Carmen Bujdei

 

 

Monstrosity and Self-Censorship in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

 

 

 

Abstract: The article explores the symbolic meanings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It discusses the monstrous body in relation to the delineation and the construction of human identity.

Keywords: English literature; Romanticism; Gothic; Mary Shelley; Frankenstein; feminine authorship

‘Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein’ (1)

 

 

‘[W]hat a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity this work presents… and the author, notwithstanding the rationality of his preface, often leaves us in doubt whether he is not as mad as his hero.’ This scathing critique (2) of Mary Shelley’s anonymously published first novel was the first in a series of several dismissive reviews which, besides purporting to highlight the seriously flawed design of the monster-making narrative, helped to perpetuate a misconception regarding the presumed ‘author’s’ identity, in the case of what appeared to be a ‘tale told by an ideot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ (3). Most of the 1818 reviewers, while expressing their concern about the impact such ‘very bold fiction’ (4) might have on its readership (5) and making deprecatory assessments of its tediousness, impiety, risibility or improbability, did not however fail to commend its excellence of style and language (6) or to detect the discrepancy between the apologetic tone of the Preface – revealed later on to have been penned by Percy Shelley – and the insufficiently delineated moral in the book proper.

Faced with such critical detractions and finding her own voice ‘silenced’ by both her husband’s massive interference in her text and the common misapprehensions of the true authorship of her novel, Mary Shelley dedicated her Introduction to the third edition of Frankenstein (7) (1831) to clarifying the quandary of ‘How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?’ (F 1). Percy Shelley’s intrusive editing of the text, ranging from changes of punctuation to altering its feminine écriture into a more masculine, ‘inflexibly public and oratorical’ diction (Levine, 1979, 3) has been carefully documented, some critics maintaining that far from representing an improvement of the original, the 1818 version was actually a substantial distortion of Mary Shelley’s authorial intent. Aiming to safeguard the authenticity of her ‘true compositions, the airy flights of [her] imagination’ (F 2), the 1831 paratext resorts to a decisively feminised imagery in outlining the fictional creative process, casting it in terms of delivery and maternal nurturance: her ‘story’ is seen as ‘the offspring of happy days’, ’born and fostered’ out of ‘the grim terrors of my waking dream’ (F 4-5).

 

‘And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper’ (F 5)

 

The past couple of decades have witnessed a tremendous growth of interest in unravelling the profusion of meanings that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – the novel and the monster (8) – encodes. Extensive research has been devoted to narrowing down the scope of monstrosity in the novel, various readings conveying partial, often competing and contradictory approaches to the fluid symbolic potential of the monster. Under the scrutinising gaze of feminist, psychoanalytical, political, or cultural critics, Victor Frankenstein’s monstrous creature has been seen to embody specific anxieties related to motherhood and female authorship; to express the pathological narcissism of a presumptuous individual who wants to recreate the world in his own image (9); to reanimate anxieties generated in Britain by the French Revolution; or to represent a portentous signal of the dangers of scientific and technological ventures. However, considering the diversity of construal that the monster invites, rather less attention has been paid to the overall picture of ‘prodigious generativity’ (Huet 1993, 126) that monstrosity conveys.

Given the ‘versatility of Mary Shelley’s myth’ (Moers 1979, 86) and the ambiguity of Mary Shelley’s reference to her ‘hideous progeny’, which invites interpretation as both the humanoid creature begotten by Frankenstein and the textual offspring of the author herself, the ‘going forth’ and ‘prospering’ are bound to be seen as applicable to the book itself. Not only does the monster emerging from the scientist’s workshop seem to circulate excessively in critical discourse, but the book itself has generated, since its publication, an array of dramatic, fictional or cinematic reworkings, engendered by what appears to be its ‘mythopoeic productivity’ (10).

It is the purpose of the present paper to explore the plurisignificatory potential of Mary Shelley’s monster, proceeding in full awareness that a comprehensive view of monstrosity is hindered by the very fact that monsters resist classification and taxonomical systematisation (11). I start from the assumption that Frankenstein’s creation represents a ‘totalising monster’ (12), which conflates signifiers of cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual otherness into one body. If it is true that cultural epochs are intent on defining their essentially human characteristics by ousting pollution phenomena (13), it will be interesting to see what other kinds of alterity are inscribed across the monstrous body of Frankenstein’s creature and how they assist in the delineation and construction of human identity. As Cohen maintains, the monster is ‘a kind of cultural shorthand for the problems of identity construction, for the irreducible difference that lurks deep within the culture-bound self’ (1999, 5).

 

‘I almost began to think that I was the monster that he said I was’ (F 68)

 

An entire line of critical inquiry, often resorting to biographical support for clarifying the uncanny equivalence between this novel of monstrous procreation and the author’s perception of her novel as misshapen progeny, claims that Frankenstein articulates not only a ‘dialectic of monstrosity’ (14), in its description of the genesis of a monster, but also a ‘dynamics of monstrous creation’ (15) as a complex trope for literary inspiration. A self-proclaimed monstrosity, the novel appears to establish connections between ‘sexual and textual generation’ (16), monster and book duplicating each other as regards their construction, as well as their generic hybridity.

A similar insistence on the analogy between monstrous creature and monstrous textuality occurs in Rubenstein’s statement that Frankenstein is ‘a book constructed like a pregnancy’ (17), with the monster’s narrative embedded within that of his parent just like in a concentric Russian-doll frame. While conceding that some analogies between artistic creation and biological procreation are, to some extent, far-fetched (18), Baldick (1987, 33) nevertheless credits the hypothesis, also maintained by Gilbert & Gubar (1979, 221-224), that in the novel anxieties of parenthood and anxieties of authorship are overdetermined by Shelley’s literary parentage and competitive artistic pressures: hence, Frankenstein’s daring transgression could be the projection of a woman writer’s own ambitious aspiring to authorship, without necessarily seeing in the issue of self-reproduction – both Frankenstein’s authoring of his monstrous offspring and Mary Shelley’s parenting her book – a question of representing the self as monstrous, in terms of a fictive transposition of ‘her own frustrated female pen-envy into a tale of catastrophic male womb envy’ (19).

Ellen Moers’ study of ‘Female Gothic’ (20), includes a groundbreaking biographical approach to the issue of monstrous genesis in Shelley’s novel. Focusing on the author’s ‘early and chaotic experience… with motherhood’ (1979, 79), Moers sees Frankenstein as a ‘birth myth’, which explores the relationship between the birth-giving experience and the pangs of female authorship, representing the origin of monstrosity as a failure of postpartum bonding. Homans, on the other hand, takes issue with Moers, insisting that the novel stages a ‘collision between androcentric and gynocentric theories of creation’ (1993, 175-177). In view of Mary Shelley’s experience of birth as either causing the death of the mothers or producing illegitimate offspring, Homans considers here ‘writing as literalisation, as a form of mothering’ (idem, 163), as a means of eschewing the horrific concreteness and materiality of biological motherhood. Shelley’s personal experience of monster-engendering biological creation led her to appropriate the idealistic, disembodied creation pattern of male Romantic artistry. This tension is also sensed by Poovey, who talks about Mary Shelley’s entrapment between two conflicting – familial and societal – pressures: towards artistic self-assertion, ‘by means of her pen and her imagination’, and towards compliance with conventional models of feminine propriety, demanding ‘self-effacement’ (1990, 163). Shifting the emphasis from the monstrous offspring onto the monstrosity of womanhood itself, Poovey’s reading seems to be consubstantial with the view according to which, in Lacanian terms, the novel stages a subtle critique of the symbolic realm’s decidedly patriarchal bias, whereby Victor Frankenstein’s transition from the visual, imaginary stage into the linguistic, public stage is conditioned by matricide or suppression of the mother. Huet, for instance, sees in the haunting image of his dead mother the ‘ultimate model for Victor’s monster’ (1993, 133). By creating a monster from stolen corpses Victor has obscurely attempted to resuscitate the mother whose death he has sacrilegiously forgotten, and by giving birth, Frankenstein is conducting a sacrilegious misappropriation of motherhood. As Collings has shown, the monster represents Frankenstein’s attempt to recuperate and animate the dead, corporeal mother, which may also account for his relinquishment of the standard oedipal path that would require the pursuit of a substitute, figural maternal representation (Elizabeth), of a symbolic rather than an imaginary mother. Flaunting the symbolic order, which ‘negates and excludes the feminine body’ (1992, 251) of ‘the archaic, physical, nameless mother’ (idem, 252), Collings maintains, both Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein stage their creations in the imaginary order (21), initiating thus an ‘imaginary revolt against the symbolic’ (idem).

