P. B. Shelley: ‘[N]or are the crimes and malevolence of the single Being, though indeed withering and tremendous, the offspring of any unaccountable propensity to evil, but flow irresistably from certain causes fully adequate to their production. They are the children, as it were, of Necessity and Human Nature. In this the direct moral of the book consists, and it is perhaps the most important and of the most universal application of any moral that can be enforced by example — Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked. Requite affection with scorn; let one being be selected, for whatever cause, as the refuse of his kind — divide him, a social being, from society, and you impose
upon him the irresistable obligations — malevolence and selfishness.’ (review of Frankenstein unpublished in his lifetime. in Shelley: Prose or the Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark, London: Fourth Estate, 1988, pp.306-07.)
[William Christie remarks: For Shelley’s and subsequent radical readings, monstrous intimidation follows necessarily from equally monstrous and dehumanizing neglect. ““Oh, Frankenstein”’, protests the Monster to his maker, ““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 your creature: I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel,
whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.”’ (pp.77-8).]
Marilyn Bulter: ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is famously reinterpretable. It can be a late version of the Faust myth, or an early version of the modern myth of the mad scientist; the id on the rampage, the proletariat running amok, or what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman. Mary Shelley invites speculation, and in the last generation has been rewarded with a great deal of it.’ (Butler, ‘Frankenstein and Radical Science”, in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Norton Critical Edition, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York and London: Norton, 1996), pp.302-313; p.302.)
Harold Bloom: ‘What makes Frankenstein an important book, though it is only a strong, flawed novel with frequent clumsiness in its narrative and characterization, is that it contains one of the most vivid versions we have of the Romantic mythology of the self, one that resembles Blake’s Book of Urizen, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Byron’s Manfred, among other works. Because it lacks the sophistication and imaginative complexity of such works, Frankenstein affords a unique introduction to the archetypal world of the Romantics. (Bloom, ‘Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus’, in his The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in the Romantic Tradition, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971, pp.119-129; p.122.)
Martin Tropp: ‘The Monster has been called the ancestor of “all the shambling horde of modern robots and androids” in science-fiction’, while Frankenstein has engendered “a whole range of demented scientists, from Dr Strangelove to the Saturday morning cartoon madmen whose symptoms include unruly hair, a persistent cackle, and the desire to (dare I say it?) “rule the world!”’: “Mad scientist and monster are figures in a modern myth; they reflect our fears about the future of man in a world of machines.’ (Tropp, Mary Shelley’s Monster: The Story of Frankenstein, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976, pp.2-3; 9.)
| Political Readings |
[Christie writes]: In the bulk of historico-political readings, Frankenstein “is traversed with the images and effects of the French Revolution’ (See Sterrenberg, “Mary Shelley’s Monster’, The Endurance of Frankenstein, p.156.) Sterrenberg, for example, cites intriguing detail like Mary Shelley’s choice, in Ingolstadt, of a place that had been identified in the Abbé Barruel’s Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797) and by Thomas Robison in his Proofs of a Conspiracy (1798) as the home of a secret society called Illuminati and thus as the intellectual cradle of the
French Revolution. (Christie, p.25.)
Chris Baldick, on the other hand, traces the accusation of monstrosity back and forth between anti-Jacobin and Jacobin throughout the revolution controversy of the 1790s. Frankenstein is seen to participate in the battle for rhetorical supremacy instigated by “the monster image’ of filial ingratitude “organizing, understanding, and at the same time preserving the chaotic and confused nature of the revolutionary events’ in Edmund Burke’s account in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)’. (Baldick, ‘The Politics of Monstrosity’, in Frankenstein’s Shadow, Chap. 2, pp.10-29.)
