Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

References to the novel are to Frankenstein 1818 Text, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford, 1994).

1. History and background

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851):

1818: first published anonymously: view of title page; Lackington: not a reputable publisher

1823: reprint edition; also appearance of Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein by R. B. Peake, the first of many stage adaptions (Mary Shelley found this on stage when she returned from Italy to London)

1831: substantially revised edition for Bentley's standard novels series

More recently known in film adaptions, best known: James Whale (dir.), 1931, with Boris Karloff as Creature.

-- over 20 of these (counting only those derived from novel), most recent is Kenneth Branagh's (1994)

Role in popular culture -- e.g., comic strips, etc. Bizarro; Larson

-- note use of electricity . . . but the book is more interesting than any of its adaptations. Touches on a range of issues: imagination; science; gender.

1816 summer: Villa Diodati, conversations about science, June 15

June 16: agreement to write a ghost story; then Mary's dream

novel draws on debate about materialism and science -- Darwin, Lawrence (for Lawrence, see Butler, Introduction)

-- exciting prospects of new chemistry, esp. Humphry Davy

-- but Mary's evident scepticism: socially irresponsible science

(hence the Modern Prometheus subtitle: Prometheus stole fire from Jupiter, who had taken it from humans; but more important, Prometheus made the first man and woman out of clay, animated them with fire -- modern: perhaps new science of electricity, Priestley, Galvanism, Franklin . . . )

2. Romantic / Imagination

Both admiration and disgust expressed in novel, e.g. near end, Frankenstein on glory of imagination p. 180; his last words, p. 186

Hence, novel a critique, almost at times, a parody of Romantic attitudes; evidently draws on husband Percy Shelley, his experiments, etc., e.g., p. 24

-- "Victor Cazire": Shelley's pseudonym for his first book of poems

-- he substantially revised Mary's MS for publication (did he see the irony?)

-- lack of public for Percy Shelley: theme of isolation: Walton, Frankenstein, the Creature (Mary's solitude with Shelley, often acute)

Creature's vices spring from solitude (p. 121); wild child, Rousseau . . .

sublime: Frankenstein's raptures over nature (e.g., p. 74)

spiritual experience, especially in high mountains; but novel reverses this:

isolation: (1) Romantic scenery, wild mountains (the Chamonix of Shelley's "Mont Blanc"), where Frankenstein meets his Creature on the glacier, the Mer de Glace (p. 76); (2) polar ice regions: but polar ending implies sterility, ultimate failure (unlike Mariner's turning point)

Frankenstein's isolation: produces a Creature who is also isolated, as his alter ego or double

ugliness: Novel as a rebuke to Romantic endeavour: questions purposes and outcome of imagination, idealism: ugliness of material outcome (p. 39):

-- note how this appearance determines all subsequent reactions to the Creature (parodies Wollstonecraft's critique of female beauty [note]) -- cf. Walton's reaction (p. 187). Body is fate (Youngquist). The Creature sees himself eventually as "an abortion" (p. 189)

Narrative structure: frame narratives (cf. Coleridge's Mariner) -- three participant narrators, one within the other: Walton / Frankenstein / Creature

(not very subtle, but . . . ); Walton's ambition anticipates Frankenstein's; his plight also;

indeterminacy of narrative judgements: ambiguity of novel, both admirable and terrible

-- but why important beyond the moral lesson: touches on significant Romantic themes, oblique light on Romantic ideals:

relation to the Fall (ref. to Milton's Paradise Lost), hubris

psychological effects (cf. the Mariner), isolation, guilt

Remorse as chief tragic emotion of Romantics (e.g., p. 69); even in Creature: final speech, remorse of (p. 191)

guiltless guilt of Frankenstein (p. 135), as if the guilt that in nature (cf. the Mariner) --

reverse: fascination with heroism -- Creature as heroic exile (p. 104); heroic elevation of Frankenstein's revenge (p. 170); Frankenstein great even in his ruin, godlike (p. 179).

3. Sex and gender issues

Authorship: novel published anonymously in 1818; dangers for woman of having a public voice, aping the masculine (see her 1831 introduction, p. 193)

Novel MS was extensively revised by Percy Shelley: changed dashes to colons and semicolons, latinized her vocabulary, etc. -- for an account, see Anne Mellor, Mary Shelley, Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (1988), pp. 58-68, and Appendix. Example.

-- her agreement to this help, undermines notion of single authorship;

-- even questioned in text: Victor as "author", p. 70, p. 78, etc.,

seems to make authorship monstrous and destructive

Female prerogative violated: sexual hubris of Frankenstein: unnatural progenitor of Creature;

-- the Creature later systematically removes William (younger brother), dearest friend (Clerval) and bride (Elizabeth), reenacting Frankenstein's voluntary isolation

-- beyond sex? Friendship as key virtue of novel, basis of family; even Elizabeth addressed as "dear friend" -- Coleridgean: "goodly company" of Mariner, etc.:

Domestic. Note separation of public and private lives: Walton, from his sister; Victor, from his family, but also Victor's father in retiring from public life only then to start a family (p. 18, 19) -- and note additions to 1831 ed., father's sheltering of Caroline, his wife (Joseph, p. 33). Woman as servant to the domestic; woman's voice absent; women hardly speak in the novel itself, and are tied to home, except for Safie -- contrast (p. 99). [Different critical views of how Shelley regards the family]

Barbara Johnson: the women in the novel are "beautiful, gentle, selfless, boring nurturers and victims who never experience inner conflict or true desire" (cited, Youngquist, 1991, p. 341)

Father of Victor: old, tied to domestic, provides no role model for child; rejects Agrippa with little understanding (p. 23)

-- home as centre of moral values -- standard ideology of the domestic -- women's influence on men, but only there . . .

