Creature and Creator:
Myth-Making and English Romanticism
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Frankenstein has as much
claim to mythic status as any story ever invented by a single author. The
original novel continues to be read by a wide audience, and has of course
spawned innumerable adaptations, imitations, and sequels.1 Through
its cinematic incarnations, the Frankenstein
story has ingrained itself on the popular imagination. Although no one believes
in the literal truth of the story, it has all the other earmarks of a genuine
myth, above all, the fact that men keep returning to it to find ways of
imagining their deepest fears. But as original as the Frankenstein myth
is, Mary Shelley did not
create her story out of thin air. Much of the power of her book can be traced
to the ways she found of drawing upon traditional mythic patterns. A glance at
the title-page shows that
in composing the book she had two of the central creation myths in the Western
tradition in mind. The subtitle of Frankenstein,
"The Modern Prometheus," points to the myth of the Greek Titan. The
epigraph from Paradise Lost suggests
that the story refers to Milton's creation
account, and by extension to Genesis. But if one tries
to align the characters in Frankenstein with
traditional mythic archetypes, one runs into difficulties. Although Frankenstein at first seems to
offer a potentially confusing array of mythic correspondences, by trying to
sort out the mythic roles assigned to the central characters, we can approach
the thematic heart of the book.
We can begin by asking: who is the modern Prometheus referred to
in the subtitle? The obvious answer is Victor Frankenstein, and many critics
have pointed to the Promethean elements in Frankenstein's character.2 Victor wants to be
the benefactor of mankind, rebels against the divinely established order,
steals, as it were, the spark of life from heaven, and creates a living being.
But like Prometheus he ends up bringing disaster and destruction down upon
those he was trying to help. In many respects, however, the monster
Frankenstein creates is an equally good candidate for the {104} role of
Prometheus in the story. It is the monster who literally discovers fire, and in
a sense steals it (99-100). Moreover, the
monster tantalizes Frankenstein with a mysterious secret concerning what will
happen on his wedding night. Frankenstein's blindness to the real meaning of
the monster's prophecy (182) associates him
with the role of Zeus, particularly if one looks ahead to Percy Shelley's version of the
Prometheus myth, in which the story of the secret concerning Jupiter's wedding
hour is central to the plot. The fact that both Frankenstein and the monster
have their Promethean aspects should not be surprising, since the original
Prometheus archetype is ambiguous. With respect to man, he appears as a creator
and thus as a divine figure; with respect to Zeus, he takes on the role of a
rebel against divine authority and eventually of a tortured creature, thus
becoming a symbol of human suffering at the hands of the gods.
The same sort of ambiguity of mythic archetypes is
evident when one considers the Miltonic analogues to the Frankenstein story.3 As the
creator of a man, Frankenstein plays the role of God. But Frankenstein
also compares himself to Satan: "All my
speculations and hopes are as nothing, and like the archangel who aspired to
omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell" (200). The narrator
Walton describes Frankenstein in terms that clearly recall the fallen Lucifer
of Paradise Lost:
"What a glorious creature must he have been in the days of his prosperity,
when he is thus noble and godlike in ruin! He seems to feel his own worth and
the greatness of his fall" (200).
The monster similarly compares himself to two Miltonic
roles. He is both Adam and Satan, as he tells his
creator: "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" (95). Later, while
reflecting on his reading of Paradise
Lost, the monster develops this idea:
I often referred
the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like Adam, I
was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state
was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the
hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial
care of his Creator; . . . but I was wretched, helpless, and alone.
Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often,
like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy
rose within me. (114)
{105} The apparent
difficulty in aligning the characters of Frankenstein with their Miltonic archetypes is that the two
main characters, Frankenstein and the monster, must be correlated with three
figures fromParadise Lost: God, Satan, and Adam. In reducing
three characters to two, Mary Shelley has in effect eliminated the middle term,
taking some elements from the role of Satan and giving them to her god-figure,
Frankenstein, and taking other elements from Satan and giving them to her
Adam-figure, the monster. The result is to make both characters in her story,
both creator and creature, in some sense Satanic. Satan's role in the
traditional story is to take all of the blame for the evil in the world away
from God and some of the blame away from man. In Milton's account, God intended
the world to be perfectly good; only Satan's willfulness perverted the
creator's plan. And although man is responsible for his fall, he was in a sense
the victim of a clever enemy's machinations. The third term in Milton's story
allows him to grant a greater purity of intention and motive to both his
creator and his creature.
Without a separate Satan-figure to mediate between her
creator and creature, Mary Shelley gives a gnostic twist to her creation myth:
in her version the creation becomes identified with the fall. Frankenstein does
God's work, creating a man, but he has the devil's motives: pride and the will
to power. He is himself a rebel, rejecting divine prohibitions and, like Satan,
aspiring to become a god himself. But Victor's act of rebellion is to create a
man, and what he seeks out of creation is the glory of ruling over a new race
of beings. Mary Shelley thus achieves a daring compression of Milton's
story. Frankenstein retells Paradise Lostas if the being who fell
from heaven and the being who created the world of man were one and the same.
In Frankenstein one
can no longer speak of an original divine plan of creation which is perverted
by a demonic being; the plans of Mary Shelley's creator-figure are both divine
and demonic from the beginning.
If the creator's motives in Frankenstein are suspect, one
might at first suppose that the rebellion of his creature must be unequivocally
good. One could in fact attempt a straightforward gnostic reading ofFrankenstein.4 The story
suggests that the original creation of man was defective; therefore man owes
nothing to his creator; his wisest course is then to rebel against what he has
always been told is the divine order. But in Frankenstein our sympathies are not this simply allied with
the creature against his {106} creator. The creature's rebellion does not lead
to liberation. On the contrary, it results in the creator and creature becoming
locked in a life-and-death struggle that eventually destroys them both.
Rebelling against Frankenstein's tyranny, the monster threatens to become a
tyrant himself, seeking to turn the tables on his master, to the point where
Frankenstein actually speaks of "the whole period during which I was the
slave of my creature" (146). Thus although
the monster has something of Adam's innocence, he is also impelled to his
rebellion by Satan's motives: envy and the thirst for revenge. The monster
carries his tempting serpent within his own breast. Instead of being passively
seduced into rebellion like Adam, he actively pursues rebellion like Satan.
The mythic ambiguity of the central figures in Frankenstein points to an
underlying moral ambiguity. What is characteristic of Mary Shelley's creation
account is that neither her creator in his creation nor her creature in his
rebellion have morally pure motives. In this respect, her myth contrasts
sharply with that of her husband in Prometheus Unbound. Percy Shelley rejected the
figure of Satan as a poetic paradigm precisely because of the moral ambiguity
of his nature. In explaining in his preface why his
Prometheus is a fitter subject for a poem than Satan, Shelley suggests that
Satan has both good and bad sides. He has "courage,"
"majesty," and "firm and patient opposition to omnipotent
force," but he also is moved by "ambition, envy, revenge, and a
desire for personal aggrandisement" (R & P, 133). In creating his
own myth, Shelley as we have seen divided up these qualities between his
Prometheus and his Jupiter, keeping the one wholly pure in his motives and the
other thoroughly corrupt and ripe for overthrow. Even Shelley realized that it
would take a struggle for Prometheus to overcome his desire for revenge and
become purely good. But Mary Shelley displays a deeper sense of the complexity
of human nature. She was unwilling to divide up the character of Satan in the
same way, parceling out all his good qualities to the rebellious monster and
leaving the creator-god, Frankenstein, with all the bad. She maintains the same
moral ambiguity in both characters, and in virtually the same proportions.5
In Frankenstein,
the creature is truly made in the image of his creator: Frankenstein and the
monster are mirror images of each
other. As many readers have sensed, they are the same being, viewed in
different aspects, as creator and as creature.6 As creator
{107} this being feels an exhilarating sense of power, an ability to transgress
all the limits traditionally set to man and realize his desires and dreams. But
as creature, this being feels his impotence, feels himself alone in a worlds
that fails to care for him, a world in which he is doomed to wander without
companions to a solitary death. It is important to realize that both
Frankenstein and the monster experience both these sets of feelings. It might
at first seem logical for one to feel like the creator and the other to feel
like the creature. But the book does not fall into that simple pattern.
Although Victor obviously has his moments of triumph and the monster his
moments of despair, the two characters reverse their roles as the book
proceeds, until it becomes difficult to tell one's voice from the other's.
