said he promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little. "'They know that metals cannot be transmuted "'and that the elixir of life is a chimera. "'But these philosophers, "'whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt and their eyes to pour over the microscope are crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens, they've discovered how the blood circulates and the very nature of the air we breathe. So I really like this quote, I just like the language here. I feel like it's very like, it's grand and hyperbolic in a way that's kind of matches the grandeur of the ambition. And just certain phrases like, they penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding places. I feel like Shelley, she's almost like anticipating like subatomic physics or like the hubristic spirit that'll eventually lead to subatomic physics. 

You know, I knew this movie, Oppenheimer was coming out this spring when I was teaching it. So I was kind of thinking about them in conjunction a lot. And so I just really just love that, just to, I don't know to what degree Shelley would have thought this was theatrical, but the language almost seems theatrical to me. It's very heightened. And I wonder to what degree it's like satire or if she's making fun of him. But yeah, it's a passage I've always really kind of appreciated. 

Matt
And Ben. 

Ben
So following my thread of, uh, male queerness in the novel and that to Mary Shelley, she seems to want to write a story about what would happen if we would listen to queer male desires rather than panic about them. I went back into the novel and just tried to find scenes where listening seemed to be the focus. And I noticed that the creature's first move in his life is to reach out to be heard. And he tries to speak to Frankenstein as soon as he gains consciousness. And quote, is his or the creature's jaws opened and he muttered some inarticulate sounds. And then in homosexual panic, Frankenstein flees. And he reflects, the creature might have spoken, quote, but I did not hear, I escaped. So when Frankenstein and the creature encounter each other atop Mont Blanc later in the novel, Frankenstein still does not want to listen to this queer creature who represents Victor's quote, one secret, and that's a dreadful one. Frankenstein uses shaming language to speak to his shameful creature. Quote, abhorred monster, Frankenstein yells. Another quote, fiend that thou art wretched devil. 

But the creature repeats, not with this abusive language back to Frankenstein, but with the request again to listen to me. And the creature says, listen, and these are quotes. The creature repeats, listen and hear more than six times in the paragraphs that follow. So listen to my tale, hear me, but hear me, listen to me, and again, listen to me, and still canst thou listen to me. So since Frankenstein considers the creature an extension of himself as quote, my own vampire, my own spirit. I read the creature's ache for a listener coming from a place in Frankenstein's own subjectivity. 

Matt
Thanks Ben. I mean that all sounds great and that all sounds like it's true, but maybe it isn't. Time for some believing and doubting. What is a part of the text that can be both believed and doubted? Whether you personally believe or doubt it or you could just look at that part of the text and say, well, maybe not. There's always some value in challenging an author as well. Kevin, I'm gonna throw it back to you. What is a part of the text that you both believe in doubt? 

Kevin
Thank you. So my part comes from chapter four, when Victor, he says, he's giving advice, he says, learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the requirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow. So this is always an aspect of the text that I found very interesting, is just the idea of questioning reason and the pursuit of knowledge. That was something I thought was very subversive when I first read this text, coming from a society that really privileges rationality and scientific progress. So this idea that human impulse can have kind of a dark underbelly was really fascinating to me.

it brings up this question, even more fundamental question, like would you rather, is there a price to pay for being coming acquired with the truth? You know, is it better to live in blissful ignorance or in, you know, miserable and have knowledge? So to me, this is a text that I can look at in two really different ways. 

Rosa
I mean, I'm gonna totally agree with you there, Kevin, absolutely, 100%. I'm gonna be controversial and say, how about the entire text? How about just like the entirety of Frankenstein? Because one of the things I'm so interested in is the idea of narration and of stories. There's so many levels of storytellers. Who can we trust? The fact that, Ben, I loved that you read that section where Victor is recounting the awakening of the creature and you read in kind of this sort of like positive, hopeful, he's reaching out way. But, isn't Victor just telling us all of this to make all of the things that happened afterwards appear better for him? Like if you're going to be, you know, telling a story to a man who found you wandering the ice with a gun and going through all these things, wouldn't you want to like make the story be more acceptable? Make you be the hero? So I think honestly the entire thing you can, you need to take with a grain of salt. Where, what is Victor trying to do? How is the creature trying to make himself better? How is the creature trying to like convince us? 