This association of femininity with monstrosity is also evinced by the episode of Frankenstein’s nightmarish vision of his mother’s animated corpse displacing Elizabeth in his embrace, encapsulated as it is within the two apparitions of the monster, subsequent to his resurrection from the dead: ‘I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel’ (F 46). Whereas for Cawson (1995, 72), this macabre reverie represents a vision of Frankenstein’s inner self on his awakening from his hubris, Poovey sees in this succession of nightmare and horrific apparition a conflation of the dead female figure (‘lover and mother’) into an image of ‘murdered domestic tranquillity’: the monster, therefore, becomes an objectification of his transgressive, oedipal desire: ‘a monstrous urge, alien and threatening to all human intercourse’ (1990, 166), Shelley implicitly indicting the egotistical drive of Romantic aesthetic self-assertion. (22)

Gilbert & Gubar have also placed Frankenstein’s self-censoring phantasm and Mary Shelley’s own anxieties about birth and motherhood specifically in relation to the controversial figure of dead mother. While not dismissing the interpretation of Walton, Frankenstein, Clerval and, ultimately the monster, as Promethean overreachers, Gilbert & Gubar insist on ‘the fluidity of the narrative’s symbolic scheme’ and demonstrate how, through endless patterns of ‘continual duplication and reduplication of roles’ (violation of paternal decrees, the prevailing sense of guilt, complicity in sin, blasphemous appropriation of divine and female generation), verging on symbiotic slipperiness, the male characters in the novel merge identities as ‘fallen angels’, and, more exactly as the Eve-figure (1979, 230). This analysis moves firmly towards outlining the assumption that ‘Victor Frankenstein’s male monster may really be a woman in disguise’ (idem, 237): he is linked, on the one hand, to Milton’s Eve through their motherless orphanhood, ‘filthy materiality’, creation in the image of the father and their speculary awareness of physical/moral deformity (23); and, on the other hand, to the ‘authoress’ herself, given their intellectually similar background.

For those who understand monstrosity in Frankenstein to represent a continuum with femininity, reference to another seminal scene is customary. Emphasising the perspective on the female body as a site of abject liminality (24), the episode which took place on an evening in July 1816, on Lake Geneva, when, after Byron’s recitation of Christabel, Percy Shelley mistook his wife for a monster with eyes on her breasts and dashed screaming out of the room, is interpreted by Homans as a manifestation of Percy Shelley’s incapacity to reconcile ‘the ideal of disembodied femininity’ with his real lover, noting that Mary Shelley’s ‘sense of herself viewed as a collection of incongruent body parts – breasts terminating in eyes – might have found expression in the demon, whose undesirable corporeality is expressed likewise of ill-fitting parts’ (1993, 172). However, this conflation between the abject materiality of the female body and the horrific physicality of the monster is most visible in the scene of the exceptionally violent dismemberment of the monsterette (25): ‘The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being’ (F 130).

 

‘My midnight labours’ (F 43)

 

If monstrous progeny, often displaying ill-assorted morphological parts, have variously been accounted for as the result of miscegenation between species (26), or of illicit intercourse between the human and the demonic, it is nevertheless true that an important strand of thought in teratology (particularly from the Renaissance to the end of the Enlightenment) considered physiological prodigies to be the result of the disordered and dangerous powers of female imagination (27). Frankenstein is seen by Huet to mark the end of the tradition that had erased the legitimate father’s image from monstrous offspring. Whereas for critics capitalising on Shelley’s profession of sole authorial responsibility for the novel (‘I did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband’, F 5), this is a text about anxieties of motherhood and literary procreation, for others, who see it as an intriguing case of ‘literary collaboration’ (28), Frankenstein is still part of the tradition tying the birth of monstrous children to their mother’s deranged imagination (‘my imagination unbidden pos­sessed me’, F 4). 

The extraordinarily complex genesis of the novel has also espoused a critical attention to its ‘uncommonly bookish and artificial’ genesis (Kiely, 1985, 65). Seeing in Frankenstein ‘a fictionalised rendition of the meaning of Paradise Lost [and its creation myth] for women’, Gilbert & Gubar have signalled Shelley’s self-conscious literariness, insisting on the novel’s ‘bibliogenesis’ (29) (1979, 221-224): deprived of maternal nurturance and paternal affection, Mary Shelley appears to have resorted to a ‘crucial if voyeuristic method of exploring origins, exploring identity’ (idem., 225), by assembling and scrutinizing a mass of literary influences from Milton to the writings of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, similar to the monster’s own culturally-mediated examination of his genesis through Paradise Lost and Frankenstein’s laboratory notes.

The similarity between the fragmented, contorted, apparently disjointed narrative surface and the monster’s patchwork anatomy is evident: the novel is ‘an aggregate of narrative pieces’ (30), approximating a ‘jigsaw puzzle, a collection of apparently random documents’, basically contained within the ‘three concentric circles of narration’ (Walton’s epistles, Frankenstein’s and the monster’s speeches), which in their turn contain embedded narrative ‘pockets’ (accounts of dreams, the stories of Caroline Beaufort, Elizabeth Lavenza, Justine, the DeLaceys, Safie, etc.) (31). For some, the novel’s intricate and fragmented narrative is proof of Shelley’s incapacity to rise to the standards of male Romantic accomplishment (32), while for others, the circularity of the novel’s manifold narratives deliberately functions as multilayered screens around her ‘authentic voice’ (33).

The monster’s artificial creation out of ‘the unhallowed damps of the grave’ (F 43) is, to some extent, similar to the manner in which the novel itself appears to have been assembled ‘from dead fragments to make a living whole’ (34) (read human tissue and bone, for the former; literary and philosophical works, for the latter). For Mary Shelley, literary creation represents, however, a process of synthetically, and not mechanically, combining preexisting fragments: ‘Everything must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase, and that beginning must be linked to something that went before it. … Invention, it must humbly be admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. … Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it’ (F 3). Shelley’s raw materials, as acknowledged in her Introduction and evinced by the text of the novel itself, encompass a variety of influences (a whole ‘fund of literary sources on which Frankenstein cannibalistically feeds’ (35)), ranging from conversations at the Villa Diodati on ‘the nature of the principle of life’ (F 4), on galvanism and Erasmus Darwin’s wriggling vermicelli, to German ghost stories, or Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Only after having amassed these materials, can the artist’s imagination synthesise the composite layers of philosophical, literary and mythological sources underlying the ‘successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bonds of reverie’ (36) (F 4). Recounting the visionary incentive of her narrative (the dream of ‘the pale students of unhallowed arts’ within her own dream), Shelley tellingly focuses on the scene of monstrous birth in the novel, rendering both experiences in terms of speculary encounters: the ‘hideous corpse’ opens its murky eyes to gaze at creator, author and, implicitly, at the audience, transforming all of them into the object of his paralysing stare. The ‘hideous phantoms’ – book and monster – have awakened to life.

 

‘My workshop of filthy creation’ (F 43)

 

Frankenstein becomes so engrossed (37) in his project of animating the dead that he appears to realise the deformity of his progeny only on the ‘dreary night of November’ when ‘the spark of life’ is infused into the ‘lifeless thing’ lying at his feet, ‘breathless horror and disgust fill[ing] his heart’ (F 45). Determined to unravel the mystery of ‘the principle of life’ and enthused with the dawning realisation (‘an almost supernatural enthusiasm’) that life and death are inextricably intertwined, Frankenstein understands that in order to examine the principle of life, he ‘must first have recourse to death’, proceeding with his investigation into ‘the natural decay and corruption of the human body’ (F 41). It is in charnel-houses and cemetery vaults that the cyclicity of life and death is revealed to him: decaying matter is merely sustenance for the emergence of a new form of life: ‘I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life’ (F 41). On the threshold demarcating darkness from light, death from life, he envisages himself not merely as a transgressor of these ‘ideal bounds’, but as the creator of a new species of ‘many happy and excellent natures’, a modern version of the Ovidian Prometheus plasticator (38).