Consider the following passage:
I abhorred the
face of man. Oh, not abhorred! They were my brethren, my fellow beings, and I
felt attracted even to the most repulsive among them, as to creatures of an
angelic nature and celestial mechanism. But I felt I had no right to share
their intercourse . . . How they would, each and all, abhor me and
hunt me from the world did they know my unhallowed acts and the crimes which
had their source in me! (176)
Reading this
passage out of context, one would guess it was the monster speaking, but it is
actually Frankenstein. Victor at times feels cut off from all mankind, denied
human sympathies as if he himself were the monster: "I walked about the
isle like a restless spectre, separated from all it loved and miserable in its
separation" (162).
By the same token, the monster has moments when he
glories in his strength, when he even feels himself more powerful than his
creator:
Slave, I before
reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension.
Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you
so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator,
but I am your master; obey! (160)
When the monster
murders Victor's younger brother, he triumphantly proclaims his own creativity:
I gazed on my
victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and hellish triumph; clapping my
hands, I exclaimed "I too can create desolation; my enemy is not
invulnerable; this death will carry despair to him, and a thousand other
miseries shall torment and destroy him." (136)
The statement
"I too can create desolation" reveals the heart of the monster's
tragedy. He can imitate his creator only in creating suffering and misery.
{108} Both Frankenstein and the monster experience
feelings of triumph and despair; each has his "creative" and his
"creaturely" moments, though obviously Frankenstein emphasizes the
creative side of man, and the monster the creaturely. Frankenstein deals with the
tension in human existence basic to the Romantic understanding
of man, the tension between man's visionary powers as a creator and his
spiritual limits as a creature. The alternation between feelings of power and
impotence is in fact characteristic of nothing so much as the Romantic poets
themselves. Consider the case of Percy Shelley: as a poetic visionary he thinks
that his power to remake the world is unlimited, culminating in his triumphant
claim in A Defence of Poetry that
"poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World" (R & P,
508). But Shelley also has a debilitating sense of himself as a creature, his
creative spark trapped in the "loathsome mask" of the flesh (Prometheus Unbound, III.iv.I93). One need not
claim that Mary Shelley was trying specifically to give a portrait of her
husband in Frankenstein,
although there is evidence that her personal experiences did play a
role in the genesis of the book.7 In any case,
in seeking to portray a creator Mary Shelley could not help being influenced by
her most direct experience of what creative spirits are like, and that means
her observations of her husband (and Byron as well). As
a result, by whatever process of imaginative recreation, she has captured in
the composite figure of Frankenstein and the monster the complex Romantic soul,
the dark as well as the bright side, the violent as well as the benevolent
impulses, the destructive as well as the creative urges. On the one hand, she
portrays the sympathetic reaching out to other human beings; on the other hand,
a merciless and brutal turning in upon the self, a willful sundering of all
bonds that tie a man to the rest of humanity. Frankenstein is not simply an example of Romantic myth; it
is also on the deepest level of interpretation a myth about Romanticism, a
mythic dramatization of the dangers of an unbridled idealism. At first
sight, Frankenstein seems
to provide a clear case of a Romantic creation myth, since its explicit theme
is remaking man. The scientist becomes a metaphor for the poet8 --
Frankenstein's physical attempt to reconstruct the human frame serves as an
image for the goal of Romantic artists: the spiritual regeneration of man. But
somehow, put into practice, this process fails to have the glorious results it
was supposed to have. The creation itself is {109} portrayed
as a filthy and disgusting process, and the creator is revealed to be seized by
a will to power. Originally the creation myth served Romantic artists as a
vehicle for criticizing the established order, for exposing the corrupt
foundations of religious and political authority. But Mary Shelley seems to
have turned the creation myth back upon Romanticism, making Romantic creativity
itself, in all its problematic character, her subject. Although certain
revolutionary elements can be found in Frankenstein, the work seems basically conservative in its
implications. Human creativity appears to be dangerous in Frankenstein, because it is unpredictable
and uncontrollable in its results. Frankenstein remains
what it was when the idea for it first came to Mary Shelley: a nightmare, the
nightmare of Romantic idealism, revealing the dark underside to all the
visionary dreams of remaking man that fired the imagination of Romantic
myth-makers.9 If one
wonders why of all Romantic myths it is the Frankenstein story that has caught
on with the popular imagination, perhaps the reason is that the understanding
of creativity embodied in Frankenstein is
close to the common sense understanding: while creativity can be exhilarating,
it can also be dangerous, and passes over easily into destructiveness.
II
Given the link between creator and creature in Frankenstein, discussions of
Frankenstein as a character and of the monster as a character tend to shade
into each other, that is, one can approach either character through analyzing
the other. In studying Frankenstein, one readily sees how the monster can be
regarded as an extension of his creator, in a sense as a projection of
Frankenstein's psyche. The more difficult task is to show in analyzing the
monster's character how in a strange sense Frankenstein can be regarded as a
projection of the creature's psyche.
The key to understanding Frankenstein's character can
be found in the detailed portrait of his childhood Mary Shelley creates.
Victor himself sees a connection between his idealistic pursuit of science and
his childhood aggressiveness: "My temper was sometimes violent, and my
passions vehement; but by some law in my temperature they were turned not
towards childish pursuits but to an eager desire to learn" (37). Given the
eventual results of {110} Frankenstein's experiments, we should not be
surprised to hear that his interest in science was originally a sublimation of
his violent impulses.10 But the most
important fact we learn about Frankenstein's youth is his attitude toward
Elizabeth, the little orphan girl his family takes in. Here Mary Shelley
introduces a displaced incest motif a familiar device in Romantic fiction.11 Victor calls
Elizabeth his "more than sister" (35), and indeed their
relationship has all the the potential for incest except the blood tie.12 They grow up
in the same household, share the same childhood experiences, and have a secret
bond of sympathy, much as do Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Even when
presented in displaced form, an incestuous relationship involves an
inward-turning of energies, a refusal to leave the self-contained world of
childhood desires and dreams, that is the central impulse in Frankenstein's
life.13
The other trait that Victor's attitude toward
Elizabeth reveals is his possessiveness. Elizabeth is introduced to him as a
present, and he persists in regarding her that way, as something given to him
to hold on to as his private possession:
On the evening
previous to her being brought to my house, my mother had said playfully,
"I have a pretty present for my Victor -- tomorrow he shall have it."
And when, on the morrow, she presented Elizabeth to me as her promised gift, I,
with childish seriousness, interpreted her words literally and looked upon
Elizabeth as mine -- mine to protect, love, and cherish. All praises bestowed
on her I received as made to a possession of my own. We called each other
familiarly by the name of cousin. No word, no expression could body forth the
kind of relation in which she stood to me -- my more than sister, since till
death she was to be mine only. (35)
This
possessiveness turns out to be the root of Frankenstein's activity as a
creator. He creates a being because he wants someone to worship him with
complete devotion: "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" (52). Victor views
his experiment as a way of becoming a father, obviously an alternative to
becoming a father in the ordinary sense in view of the way the experiment
poisons his relationship to Elizabeth. The irony of Frankenstein's story is
that he is obsessed with the idea of creating human life, and yet seems to do
everything in his power to avoid creating life in the easiest fashion, As
Robert Kiely writes of Frankenstein:
{111} Stripped of
rhetoric and ideological decoration, the situation presented is that of a
handsome young scientist, engaged to a beautiful woman, who goes off to the
mountains alone to create a new human life. When he confesses to Walton that he
has "worked hard for nearly two years" to achieve his aim, we may
wonder why he does not marry Elizabeth, and, with her cooperation, finish the
job more quickly and pleasurably.14
Victor's hope for
his creations -- "no father could claim the gratitude of his child so
completely as I should deserve theirs" -- shows why he rejects the
conventional role of a parent. A father must share the gratitude of his
children with their mother. As a true Romantic creator, Victor wants total
responsibility -- and total credit -- for any of his creations. In the image of
Victor Frankenstein going to any lengths to avoid being indebted to nature,
Mary Shelley's myth embodies a profound understanding of the character of
modern creativity. Frankenstein rejects a natural means of creativity, fatherhood,
which would prevent him from calling his creation wholly his own, in favor of
an artificial means of creativity, which allows him to regard his creation as
solely a projection of his self. But to produce a creature with its origin in
his self and his self alone, Frankenstein must draw upon every resource within
his self. He ends up cannibalizing his life for the sake of his experiment,
sacrificing all his everyday human concerns to his single-minded aim of
creating a living being:
I pursued my undertaking
with unremitting ardour. My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had
become emaciated with confinement . . . My eyes were insensible to
the charms of nature. And the same feelings which made me neglect the scenes
around me called me also to forget those friends who were so many miles absent,
and whom I had not seen for so long a time . . . I wished, as it
were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the
great object, which swallowed up every ha bit of my nature, should be
completed. (53-54)
In psychological
terms, Frankenstein is a classic case of sublimation; he uses the energy he
derives from repressing his normal feelings, especially his sexual desires, to
fuel his intellectual and scientific pursuits.15Victor's
loneliness and isolation is thus not accidental to his creativity. He must cut
himself off from the rest of humanity to achieve his goals, and his goals
require that he do everything alone.