Going back to Kevin's idea about, you know, reading this alongside Paradise Lost, the creature has the power, the persuasive power of Satan and you almost believe him. So yeah, I believe and doubt the entire thing.

Katherine
Rosa, are you going for the Fight Club version of the text where actually Victor was the one who killed everybody? I'm not saying that's supported by the text, I just came to mind. 

Rosa
Why not? I just said why not? I'm just dropping the mic here. 

Matt
Katherine, why don't you pick up?

Katherine
So a passage that I doubted very strongly when I first, well not for the first time, but when I came across it on this reread of the novel was the first paragraph in volume 1, chapter 7. And this is Victor ruminating and fretting about the upcoming trial after Justine has been accused of murdering his brother. And he's kind of stewing in this vortex of self-blame. 

We passed a few sad hours until 11 o'clock when the trial was to commence. My father and the rest of the family being obliged to attend as witnesses, I accompanied them to the court. During the whole of this wretched mockery of justice, I suffered living torture. It was to be decided whether the result of my curiosity and lawless devices would cause the death of two of my fellow beings, one a smiling babe full of innocence and joy, the other far more dreadfully murdered with every aggravation of infamy that could make the murder memorable in horror. Justine was a girl of merit, and possessed qualities which promised to render her life happy. Now all was to be obliterated in an ignominious grave, and I the cause. A thousand times rather would I have confessed myself guilty of the crime ascribed to Justine, but I was absent when it was committed, and such a declaration would have been considered as the ravings of a madman, and would not have exculpated her who suffered through me.

So the reason I doubted this passage was I read it and I immediately thought, are you sure? Victor, are you sure there's nothing you could say or do to intercede on Justine's behalf? You know, maybe people wouldn't believe you if you said you had built an artificial man from dead body parts and unleashed him onto the countryside to commit a string of murders, but you could tell that I saw a stranger standing in the field in the storm on my way into the village. I think it might have been him and not Justine. It feels like there are things he could do to intercede. In a weird way, I almost feel like this passage is another example of Victor's obsession with holding the power over life and death. Like in some perverse way, he's almost enamored with this idea that it's his fault that these two people have died, that Justine will be put to death. And I felt like he might have had some power to assist her, but he withholds it, maybe from some like unconscious narcissistic power drive that was part of what led him to create this monster and such a, or creature I should say, in such an irresponsible fashion. So I doubted Victor's motives there. I wondered whether he wasn't being a little bit like self-protective or even indulging in his power fantasy a little bit further by withholding some form of testimony on Justine's behalf. But at the same time, I did believe this passage in the sense that I found it, I guess, psychologically believable, that someone could be this afraid of being perceived as mad, or maybe on some level this wrapped up in their power fantasy that life and death hinges on their actions, that they would sort of stay quiet and not speak out and not try or not call upon the community, for instance, to help him track down. He doesn't have to say it's a creature, he could just say it's a stranger he saw. So I doubted this passage in the sense that I wasn't convinced by Victor's reasoning or his account of himself, but I believed it in the sense that I could see a person like Victor behaving in this way. 

Matt
Are you telling me you've never been to an official function where someone didn't stand up and say, I have created an artificial person from dead body parts. Cause I certainly haven't. Ben, do you have any doubts about this text? 