Finally, Marie Roberts discovers an allegorical specificity, not in the historical origins of the novel, but in the political theory it proposes: “The dialectic between Victor and the monster may be understood in terms of Marx’s theory of alienation, part of which concerns mankind’s alienation from the product of its labour, seen in the estrangement of the monster from his maker. The ceature has the characteristics of both worker and product, having been negated and alienated by capitalist society’. (Marie Roberts, “Mary Shelley: Immortality, Gender and the Rosy
Cross’, in Reviewing Romanticism, pp.60-8 (p. 62).
|
| Feminist Readings |
[Christie writes:] ‘And certainly the critical identification and exposition of the feminine preoccupations of this male-dominated text have given rise to some of the best, most various and intriguing critical readings of Frankenstein over the last twenty-odd years. The mother of its feminist or female readings, Ellen Moers was the first to suggest that “Frankenstein is a birth myth, and one that was lodged in the novelist’s imagination, I am convinced, by the fact that she was herself a mother’. The obsession with birth is said to derive in large part from Mary Shelley’s traumatic experiences of loss in child birth — first of losing her mother, who died so soon after Mary Shelley’s own birth, then of losing children of her own — as well as from her more general knowledge of the potential dangers in pregnancy and giving birth faced by women at the time. But it is especially in Victor Frankenstein’s abandonment of the Monster, writes Moers, “where Mary Shelley’s book is most interesting, most powerful, and most feminine’: in the motif of revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences. Most of the novel, roughly two of its three volumes, can be said to deal with the retribution visited upon monster and creator for deficient infant care. Frankenstein seems to be distinctly a woman’s myth-making on the subject of birth precisely because its emphasis is not upon what precedes birth, not upon birth itself, but upon what follows birth: the trauma of afterbirth.’ (Moers, “Female Gothic’, in The Endurance of Frankenstein, pp.77-87; pp.79; 81.)
|
| |
Ellen Moers [cont.]: ‘Again, as in the various political readings which are in truth social versions of the same psychodrama, the most articulate in defence of this interpretation is the Monster himself: “ “Hateful day when I received life!”, I exclaimed in agony. “Cursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?” ’ (p. 105). [Note: Christie remarks: ‘An often clear eyed and always eloquent interpreter speaking out of the narrative centre of the novel, the Monster in fact can be said to have pre-empted most of the allegorical readings of the novel." (p.11.)
|
| |
Gilbert and Gubar: “the tale of the blind rejection of women by misogynistic/Miltonic patriarchy’ is the “covert plot’ of the novel only, and the closest it ever comes to a critique is merely to clarify the insuperable prejudices of the Miltonic myth — thus presumably serving to expose them to the more alert and motivated criticism of later commentators." (Sandra A. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, pp.243; 221.)
‘If Victor Frankenstein can be likened to both Adam and Satan, who or what is he really? Here we are obliged to confront both the moral ambiguity and the symbolic slipperiness which are at the heart of all the characterizations in Frankenstein. In fact, it is probably these continual and complex reallocations of meaning, among characters whose histories echo and re-echo each other, that have been so bewildering to critics. Like figures in a dream, all the people in Frankenstein have different bodies and somehow, horribly, the same face, or worse — the same two faces. (The Madwoman in the Attic, p.229.)
‘But the book is a woman’s and feminism has no room for other oppressions: “Though it has been disguised, buried, or miniaturized, femaleness — the gender definition of mothers and daughters, orphans and beggars, monsters and false creators — is at the heart of this apparently masculine book’. (The Madwoman in the Attic, p.232.)
‘[I]t is worth remarking how easily criticism has been able to politicize the Monster’s predicament as feminine, in spite of his nominal masculinity. For Gilbert and Gubar, for example, “the monster’s narrative is a philosophical meditation on what it means to be born without a “soul” or history, as well as an explanation of what it feels like to be a “filthy mass that move[s] and talk[s]”, a thing, an other, a creature of the second sex’ (The Madwoman in the Attic, p.235.)