Frankenstein's urge to create life by himself shows
his titanism, his longing to do something never before attempted by man. But it
also suggests a less heroic side to his character, a fear of growing up, a
hesitation at taking his place in the world of adult responsibility. {112} That
this fear is in part sexual in nature is shown by the fact that Frankenstein's
anxieties eventually come to focus on his wedding night. Though on the literal
level of plot, the monster's threats concerning this night give Victor
sufficient cause to be afraid, certain details of the narrative make one wonder
what exactly is the "dreadful secret" (183) Frankenstein is
worried about revealing to his innocent bride. The description of Frankenstein
on his wedding night suggests an immature and nervous bridegroom, looking for
anything to divert him from consummating his marriage. When Victor speaks of
the struggle he anticipates, though he clearly has the monster in mind as his
adversary, he is inadvertently revealing the subconscious, childish fears that
have long delayed his union with Elizabeth, whom he in some sense regards as
his real enemy:
I had been calm
during the day, but so soon as night obscured the shapes of objects, a thousand
fears arose in my mind. I was anxious and watchful, while my right hand grasped
a pistol which was hidden in my bosom; every sound terrified me, but I resolved
that I would sell my life dearly and not shrink from the conflict until my own
life or that of my adversary was extinguished.
Elizabeth observed my agitation for some time in timid
and fearful silence, but there was something in my glance which communicated
terror to her, and trembling, she asked, "What is it that agitates you, my
dear Victor? What is it you fear?"
"Oh! Peace, peace, my love," replied I,
"this night, and all will be safe; but this night is dreadful, very
dreadful."
I passed an hour in this state of mind, when suddenly
I reflected how fearful the combat which I momentarily expected would be to my
wife, and I earnestly entreated her to retire, resolving not to join her until
I had obtained some knowledge as to the situation of my enemy. (185-86)
Noting "the
language of anxiety, phallic inference, and imagery of conflict," Kiely
writes of this passage: "the immediate situation and the ambiguity of the
language contribute to the impression that the young groom's dread of the
monster is mixed with his fear of sexual union as a physical struggle which
poses a threat to his independence, integrity, and delicacy of character."16 When
Frankenstein's monster succeeds in turning his bridal bed into a "bridal
bier" (186), one might read
the episode in psychological terms as indicating that Frankenstein's marriage
is destroyed by his fear that sexuality is something monstrous, a force that
turns men and women into something other than human beings.
But Frankenstein's fear of getting married and having
a family like any ordinary man is not simply sexual. He regards family life as
{113} dull and conventional, potentially stifling to his creativity. When he
reflects upon his father's career, he sees a disjunction between the path of
glory and the path of raising a family:
My father had
filled several public situations with honour and reputation . . . He
passed his younger days perpetually occupied by the affairs of his country; a
variety of circumstances had prevented him from marrying early, nor was it
until the decline of life that he became a husband and the father of a family.
(31)
The 1818 edition of Frankenstein contains a further
suggestion that Victor has reason to fear that a family will limit his
creativity: "When my father became a husband and a parent, he found his
time so occupied by the duties of his new situation, that he relinquished his
public employments, and devoted himself to the education of his children."17 Victor
reveals another defect of becoming a father in the conventional way: it carries
a sense of responsibility to one's children, to care for them and raise them
properly. Victor does not want to be burdened by such time-consuming ties to
other human beings. He was spoiled as a child, and as he grows older he does
not want to relinquish the situation of having everything go his way, without
his having to make any concessions to the needs of others. He says of his
childhood:
My mother's tender
caresses and my father's smile of benevolent pleasure while regarding me are my
first recollections. I was their plaything and their idol, and something better
-- their child, the innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by heaven,
whom to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in their hands to direct
to happiness or misery, according as they fulfilled their duties towards me. (33)
When Frankenstein
comes to be a father in his special way, he conveniently forgets these duties
of parents to their offspring. The one quality he most conspicuously lacks as a
creator is the quality he most praises his own parents for: "the deep
consciousness of what they owed towards the being to which they had given
life" (33). What ultimately
turns Frankenstein's creation into the improvident, even bungled work of a
gnostic demiurge is the fact that from the start he seeks out this form of
creativity precisely as a way of escaping the responsibilities of ordinary
parenthood.
From one point of view, Frankenstein appears as
a Faustian figure,
daring to undertake a superhuman task; from another, he seems like a little
boy, hoping to prolong forever the situation of his childhood, in which he can
live within the private world of his own {114} fantasies, unburdened by the
duties of adult life. In particular, he seems to fear the entanglements of
mature sexuality, and one senses that his experiment has in part the purpose of
finding a way for him to reproduce without his own body having to become
directly involved in the process. Frankenstein wishes that human beings could
create life with their minds alone. He is most fundamentally a Romantic in his
faith in the power of the imagination to shape a world in accord with man's
dreams and visions, although ironically his attempt to realize his dreams only
draws him deeper and deeper into contact with the corrupt material world he is
seeking to avoid. In the end, one cannot distinguish the heroic from the
childish side of Frankenstein. All his strengths and weaknesses are bound up
with his refusal to accept an adult role in life. By clinging to his childhood
dreams, he retains a power of vision that lifts his imagination above that of
ordinary men, and gives him the power to create. But at the same time, he is
thoroughly irresponsible in his creativity and lacks the courage to face up to
the consequences of his deeds.
Like many Romantic works, Frankenstein suggests a link
between the creator and the child. But Mary Shelley portrays this relation much
more equivocally than most Romantics do, for she senses the childish, as well
as the childlike, aspects to Frankenstein's "innocence." What from
one angle appears as a visionary refusal to rest content with the way things
are and always have been, from another angle appears as an immature
unwillingness to come to terms with the facts of the human condition. At the
core of Frankenstein's scientific enterprise is a partly heroic, partly
childish, refusal to accept the fact of death. Victor's departure for the University of Ingolstadt, where his
researches begin, is immediately preceded by the death of his mother. His
reaction to this event perhaps supplies the deepest motive for his experiments:
I need not
describe the feelings of those whose dearest ties are rent by that most
irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair
that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can
persuade itself that she whom we saw every day and whose very existence
appeared a part of our own can have departed forever . . . The time
at length arrives when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity
. . . My mother was dead, but we had still duties which we ought to
perform. (43)
For once Victor
speaks with the sober voice of experience. But beneath his adult reflections on
the need to accept death and carry on with the day-to-day business of life, one
can hear the accents of his {115} uncompromising idealism, his hope that the
mind could somehow triumph over the brute fact of death. That becomes the goal
of his scientific experiments:
Life and death
appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a
torrent of light into our dark world . . . I thought that if I could
bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time
. . . renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to
corruption. (52-53)
If to be a
Romantic is to deny the limits on human creative power, then Frankenstein's
project becomes the ultimate test of Romantic vision. With the eagerness, the
confidence, and the willfulness of a child, he sets out to challenge the one
seemingly in disputable fact of man's nature, his mortality.
III
Frankenstein's activity as a creator presents such a
mixture of idealistic and self-serving motives that evaluating it in moral
terms becomes difficult. But whatever Frankenstein's intentions may be, he
clearly does not plan his creation with the interests of his creature in mind.
He is too concerned about his own glory to take the safer, surer course in
creation:
I doubted at first
whether I should attempt the creation of a being like myself, or one of simpler
organization; but my imagination was too much exalted by my first success to
permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and
wonderful as man. (52)
Frankenstein's
talk of his "exalted imagination" makes one think of a poet, and
indeed he thinks he can become a poet of material reality, immediately
embodying his most ideal visions in physical form. The narrator Walton, who
admits to being a failed poet himself (16), displays the
same fault as Frankenstein: "I am too ardent in execution and too
impatient of difficulties" (18). In his haste
and lack of attention to details, Frankenstein adopts a course guaranteed to
satisfy his eagerness but at the same time to make his creature miserable:
The materials at
present within my command hardly appeared adequate to so arduous an
undertaking, but I doubted not that I should ultimately succeed . . .