Ben
Yeah, thank you. So my believing in doubting is more about other scholars, possible objections to my interpretation, their doubts of my approach to Frankenstein as a novel about the importance of, for Mary Shelley, giving space for a male to express his shame about his queer desires. I find Walton a redeeming character for his patience and quiet listening to his story about male sexuality very few want to hear. But I think some scholars would consider Walton a jerk and therefore doubt the validity of my approach. So for instance, Jessica Richard criticizes Walton as a chauvinist who recklessly places delusions of imperialism over human life, much like Frankenstein places scientific ambitions over ethical considerations. Richard condemns Walton as an irresponsible captain who's obsessed with conquering, penetrating and possessing other lands.

And the scholar Angela Wright has critiqued Walton for imposing his own feelings and thoughts onto his sister, Margaret Saville. So questions that Walton poses to his sister in the letters that he writes to her are swiftly supplanted by assertions of what Walton wills her to feel and think. And other critics, including Adriana Craciun, find that Walton's act of listening might be less important then the fact that the tale he listens to conforms to the taste of a nineteenth century readership schooled in, this is Craciun's quotes, schooled in tales of starvation, murder, cannibalism, and madness, common features of Gothic romances, captivity narratives, shipwreck accounts, and travel writings.

So one could argue that Walton listens to Frankenstein and the creature's story not to dignify them, but to monetize them. And perhaps Walton aims to acquire a sensationalized story for publication in an industry that loves to market juicy polar expedition narratives. So in some Walton's character and motivations are shaped by problematic ideologies of masculinity. 

For me, though, I still believe in my position, because I would just respond to these possible objections to my argument by saying that, yes, Walton does stand for these problematic versions of masculinity. However, to remain focused on Walton's questionable aspects could blind us from noticing a considerably long thread that Shelley draws out through his character to reimagine masculinity. Despite reservations, one could raise about Walton's ethics, I would argue that he nonetheless models the urgent work of responding to queer shame with patient listening rather than with alarm. Walton is the first and only character who both sees the creature and does not run away or attack him. So we might expect Walton to move his body in a panicky direction like other men by shutting his ears and forbidding a story of queer shame, especially since Frankenstein has primed Walton to hate the creature, but Walton is so patient with distress that he muscles his body into stillness and silence. He becomes present for the creature. And then the creature, this is a quote from Shelley, the creature paused, looking on me or Walton with wonder. And I think of wonder as that Walton's masculinity has calmed in the face of queerness rather than panic. Walton's decision to attend to, instead of shame, the face of queer shame is wondrous. And as such, Walton's Arctic accomplishment is not the discovery of a new imperial trade route to China and India from Britain, but rather a quieter achievement, listening to queer shame. 

Matt
Thanks, Ben. Now we're going to take those doubts and put them to work. We're going to do Add, Delete, Rewrite? So you are now all editors of the text. You have the option to add a section to the text, delete something, or rewrite a section. Which do you choose and why? 

Ben
This is such a good question. I don't quite know how to answer it. Just because I bowed down to Mary Shelley as a writer and there are parts of her novel that I'm like, what is this about and what is the relevance? But I think her as a brilliant writer and thinker, she's like, well, that's your job. You have to think about why I put this in and what it might mean. However, one thing that I think as a writer myself, I would have changed is the ending. We have Victor Frankenstein dying in queer shame that is so deep, he can't even face it. He can't even address that he himself is ashamed about queer desire. And then we have the creature who to me represents all the queer desire that goes unnamed, unspoken. And the creature is cast off supposedly to die alone in the Arctic freezing ocean. And I just find this so sad. I want something a little bit more hopeful. But then I think, Shelley does leave us with something more hopeful. She leaves us with Walton, the captain who has heard the story of queer shame and who is sailing back to his sister, who's stopping his imperial conquest to go back and create a community with a woman, his sister, that is queer. It's not furthering patriarchy. It's because he's not trying to marry his sister and control her life.

So I do see this as a very hopeful ending. And I think what I love about the ending too is Mary Shelley is telling us as writers and thinkers, well, how would you continue this story? What do you want a story of queerness to look like? And she's inviting us as writers to continue that story, whether we continue that story in our, in poems, in the academic essays we write about the novel. In novels we write, in dances we create, in paintings we paint. So yeah, I guess all the rewritings are still up to us to create. 

