Monsters as the 'Other': A Defence of Polyphemos from Homer's Odyssey to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

This research sits within the subdisciplines of classical reception and monster theory. By examining ‘monstrosity’ from the perspective of behaviour rather than abnormal physical appearance, the thesis challenges the supposed boundaries between ‘monster’ (Other) and ‘hero’ (Self) through the mutually informing case studies of the Cyclops Polyphemos from antiquity and the Creature from Mary Shelley’s nineteenth-century novel, Frankenstein. The first chapter offers a new reading of Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey which invites us to rethink the monstrosity of both the monster Polyphemos and the eponymous hero Odysseus. Here I show that a close reading of the text reveals signs of ambiguity and ambivalence towards both characters. Through the selected ancient texts of Euripides’ Cyclops, Theocritus’ Idylls 6 and 11, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, it shows that these ambiguities and ambivalences influenced the development of the character of Polyphemos throughout antiquity and into modernity, most notably in Mary Shelley’s novel. In her correspondence with the essayist Leigh Hunt, Mary Shelley herself described her novel as being ‘a book in (favour) defence of Polypheme’. The previous scant scholarship has picked up on this correspondence only in relation to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. My new research shows that Mary Shelley’s ‘defence’ encompasses the Polyphemos of all of the ancient texts examined in my thesis and innovatively places Frankenstein within the trajectory of literary works that draw on Homer’s Odyssey.