Nor could I consider the magnitude and complexity of my plan as any argument of
its impracticability . . . As the minuteness of the parts formed a
great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first {116} intention,
to make the being of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about eight feet in
height, and proportionably large. (51)
Frankenstein
casually revises his plans at the last moment, solely to make things easier for
himself, without the slightest thought of how this "gigantic stature"
will affect his creature's life. His idealistic unwillingness to compromise
with the limits of human nature evidently passes over easily into total
disregard for practical considerations of the physical needs of man.
As a result, Mary Shelley's myth takes us back to the
world of the demonic creator. Frankenstein resembles a gnostic demiurge,
struggling to infuse the spark of life into dead matter:
In a solitary
chamber, or rather cell, at the top of my home, and separated from all the other
apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation;
my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my
employment. The dissecting room and the slaughterhouse furnished many of my
materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation.
(53)
From the way
Frankenstein secludes himself, one begins to suspect that he is ashamed of what
he is doing. By his own admission, Frankenstein's creation is a
"filthy" process, and he dwells upon its disgusting physical aspects.
He is clearly not the benevolent, all-powerful creator of Genesis, who could stand
back from his creative activity and see that it was good. On the contrary,
Frankenstein has to struggle with his materials and with himself to go on with
the creation, and the whole process makes him ill.
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 more 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 . . . Now that
I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and
disgust filled my heart. (56)
Mary Shelley
provides a nightmarish counterpart to her husband's experience as a
poet of the gap between inspiration and composition: "When composition
begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry
that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the
original {117} conceptions of the poet" (R & P, 504). Frankenstein
beholding his creature is like a Shelleyan poet, disgusted by the fixed form
into which his imaginative inspiration has sunk.18 The
corrupting medium of human flesh has distorted Frankenstein's creation into a
grotesque mockery of his original vision. When forced to confront his creation
later, Frankenstein rejects him completely. Having created for the sake of his
own glory, Frankenstein is ready to take out his frustrations on his creature
for not living up to his expectations. His first thought is to destroy the
evidence of his own limitations and failings as a creator, not to try to make
up for the defects of his creation.
But the monster survives and as a result,
Frankenstein's will to power does not stop with the act of creation. The
monster becomes Frankenstein's Doppelgänger, his double or
shadow, acting out the deepest, darkest urges of his soul, his aggressive
impulses, and working to murder one by one everybody close to his creator.19 As we have
seen, Frankenstein thinks that his violent side has been harmlessly sublimated
into his scientific pursuits. But the result of his experiments is to set free
the aggressive emotions his conscious mind refuses to acknowledge. In
particular, Victor's possessiveness as a lover ultimately requires the death of
his beloved, for only death can turn her into an object instead of an
independent human being, and thus into something he can call his own.
Immediately after creating the monster, Victor dreams of Elizabeth's death:
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. (57)
In addition to
vividly expressing Victor's Oedipal longings, this dream shows that he somehow
associates Elizabeth with the death of his mother.20 His mother
contracted her fatal illness while taking care of Elizabeth and died
instructing her: "Elizabeth, my love, you must supply my place to my
younger children" (42). Perhaps Victor
does not believe that Elizabeth has adequately supplied the place of the woman
she "killed," and harbors repressed anger against her that can reach
the surface of his mind only in the distorted form of a dream, in which
Elizabeth dies and then is replaced by Victor's mother, thus reversing and
righting her original "crime." Finally, {118} the dream reveals how
closely linked the ideas of love and death are in Frankenstein's mind. In his
subconscious, the kiss of love is ultimately the kiss of death, and one can
possess one's beloved only in a shroud.
The timing of Victor's dream -- his passing out at
this point results in setting the monster loose -- suggests that the monster is
the agent for bringing about Frankenstein's equation of love and death. He
himself sees that the monster serves his own destructive urges:
I considered the
being whom I had cast among mankind and endowed with the will and power to
effect purposes of horror, such as the deed which he had now done, nearly in
the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave and forced
to destroy all that was dear to me. (74)
Accordingly,
Frankenstein seems to know intuitively what the monster has done, even before
he receives confirmation of the facts: "Could he be (I shuddered at the
conception) the murderer of my brother? No sooner did that idea cross my
imagination than I became convinced of its truth" (73). Frankenstein
even seems able to anticipate the monster's intentions:
Sometimes I
thought that the fiend followed me and might expedite my remissions by
murdering my companion. When these thoughts possessed me, I would not quit
Henry for a moment, but followed him as his shadow, to protect him from the
fancied rage of his destroyer. (155)
Frankenstein knows
the monster's intentions because deep down they are his own. Something in
Frankenstein wants to kill anyone who comes close to him so that he can
maintain his willful isolation. Once the monster has succeeded in cutting
Victor off from all the ties that bind him to the rest of humanity, only one task
remains: to see that Frankenstein himself is destroyed. From the beginning,
Victor's aggressive impulses have the potential of being directed inward. If
the monster is truly his double, then Frankenstein's destructiveness is finally
revealed to have been self-destructiveness.21
As we have seen, from the start Frankenstein's
experiments serve the purpose of avoiding marriage and banishing him from the
ranks of ordinary mankind. His idealism provides him with a noble-sounding
excuse for not facing up to his immediate responsibilities. Frankenstein is
characterized by a kind of abstract benevolence. He is willing to see himself
and anyone else he knows suffer in the {119} name of a visionary dream of
aiding mankind as a whole. We see how his mind operates when he rejects the
idea of creating a mate for the monster, despite the threat to his loved ones:
A race of devils
would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the
species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I right, for my
own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?
. . . I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their
pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price,
perhaps, of the existence of the whole human race. (158-59)
Later Victor tells
his father of the monster's victims: "A thousand times would I have shed
my own blood, drop by drop, to have saved their lives; but I could not, my
father, indeed I could not sacrifice the whole human race" (177). Frankenstein
may well be correct in his assessment of the dangers of allowing a race of
monsters to propagate, and his self-sacrifice in acting to prevent that outcome
is noble. Nevertheless, it is significant how quickly his mind moves from the
immediate and concrete threat against his friends and family to the more remote
and vaguer threat against humanity in general. Frankenstein readily leaps from
his specific situation to visions of distant lands and future ages, and he
shows the reformer's mentality in his willingness to sacrifice individual men and
women for the sake of mankind. As he himself senses, there is even something of
the religious zealot in his character:
I trembled with
excess of agitation as I said this; there was a frenzy in my manner, and
something, I doubt not, of that haughty fierceness which the martyrs of old are
said to have possessed. But to a Germanmagistrate, whose
mind was occupied by far other ideas than those of devotion and heroism, this
elevation of mind had much the appearance of madness. He endeavored to soothe
me as a nurse does a child and reverted to my tale as the effects of delirium.
(191)
In its equation of
religious martyrdom with madness, and of heroism and elevation of mind with the
delusions of a child, this passage sums up the complex character of
Frankenstein, who forever presents two sides to us, no matter how we look at
him.
IV
As fruitful as it is to study the monster as an extension
of his creator, one cannot fully appreciate the significance of the character
until one studies his story from his point of view. In portraying the {120}
monster, Mary Shelley, whether directly or indirectly, drew upon Rousseau's conception of
natural man.22 Thus at the
same time as Frankenstein involves
a retelling of Paradise Lost, it also
undertakes an imaginative recreation of the Second Discourse, blending Milton and Rousseau
just as the poetic creation myths we have studied do.
One could undertake a fairly simple interpretation of
the monster's story in Rousseauian terms. The monster as originally created
corresponds to natural man; his fall is his fatal attraction to civil society;
and his attempt to join the ranks of social men leads to his misery. The story
would then show how civilization corrupts an essentially benevolent being into
a demon. Society is shown as being based on the will to power, and therefore
rejects the outward-turning sympathies of natural man. The civilized world
brutalizes the monster, awakening his lust to dominate by thwarting his impulse
to love.23 One can
almost hear the voice of the monster in Rousseau's comment on himself in
the Reveries:
If I had remained
free, obscure, and isolated as I was made to be, I would have done only good;
for I do not have the seed of any harmful passion in my heart. If I had been
invisible and all-powerful like God, I would have been beneficent and good like
Him. (R, 82)
The fact that the
representative of natural man in Frankenstein appears
as monstrous to those he meets could be a telling commentary on a society that
has lost touch with its origins and thus lost its ability to distinguish true humanity
from the veneer of civilization.
