Yesterday I finally made it out to the Biblioteca Nacional in the Recoleta neighborhood of Buenos Aires. It's an interesting building architecturally, and I've been meaning to go there for months. I was hoping to browse around through an enormous collection of books, but I was disappointed to find that the collection is all kept in storage that can be only accessed by employees, and to read a book you have to specifically request it. I didn't feel like waiting around, so I just wandered around the place until I stumbled into an exhibit they had commemorating "Frankenstein." It was a cool exhibit, and the highlight was undoubtedly a few pages of Mary Shelley's original manuscript, including some edits that her husband Percy had written into the margins. I've always enjoyed Frankenstein (as I'm sure you already know if you happened to read my Lilo and Stitch essay from a few weeks back), and while I can't think of much to add right now, I figure I might as well share with you all an essay I wrote a while back on the novel, arguing that patriarchal society and the marginalization of femininity are the real monsters of story, not Frankenstein's creature.
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As the story goes, Mary Shelley came up with the idea for Frankenstein after a late-night discussion with several other writers, in which they tried to determine what, exactly, humanity as a whole found most terrifying. The short story that would eventually grow into Frankenstein was born from a dream that Shelley had a few days after this late-night discussion. While her novel is full of grief, grotesqueries, anger, and violence, Frankenstein is also chock full of frightening social and philosophical implications, and it seems that this is where the novel's deepest horrors lie.
In writing her novel, Mary Shelley drew inspiration from many sources. She grew up owning a copy of Gulliver’s Travels, and this influence is evident in the structure of the narrative, which uses faux-correspondences as a framing device. Her husband, Percy Shelley, wrote Prometheus Unbound, and Frankenstein (AKA The Modern Prometheus) explores similar, “promethean” themes of usurping power from nature or the gods. However, it is Mary Shelley's portrayal of human nature that makes her novel so significant, and so terrifying. In this regard it seems she may have taken chief inspiration from her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, most notable for her early feminist writing. In Frankenstein, Shelley explores the consequences of an unnatural, patriarchal world in which women are made subservient to men.
While Frankenstein and his creation are tragic characters, they are no strangers to moments of happiness. Both characters associate the sublime beauty of nature with some of their happiest moments, and both find some solace in nature during times of grief (Ames 1). Frankenstein, recalling his trip to Geneva after a nervous few days with Henry, says:
“I remained two days at Lausanne, in this painful state of mind. I contemplated the lake: the waters were placid; all around was calm, and the snowy mountains, 'the palaces of nature,' were not changed. By degrees the calm and heavenly scene restored me, and I continued my journey towards Geneva... The road ran by the side of the lake, which became narrower as I approached my native town. I discovered more distinctly the black sides of Jura, and the bright summit of Mont Blanc. I wept like a child: "Dear mountains! My own beautiful lake! How do you welcome your wanderer? Your summits are clear; the sky and lake are blue and placid. Is this to prognosticate peace or to mock at my unhappiness?” (Shelley 47)
“Placid,” “calm,” “beautiful” nature is the only place where Victor can find solace. The monster, in recounting the beginning of his own tale, describes very similar experiences with nature. Before acquiring any knowledge of humanity, the creature is struck by the natural beauty of the forest, with its tress, flowers, and chirping birds.
It is fitting that nature is almost always described as feminine in the novel. In moments like these, the characters are able to find the motherly affection they need through the embrace of Mother Nature. However, as a lack of motherly affection weighs upon them from elsewhere, they begin to feel scorned by Mother Nature herself, and they lose sight in the beauty of nature. Frankenstein's scientific devotion and constant fears regarding the whereabouts of the monster cause him to ultimately regard nature callously, as a soulless landscape on which we play out our lives. Aspects of nature like rain begin to cause him more sadness than consolation. He spends his final days pursuing his creation across a barren arctic expanse, a landscape that seems to reflect the arid lifelessness that Frankenstein now attributes to nature (Ames 1). Without the sense of purpose provided by a healthy relationship with Mother Nature, Frankenstein and his creation are forced to search for purpose elsewhere, ultimately finding it in such negative places as retribution, destruction, and attempts to control the world around them.
In creating life, Frankenstein has violated nature by attempting to assume the role of both woman and God. God, who is equated with “Mother Nature” in the novel, is the ultimate creator of life. For humans, that creation takes the form of the natural growth of a child within its mother's womb. By usurping this role from women and from Mother Nature, Frankenstein is rendering the roles of both God and women meaningless (Mellor 116). Meanwhile, in creating life through unnatural means, Frankenstein comes to regard his creation as unnatural, instead of seeing it as a mother would a child. The creature contains no part of Frankenstein beyond his craftsmanship, and thus he is unable to empathize with what he regards as a hideous experiment gone-wrong. The lack of motherly love and acceptance is the source of the creature's rage, and the root source of all the suffering endured by characters in the novel.