|
| |
Meena Alexander: “Forced right from its inception into a posture of marginality ... the creature bit by bit is forced to discover itself as a monster: its being for itself determined by the gaze of others. And so begins one of the most painful of Romantic educations, one that only a woman, a slave or a colonised subject could imagine.’ (Alexander, Women in Romanticism, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989, p.129.) |
| |
Ludmilla Jordonova: ‘The fluid boundary between death and life — a dominant theme in the bio-medical sciences of this time — was of such importance that Frankenstein imagined that, in time, he might be able to “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption’. The belief that the boundary between life and death was reversible was widely held at the time, indeed for most of the eighteenth century there had been sustained interest in suspended animation, techniques for reviving the drowned and the hanged, premature burial — indeed in any aspect of medicine that held out the hope that death could be delayed, avoided, held at bay. Medical writers imagined doctors in a quasi-divine role, shedding new light on nature’s processes. (Jordonova, “Melancholy Reflection: Constructing an Identity for Unveilers of Nature’, in Frankenstein, Creation, and Monstrosity, ed. Stephen Bann, London: Reaktion, 1994, pp.60-76.) [Note: Jordanova focusses her discussion on the controversy of “man midwifery’. (Ibid., p.67; 73 ff.) |
| |
| Robert Kiely: ‘[Frankenstein is]a parable in which Victor Frankenstein’s hubris lies not in his usurping the creative power of God, but in his attempt to usurp the power of women[.]’ (Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England, p.164.) |
| |
Margaret Homans: ‘The novel is about the collision between andro-centric and gyno-centric theories of creation, a collision that results in the denigration of maternal child bearing through its circumvention by male creation. The novel presents Mary Shelley’s response to the expectation, manifested in such poems as Alastor and Paradise Lost, that women embody yet not embody male fantasies. At the same time, it expresses a woman’s knowledge of the irrefutable independence of the body, both her own and those of the children that she produces, from
projective male fantasy.’ (Homans, “Bearing Demons: Frankenstein’s Circumvention of the Maternal’, in Duncan Wu ed., Romanticism: A Critical Reader(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp.379-400 (pp.380; 382). |
| |
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: ‘But “because it does not speak the language of feminist individualism which we have come to hail as the language of high feminism within English literature’, to quote Gayatri Spivak, as a text of “nascent feminism’ it “remains
cryptic’." ( Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, in Frankenstein: New Casebooks, p.248.) |
| |
| Mary Poovey: ‘[T]he egotism that Mary Shelley associates with the artist’s monstrous self-assertion.’ (Poovey, ““My Hideous Progeny”: The Lady and the Monster’, in her The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1984), pp.114-142 (p.123). |
Christopher Small: “Frankenstein himself is clearly and to some extent must intentionally have been a portrayal of Shelley’ in a novel which is a meditation on miscreants." Small, Ariel Like a Harpy: Shelley, Mary and Frankenstein (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972), pp.101 & ff.
Joseph Kestner: ‘The whole truth of this episode is that, fearing sexual contact, Frankenstein wanted the woman dead, desiring only to love himself, latently homosexual. The narcissistic Other (the Creature), by strangling Elizabeth, intervenes to prevent the normal separation of “ego-libido’ from “object-libido’ discussed by Freud in “On Narcissism’. Instead, Frankenstein’s libido is a narcissistic autoerotism. Just as the face of the Creature had appeared when Frankenstein awoke from his dream about Elizabeth and his mother, so now does “the face of the monster’ grin at him through the inn window." Joseph Kestner, “Narcissism as Symptom and Structure: The Case of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’, in Frankenstein: New Casebooks, pp.68-80 (p. 76-77). [Christie comments: ‘[Like Echo in the Greek myth, Elizabeth is destroyed by her Narcissus.’
Jerrold E. Hogle: ‘The creature is a “monster’ in that it/he embodies and distances all that a society refuses to name — all the betwixt-and-between, even ambisexual, cross-class, and cross-cultural conditions of life that Western culture “abjects’, as Kristeva would put it — ... It/he is “the absolutely Other’ ... pointing immediately, as we have just seen, to intermixed and repressed states of being, the divisibility of the body, “thrown-down’ social groups, class struggles, gender-confusions, birth-moments, and death-drives ... as well as to a cacophony of ideological and intertextual differences. All the while, though, he/it both re-presents each of these alterities and keeps them at a great remove by being quasi-human yet strictly artificial." (Hogle, “Frankenstein as Neo-Gothic’, in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre, pp.186-7.)