One can find elements of social commentary in Frankenstein, and one should not
neglect the ways in which the novel is a plea for social justice and
benevolence among men. The story exposes the decadence and corruption of
sophisticated society, while portraying the virtues and benefits of a simple
life. This dimension of the novel is particularly evident in the long De Lacey
episode, which contrasts the injustice of theFrench monarchy
with the rustic simplicity and harmony of the Swiss republic, thus moving
between the two poles of Rousseau's life and thought: Paris and Geneva. But a
straightforward social-political reading ofFrankenstein is ultimately inadequate. To be sure, on one
level Mary Shelley is saying
that a little more kindness and understanding in the world would improve the
lot of man. But she senses a profounder tension in human existence than mere
social conflicts. Thus her novel is truer than most Romantic works to the
complexities of Rousseau's {121} thought. Like the Second Discourse, Frankenstein is
a story of a being's fall from an original unity with nature into a state of
painful separation. But, also like the Second Discourse, Frankenstein does
not offer a way to overcome this separation. In Mary Shelley's myth, isolation
from nature seems to be the permanent price man pays for his consciousness and
his creativity. The monster moves through the first two stages of the Romantic
dialectic, but never achieves any third or higher stage which would allow him
to transcend the contradictions of his existence.
Like Rousseau's natural man, the monster begins his
life in a solitary state, living in the woods by himself with only accidental
contact with other beings. This solitariness gives him the freedom of
Rousseau's natural man: "I was dependent on none and related to none"
(123). His life is
uncomplicated by social relations, and also uncomplicated by the sophisticated
and decadent wants men acquire in the process of civilization as Rousseau
portrays it. At first the monster need only fulfill his basic animal desires,
which he finds simple enough to do, since he is not attached to any given
locale and can move on whenever he runs out of food:
Food, however,
became scarce, and I often spent the whole day searching in vain for a few
acorns to assuage the pangs of hunger. When I found this, I resolved to quit
the place that I had hitherto inhabited, to seek for one where the few wants I
experienced could be more easily satisfied. (100)
In accord with
Rousseau's speculation that natural man did not eat meat,24 the monster
is a vegetarian: "My food is
not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and kid to glut my appetite; acorns
and berries afford me sufficient nourishment" (139). With his simple
diet and easily satisfied wants, the monster begins life in animal contentment.
Like Rousseau, he at times longs for this original state: "Oh, that I had
forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of
hunger, thirst, and heat!" (115).
But the monster's innocent state has its limitations,
even if he eventually comes to regret having left it. Again like Rousseau's
natural man, he originally lacks speech or fully developed powers of reasoning.
The world presents itself to him right after his creation as a mass of
undifferentiated sensations, which he only gradually learns to distinguish:
A strange
multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt at the
same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to {122}
distinguish between the operations of my various senses . . . No
distinct ideas occupied my mind; all was confused. I felt light, and hunger,
and thirst, and on all sides various scents saluted me . . .
Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and
inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again
. . . My eyes became accustomed to the light and to perceive objects
in their right forms; I distinguished the insect from the herb, and by degrees,
one herb from another. (98-99)
This account of
the development of the monster's consciousness resembles Rousseau's
speculations on the origins of speech and reasoning, particularly in the
characterization of the monster's mental growth as a process of learning to
differentiate an originally unarticulated whole (SD, 123). The monster's mental
progress is, however, considerably faster than that of Rousseau's natural man,
largely because he is able to acquire language from already civilized men.
But the monster's reaction to his education is much
like Caliban's to his teacher Prospero: "You taught me language, and my
profit on't / Is, I know how to curse" (The Tempest, I.2.363-64). The monster's
loss of innocence and growing experience of the world only make him
progressively more miserable: "sorrow only increased with knowledge"
(115). At times he
longs to reject his learning and return to his original state of virtual
unconsciousness: "Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the
mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock. I wished
sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling" (115). Frankenstein
expresses the same sentiments in a passage that reads like pure Rousseau:
Alas! Why does man
boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders
them more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst,
and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that
blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us. (93)
In Frankenstein both creature and
creator end up seeking freedom from the burden of consciousness. But in the
bleak world of Mary Shelley's myth, no way to achieve this freedom can be
found, no means of combining the happiness and unity of man's original state
with the consciousness and developed power of his civilized state.
Thus the monster has a tragic vision of the direction
in which his story is headed: "I learned that there was but one means to
overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death" (115). In the absence
of a means of retaining the gains of experience while {123} recapturing man's
lost innocence, death becomes desirable as the only way of annihilating the
painful divisions of consciousness. The monster's story culminates in the
promise of an apocalyptic moment of death, which, in its symbolism of a funeral
pyre and drowning waters, is reminiscent of the climax of Wagner's Götterdämmerung:
I shall die, and
what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct.
I shall mount my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the
torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will
be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it
thinks, it will not surely think thus. (211)
The monster's
Immolation scene centers on a common Romantic image for consciousness: a fire
rapidly consuming itself which gives off blinding light but eventually burns
itself out.25 The monster
expects his ashes to be swept out to sea, where, dissolving into the primeval
waters, he can at last be reunited with nature. Death conceived as physical
dissolution becomes a way of recapturing the primal unity man lost when he
first departed from his natural state. This motif of undoing the fall by means
of a catastrophic dissolution into nature is the mythic equivalent of the more
familiar Romantic notion of the healing powers of nature. Frankenstein knows
that when he is feeling depressed, he ought to seek out sublime scenery:
Sometimes the
whirlwind passions of my soul drove me to seek, by bodily exercise and by
change of place, some relief from my intolerable sensations. It was during an
access of this kind that I suddenly left my home, and bending my steps towards
the near Alpine valleys, sought in the magnificence, the eternity of such
scenes, to forget myself and my ephemeral, because human, sorrows. (89-90)
Achieving some
form of unity with nature helps Victor overcome the divisions within his own
soul, until he is able to achieve a momentary peace and release from suffering:
"The same lulling sounds acted as a lullaby to my too keen sensations;
when I placed my head upon my pillow, sleep crept over me; I felt it as it came
and blessed the giver of oblivion" (91). But sleep is
only temporary, and like the monster, Frankenstein eventually can find relief
from the intolerable pain of his consciousness only in death.
One interpretation of the original Prometheus myth is that
it embodies man's awareness of the equivocal value of his consciousness.26 According to
this view, the spark Prometheus steals for man is the spark of consciousness.
Prometheus awakens man from his animal ignorance, thereby making him conscious
of the threatening {124} aspects of his existence, above all, his
mortality. Frankenstein is
true to its central Prometheus archetype in suggesting that man's fall results
from his attempt to rise above his animal nature, for in developing his
specifically human potential, his creative powers, he brings a greater
awareness of pain and suffering upon himself. Frankenstein expresses the
feeling of being trapped within his own consciousness in a passage that
suggests the image of Prometheus Bound: "For an instant I dared to shake
off my chains and look around me with a free and lofty spirit, but the iron had
eaten into my flesh, and I sank again, trembling and hopeless, into my
miserable self" (153). Having sought
to create solely out of his own self, Frankenstein succeeds in destroying
everything he loves, everything that might threaten his independence, until he
is left alone with only a creation of his own hands, an extension of his self.
But under these circumstances, his self becomes a prison to him. Frankenstein
banished with his creature to the Arctic wastelands becomes an
emblem of the dangerous solipsistic tendency inherent in the Romantic concept
of the imagination.27 If man
creates the world through the power of his own consciousness, then man is
threatened with having to exist alone in that world, or, worse, to be
confronted only by an externalization of his own desires that horrifies him in
its hideousness. To be the sole creator of one's world seems like a glorious
prospect, until one realizes the consequences of seeing one's self mirrored
everywhere one turns.
V
Is there any way out of the Romantic prison of the
self? Paradoxically the monster pursues a solution to this problem with a
greater sense of urgency than his human creator does. Frankenstein usually
expresses a longing for another human being only when that person has been
placed out of reach by death. The monster by contrast truly desires a living
companion. In depicting the monster's sympathetic reaching out for human
beings, Mary Shelley draws upon
another trait of natural man in Rousseau's view, his
compassion (SD, 130-33). From the beginning, the monster experiences fellow
feeling for all living creatures. He even applies Rousseau's formula for
natural man to himself, claiming that he was naturally good until human society
made him otherwise: "Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably
excluded. I was benevolent and {125} good; misery made me a fiend. Make me
happy, and I shall again be virtuous" (95-96). Longing for
some form of love, the monster reaches out for any human being he sees, and of
course his one request of his creator is to provide him with a mate. The
monster exhibits all the natural sympathies Frankenstein had to repress in
order to create him.