Shelley portrays women as the natural creators of life and the ultimate source of love and compassion. To truly love one's offspring is to love them out of empathy and not strictly as a possession, which is how Frankenstein comes to regard almost everyone, beginning with his adopted sister Elizabeth. “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 a possession of my own” (Shelly 31)
Perhaps it is because they can see themselves in their children, but most mothers feel an innate desire to love and cherish their child, regardless of physical appearance. By loving their children, mothers instill a sense of security, as well as love and compassion in their children; Frankenstein's childhood is described as idyllic. He is raised happily in a nurturing family with a caring mother, and he develops a strong love for nature. However, his mother passes away from scarlet fever when he is a teenager, and he is left with grief and no source of motherly affection. The loss of his mother leaves him with a distrust of God, and he endeavors to take the creation of life into his own hands, devoting many years in the pursuit of science and a proper technique for creating a living, breathing person.
This desire for creation would not necessarily be bad if it were made out of love, but Frankenstein is driven by his own egotistical ambition and not by an honest desire to create life. “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. 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” (Shelley 82). In attempting to become the ultimate father and the sole designer of a new species, Frankenstein is clearly trying to play God, a misguided ambition that also reflects his creation's later musings on Adam and Satan.
“Like Adam, I was created 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 special care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with, and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature: 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” (Shelley 169).
Frankenstein envied his creator, Mother Earth, because he felt that he had been cast aside by fate. This was the twisted source behind his desire to create a new form of life. But, in creating life for such immoral means, Frankenstein comes to feel ashamed of his ugly creation and casts it aside in a manner infinitely more cruel than he had suffered at the hands of Mother Nature. It does not take long for it to become apparent that creation is a task best left to those with the proper intent, women and mother nature. Upon seeing the grotesque, unnatural features of his creation, Frankenstein abandons it, denying it the very same empathy and acceptance that he himself longs for. The monster does not become a monster until his creator and society label him as such. All of his crimes are committed out of frustration with the fear and hostility with which his creator and the community regard him. The obvious lacking element in this twisted and doomed parental relationship is motherly love. If Frankenstein had loved his creation, as any mother would their child, then the “monster” never would have developed the fear and resentment that led it to murder several of Frankenstein's loved ones.
Frankenstein's creature is not a cold and callous killing machine. Its experiences instill a deep-rooted sense of morality and desire to be loved, just like any normal person. The creature eloquently describes the first time he observed empathy, and it is no coincidence that Shelley had this empathy come from a female character (Haddad 1). The creature observes the cottager's daughter, Agatha, as she waits hand and foot on her blind father, full of love and concern for him. “Agatha listened with respect, her eyes sometimes filled with tears, which she endeavored to wipe away unperceived” (Shelley 93). The creature also instinctively rescues a drowning girl, and he is filled with remorse after his first murder, and even more so after the ultimate demise of his creator. Being loved and accepted by our creator is perhaps the most deep-rooted human desire, and certainly the greatest desire for those of us who feel that they have been slighted in this department. Whether through belief in a higher power or through human relationships, we have to satisfy this desire in order to fulfill our sense of purpose. Frankenstein and his creature are almost exactly alike, because they are both tormented by the feeling that they have been abandoned by their creator and lack purpose as a result.
Frankenstein is notably lacking in assertive female characters. However, the passivity of the female characters is heavily encouraged and exploited by their male counterparts, like Victor Frankenstein, who would just as soon eliminate any role for womanhood altogether. Frankenstein's desire to negate the role of women is evident in his eventual decision to destroy his second creation, a female companion for his original creature.
“I was now about to form another being, of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might became ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighborhood of man, and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation. They might even hate each other; the creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he be again alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of his own species... Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would be children, and 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 a right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?” (Shelley 163)
In this monologue, Frankenstein reveals that one of his deepest fears is a strong-willed and sexually liberated woman. He fears and envies the power held in femininity, both in a woman's sexual freedom and in her capacity to create life (Mellor 120). He fears the lack of control inherent in his impending creation of female life, and this leads him to destroy his completed female body, stripping his original creation of any chance for finding love or companionship in an effort that symbolizes a desire to ensure the passivity of the female gender. The body of the female, lifeless, defenseless, and bare, is the embodiment of passivity, and Frankenstein mutilates and “penetrates” it savagely, in a manner symbolic of rape (Mellor 120).
Frankenstein's decision to destroy the female creation is a pivotal moment, but it is by no means the novel's only tragic example of female passivity. Justine, for example, is wrong-fully accused of murdering William Frankenstein, but she quickly resigns to her fate. “God knows how entirely I am innocent,” she says. “But I do not pretend that my protestations should acquit me; I rest my innocence on a plain and simple explanation of the facts” (Shelley 65). Justine is a victim of circumstance, but, in spite of her innocence, she is swept by a male-driven tide toward execution for a crime she had no motive to commit. Elizabeth's is the only voice that cries out over the injustice of the execution, but in a male-dominated society, her opinion goes unheeded. She says:
“When one creature is murdered, another is immediately deprived of life in a slow torturing manner; then the executioners, their hands yet reeking with the blood of innocence, believe that they have done a great deed. They call this retribution. Hateful name! When that word is pronounced, I know greater and more horrid punishments are going to be inflicted than the gloomiest tyrant has ever invented to satiate his utmost revenge” (Shelley 83).
