Chapter 8, Rock and Romanticism, Palgrave Macmillan

Chapter 8 of Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms: “Manner, Mood, and Message: Bowie, Morrissey, and the Complex Legacy of Frankenstein” (pp. 145-161) by Samuel Lyndon Gladden, Associate Dean of the School of Human Sciences and Humanities and Professor of Literature, University of Houston, Clear Lake.

• Chapter summary
  • Samuel Gladden shifts focus to monstrosity in “Manner, Mood, and Message: Bowie, Morrissey, and the Complex Legacy of Frankenstein.” He compares Bowie’s and Morrissey’s appropriations of the figure of Frankenstein’s Creature to explore their differing responses to isolation and loneliness. In Gladden’s account, Bowie focuses on the discardedness of the Creature as he adopts and discards personae just as Frankenstein abandoned his Creature. Bowie ultimately gathers up many of his previous personae in the song and video “Blackstar,” particularly his first personae, Major Tom, who allows Bowie to revisit the trope of being in an alien environment in anticipation of his own impending death. Morrissey, on the other hand, focuses his attention on the Frankensteinian themes of hybridity or bricolage in “November Spawned a Monster,” emphasizing that Morrissey adopted as his own the hybridity or bricolage associated with the Creature through a variety of personae with disabilities, all of them set within an “idealized past.” The disfigurements of the subject described by Löwy and Sayre, therefore, assume material form in Morrissey’s various personae.
• Music
  • Madonna, “Frozen”
  • David Bowie
    • “Ziggy Stardust”
    • “Aladdin Sane”
    • “Station to Station”
    • “The Next Day”
    • “Heathen”
    • “Heroes”
    • “Blackstar” music video
    • “Outside”
    • “Fashion” music video
    • “Ashes to Ashes” music video
    • “Where Are We Now?” music video
  • Morrissey,
    • “November Spawned a Monster”
    • “At Amber”
    • “Mute Witness”
  • David Bowie, “I Am With Name”
  • The Smiths, “Vicar in a Tutu”
• Literature
  • Mary Shelley
    • Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (full, professionally edited text at Romantic Circles Reviews and Receptions)
    • See the Shelly-Godwin Archive for images of the handwritten manuscripts and Charles Robinson’s careful curatorial work.
    • Biblion page at the New York Public Library for Frankenstein.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost
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