But there is a dark side to the monster's reaching out
for sympathy. When he is rejected, he lashes back with fierce hatred, most
often with murderous fury:
All, save I, were
at rest or in enjoyment; I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me, and
finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc
and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin. (130)
The monster has
inherited a deep ambivalence of emotions from his creator: his love is never far
from hate. He is most demonic -- even quoting Milton's Satan -- when he
vents the sum of his frustrations in his final revenge upon his creator:
When I discovered
that he, the author at once of my existence and of its unspeakable torments,
dared to hope for happiness, that while he accumulated wretchedness and despair
upon me he sought his own enjoyment in feelings and passions from the
indulgence of which I was forever barred, then impotent envy and bitter
indignation filled me with an insatiable thirst for vengeance . . .
Evil thenceforth became my good. (208-9)
The monster
certainly has reasons for hating humanity, but in one sense he may be treating
men as unfairly as they treat him. For all his fellow feeling, the monster is
not sympathetic to others in one respect, for he fails to understand fully
their difficulty in accepting him. They judge him by appearances, and his looks
are hardly calculated to inspire warmth and affection.
This problem calls our attention to the one decisive
respect in which the monster differs from natural man in Rousseau. Natural man is
of course in the state of nature, that is, everybody around him is in more or
less the same condition and thus nobody stands out. But the monster's state
more closely resembles that of a natural man in the midst of civil society. One
can compare his situation to that of the savages brought to Europe whom
Rousseau discusses in the Second
Discourse. His situation is even worse, since the people who meet the
monster will not even acknowledge his common humanity. They all think that he
is some form of beast, an inferior being. None of the characters in Frankenstein acknowledges the
{126} ways in which the monster is superior to them, the fact that he is
physically stronger, can endure the elements better, can survive in places
which would destroy them, and is all in all the more independent being.28 The
monster's tragedy is that he is forced to accept the civilized world's view of
him as inferior, for he has no other standard to go by. Rousseau's savages can
reject Europe and return to their own people, as the Frontispiece of the Second Discourse reminds us:
"He goes back to his equals" (76). Possessing an independent standard
for judging themselves, these savages can remain convinced of their own worth,
no matter what the Europeans think of them. But having no equals and hence no
standards of his own, the monster is forced to accept the opinion of the only
beings he has ever known and they all think that he is hideously ugly. He must
accept the same conclusion:
I had admired the
perfect forms of my cottagers -- their grace, beauty, and delicate complexions;
but how was I terrified when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I
started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the
mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster
that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification.
Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal effects of this miserable
deformity. (108)
The reason the
monster desperately desires a mate is to have someone who would deny his
ugliness, if only because she shared it. In demanding a creature as
"hideous" as himself, the monster clearly has this consideration in
mind:
I am alone and
miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as
myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species
and have the same defects . . . It is true, we shall be monsters, cut
off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attracted to one
another. (137, 139)
When Frankenstein
fails to fulfill the monster's request, he destroys his one hope of achieving
any form of self-satisfaction.
The deepest source of the monster's troubles is that
he is alienated from himself, doomed to see himself as others see him. In that
respect, he is not free to be a natural man in Rousseau's terms: "The
savage lives within himself; the sociable man, always outside of himself, knows
how to live only in the opinion of others; and it is, so to speak, from their
judgement alone that he draws the sentiment of his own existence" (SD,
179). Tragically, the monster is forced to endure the isolation of natural man,
but is denied his {127} independence of judgment. His socially derived sense of
his own ugliness, and hence of his unworthiness, ultimately thwarts all his
benevolent impulses. Convinced that his creation was defective, the monster is
filled with an "impotent envy and bitter indignation" that awakens
his "insatiable thirst for vengeance" (208). Thus he lays
all the blame for his crimes at the feet of his creator, since Frankenstein is
responsible for his being ugly: "Unfeeling, heartless creator! You had
endowed me with perceptions and passions and then cast me abroad an object for
the scorn and horror of mankind" (133). In this
reproach we begin to get a glimpse of how Frankenstein can be regarded as a
projection of the monster's psyche. The monster is undoubtedly placed in
unusual circumstances by his objective ugliness and he clearly has just cause
for complaint against his creator. And yet his situation is not unique the way
he claims; his experience is not entirely remote from that of ordinary men. All
men have moments when they feel different, when they feel themselves inadequate
to mixing in society, when they sense some form of ugliness standing between
themselves and other human beings. The monster's fear of not being accepted
because of being different is, paradoxically, a very human fear.29 But the
monster also has a very human response to this fear: he claims that he is not
really different -- inside he is just like any human being -- only his outward
form makes him seem different,30 and for that
his creator is to blame. In making a distinction between inner being and
outward form, the monster is trying to turn what differentiates him from others
into a principle external to his self, projecting onto his creator the total
responsibility for his alien character.
In this way, the monster is strangely like a Romantic
myth-maker, picturing for himself an incompetent, power-mad creator, who is
wholly to blame for the misery of his situation. The monster gets to act out
the scene many a Romantic poet dreamed of: the opportunity to confront his
creator and tell him how thoroughly he bungled the job of creation. The idea of
a demonic creator allows man to evade responsibility for his condition in the
thought that, given the chance, he would have made himself better. We see this
tendency toward evasion in the monster, even though he is more justified than
most in criticizing his creator. "Victor Frankenstein" becomes his
answer to all his nagging questions concerning why he fails to fit into the
world. The monster continually consoles himself {128} with the idea that if he
had only been made with more skill and forethought, he would have been a
morally better being. His repeated argument is that any ugliness in his soul is
purely the result of the ugliness of his body; he is in no way responsible for
his self because his self is the product of someone else's creativity; he was
not given the freedom to create his self once he was placed in a warped body.
Mary Shelley's epigraph from Paradise Lost sums up the
monster's charges:
Did I request
thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
To mould me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
These lines
express what came to be a widespread Romantic experience: the protest against
the lack of autonomy in the human condition.31 Milton's Adam speaks for
many Romantics when he complains: "my will / Concurred not to my
being" (X.746-47).32 The desire
to remake man's being until it becomes entirely the product of his own will, or
at least to reject a situation not of his own making and choosing, is what is
expressed in the gnostic pattern of Romantic creation myths. Though they
express it in different ways, both the monster and Frankenstein share this
attitude. Convinced that only a defective providence denied him happiness, and
armed with hard and fast evidence of the limitations of his creator, the
monster expresses the Romantic sense of man as a creature. Confident in his
ability to remake human nature, Frankenstein expresses the Romantic hope in man
as a creator. One of the profound ironies of Mary Shelley's myth is that the
visionary creator can only produce a heightened version of human creaturely
dependence.
VI
No matter what line we pursue in Frankenstein, we keep coming back to
the fundamental identity of Victor and the monster, of the creator and the
creature. The story of the monster seems to take up what it would be like for a
lower, or more primitive, being to fall into civilized society. But at the same
time, it takes up what it would be like for a higher, or more advanced, being
to move among the ranks of ordinary men, if we bear in mind the ways in which the
monster exceeds normal human capabilities. Conventional society {129} cannot
tell if the monster is an inferior or a superior being, for it cannot fully
understand him. All it really knows is that he is somehow different from
ordinary men. In this respect, the monster's story is the same as
Frankenstein's. As Victor suspects (and as several movies have proven), if the
common people knew of his experiments, they would hunt him down like a beast.
Any man with an unconventional vision runs the risk of being regarded as
inhuman by conventional society. Rousseau expresses this idea in a passage that
sounds as if it came right out of the pages of Frankenstein:
Could I in my good
sense have supposed that one day I, the same man that I was, the same that I
still am, would -- without the slightest doubt -- pass for and be taken as a
monster, a poisoner, an assassin; that I would become the horror of the human
race, the plaything of the rabble. (R, 2)
Frankenstein is in
a very real sense a higher being than those around him: he is more imaginative
and has greater creative powers. But for that very reason he can no more fit
into conventional society than his monster can.
In dramatizing the position of an alien being in an
uncomprehending community, Frankenstein embodies
what gradually emerged as the Romantic conception of the artist's relation to
society. Victor is the epitome of the isolated Romantic genius: a man with a
special power of insight, a rebel against convention, living on the fringes of
society, losing touch with his fellow men even as he works to transform their
existence. Both Frankenstein and the monster stand out from the ranks of
ordinary men. What distinguishes the creator from the creature is that he
glories in his sense of being different: "I could not rank myself with the
herd of common projectors" (200). The monster, by
contrast, does not like to dwell upon the ways in which he excels ordinary men,
but only craves their acceptance in normal life. Frankenstein, who evidently
could enjoy a successful family life with Elizabeth, gives it up for the sake
of his creativity, while the monster, who is free of all ties and could, for
example, achieve success as an Arctic explorer beyond Robert Walton's wildest
dreams, longs for nothing more than lingering by the sort of family hearth both
Frankenstein and Walton despise. Deep down, the creator and the creature
in Frankenstein yearn
to exchange roles: the monster craves the home life Frankenstein rejects, and
Frankenstein covets the freedom from personal bonds which the monster views as
his curse.