Rather than yielding a human being, Frankenstein produces an unnatural monstrosity, pieced together from somatic fragments (the Promethean ‘lifeless clay’, F 43), furnished by the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse. Relinquishing his initial intention of selecting average-size human limbs (‘the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed’), Frankenstein decides ‘to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large’ (F 43). The result is an aggregate of commensurate and beautiful bodily parts, yet the overall effect is horrific. Why should Frankenstein’s disappointment be so huge when, from its inception, the creature is bound to exceed human norms of size and its physical components appear to be in proportion? The disparity between the comeliness of the component parts and the hideous repulsiveness of the finished combination reinforces the discrepancy between his visionary projection (‘the creation of a human being’, F 42-43) and the concrete materiality of his creature (‘the miserable monster whom I had created’, F 46). What has caused this slippage, this displacement of humanity by monstrosity? Has Frankenstein inadvertently jeopardised his creation through sheer sloppiness (the impending necessity of ‘speed’)? One explanation may reside in the fact that Frankenstein has severed the corporeal pieces from a totalising frame of referentiality, heightening the impression of immensity and the anxiety of disaggregation that giants impart upon the human viewer. As Cohen maintains, to gaze at the giant as something more than a body in pieces would require the adoption of an ‘inhuman, transcendent’ perspective’: ‘the giant is a body that is always in pieces, since within a human frame, he can be perceived only synechdochically, never as a totality’ (1999, 11). Therefore, giants may be seen to embody a phenomenon of extimité (39), a concurrence of ‘external intimacy’ and ‘intimate alterity’. Frankenstein will experience a dissolution of identity, an appropriation of the very features that are supposed to demarcate monstrosity from humanity: he subsequently refers to the monster as ‘my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave’ (F 61), he becomes ‘a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity’ (F 123), acquires a ‘haggard and wild appearance’ (F 114), abhors the ‘face of man’ (F 141), and it is only when disjointing the monsterette that he feels restored to humanity: ‘I again felt as if I belonged to a race of human beings like myself’ (F 130).  While monsters appear to reside outside the human realm and body, bordering the limits of their coherence – hence the threat of dismemberment, anthropophagy, which is voiced by several characters in the novel, would signal a fear of complete dissolution of their selfhood – they are also fully within (40) (giants are ‘foundational’ figures, builders of cities and nations). Explorers and travellers who traditionally encountered hybrid monsters at geographical margins, found their own humanity threatened by such liminal creatures, because their composite bodies did not merely signal difference, but also similarity with the human (41). It is the attribute of size that renders the giant subhuman, yet his human shape leaves him suspended in a hybrid site, a liminal interstice between categories.

 While I tend to agree with Baldick’s dismissal of the psychological account, according to which the monster’s abhorrent sight might be a projection of Victor Frankenstein’s sense of ‘guilty revulsion from his deed’ (1987, 33), since neither does the novel offer any conclusive explanation for the creature’s unsightliness, nor is the monster’s ugliness apparent only to his progenitor, but to everyone, including to himself, I nevertheless find the giant’s alterity, the excesses of his monstrous body to mirror his progenitor’s excessive, indeed ‘presumptuous’ scheme of reforming mankind by resurrecting the dead into a monolithic corporeal entity: ‘A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures  would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs’ (F 43). Giants, indeed, do not merely stand in stark opposition to the human, as a ‘measure of man’ (Friedman, 2000, 26), they are not simply an illustrative antithesis proving by negative example the truth of civility (42), but, uncannily, they become a contrastive device in the construction of human identity: as Cohen maintains, the ‘giant is simultaneously disavowed and heeded, abjected and interiorised’ (1999, 185). Gazing at the vast, fractional body of the giant, Frankenstein has a speculary realisation of the speciousness of his demiurgic enterprise, indeed of his self-identity as Promethean overreacher: ‘Oh! No mortal could support the horror of that countenance’ (F 46). The monster’s body is a gigantic conglomerate of dead human individuals, yet the offspring that it might propagate upon the earth would be ‘a race of devils’ who might make ‘the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror’ (F 127): ‘reading’ the giant’s body enables Frankenstein to realise that his utopian project of regenerating mankind is utterly flawed.

 

“Anonymous androdæmon” (43)

 

‘… by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated his limbs. How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! – Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.’ (F 45)

In the retrospective description of the creature’s deformity, the sequential volley of signifiers is interrupted by a double exclamation, which functions as a caesura, intensifying the horrific effect of Frankenstein’s visual encounter of the monster. The climactic feature that appears to infirm the ‘beauty’ of the monster’s features is the transparency of his skin, which makes visible the ‘work’ (44) of arteries and muscles beneath: what is discernible underneath the translucent screen of the monster’s anatomy is not merely the intricate network of ‘fibres, muscles and veins’ (F, 42), but also their pulsation, their life. It is this lifelikeness – detectable also in the ‘luxuriances’ of the lustrous, flowing hair and the ‘pearly whiteness’ of the teeth – that is set in ‘horrid contrast’ with the monster’s necrotic features: its ‘dun white sockets’, its ‘shrivelled complexion and straight black lips’. In contrast with the ‘convulsive motion’ agitating the creature’s limbs, the latter features betray a lack of internal circulation (45) and are a constant reminder of the community of cadavers that has supplied them. A gigantic creature resurrected from the dead, the monster cannot, as Frankenstein has envisaged, conclusively cross the threshold separating life from death, and is doomed to bear the marks of its permanent straddling of these boundaries. As Punter very aptly remarks, the monster’s body becomes the liminal topography which sites ‘this mysterious interlocking of birth and death’, fostering the collapse of any ‘neat distinction between fertility and sterility, between the organic and the inorganic’ (1998, 51-52). Furthermore, that the sutured layer of the monster’s epidermis should be concurrently pictured as taut and ‘shrivelled’ evinces a surface tension permanently on the point of disruption. The ‘contaminating life’ of the creature threatens to pour out from his overstretched skin and ‘pursue Victor physically and psychologically’,(46) threatening to ‘consume’ not only him, but also the entire symbolic order in which he is inserted.

 

 

‘Not thus, after all, would life be given’

 

The failure of Frankenstein’s grandiose project of ‘bestowing animation upon lifeless matter’ has spawned several interpretations (47), two approaches, the aesthetic and the political, appearing to prevail. The composite morphology of the monster has since antiquity been employed in aesthetic discussions of the relationship of parts to the whole. While in neoclassicism, the rules for a decorous imitation of nature precluded any ill-assortment of the parts that would result in unnatural combinations and grotesque aggregations, the injunction against a mechanical combination of the parts resounds particularly strongly in the aesthetics of Romanticism. The essential opposition between the mechanical and the organic in-forms Coleridge’s conception of Imagination, evinced by the distinction he operates between a mere mechanical assemblage of the parts by Fancy or associative ingenuity, and the organic fusion operated by the secondary Imagination, which ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead’ (48). Coleridgean imagination is a ‘synthetic and magical power’ that blends or reconciles ‘opposite or discordant qualities’; the unity of the parts is, unlike the mechanical and preordained unity of neoclassicism, organic, vital, akin to nature. Analysts such as Baldick (1993) have adequately remarked that Frankenstein’s failure to ‘co-adunate’ (join and shape into one) the raw materials of his artificial genesis must be ascribed to his mistaking the beauty of the dead limbs for the beauty of a whole organism: this can arise only from a pure vital principle (‘spark of life’) within, to which both the subordinate parts and the resultant harmonious unit will then conform. In fact, Frankenstein’s is a ‘triple failure of imagination’, as Mellor as observed: a failure to imaginatively identify with his creature (49), a phantasmatic presumption that ‘the male can produce a higher form of evolutionary species by lateral propagation than by sexual procreation’, and a discarding of the fundamental tenet of Romantic poetics whereby ‘the creative imagination must work spontaneously, unconsciously, and above all organically, creating forms that are themselves organic heterocosms’ (1988, 102).

