Inner Mad

The art I chose is called The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, ca. 1783-91. This artwork is actually a piece that the artist liked when he saw it at London’s Royal Academy. The center of the artwork revolved around a nightmare involving a blend of “violence, eroticism, and the irrational excessively disturbing.” In the painting a girl lays on a bed seemingly to be having the nightmare, a horse is poking it’s head through a curtain seemingly surprised as to what is going on. A demon in sitting on the bed next to her looking down at her looking mischievous with the grin on its face.

This relates to Frankenstein in an interesting way. In the book Frankenstein, he basically created a monster that he later realized what he has done and what a huge mistake it was. Relating to the painting, the monster resembles the nightmare and the doctor is the victim to it. Nightmares happen when you are incredibly vulnerable, being while you are sleeping. The monster attacks the doctor while he is most vulnerable with his family, he isolates himself and is clearly not in a state of well-being. The art talks about how the painting is clearly “mad.” This relates to the doctor going mad enough to isolate himself completely and create the monster that he created.

Citations

Fuseli, Henry. The Nightmare. The Norton Anthology of British Literature: The Romantic Period. 10th ed. Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor. W. W. Norton, 2017. p. C5.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus : the 1818 Text. Oxford ; New York :Oxford University Press, 1998.