{130} Perhaps then we can view the monster's attitude
toward Frankenstein as the creature in man rebelling against the creator in
man. The monster expresses the resentment of man's creaturely instincts against
his creative impulses, which cause him to suffer and be lonely in his life.
Reduced to its essentials, the monster's charge against Frankenstein is:
"You've made me miserable for the sake of your creativity." One can
think of this reproach as the human half of a poet saying to the artistic half:
"For the sake of your art, you've ruined my life." If we take
seriously the idea of Frankenstein and the monster as a composite being, we see
that in portraying the conflict of creator and creature, Mary Shelley's novel
begins to explore the tension between art and life that became such a central
theme in nineteenth-century literature.
If one thinks of the creator-half as the real essence
of man, then the monster is his nightmare image of his human, all-too-human
limitations.33 To an
idealistic visionary like Percy Shelley, his creaturely
aspects as a human being can seem monstrous. Anxious to soar into the heaven of
his own imagination, he would like to be free of the weight of his own body,
which he regards as ill-made because it is not the creation of his own mind.
But in trying to reject his creaturely impulses, to distance himself from them,
the artist runs the risk of perverting them, of letting his darkest urges work
below the level of consciousness toward destructive ends because he refuses to
recognize them for what they are. Frankenstein is much like Blake's Urizen:34 he tries to
reject his emotions, to separate himself from them by shunting them off into
his creation. But as a result Frankenstein's emotions run wild in the
externalized form of his monster.35 His story
suggests that the worst thing that can happen to an artistic visionary is to
let his concern for his art and his vision thwart his ordinary human
sympathies. Frankenstein himself rather heavy-handedly points the moral of his
tale:
If the study to
which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to
destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly
mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the
human mind. (54)
If the
creature-half is the real essence of man, then an obsessed creator-god is his
nightmare image of the artist in him. He sees this force as ruining all his
chances for acceptance in life and thereby making him miserable. The danger of this
form of projection is that it provides an excuse for not facing up to the
challenges of life. {131} The thought that only his creator could improve his
condition relieves the monster of the task of trying to make something of his
ugliness, of creating something out of his admittedly defective existence. It
is perhaps asking too much to expect the monster to accept his solitary
situation and learn to sublimate his energies into some form of creative
endeavor. But if he did, it would not be the first time that a curse proved to
be a blessing, and the creaturely defects of man turned out to be a spur to his
creativity. Because of his resentment against his creator, the monster ensures
that his difference from others can never become a creative difference. Only
once does he force himself to leave his creaturely doubts behind him:
I felt emotions of
gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half
surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away
by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy. (134)
Here the monster
achieves an important insight: for him happiness requires daring. Pursuing the
life of a Rousseauian solitary walker and rejecting the artificial standards of
civilization in order to achieve communion with nature, the monster is able for
the moment to forget his "deformity." But as he says, this path
requires the courage to set his own standards and be his own judge. Once the
monster turns to Frankenstein to give him happiness, assuming that Frankenstein
knows what is best for him and is the only one who has creative power, the
monster seals his fate. One begins to suspect that Frankenstein plays the role
of God for the monster in a deeper sense than at first appears.36
The psychological projections Frankenstein and the
monster attempt can, then, be viewed as ways of evading responsibility for
their deeds.37 Each becomes
the other's all-purpose excuse. One must not be misled by the tendency of
Frankenstein and the monster to wallow in self-accusations. Their admissions
always take the form: "I am the greatest of criminals, but --." Each
always has some way of disclaiming ultimate responsibility for his
actions. Frankenstein builds
up to what promises to be a climactic scene of mutual confession from Victor
and the monster. But what starts out in the mea culpa mode passes imperceptibly into a final round of
self-justifications. Somehow Frankenstein finds it possible to conclude:
"During these last days I have been occupied in examining my past conduct;
nor do I find it blameable" (206). And the {132}
monster returns to his favorite theme: "Am I to be thought the only
criminal, when all mankind sinned against me? . . . Even now my blood
boils at the recollection of this injustice" (210). In their
conviction of the original purity of their intentions, and their belief that
only material circumstances thwarted their benevolent impulses, both
Frankenstein and the monster maintain to the end the idealist's moral composure
in the face of even his most disastrous attempts to act in the real world. The
source of this self-assurance is in the nightmare images Frankenstein and the
monster have of each other, which allow them to project their faults and
failings onto something external to their selves.
Understanding the psychological functions which
Frankenstein and the monster serve for each other helps in understanding why
they become locked in a life-and-death struggle of mutual flight and pursuit.
The creator can never get entirely free of the creature in man, and the
creature would be lost without the creative power that is his only hope for
making something better of himself. Yet somehow the creative and creaturely
principles cannot get together and they remain at war with each other. Frankenstein embodies the two
images of man that are the imaginative core of Romantic creation
myths, but it elaborates them differently than do most Romantic works. The
monster stands for man as suffering creature, poorly provided for by an
indifferent world order. Frankenstein stands for man as powerful creator,
hoping to claim his long-sought happiness by making himself anew. But in Mary
Shelley's myth, the deformed is not transformed, the monster is not the prelude
to Frankenstein, the suffering creature is not on the verge of turning himself
into the powerful creator in an apocalyptic metamorphosis of the human
condition. For Mary Shelley, the two sides of man coexist, and apparently can,
never achieve a simple harmony. Both Frankenstein and the monster are symbols
of the Romantic revolt against the human condition, the idealistic refusal to accept
the facts of human nature. In portraying the disastrous consequences of this
revolt Mary Shelley wrote one of the few truly tragic stories in Romantic
literature because she was dramatizing Romanticism itself. For another attempt
to portray the Romantic tragedy, to show the twisting of idealistic thoughts
into murderous impulses, we turn to Byron's Cain.
Notes
1. Of recent
versions of the Frankenstein story
I have read, the most inventive and symbolically rich is Frankenstein: The True Story (New
York: Avon Books, 1973), a screenplay written by Christopher Isherwood and Don
Bachardy for a 1973 television movie. In the same year, an interesting science
fiction treatment of the theme appeared, Brian Aldiss's Frankenstein Unbound (New York:
Random House, 1973). Both works develop the connections between the
Frankenstein story and the events in the Byron-Shelley circle at
the time Mary conceived the novel.
2. See, for
example, Harold Bloom's Afterword to his edition of Frankenstein, pp. 213-14. On
the Prometheus archetype
in Frankenstein, see also
Small, Frankenstein, pp.
48-55 and Martin Tropp, Mary
Shelley's Monster (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), pp. 56-57.
3. See
Small, Frankenstein, pp.
57-70, 64-65; Tropp, Mary
Shelley's Monster, pp. 69-80; James Rieger, "Introduction"
to Frankenstein (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), p. xxxii; and Burton R. Pollin,
"Philosophical and Literary Sources of Frankenstein," Comparative
Literature, 17 (1965), 103-4.
4. See, for
example, William Walling, Mary
Shelley (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972), pp. 41-47 and Milton
A. Mays, "Frankenstein:
Mary Shelley's Black Theodicy," Southern Humanities Review, 3 (1969), 146-53.
5. See
Small, Frankenstein, pp.
59, 66, 186 and George Levine, "Frankenstein and the Tradition
of Realism," Novel, 7
(1973), 23.
6. See, for
example, Harold Bloom, "Afterword," p. 113; Levine, "Tradition
of Realism," p. 18; Small, Frankenstein, p. iii; and
Tropp, Mary Shelley's Monster,
pp. 8, 81.
7. See
especially Tropp, Mary Shelley's
Monster, pp. 17, 59 and Rieger, Mutiny Within, pp. 237-47. The most elaborate and convincing
attempt to link Frankenstein and Shelley can be found
in Small, Frankenstein,
pp. 100-121. Small establishes the parallels between Frankenstein's
intellectual development and Shelley's, above all their common interest
in alchemy, chemistry, and
technological progress, and their fascination with death as the key to life.
"Victor" was Shelley's childhood name for himself (p. 101). Small
concludes of Frankenstein: "If he is not Shelley he is a dream of
Shelley" (p. 102).
8. See Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 161; Wilfred Cude,
"Mary Shelley's Modern Prometheus: A Study in the Ethics of Scientific
Creativity,"Dalhousie Review,
52 (1972), 218; and D. J. Palmer and R. E. Douse, "Frankenstein: A Moral
Fable," The Listener,
68 (1962), 281. Frankenstein himself, in thinking of his enthusiasm as a
creator, mentions "an artist occupied by his favourite employment" (55).