-- Creature seeks it, finds it for a while in viewing De Lacey's; but -- domestic as already fatally flawed

-- suggests home too nurturant, feminized (no adequate role model for Victor)? V's need to break boundaries; his male spirit breaks out in monstrous form --

Absent mother. Shelley's hidden aim in the novel: to exorcise guilt and grief over loss of mother?

-- but not to repeat her mother's public defence of woman; rather, to affirm importance of domestic, affectional relations;

-- not the de-sexing of Wollstonecraft's appeal to reason, but a recognition of the embodied nature of woman's experience: "the sex of our material mechanism makes us quite different Creatures" (letter of 1835);

-- body is fate, as Shelley shows in the case of the Creature;

-- fear of monster: primitive dread of the defiled, unclean: even the Creature says so, p. 105; i.e., as if pre-birth, still within female domain -- even Victor's workshop set apart, like a womb, p. 36-7; sexual imagery, e.g., "consummation", p. 34

-- but followed by incestuous, necrophiliac dream, p. 39 (suggests withdrawal of the sexual). Mellor:

In constituting nature as female--"I pursued nature to her hiding places" (36)--Victor Frankenstein participates in a gendered construction of the universe whose negative ramifications are everywhere apparent in the novel. The uninhibited scientific penetration and technological exploitation of female nature is only one dimension of a patriarchal encoding of the female as passive and possessable, the willing receptacle of male desire. The destruction of the female implicit in Frankenstein's usurpation of the natural mode of human reproduction symbolically erupts in his nightmare following the animation of his creature, in which his bride-to-be is transformed in his arms into the corpse of his dead mother--"a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel" (53). By stealing the female's control over reproduction, Frankenstein has eliminated the female's primary biological function and source of cultural power. Indeed, for the simple purpose of human survival, Frankenstein has eliminated the necessity to have females at all. (Mellor, p. 115)


Notes

Wollstonecraft, e.g.:

Pleasure is the business of woman's life, according to the present modification of society, and while it continues to be so, little can be expected from such weak beings. Inheriting in a lineal descent from the first fair defect in nature [Eve], the sovereignty of beauty, they have, to maintain their power, resigned the natural rights, which the exercise of reason might have procured them, and chosen rather to be short-lived queens than labour to obtain the sober pleasure that arise from equality. (Vindication, Norton, p. 55)

Youngquist, Paul. "Frankenstein: The Mother, the Daughter, and the Monster." Philological Quarterly 70: 3 (1991): 339-59.

Percy Shelley's revisions. Example from Mellor, p. 60 (Frankenstein 1818, p. 24):

Mary's text Percy's revision
Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was also a favorite pursuit and if I never saw any I attributed it rather to my own inexperience and mistakes than want of skill in my instructors. Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favorite authors, the fulfillment of which I most eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake, than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors.

 

Critical views of family:

Mellor: unity of bourgeois family

I have interpreted Frankenstein as an extended analysis of what happens, both psychologically and socially, when such a family, and especially a loving parent, is absent. Mary Shelley's own anxieties about her capacity to be an adequate mother determined both the origin and the production of the novel (the ghost story contest and her subsequent dream, the structure of the novel, the revisions of her manuscript). Victor Frankenstein's failure to mother his child produces a monster at many levels of cultural meaning. Mary Shelley's celebration of the egalitarian bourgeois family has political, aesthetic, scientific, and philosophical implications. Politically, it endorses the conservative position espoused by Edmund Burke, a position that upholds the traditional, organically evolving, affectionate nuclear family and condemns the revolutionary irresponsibility of Promethean politics. Aesthetically, it entails an affirmation of the beautiful over the sublime, for the beautiful (as Burke had shown) is identified with the female procreation of the family while the sublime is associated with a solitary egoistic male triumph over death. In her view, "good" science recognizes and respects a sacred procreative life-force troped as "Mother Nature," whereas "bad" science construes nature as dead matter or a machine to be manipulated, controlled, and changed. (Mellor, p. 215)

Ellis: failure of bourgeois family

Repeatedly throughout the novel, Shelley gives us examples of the ways in which the bourgeois family creates and perpetuates divided selves in the name of domestic affection, drawing a circle around the home that keeps it in and "disunion and dispute" out. We have noticed already that those whose role is to embody domestic affection cannot go out into the world. "Insiders" cannot leave, or do so at their peril. At the same time Shelley dramatizes, through the experience of Victor's ugly "child," that "outsiders" cannot enter; they are condemned to perpetual exile.and deprivation, forbidden even from trying to create a domestic circle of their own. This fate is emphasized by the fate of Justine, who succeeds in imitating to perfection the similarly rescued Caroline Beaufort, but who is abandoned by the Frankensteins at the first suggestion of rebellion. Abandoned first by her own jealous mother, Justine embodies Shelley's most devastating indictment of bourgeois socialization: a second "adopted" family cannot, as Milton put it, "rectify the wrongs of our first parents." (Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle (1989), p. 197)


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Document created November 3rd, 2000