Matt
Thanks Ben. Catherine, what are you doing? 

Katherine
I'll preface my comments by identifying one additional aspect of the text which I'm inclined to doubt, which is I'm one of those readers who I'm not 100% sure I believe the creature when he promises to go and immolate himself in the Arctic. I kind of wonder whether he might love life a bit too much not to kind of chicken out at the very end. But having said that, that doubt is maybe the basis for what I could imagine as an interesting, I guess, like follow up to the text. Mine also connects to the character of Mrs. Saville who is Walton's sister. I wonder maybe she might go looking for her brother, maybe he gets lost in the Arctic. What would happen if she encountered the creature? What would happen if he returned, say, to London and England? And I'd be really curious to get the creature's outlook on urban life, because we see him interact with, like, villagers, and I think the word peasants is probably used in the text. But we know that, like, cities were... we are not yet in the industrial age, but we're getting close. And I think it will be really fascinating to get this creature's very unique perspective on maybe like the differences between urban community and society and rural society, because, you know, in a city hiding under a hedgerow or in hiding like a little shed behind the peasant's house watching them all the time, you might get caught, you might get labeled a peeping tom. There might be few, there are more places you can hide and blend in certain ways as a person who is literally like a creature who doesn't look like anyone else and you know is very unusual, but there are also ways in which you can't hide and there are ways in which there are more resources available to you and ways in which there are much fewer. You can't necessarily go and forage for berries and acorns. So I'm curious what the creature's philosophical outlook on society would be if he had the experience of say London in the early nineteenth century as opposed to just like the sort of idyllic Swiss countryside and the empty Arctic. 

And I think it'd be interesting to see him develop a relationship with a female interlocutor because he has a very objective, objectifying view of women based on, you know, his description of what he wants in a female partner.

Matt
Thanks, Catherine. Kevin? 

Kevin
So when I took this, when I first read Frankenstein, it was part of a class, and we had to do a creative response to it. And I was having a hard time thinking of something to do, so the professor suggested he said, why don't you make a Franken-poem where you take a scene from Frankenstein and a parallel scene from Paradise Lost and kind of splice the language together? So I did that with a scene where in Paradise Lost where Satan is kind of peering in at Adam and Eve kind of through the bushes of the Garden of Eden and being so jealous. And then comparing that with a scene of the creature looking in on the family and kind of also envying that human comfort. It was really just a fun exercise to kind of recombine the language, see how well they blended together. And it created almost like kind of a found poem. So for me, that was just really fun language exercise. This text lends itself to.

Matt
Well, I'm stealing that and now everyone else who heard this is also stealing that. Thanks everybody. All right, so we're going to move on to our next category, which is our fun one. The Hollywood treatment. So Frankenstein has been made to many, many movies and TV shows at this point, but guess what? There's another one coming out and you get to cast it. So I want everyone to tell me what are your one or two best castings? What are the ones that you feel like, yes, I nailed this, I know which actor this should be, who is it? 

Ben
This was fun. I would cast Meryl Streep as the creature. I think she's just so versatile in the roles that she can play and she seems to really enjoy the challenge of acting as different characters with different backgrounds. I think, playing a non-human, yet male creature might be a rewarding challenge for her. And for Victor Frankenstein, I was thinking I wanted like a really buff, masculine actor, so I was thinking of Jake Gyllenhaal, someone whose appearance is so-called manly and whom one might not think, at first glance, experiences queer, homosexual desires, since the novel to me is about the ways that these strict ideologies of gender govern assumptions about our own or others desires. That's who I would cast, thank you. I'm feeling Gyllenhaal. I mean, I'm feeling both of them, but Gyllenhaal definitely has a certain darkness to him that I think he can bring out. I feel that. Catherine, what do you got? Do you agree or disagree on either of those two or you have some different castings for us?