Furthermore, in order for the creature not to be perceived as a mere mechanistic aggregation of anatomical parts, he should inspire the viewer with the imaginative power capable of uniting his fragmented somaticity into the totality of a human being – after all, Frankenstein’s exalted imagination has impelled him to ‘give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man’ (F, 42). In an attempt to unravel the causes that disrupt Frankenstein’s imaginative effort to connect his creature’s diverse components into a single, coherent totality, Gigante (idem, 571) resorts to the Burkean tautological description of ugliness (50), which is utterly dependent as an aesthetic effect on the perceiving/perceived eye: ‘I think then, that the beauty of the eye consists, first, in its clearness … none are pleased with an eye whose water… is dull and muddy. We are pleased with the eye in this view, on the principle upon which we like diamonds, clear water, glass, and such transparent substances’ (51). The monster’s deformed physicality is clearly subjected to a regime of the gaze: Frankenstein does not manage to visually encompass the creature’s physique as human-like because its assembly of features is a striking concoction of dissimilar ingredients: on the one hand, the opaqueness of human skin, normally occluding any insight into the corporeal interior, becomes here a transparent cutaneous surface exposing the mechanics of his creation; on the other hand, the translucency of the human ocular globe becomes a murky, lustreless eye, which obstructs visual access to the depth of subjectivity. Frankenstein’s visual apprehension of the materiality of the creature’s ‘dull yellow eye’, which then replicates into two ‘watery eyes’, accounts for the clogging of imaginative perception and the frustrated attempt to contain the monster’s centripetal, disintegrating morphology into coherent representation.

 

 

‘My accursed origin’ (F 100)

 

Frankenstein’s artistic fashioning of his creature – by selecting discrete parts for their beauty rather than choosing an entire body for reanimation – has spurred an equally fruitful line of investigation, which has articulated the issue of Frankensteinian monstrosity in historical and political terms. Analysts like Jansson (1993, viii) have noticed that while the novel resists a single interpretation, at the crux of Mary Shelley’s text lie fundamental social and public issues of the period spanning the aftermath of the French Revolution. Significantly, the first decade of the French Revolution witnessed the proliferation in Britain of two ‘bodies of writing’: a flurry of gothic novels and political pamphlets – incited by Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1789) – in which the monstrous figured as an important aid in shaping both counter- and pro-revolutionary argument (52). While in radicalist discourse, such as William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), there was a persistent reference to the lingering aristocratic system – which perpetrated injustice, oppression and inequality – as a stuffed and ‘voracious monster’, demonic imagery was also consistently applied by the Anti-Jacobins to the seditious and destabilising works of radical philosophers, conceived as emanating directly from ‘that putrid carcase the French Revolution’ (53). Moreover, such was the power of contamination feared to reside in the prorevolutionaries’ propaganda, that a standard conservative trope became picturing the proselytes of Utopian reformers like Godwin and Wollstonecraft as ‘the spawn of the monster’ (54), breeding further monsters (revolutionary crowds), which threaten to destroy their progenitors.

An essentially promonarchical document, such as Burke’s Reflections (55), insisted on the necessity of the natural, organic growth of any constitution, declaring the new republic in France to have been born ‘out of nature’ with a ‘monster of a constitution’ or ‘that monstrous fiction’ which, like deceitful  ‘chimeras of a monstrous and portentous policy’, promised political and material equality for all citizens. A ‘foul, impious, monstrous thing, wholly out of the course of moral nature’ (56), the French Revolution was, Burke claimed, bound to engender ‘an ignoble oligarchy, founded on the destruction of the crown, the church, the nobility, and the people’, to create ‘monstrous democratic assemblies’ and ‘degenerate into a military democracy, a species of political monster, which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it’. Musgrave (1999, 271) contends that the Burkean critique of the French Revolution is anchored in ‘its aesthetic transgressions’ of the political and ethical order of things, his antirevolutionary plea being an appeal against the ugliness perpetrated in the social body (‘mental blotches and running sores’ (57)) by the disruptive revolutionary acts: ‘What Burke fears is the irruption of the repressed social real through the skin of ‘pleasing illusions’ that contain – and sustain – society. Any fissures in the ‘system of manners’ become infections … that inevitably infect the social body with the ‘contagion of their ill example’ (Gigante, idem, 568).

First published within three decades since the French Revolution, Frankenstein (58) reanimates the heated debate concerning the revolutionary regime in France, whereby English radical and conservative circles in the 1790s supported or contested the appropriateness of similar movements in Britain. Shelley’s novel evinces a non-partisan appropriation of the scalding rhetoric deployed both by political conserva­tives and by English republicans. As Sterrenburg maintains, despite the radical heritage of her illustrious parents, Mary Shelley eschews in Frankenstein any conclusive political partisanship, moving beyond ‘both the radical and the conservative traditions it appropriates’ and accomplishing a ‘subversion of all ideology’(1979, 144). While Shelley’s depiction of a terrifying, man-made monster, who wreaks havoc and destroys his progenitor, is seen as a counter-revolutionary response to the presumptuous confidence and utter failure of Enlightenment utopianism, the author’s designation of the monster’s maker as the ‘modern Prometheus’ would signal Shelley’s equally (and ambiguously) firm anchorage in prorevolutionary convictions. Nevertheless, the novel registers a downsizing of this political symbolism to a private and psychological scale: the conflictual situation between Frankenstein and his monster is a reenactment of previous political polemics at the level of personal psychology. Seen from this perspective, the Monster’s vengeful destabilisation of the Frankenstein household is consistent with the conservative stereotypes picturing regenerationist ideals as the ‘unleashing of parricidal monsters and spectres from the grave’ (Sterrenburg, idem, 145).

That the ‘demoniacal corpse to which [Frankenstein] had so miserably given life’ (F 46) should be a hybrid body, a somatic conglomerate sutured from pieces scavenged in dissecting rooms and mortuaries, renders Frankenstein’s progeny a community of corpses, a relational matrix uniting its private body to the public body. Punter (59) contends that Frankenstein is a text about the ‘cannibalisation of the body’, a reworking of the Christian myth of resurrection in the sense that the creature’s birth is actually a physical, and not a spiritual, rebirth ‘from the detritus of the organic’, standing therefore ‘for the resurrection of the body which is to come’ (1998, 50). A similar point is made by Hirsch, who argues that Frankenstein’s enterprise does not entail resurrecting a ‘single Lazarus, the already integral body of a dead individual’ but regenerating an entire ‘le genre humaine’, one that exceeds the bounds of an individual and confederates the limbs of ‘myriad individuals’ into a ‘new, conglomerate mass’ (1996: 116). A stereotype of political discourse, the ‘body politic’ under siege reverberates in conservative attacks against the French Revolution in representations of anatomical deformity, signifying the threats posed by rebellion and political discord to the integrity of this ‘body’. In The Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes states all men, in a state of nature, that is prior to their submission to a form of government, are at perpetual war with each other; by combining into communities and subjecting themselves to a central authority, the sovereign body, they enter a covenant, or social contract, whereby this commonwealth or ‘Leviathan’ can escape from the anarchy. (60) The monster’s body seems fragilely agglutinated under the epidermal layer, constantly on the verge of re-becoming a corps morcelés: the monster’s sutured skin iconically represents not only the potential disruption of its heterogeneous mass into the myriad individuals it agglutinates, but also the disquieting prospect of piercing through the fabric of society (61), or, reduced to the smaller scale of the Frankenstein family, anthropophagy, cannibalisation. This the monster is perceived as such a threat is evident in William Frankenstein’s reaction to encountering the monster: ‘you wish to eat me, and tear me to pieces – You are an ogre!’ (F 109). Frankenstein himself refers to the monster’s engulfing propensity, when, absorbed in his creation, he puts off any communication with his family ‘until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed’ (F 44).