Hogle [cont.]: ‘The “heterogeneous flux’ of being partly held inwards and partly pushed outwards by the mother’s body at the moment of birth ... and the state, at the same time, of emerging out of death (pre-natal nonexistence) and starting to live towards death (the end point of all the “want’ that begins at birth . . .). This liminal condition of multiple contradictions, where each supposedly distinct state slides over into its “other’, is the radical heterogeneity.’ (Hogle, “Frankenstein as Neo-Gothic’, in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre, p.195.)
Fred Botting: ‘[T]he text, like the monster, solicits and resists attempts to determine a single line of significance [...] frustrating the desires for authority that are represented in and resisted by the text-monster. Identifying the novel’s fixed, singular and final meaning by way of historical and biographical archives, [certain] readings return to the unifying figure of the author as they attempt to authorize their own accounts and arrest the monstrously overdetermined play of significance that operates in and between criticism’s “pre-texts”. Thus they repeat Frankenstein’s project. But the monster, this time Frankenstein, again eludes capture even as it sustains the pursuit.’ (Botting, “Frankenstein and the Language of Monstrosity’, in Reviewing Romanticism, pp.53-4; pp.55; 56.) [Note: Christie remarks: Frankenstein, in short, discourses on its own discursive unmeaning.]
Peter Brooks: ‘The Monster [...] attempts to state the object of his desire [cf. Lacan]. In constructing his narrative appeal, he has contextualised desire, made it, or shown it to be, the very principle of narrative, in its metonymical forward movement. This movement, in Lacanian terms, corresponds to the slippage of the inaccessible signified — the object of unconscious desire — under the signifier in the signifying chain... . Thus it is that the taint of monsterism, as the product of the unarrestable metonymic movement of desire through the narrative signifying chain, may ultimately come to rest with the reader of the text... . Perhaps it would be most accurate to say that we are left with
a residue of desire for meaning, which we alone can realise." (Brooks, “What Is a Monster?’, Frankenstein: New Casebooks, pp.91; 96; 100.)
Barbara Claire Freeman: ‘Like Frankenstein’s Monster, theory devours whatever it encounters, be it a discourse, text, individual, or institution. The terroristic effect of theory, as of monstrosity, resides in its capacity to incorporate and swallow up another entity without leakage or cessation of appetite. Lately, deconstructive theory in particular has infiltrated and then devoured departments of language and literature, becoming the focus of attention, breaking down instutional divisions and domains. What terrorises those who oppose it — and even those who do not — is its totalising power and the rapidity with which it spreads, as if the university’s immune system has no defence against it... . It is as if the future of the so-called Sciences of Man has been, or is in the process of being, monsterised by theory. (Barbara Claire Freeman, “Frankenstein with Kant: A Theory of Monstrosity or the Monstrosity of Theory’, in Frankenstein: New Casebooks, pp. 191-205; pp.200-1.)
Paul Sherwin: ‘If, for the orthodox Freudian, he is a type of the unconscious, for the Jungian he is a shadow, for the Lacanian an objet à, for one Romantic an “spectre’, for another a Blakean “emanation’; he has also been or can be read as Rousseau’s natural man, a Wordsworthian child of nature, the isolated Romantic rebel, the misunderstood revolutionary impulse, Mary Shelley’s abandoned baby self, her abandoned babe, an aberrant signifier, différence, or as a hypostasis of godless presumption, the monstrosity of godless nature, analytical reasoning, or alienating labour. Like the Creature’s own mythic version of himself, a freakish hybrid of Adam and Satan." (Paul Sherwin, ‘Frankenstein: Creation as Catastrophe’, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, New Haven, Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1987), pp.27-54; p.40.)
Barbara Johnson: ‘monster can thus be seen as a figure of autobiography as such’ [...] Frankenstein can be read as the story of autobiography as the attempt to neutralize the monstrosity of autobiography’. (Barbara Johnson, ‘My Monster/My Self’, in her A World of Difference (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, pp.144-54; p.146.) |