9. See M. K.
Joseph, "Introduction" to Frankenstein (London:
Oxford University Press, 1969), p. xiv and Mary Poovey, "My Hideous
Progeny: Mary Shelley and the Feminization of Romanticism," PMLA, 95 (1980), 332-33. For the
connection between Frankenstein and Mary Shelley's doubts about her husband's
idealism, see P.D. Fleck, "Mary
Shelley's Notes to Shelley's Poems and Frankenstein," Studies
in Romanticism, 8 (1967), 226-54.
12. In the
original version of Frankenstein (1818),
Victor and Elizabeth are in fact cousins. As Small points out,
"Elizabeth" was the name of Percy Shelley's mother and of his
"favourite sister" (Frankenstein,
p. 103).
13. See Levine,
"Tradition of Realism," p. 21. Consider in this
context the argument Frankenstein uses to repulse Walton's offer of friendship:
"the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our
minds which hardly any later friend can obtain. They know our infantine
dispositions, which, however they may be afterwards modified, are never
eradicated" (201).
14. Kiely, Romantic Novel, p. 164.
15. See
Tropp, Mary Shelley's Monster,
p. 64. Hawthorne's short story, "The Birthmark," which
resembles Frankenstein,
also presents science as the product of sublimated sexuality. See Frederick
Crews, The Sins of the Fathers:
Hawthorne's Psychological Themes (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1966), pp. 111-12, 125-26, 156-57.
16. Kiely,
Romantic Novel, pp. 165-66.
17. Rieger, Frankenstein (The 1818 Text), p. 29.
18. See Sherwin, "Creation
as Catastrophe," p. 899. That Frankenstein
himself is thinking of the poetic imagination at this moment is evident from
the fact that he says of the animated monster: "it became a thing such as
even Dante could not have conceived" (57). Mary Shelley's
choice of words in her recollection of the animation scene in her original
dream is also revealing: "His success would terrify the artist; he would
rush away from his handi-work, horror-stricken" (xi). Frankenstein is
even more repelled by his second attempt at creating life (see pp. 156-57). Like a Romantic
artist, he loses his enthusiasm for the task of creation once he is forced to
repeat it. The second time around, Frankenstein's work is, as it were,
commissioned by the monster, and hence not the free projection of
Frankenstein's mind.
19. See Tropp,
Mary Shelley's Monster, pp. 24, 37-40, 43, 48, 50 and Small, Frankenstein, pp. 186, 214.
20. See
Kiely, Romantic Novel, p. 165; Small, Frankenstein, p. 191; Tropp, Mary Shelley's Monster, pp. 22-23;
and Sherwin, "Creation as Catastrophe," p. 887. Mary Shelley's
own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died as a result
of bearing her, and perhaps she was familiar with the results of this kind of
association in her father's neglect of her
as a child.
21. See
Tropp, Mary Shelley's Monster,
p. 42. Frankenstein's suicidal longings are revealed long before the conclusion
of his tale. See, for example, p. 82: "I was
tempted to plunge into the silent lake, that the waters might close over me and
my calamities forever."
22. For the
influence of Rousseau on Mary
Shelley, see Small, Frankenstein,
p. 62; Tropp, Mary Shelley's
Monster, pp. 71, 162-63 (n. 12); and Pollin, "Sources of
Frankenstein," p. 106. Mary Shelley's
journal records that she read the Emile and the Nouvelle Heloise in 1815. She was reading
the Reveries from
Thursday, August 1 to Sunday, August 4, 1816, that is, exactly
when she was at work writing Frankenstein.
SeeMary Shelley's Journal, pp.
48, 55-56. I have been unable to find any evidence that Mary Shelley read
the Second Discourse, but
she certainly was exposed to the work's ideas through the writings and
conversations of both her father and her husband.
23. This was
Percy Shelley's interpretation of Frankenstein:
in his review of the book
(unpublished in his lifetime), he stated its moral this way: "Treat a
person ill and he will become wicked." See Shelley's Prose,p. 307.
24. See Note (e)
of the Second Discourse,
pp. 187-88. It might be argued that in making the monster a vegetarian, Mary
Shelley was influenced not by Rousseau but by her husband's early essay, A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813). But since
Shelley's essay is itself heavily influenced by Rousseau -- he advances the
same evidence as Rousseau from comparative anatomy to prove that man is by
nature a frugivorous animal -- this example shows how the influence of Rousseau
might have reached Mary Shelley indirectly, if not directly.
25. See Harold
Bloom, "Afterword," p. 222. A late example of this Romantic fire
motif is Nietzsche's brief poem, "Ecce Homo," in the prelude to The Gay Science.
27. See Levine,
"Tradition of Realism," p. 21. The solipsism of
Frankenstein's imagination becomes evident once all his relations are dead and
he believes that he can possess them within his mind: "During the day I
was sustained and inspirited by the hope of night, for in sleep I saw my
friends, my wife, and my beloved country . . . Often . . .
I persuaded myself that I was dreaming until night should come and that I
should then enjoy reality in the arms of my dearest friends" (195). Walton views
Frankenstein's confusion of dream and reality as "the offspring of
solitude and delirium": "he believes that when in dreams he holds
converse with his friends . . . they are not the creations of his
fancy, but the beings themselves who visit him from the regions of a remote
world" (200). This passage
should be compared with Mary Shelley's description of her own childhood
day-dreaming: "I was not confined to my own identity, and I could people
the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age than my own
sensations" (viii).
28. These are
precisely the ways in which Rousseau thinks natural man excels civilized man.
For the monster's advantages, see for example p. 115: "I was more
agile than they and could subsist upon coarser diet: I bore the extremes of
heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded
theirs."
29. See
Frye, English Romanticism,
p. 44 and Elizabeth Nitchie, Mary
Shelley: Author of "Frankenstein" (New Brunswick, New
Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1953), p. 187.
30. Consider the
monster's comment: "Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who,
pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was
capable of unfolding" (209).
What had I Done in this? I was unborn;
I sought not to be born; nor love the state
To which that birth has brought me.
I sought not to be born; nor love the state
To which that birth has brought me.
(I.i.67-69)
Later Cain seeks
to excuse his crime because of the bad timing of his conception:
After the fall too
soon was I begotten,
Ere yet my mother's mind subsided from
The serpent, and my sire still mourned for Eden.
That which I am, I am. I did not seek
For life nor did I make myself.
Ere yet my mother's mind subsided from
The serpent, and my sire still mourned for Eden.
That which I am, I am. I did not seek
For life nor did I make myself.
(III.i. 506-10)
32. Frankenstein
predicts a similar attitude in the mate he is creating for her monster; he
suspects that she "might refuse to comply with a compact made before her
creation" (158).
33. See Joseph,
"Introduction," p. xiv: "If Prometheus, in the romantic
tradition, is identified with human revolt, is the monster what the revolt
looks like from the other side -- a pitiful botched-up creature?" A
similar, though even more grotesque, image for the creator's disgust at the
creatureliness of man is developed in John Barth's "Petition"
in Lost in the Funhouse (New
York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1969). Barth pictures the artist-half of man as the
weaker of a pair of Siamese twins, perpetually repulsed by the grossness of his
more physical half, who takes active pleasure in life, while his frail brother
remains "an observer of life, a mediator, a taker of notes, a dreamer if
you will . . . being out of reach except to surrogate gratifications"
(pp. 61, 65).
35. Something
similar happens in the other great nineteenth-century myth of scientific
creativity gone awry, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll's attempt to distill out the
good part of man only results in turning his evil impulses loose in the
monstrous form of Mr. Hyde. See Palmer and Douse, "Moral Fable," p.
284.
36. For insight
into this aspect of Frankenstein,
see the chapter, "The Ugliest Man," in Part IV of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which becomes
in effect a dialogue between the creature and the creator in man, and explores
the connection between creaturely ressentiment and
the murder of the creator-god. In Nietzsche's terms, the problem with the
monster is that he is so thoroughly a creature that he cannot create his own
values and hence is forced to accept them ready-made from his creator and his
creator's race. That is why the monster can become creative only in
destruction. The most he can do is to attempt what Nietzsche calls the slave
revolt in morals, merely reversing the values of his "natural lord and
king" (95). It is in this context that we can best understand the
monster's echo of Milton's Satan: "Evil thenceforth became my good"(209).
37. On the issue
of moral responsibility in Frankenstein,
and its relation to Percy Shelley's own capacity
for psychological projection, see Small, Frankenstein, pp. 171-95.
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