While the abortive result of Frankenstein’s enterprise has supported the view that, in effect, Shelley’s novel is a critique of Godwinian utopianism and of the Revolution’s failure to fulfil its regenerative purpose, an equally valid perspective opens when considering the monster’s rebellion against his progenitor in the light of his unjust abandonment. A literalisation of the revolutionary metaphor, the redemption of humankind by reuniting the dead into a new social corporation (Hirsch 1996, 117), Frankenstein’s progeny also voices the radical argument in favour of rebellion against social and familial oppression. Whereas the monster’s rebellion is parricidal, it is nevertheless a consequence of abandonment and unjust treatment. Frankenstein’s Promethean enterprise is successful indeed, in the sense that he created Natural Man as the meliorists envisaged such a man; his tragedy is not so much an outgrowth of his excess – his aspiration to become a supreme artificer – but an outcome of his moral error, his failure to accept his parental responsibilities (62). Parental neglect amounts to actual tyranny in the novel, the monster’s narrative fusing the two central Christian symbols of theme of divine oppression, Satan and Adam (63). ‘Oh, Frankenstein,’ the monster pleads, ‘be not equitable to every other and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed’ (F 77-78). As Botting maintains, Frankenstein uses ‘a recognisably Gothic framework in its themes of parental wickedness and filial suffering’ (1996, 99-100), establishing an effective connection between domestic and political tyranny. While it may be argued that the creature’s graphic description (the chromatics of which are at odds with the standard European physiognomy: the yellowness of the eyes and skin, the glossy darkness of the hair and lips and the ‘pearly whiteness’ of the teeth) echoes colonial descriptions of ‘savages’ (64), what is more terrifying than his physical otherness is the monster’s desperate plea for his inclusion within ‘le genre humain’ (65). While some critics have seen Frankenstein or the ‘modern Prometheus’ as critical of the failure of the Revolution to fulfil its utopian promise, it is thus more accurate to see in Shelley’s figuration of monstrosity a convergence of counter- and pro-Revolutionary rhetoric. Frankenstein’s monster emerges as a grafting of two symbolic traditions that at end of 18th century used the monster as a political metaphor to either uphold or inveigh the legitimacy of a radical reconfiguration of the ‘body politic’.

 

 

‘The lords of my imagination’

 

Among the most enduring significances that the term ‘Frankenstein’ has perpetuated in the popular conscience is its association with the technological production of a monstrous double. Levine sees this to be altogether consistent with Shelley’s original conception of the novel, since Victor’s quest for the secret of life is ‘fundamentally scientific’. However, his assessment of the monster’s creation as a ‘mere trick of technology’ (1979, 16) is far-fetched; it would be more appropriate to see here, as Tropp (66) notes, a conflation of the Gothic concept of the double with technological monstrosity, or a technologically generated double (Hansen, 1997), betraying anxieties about the blurring of the distinction between man and machine.

Although critics like Baldick categorically dismiss the possibility of Frankenstein’s creation representing a technological prophecy, since ‘he constructs his monster with no technological ends even remotely in view; not as a machine, a robot, a helot, or any other labour-saving convenience’ (1987, 44), the mechanical, robotised, and therefore dehumanised figure can also be detected in the assortment of alterities that the monster’s body displays. Despite the fact that crediting Shelley’s novel with parenting the genre of science fiction (67) may represent an offshoot of its later cinematic and fictional renditions, and that Frankenstein’s energies are solely devoted to the creation of life, and not machinery, the staging of his creationist quest in terms of embarking on a path of scientific discovery enables the perspective of the monster as a ‘product of technology strictly defined as applied science’ (Tropp 1990, 40). The underlying metaphor of man as machine reveals the ambivalent effect of the Industrial Revolution, coalescing contemporary feelings of, on the one hand, confidence in man’s ingenuity and powers of intellect to supplant manpower with indefatigable machines, and, on the other hand, anxieties at the disturbing prospect of mechanised devices utterly replacing humans or rendering people as the dehumanised parts of an industrial machine (idem, 32). In fact, replicating life by artificial means is a theme that reaches far back into classical antiquity, to mythological artificers such as Prometheus, Daedalus or Pygmalion. The practice of ‘body modification’, through an alliance of art and technology, is, as Sawday maintains, ‘one of the defining characteristics of human culture’ (1999, 172), challenging, in effect, our sense of the body as the defining limit to our own sense of selfhood. A refashioning of the human body through an appropriation of technology can be seen, therefore, as a way of refashioning the self.  In scientific discourse the distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ was already breaking down in the 16th century, with the emerging sciences of technology and anatomy conspiring together to offer ‘a complete ‘mechanical’ image of the world’ (68). By the end of the 17th century, anatomists’ explorations had gradually dismantled what appeared to be a tremendously complex mechanism, while the understanding of mechanics rested on the analogical functioning of human bodies; hence the fantastic cult of automata in the Renaissance. In his investigation of the genealogy of machine automation, Hansen (2000) correlates the advent of the Industrial Revolution with the discovery of matter as possessing its own source of dynamics, an innate vital force, electricity (69). While previous automata were not self-moving, and dualistic in their categorical distinction between fabricated body and manipulating agency, Frankenstein’s monster can be seen to transgress the boundary between organism and machine, to embody a deconstruction of the nature/culture (70) divide, or, rather, to question whether there is anything organic about its monstrous ontology (71). The complexity of Frankenstein’s enterprise should not, however, be reduced to a simple relinquishment of the misguided, pseudoscientific alchemical knowledge in favour of a more scientific approach to the issue of artificial birth, via chemical physiology (72). As Botting has shown, ‘Frankenstein is not just a scientist in the modern, empirical sense. His project is imbued with grander speculations of alchemical power, speculations which, in the context of natural philosophy, promise, not supernatural knowledge, but the awesome secrets of nature, the mind and the body in the manner laid out by chemical and electrical experiments of the time’ (1996, 103).

‘But where were my friends and relations? … I had never yet, seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I?’ (F 94). The reason of the monster’s clamour for identity clues is, as Rowen (1990, 169) argues, his restrictive access to the story of man’s genesis, since the only creation narrative available to him is Milton’s Paradise Lost. However, the monster’s birth may clearly have been patterned after models alternative to divine genesis (73) – and in this case, Rowen ventures to say, Frankenstein’s monster may be in the company of illustrious predecessors, all examples of paternal propagation, products of artificial, motherless births (albeit of monstrous progeny), which either flaunt or attempt to copy the divine creative act: the Golem of the Jewish mystics, the alchemical homunculus, or the automaton.

Both Huet (1993, 128) and Halberstam (1998, 192) seem to sanction the similitude linking Frankenstein’s progeny (74) with the golem, a shapeless earth or clay mass, figured to be soulless, and animated by means of an injection of divine spirit. Rowen (1990, 170) provides the fullest account of the monster as a version of the golem, reducing this creational model to several particulars, foremost amongst which is its dualistic origin: the organic originating substance (the feminine element) – worn-out, human detritus collected in graveyards and charnel houses, suggesting lifelessness in the case of the monster, and warm and fertile clay, suggesting vitality, in the case of the golem – is infused with life from an extrinsic source – a lightning bolt, in all probability (75), in the case of the former, and the breath of spirit, in the case of the latter; however, while the golem’s body is integral, the creature is pieced together from various human parts. A different model of man-engendering creation, which, this time, mimics normal processes of generation, is that of the homunculus.  That the alchemists’ ‘visions’ or ‘chimeras of boundless grandeur’ may underlie Frankenstein’s enterprise is evidenced by his early indulging in reading the recondite works of Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus (76), ‘the lords of my imagination’ until his arrival at the university at Ingolstadt and his disavowal of ‘natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation’ (F 33).