It is an important distinction to make that the women of this novel are not only ignored, they are suppressed. Their desires, fears, and opinions are rendered meaningless by a male-dominated society. Justine's truthful proclamation of innocence goes unheeded, just as Elizabeth's lamentation over man's desire for retribution also goes completely unheeded. Elizabeth knows that Justine is innocent not from objective evidence, but from her understanding of Justine's character, from her empathy. The only man with the factual knowledge of Justine's innocence, Victor Frankenstein, chooses not to tell the public out of egotistical fear, and Justine is subsequently killed out of misplaced retribution. Retribution, of course, is a recurring motivation for males in Frankenstein. Justine is killed out of misplaced retribution for a murder, and the creature seeks revenge on Victor by killing Elizabeth and Clerval, which leads to Victor seeking his own revenge upon the creature. Safie, a member of the cottage-dwelling family that the creature liked to spy on, is the only woman in the novel to juxtapose the otherwise passive role of women. She disregards her father's attempts to restrain her to Constantinople, and she travels to Europe, fleeing the gender inequality of her home in an act of pure assertiveness. She and the people dearest to her all appear to be happier as a result of her decision, and Shelley seems to be giving at east a small nod to the state of gender equality in Europe, which, in comparison to the Arab world, allowed women a fairly significant amount of personal freedom.
The subservience of women to men is also quite evident in the structure of the novel's plot. The chief narrator of the novel is Captain Robert Walton, who is relating the story to his sister Margaret as well as to the reader, both of whom are powerless, and completely passive in relation to the events of the novel. We hear Frankenstein's story in his own words, and the creature's story is told through Frankenstein's interpretation, but both stories are filtered through Walton. There are essentially three male narrators, the creators and life-givers of the story, but there are no female voices at all. Their words are recounted by men, but never heard directly. Because of the perspective of the narrative, each woman is characterized as being passive, disposable, and serving a utilitarian function (Haddad 1). The men are simply incapable of empathizing with them. Upon seeing his potential companion destroyed, the creature vows to meet Frankenstein on his wedding day. The doctor is so self-obsessed, however, that he takes this only as a threat to his own life, and shows no regard for the safety of his bride, failing to even acknowledge the possibility that the creature's threat might be on her life instead of his.
When the concept is entrenched so firmly in the structure of the book's narrative, it is hard to imagine that the passive role of women is not one of the central themes in Frankenstein. In a book intended to terrify its audience, most of the horrors seem to stem from the suppression of femininity in favor of a callous, egotistical, and male-driven relationship with the world. Frankenstein's desire to make a living being in his own image and the creature's desire to be loved by Frankenstein are emblematic of the narcissistic homosocial longing that drives the male characters in the book, a longing “which not only ignores but deliberately excludes the feminine” (Hale 15). In addition, all of the women of the novel, except perhaps Safie, live their lives shackled to their domestic roles, roles allotted to them by the men in their lives. Frankenstein's decision to destroy the female creature is obviously a strong example of a desire to render the female gender powerless; However, his first act of creation is just as rooted in this desire. Frankenstein's defining decision, to give life to a mechanically constructed, unnatural creature, stems from the same desire to render all forms of femininity powerless (Mellor 115).
“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... His creature is male; he refuses to create a female; there is no reason that the race of immortal beings he hoped to propagate should not be exclusively male” (Mellor 115).
Essentially, Frankenstein portrays a world in which men threaten to eradicate the entire role for women, and that, to Mary Shelley, is the most frightening concept imaginable. Without the voices of women to temper the selfish ambitions of men and instill a sense of love and compassion, there is no limit to the power men may gain or to the destruction they may cause. By suppressing our natural sources of motherly love and empathy, we create a snowball-effect of fear, loathing, sadness, and patriarchal egotism. Frankenstein is a story in which female voices are silenced, and a snowball is allowed to grow into an avalanche of misfortune.
References:
Ames, William. "On Nature in Frankenstein." The Poet's Forum. N.p., 2009. Web. 19 February 2015.
Haddad, Stephanie S. "Women as the Submissive Sex in Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'" Student Pulse. N.p., 2010. Web. 19 February 2015.
Hale, Jessica. "Constructing Connectedness: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. University of California, Irvine, n.d. Web. 19 February 2015.
Mandal, Anthony. "Knowledge & Gender in Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'" Cardiff Book Talk. Cardiff University, 28 June 2011. Web. 19 February 2015.