Katherine
I wouldn't say I necessarily disagree. I like them both as ideas. They weren't who came to mind for me. I enjoyed this question and it made me realize that, I mean, I'm exposing myself as an out-of-date millennial here, but for me, Victor Frankenstein, I always picture him as looking just like Ben Whishaw from the John Keats movie that came out like 12 years ago or something, Bright Star. Sort of like a pale scrawny guy with dark hair and kind of buggy eyes. And I guess maybe the Gen Z equivalent of that might be Timothee Chalamet, who is playing Willy Wonka in an upcoming movie. And I think they are actually kind of similar characters in a way, because they're both like mad scientists who are, you know, kind of living alone in their like little imaginative world. So I'll say Timothee Chalamet for lack of knowledge of who else is currently on the scene as like an up and coming young 20-something actor. And then for the creature, I think it would be fun to see him played by some kind of like massive hunk like Henry Cavill who plays Geralt on The Witcher, I thought would be great. They could cover him in like disgusting prosthetics, but he would still have like the physicality and amazing like voice and just intensity of the creature. I think that would be really fun. Especially I feel like in terms of appearance, Victor and the creature need to be a bit of an odd couple. Arguably, literally, if we go with Ben's interpretation of the text. So those are my nominations. 

Matt
Awesome. Thank you, Catherine. Kevin, who do you got? Do you have the same two or do you have some other characters as well? 

Kevin
Well, I actually wanted to comment on the recent announcement of an adaptation that they're going to make where Guillermo del Toro is going to direct, which I was really thrilled to hear about because it would be great to have someone with some real visual flair direct a faithful adaptation. And the two actors they announced were Oscar Isaac and Andrew Garfield and they didn't specify who was going to be in which role, but I really thought Oscar Isaac could be the creature because he kind of has like, you know, squarish rectangular face and head. And then Andrew Garfield, I think he's kind of like past the, he's a little older now, so I think he could potentially be Victor Frankenstein. So I'm excited for that new adaptation. I hope it's faithful to the text so we can use it in class. 

Matt
Isaac is definitely a bit more quote unquote classically masculine in the way that Hollywood often portrays that. He's portrayed a lot of action hero kind of roles. All right, I really like all of those. I don't know that I can decide here. I will say I like Gyllenhaal, I think, probably the best as Victor. 

And that brings us to our final category, which is the Sequence. The Bard Seminar was originally conceived as a sequence of texts that would take students on an intellectual journey. What is the sequence of texts that you would pair with Frankenstein and what is the journey that you'd like to take your students on? Catherine, if you could pair any texts with Frankenstein, what would they be and why? 

Katherine
So for context, the same period of days I was re-reading Frankenstein for doing this podcast, I was also reading a lot about the Franklin Expedition. So it was the sort of barren wasteland of the Arctic... theme and a setting that was informing a lot of my thinking about this question. One book I think would be interesting to read as a follow-up to Frankenstein would be The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. For anyone who's not familiar, it's I think now considered like a classic science fiction novel. It's about a man who travels to a planet where people don't have binary sex or gender and they don't really have that as a concept because is inherently gender fluid and capable both of birthing children themselves and also quote unquote like fathering children with another person. And the person who's a visitor to the planet is like a sort of regular like a vanilla human being and it's sort of about him going on a journey with one of these people across you know a barren desolate wasteland and figuring out his feelings about their culture and some of the sort of instinctive like prejudice and like disgust he experiences towards these other people on the basis of their difference from him. And it's also another really influential and important science fiction work that was written by a woman. So I think it would be a really great thing to read in a class together with Frankenstein. 