Nevertheless, the monster’s birth cannot be definitively ascertained to follow a particular model of generation; it appears, rather, to conflate several such models. The alchemical model is not dismissed by Kiely, who notices the concurrence of Frankenstein’s scientific ambitions with the aspirations of metaphysicians to probe into the most profound mysteries of life (77): ‘though Frankenstein himself scorns the notion, his “scientific” method has a large dose of hocus-pocus in it and comes a good deal closer to alchemy than it does to physiology’ (1985, 70). Closer to the actual procedures of assembly – a quasi-synthetical construction out of pre-manufactured fragments (artificial/human) – that Frankenstein’s monster is subjected to is a third model, the automaton, or machine man, which by the end of the 18th century had already been produced by technologists. Tropp also insists on a syncretic genealogy of the monster, who is seen as ‘evolved from the supernatural apparitions of horror stories’ (‘dreaded spec­tre’), as well as the product of a ‘(cruder) technological process’ (30), given his construction like a machine. The reason why Frankenstein’s monster is ultimately a terrible miscreation may be either, as Donawerth puts is, the scientist’s ‘usurping both God’s and woman’s powers of creation’ (1997, 20) or, as Homans considers, ‘an oedipal violation of Mother Nature’ (1993, 164). A contradictory mix of magic, alchemy and science, the monster is emblematic of ‘the way that notions of human identity… were being transformed and secularised… in the scientific discoveries of the time’ (78): engendered in a time when the positive, scientific spirit was beginning to shape alternative creationist discourse, the Shelleyan monster is ultimately ‘a golem estranged from all animating spirit, a machine-man made of vulnerable flesh, a homunculus bred not out of the womb but of the grave’ (Rowen idem, 176). Published almost 50 years after Lazzaro Spallanzani’s first attempt to produce artificial fertilization, at a time when medical investigation into generation had shifted its emphasis from the mother’s influence to the isolated scientist experimenting in his laboratory, Frankenstein may forecast the ‘prophetic image of the teratogenist scientist’ (Huet, idem, 129-130), which was to be redeployed in the late 19th-century gothic novels of Wells (The Island of Doctor Moreau) and Stevenson (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde).

 

 

‘This being you must create’ (F 111)

 

Perhaps the most significant renovation that Mary Shelley’s first novel brings to the Gothic genre is its recharting of gothic topography, in the sense that it maps the monstrous body (79) as the locus of fear. Previous Gothic novels, starting with Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, and culminating with the Gothic romances produced in the decade of the French Revolution (such as Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho or Lewis’s The Monk) had emphasised locale as the site of terror/horror. As Halberstam (1998, 28), for instance, remarks, in Frankenstein deformed physiognomy or misshapen corporeality replaces the traditional ‘architecture of fear’ (such as labyrinthine crypts or devil-ridden vaults). While the sublime landscape (the craggy Alps or the icy vastness of the Arctic) retains its terror-provoking potential, it is bodily monstrosity that is accountable for the more prevalent strain of visual horror. (80) The monstrous body functions, in a manner analogous with Gothic labyrinths, as a permanently unstable and fluctuating site, with borders that are ‘always on the verge of dissolution’ (Punter, 1998, 46), perpetually threatening to exceed its representation and contaminate. Indeed, while Frankenstein’s creature is an atypical monster, since his corporeal prowess is outdone by his intellectual power, and since his outward deformity is strongly counterbalanced by his eloquence and articulate intelligence, it is nevertheless consistent with the traditional idea of the monstrous as sheer visible surface: monstrosity depends for its construction on visual codes, it is entirely conceivable in the ‘scopic regime’: ‘a construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read’ (Cohen, 1996, 4). Seeing, beholding, visualising become inextricably linked with monstrosity: the monster himself is aware of the power of the gaze when he remarks: ‘the unnatural hideousness of my person was the chief object of horror with those who had beheld me’ (F 102). Even etymologically, monstrosity is primarily related to visual display, whether one considers the Augustinian connection made between the Latin monstrum (a divine portent, usually of misfortune) and the verb monstrare (‘to show’, ‘to reveal’), or the one operated by Isidore of Seville, who derived it from monere (‘to warn’). The legible deformity (81) of monstrous bodies is meant for visual exploration and interpretation, as heralds either of dire events or of good fortune or as exhibitions of moral vices. Addressing the blind De Lacey, the monster impugns the perceiving eye for its distorting, disfiguring flaw: ‘a fatal prejudice clouds their eyes, and where they ought to see a feeling and kind friend, they behold only a detestable monster’ (F 103). Punter senses the potential of the Frankensteinian monster’s articulacy (82) when he states that it may indicate a ‘coming to consciousness of the primordial matricial body’ (what Kristeva calls the transition from the semiotic into the symbolic), and/or an ‘imperialist takeover by language of a state of bodily innocence’ (1998, 57). It has been suggested (83) that in the episode when the monster confronts his creator amidst the sublime scenery of the Alps, Frankenstein’s relapse into an apprehension of the horror of hideous physicality (84) after having accepted to ‘listen’ compassionately to his progeny’s story marks a conclusive exclusion of monstrosity from signification and meaning: the monster may never accede into the symbolic, he is forever trapped by his repugnant appearance in the imaginary. However, as Halberstam argues, ‘it is precisely in the realm of the symbolic, in the realm of language… that monstrosity and humanity emerge as inseparable ‘ (1998, 44). While apparently this novel focuses on the creation of a monster, the latter’s dialectical otherness is a foundational device for constructing human identity as it egresses the semiotic, visual, imaginary stage, entering the symbolic, linguistic one. Ultimately, the monster may indeed stand for Shelley’s conflictual emergence within the public realm of discourse. 

 

 

Notes

1 The title of the first dramatic adaptation of Shelley’s story, authored by Richard Brinsley Peake (1823). According to Forry (1990: ix), the incentive to the immediate popular success registered by Frankenstein was due, notwithstanding its negative critical reception, to dozens such dramatizations of the Shelleyan plot, whose proliferation in the 1820s coincided with a resurrection of the Gothic vein in the age of Romanticism.

2 Issued in The Quarterly Review of January 1818.

3 Idem.

4 The Belle Assemblée (March 1818)

5 ‘It inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners, or morality; it cannot mend, and will not even amuse its readers, unless their taste have been deplorably vitiated — it fatigues the feelings without interesting the understanding; it gratuitously arrases the sensations’ (The Quarterly Review, idem).

6 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (20 March/1 April 1818).

7 Mary Shelley. Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus. Jansson, Siv, ed. (Wordsworth Classics, 1993, based on the third edition of 1831).

8 The confusion between Frankenstein and his creature may have been triggered by the monster’s namelessness and by its consequent appropriation of his creator’s name in later cinematic versions of the novel (see Kiely 1979, 68). Mellor considers that error of assigning the name of Frankenstein to the monstrous creature and not to the creator himself ‘derives from an intuitively correct reading of the novel’ (1988, 38). Spark likewise sees in the common mistake of naming the monster ‘Frankenstein’ a symptom of the merging between the creature’s and creator’s identities: ‘Frankenstein is perpetuated in the Monster’, and the monster is Frankenstein’s ‘doppelganger’ (1985, 16-19). For Bloom, this case of mistaken identities is indicative of the fact that they are the ‘antithetical halves of a single being’ (1985, 1-2).

9 See, for instance, Punter (1998, 60) or Kiely (1985, 67-73).

[1]0 Baldick insists that while all books necessarily run ‘loose from authorial intention’ and tend ‘to mock their begetters by displaying a vitality of their own’, Frankenstein’s case is an extreme one, its semantic generativity approximating what he calls ‘textual monstrosity’ (1987, 30).

[1]1 Williams (1996, 107-108) detects the fundamental arbitrariness and absolute impermanence of any teratological taxonomy. Cohen similarly remarks that monsters are characterised by ‘ontological liminality’; they are ‘disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration’ (1996, 6).  

[1]2 I owe this suggestion to Judith Halberstam (1998, 29), who, following Franco Moretti (1999, 44), distinguishes ‘essential monstrosity’ (which represents ‘an integral feature of very specific bodies’) from ‘totalising monstrosity’ (which ‘allows for a whole range of specific monstrosities to coalesce in the same form’).

[1]3 Douglas (1966, 147-9).

[1]4 Halberstam (1998, 28).

[1]5 Huet (1993, 156).

[1]6 Baldick (1987, 32).

[1]7 Rubenstein, Marc A. ‘”My Accurs’d Origin”: The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein’, Studies in Romanticism, XV (1976), 172; qtd. in Baldick 1987, 32.

[1]8 The suggestion for instance that, like Frankenstein’s monster, the novel itself had a nine-month gestation from its first draft to its publication.

[1]9 Barbara Johnson, ‘My Monster/ My Self’, Diacritics, 12 (Summer 1982), 8. Qtd. In Hansen (1997, 32).

20 By ‘female gothic’, Moers (1979, 77-87) understands the corpus of literary works produced by women writers in the Gothic genre since the 18th century. Like the novel’s author herself, Frankenstein, the creator of a quasi-human offspring, is besieged by birth-giving and death-bearing anxieties. Given Shelley’s personal experience of child loss, the monster’s resuscitation from the dead is bound, Moers claims, to be fraught with an ambivalent ‘fantasy of the newborn’ as simultaneously ‘monstrous agent of destruction and piteous victim of parental abandonment’. Moers rehabilitates the monster as the figure of an infant who, deprived of parental care, recapitulates the ‘infantile and adolescent stages of human development’ and naturally turns against his progenitor.

2[1] ‘My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bonds of reverie. I saw…I saw…’ (F, 4); ‘by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open…’(F 45).

22 A point supported by Hirsch: Victor’s asexual construction of a creature without women’s agency can be interpreted as a ‘gynophobic attack on woman-centred fam­ily domesticity’ (1996, 124).

23 Gilbert & Gubar (1979, 240) chart an interesting parallel of the monster’s ‘literal [bodily] monstrosity’ and Eve’s ‘figurative [spiritual] monstrosity’: whereas the monster recounts his ‘despondence and mortification’ at viewing himself in a transparent pool, distrusting at first the accuracy of ‘the mirror’ and then internalising the image of ‘the monster that I am’, Eve’s narcissistic self-absorption in her reflected image (Paradise Lost, IV.449-68) is indicative of her moral misshapenness.

24 Cf. Kristeva  (1982, 1-11).

25 Huet (1993, 164) sees a similarity between Percy Shelley’s raving response to the sight of his mistress’s body and Frankenstein’s frantic decision to dismember the female monster: ‘I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and, trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged’ (F 127).

26 Waterhouse (1996, 33) reconstitutes ‘monstrous genealogy’ by tracing species miscegenation as a practice generative of monsters back to the Genesis 6:4, where the intermingling of filii dei and the filiae hominum was seen to produce giants.

27 In his reading of the cultural meanings of imagination as an agent of teratogenesis, Todd (1995) examines the 18th-century debates staged in certain London medical and political circles over the corporealising power of maternal imagination, and investigates how concerns surrounding preformationism reverberated in anxieties about identity issues. In a similar vein, Huet’s study (1993) dissociates between the period up to the beginning of the 19th century, when monstrous genesis was mostly related to the maternal imagination (basically mimetic, reproductive), and the reassignment in Romantic aesthetics of the role of creative, productive imagination this time, onto the male artist (‘the Romantic claim that artistic creation was a monstrous genesis and the work of art a form of teratological disclosure’, p. 3).

28 Huet (1993, 155). In his Introduction (1974, xviii; qtd.  in Jansson 1993, xiv) to the edition of the 1818 Frankenstein, James Rieger catalogues Percy Shelley’s massive and extensive assistance in the book’s manufacture as his coparenting of the novel.

29 Or ‘textual quest of her origins’ (Cf. Baldick, 1987, 31).

30 Halberstam (1998, 33).

31 See Gilbert & Gubar (1979, 224-225).

32 Bloom (1985, 5) censures Frankenstein as  ‘a strong, flawed novel with frequent clumsiness in its narrative and characterization’ which, though lacking the ‘sophistication and imaginative complexity of such works’ as Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Byron’s Manfred, nevertheless offers ‘one of the most vivid versions we have of the Romantic mythology of the self’, providing thus ‘a unique introduction to the archetypal world of the Romantics’.

33 Mellor (1988, 157).

34 Baldick (1987, 30).

35 Baldick’s statement (idem, 34) leads Halberstam to articulate her theory of the Gothic novel as a genre characterised by extreme hybridity, ‘a stitched body of distorted (inter)textuality’ (1998, 33). Furthermore, Frankenstein has been seen to be fraught with ‘generic instability’: this has made critics such as Tropp label it as an outgrowth of ‘the traditional Gothic tale of terror’ (1990, 28), while others, like Sterrenburg, see Frankenstein as enacting a ‘graveyard melodrama’ in private, psychological terms’ (1979, 152).

36 Frayling (1996, 6-33) insists on Frankenstein’s genesis in nightmare, consistent with the ‘Romantic craze’ for unleashing imagination through ‘the gateway of dreams’. Pointing out the double oneiric import in the novelistic conception of Frankenstein, he links it both to Mary Shelley’s personal dream of reanimating her dead infant and to John Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, which may have proved an incentive to her visualising the scene of Elizabeth lying ‘lifeless and inanimate’ on her ‘bridal bier’ after the death-inflicting nocturnal visit of the monster-incubus. Mary Shelley’s elliptic and fragmented Journal entry for March 19, 1815 reads: ‘Dream that my little baby came to life again – that it had only been cold  and that we rubbed it by the fire and it lived – I awake and find no baby’ (The Journals – vol one 1814-22, ed. by Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, Clarendon Press, 1987. qtd. in Frayling 1996, 33).

37 Although circumventing sexual channels of procreation, Frankenstein describes his venture in terms of ‘mothering’ his creature: he speaks of ‘delight and rapture’ at the prospect of arriving at ‘the summit of [his] desires’ in a ‘most gratifying consummation of [his] toils’ (F 42).

38 As Bloom (1985, 8) has astutely noticed, the ‘daemon is allowed a final image of reversed Prometheanism’, basically replicating the Aeschylian version of Prometheus pyrphorus: ‘I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames’ (F 170). In fact, consistent with the pattern of doubling that locks creator and creature in an occlusive dyad, Frankenstein and his monster both represent ‘The Modern Prometheus’ of Shelley’s subtitle: Frankenstein’s attempt to bypass normal methods of procreation is echoed by the monster’s injunction that a sibling/mate be created for him, while the creature’s learning the equivocal potentialities of fire mirrors Frankenstein’s stealthy appropriation of the secret of giving birth, with all the ambiguous mixture of reward and retribution that such a titanic exploit entails.

39 Cf. Cohen (1999, xii).

40 Idem.

4[1] See King (1995, 138-139).

42 White refers to the ‘technique of ostensive self-definition by negation’, whereby notions of wildness, savagery (Frankenstein’s monster has often been conceived of as a Wild Man, a Noble Savage) become ‘culturally self-authenticating devices’ deployed to indicate their ‘dialectical antitheses’ to civilisation’ (1978, 151-2).

43 The British Critic (April 1818)

44 Tropp (1990, 34) finds the monster’s hideousness to be the result of its ‘visible internal mechanical structure’; overemphasizing the idea that Shelley’s novel betrays anxieties at technology encroaching the human realm, he even ventures to see Frankenstein’s ‘product’ as a ‘mechanistic reincarnation of Satan’.

45 Cf. Halberstam (1998, 38).

46 Gigante (2000, 569).

47 Kiely (1985, 75), for instance, considers that the main theme of the novel is the ‘monstrous consequences of egotism’; Barbara Johnson agrees with a recent line of investigation launched by Moers (1979) that sees in Frankenstein’s aversion to the sight of his creation as a ‘study of postpartum depression, as a representation of maternal rejection of a newborn infant’ (see above reference); Huet (1993, 142) refers to Frankenstein as a ‘tale of disrupted filiation, a story grounded in the belief that it is sacrilegious to give birth when death surrounds us’.  According to Mellor (1988, 42), Frankenstein’s rejection of his progeny is engendered by a ‘failure of empathy’ and ‘lack of imaginative identification’ with his progeny, or, in Keatsian terms, his lack of ‘negative capability’, soon to degenerate into the extreme impulse of ‘putative infanticide’. Bennett sees here a clear displacement of the Greek myth of Prometheus, whose sufferings were, like Christ’s passions, redemptive for a spiritually resurrected mankind, whereas Frankenstein’s quest is ‘reduced to a mocking parody of enlightenment intention and execution’ (1998, 35).