And if I, when you asked the sequence question, it sounded like you wanted something from beforehand as well. So this is kind of from maybe way too far in the past to really make sense as I'm pairing with the other two books. But I think that the myth of Arachne is really interesting to me in the context of Frankenstein. For anyone who knows that story, whether they've read it in the tales of Ovid and the Metamorphoses or encountered it, even through like a cartoon or something. Arachne was this ancient weavess in the time of Greek mythology, you know, before time began, so to speak, and she boasted that she was the most gifted weaver in the world. She was better at it even than Athena. The two had a contest and Arachne actually outperformed Athena. She created a more impressive tapestry depicting the creation of the world, but it also depicted the gods in a very diminished status, sort of embarrassing themselves by getting drunk and having affairs. And through her artistic creation, she demonstrated that she was not someone who helped the gods in reverence. And for this, and also out of resentment and jealousy of Arachne's superior talent, Athena cursed her by turning her into a spider. So, you know, she would be a very prolific weaver for the rest of eternity by weaving webs. And I thought that was a really interesting sort of take on the Prometheus story that Frankenstein invokes with its subtitle. But again, with female characters and this very like feminine associated practice of weaving as an artistic medium. So instead of like stealing Zeus's thunderbolts, you're kind of not actually stealing something from Athena, but just showing that you have the capacity to create an imaginative world in a more impressive and skillful way than even a goddess would. But then you're punished for it. So I think Arachne and Frankenstein have a little bit in common.

Matt
Thanks, Catherine. Yeah, any texts from any time, no requirements on that. Kevin, what texts are you pairing Frankenstein with? What's the journey you want to take your students on? 

Kevin
Yeah, so this was my first time teaching Frankenstein this year. And the angle that I noticed my students respond to the most was kind of thinking about the text as an allegory of a parent abandoning a child. And I always try to find a way to take my students' natural organic reaction to the texts and look link that to some aspect of philosophy or literature. So to me, they were really talking about theodicy, which as I understand it, is a creature taking umbrage with their creator. So I would love to create a sequence of study where we're kind of putting the creature on a continuum of with, you know, like Job, Milton's  Satan, Ivan Karamazov, and just a whole kind of lineage of creatures taking umbrage against their creator and kind of letting that be the common theme. 

Matt
Thanks, Kevin. And Ben, what's your sequence?

Ben
I like to look at literature, especially literature associated with the modern condition, as each character in the text as representing somehow part of the modern human psyche. So every character in Frankenstein represents a part of my own psychology. Every character in Frankenstein represents a part of every human being's psychology. So for instance, the creature could be that part of our psychology where we hold shame. We think we'll never measure up. Uh, we're not good enough. We have to hide away. And then Victor Frankenstein also represents that part, that part, you know, that just wants to belong, that just wants to...yeah, just hide whatever it is that's shameful that one feels a shame about oneself. So there's this beautiful poem by Emily Dickinson that is also about the difficulty of befriending all of those selves within one. And so the poem is God Made a Little Gentian. A gentian is a flower that's purplish blue. So anyway, here's her poem.

God made a little gentian. It tried to be a rose and failed. And all the summer laughed. But just before the snows, there rose a purple creature that ravished all the hill and summer hit her forehead and mockery was still. The frosts were her condition. The Tyrian would not come until the north invoke it. Creator, shall I bloom?

Emily, you're killing me. 

Matt
Thanks, Ben. And thanks for ending with something that I cannot possibly approach nor top. So let's let Emily Dickinson have the last word. Thank you all so much. This has been a completely wonderful conversation. Thank you, Catherine. Thank you, Ben. And thank you, Kevin. Also, thank you to Rosa, who did have to drop out of the pot a little bit early. But she expresses that she was able to get all of her good stuff in. So thank you all so much. I greatly appreciate you. And I hope to talk to you all soon. 

And thanks to Kevin Doyle and Ben Bagocious who teach for the Bard Sequence, Rosa Schneider who formerly taught for the Bard Sequence and now is at Urban Academy in the Bronx, and Katherine Bergevin who is finishing her PhD at Columbia University and is the Director of Operations at the Keats-Shelley Association of America. Thanks everybody. Stay neat, clean, and well advised.