48 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria. Watson, George, ed. London: J. M. Dent, 1975.

49 In her study of the scientific background of Frankenstein, Mellor has signalled the influence of Erasmus Darwin’s theory of male imagination as responsible for monstrous births (1988, 99).

50 Burke’s cursory dismissal of ugliness, ‘It may appear here as a sort of repetition… to insist here upon the nature of ugliness’ (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1757. Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1958, 119), underscores Gigante’s account of ugliness being excluded as a category from the 18th century aesthetic theory, whereby, he concludes, ugliness is inscribed a mere lack, as the negative form or ‘spectral other’ of the beautiful.

51 Burke, idem, 118.

52 Cf. Baldick (1987, 16).

53 Burke, cited by Sterrenburg (1979, 146).

54 The Anti-Jacobin Review V (1800); 427, qtd. in Sterrenburg (1979, 147). Sterrenburg also examines other conservative writings which were avidly read by Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley during their 1814 continental tour. Amongst these is Abbé Barruel’s Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797), which provides a fervent critique of the ‘cabal’ of the Illuminati at Ingolstadt whose philosophies spurred the French Revolution and resorts extensively to the parent-child metaphor to refer to the relationship between enlightenment philosophers and their monstrous offspring (the revolutionary mobs).

55  See paragraphs 15, 59, 174, 327, 356, 357.

56  Burke, ‘An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs’ (1791), qtd. in Musgrave (1999, 271).

57  Burke, Reflections, §174.

58  Sterrenburg (1979, 148) considers Frankenstein to be directly descending from the anti-Godwinian novels of the 1790s (such as George Walker’s The Vagbond, 1798). Accordingly, Mary Shelley’s novel provides not only a subtle criticism of Godwin’s personal and pedagogical failures but also a critique of his millenarian, messianic ideals of regenerating mankind, specifically pictured as a new human race, impervious to disease and mortality, produced not via the normal channels of procreation but through social engineering.

59 Insisting, in the wake of Levine’s analysis of Frankenstein (1979, 6-7) as a ‘transformation of fantasy and traditional Christian and pagan myths into unremitting secularity, into the myth of mankind as it must work within the limits of the visible physical world’ and a rejection of the ‘conception of man’s spirit [as] unanchored in flesh’, on the material strain that informs the novel, Punter (1998, 50-51) dismisses the Promethean myth as lying at the core of Shelley’s narrative. Instead, all the myths and legends (‘this patchwork of myth’) that he considers to underlie Frankenstein’s enterprise (animating the dead) – the Christian myth of resurrection, Hercules’ descent into the underworld, or Orpheus’ attempt to retrieve Persephone from Hades – focus on delving into ‘primal, birth‑giving matter, into the originary matrix, an unimagin­able return to a hypothesised primal scene’.

60  See also Russell (1961, 534-535). Baldick relates Frankenstein’s artificially assembled monster to Hobbes’s gigantic creature, remarking that they both signal the ‘dismemberment of the old body politic as incarnated in the personal authority of late feudal and absolutist rule’ (1987, 16).

61  A reading of the monster as a symbol of the potential of social re-formation or as embodying the destabilising potential of the lower classes has spurred Marxist interpretations of the monster as ‘the emergent proletariat’ (Montag 1992, 303). In his approach to ‘modern monsters’, Moretti sees Frankenstein’s creature and Dracula as ‘two indivis­ible, because complementary, figures; the two horrible faces of a single society, its extremes: the disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor’ (1999, 43).

62 Cf. Bloom (1985, 5-6).

63  See also Walling (1985, 58).

64 A point supported by Seymour (2000, xii-xiii), who considers that ‘the Creature’s carefully described and decidedly un-English appearance’ is suggestive of Shelley’s covert attack of ‘a society which still believed that the physical appearance of the Africans [most definitely encountered, the critic ascertains, by the author on the London docks] indicated their moral inferiority to Europeans’.

65  Hirsch, idem, 118.

66  Martin Tropp, Mary Shelley’s Monster. Boston, 1976, 52, qtd. in Levine (1985, 16).

67  Mellor considers that Frankenstein ‘initiated a new literary genre, what we now call science fiction’ (1988, 89). Familiar with the most important scientific works of her time, Mellor continues, Mary Shelley critiques the intrusive type of scientific research ‘which attempts to control or change the universe through human intervention’ (90).

68  Sawday (1999, 184-185).

69  See Mellor (1988, 104-105), who documents Shelley’s interest in Galvanism and its import for the creation scene in the novel.

70 Mellor sees in Frankenstein’s usurpation of natural means of reproduction a ‘scientific penetration and technological exploitation of female nature’ (1988, 115). Science can be conceived as an erotic domination of female nature by the male scientist: take for instance Frankenstein’s scientific urge that is expressed in terms of a  ‘penetration into the causes of things’ (F 24); a pursuit of ‘nature to her hiding‑places’ (F 43).

71 For Harraway, the (con)fusion of the organic and the cybernetic is very much a feature of the 29th century: she sees the Cyborg as standing for sheer fluidity (‘chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism’ (Donna Harraway. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’. New York: Routledge, 1991, qtd in Hansen, 2000).

72 Mellor (1988, 90).

73  What Mellor calls a parodic perpetration of the orthodox creationist theory: on the one hand a denial of God’s unique power to create organic life, on the other hand, a confirmation of the idea of solitary paternal propagation (1998, 101).

74  In particular, as suggested by Frankenstein’s reference to his creation as ‘filthy mass’ (F 113).

75 See Mary Shelley’s account of the scientific discussions around the issue of Galvanism that underlay the realisation that ‘the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth’ (F 4). The terrible storm issuing from the mountains of Jura, causing ‘a stream of fire [to] issue from an old and beautiful oak’ was the catalyst of Frankenstein’s own acquaintance with ‘the more obvious laws of electricity’ (F 33). For a comprehensive perspective on the scientific atmosphere surrounding the creation of Frankenstein, see Mellor (1998, 89-105).

76 Even after the professors of natural philosophy at Ingolstadt manage to deflate his initial interest in alchemy and he relinquishes the ‘dusty old authorities’, he cannot forbear his contempt for the ‘uses’ of the new science, which amount to nothing more than ‘realities of little worth’, and never abandons the ‘futile’, though ‘grand’ ‘dreams of forgotten alchymists’ (F 37).

77 ‘It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world’ (F 30).

78 Botting (1996, 93).

79 ‘Frankenstein is a text which, crucially, about the body’ (Punter, 1998, 50).

80 I resort here to the distinction between ‘terror’ and ‘horror’, operated by Radcliffe in her posthumously published essay, On the Supernatural in Poetry, 1826 (in Clery, E. J. & Robert Miles, eds. Gothic Documents. A Sourcebook 1700-1820. Manchester University Press, 2000)

81  See the episode of the encounter between the monster and little William. The confrontation between monster and human is here staged primarily at the visual level: both gaze at each other, and both read each other wrongly. ‘Suddenly’, the creature says, ‘as I gazed on him, an idea seized me, that this little creature was unprejudiced, and had lived too short a time to have imbibed a horror of deformity’(F 109); the monster’s plan of turning the boy into an educable (!) companion falls flat because ‘as soon as he beheld my form, he placed his hands before his eyes and uttered a shrill scream’(idem), followed by a volley of expletives that begin and end in ‘monster’.

82 Brooks (1985, 103) considers Mary Shelley’s radical ‘decision to stage a deformed and menacing creature who, rather than using grunts and gestures, speaks and reasons with the highest elegance, logic, and persua­siveness. In the Monster’s use of language the novel poses its most important questions, for it is language alone that may compensate for a deficient, monstrous nature’.

83  Idem, p.106.

84 ‘When I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of hatred and horror’ (F 113).

 

 

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