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Paradoxically,Frankenstein has yet to receive closescrutiny in any of its psychological aspects by those mostattracted to that material. Even readily explicablepsychological terrain is unexplored if not unnoted territory.Various formulas of incest wish or obsession with paternity havebeen offered, but they eventually prove unsatisfactory whenfaced with the novel's many developments. We need a contextualorientation in meeting this novel, especially if we attempt anyof its depths, even as we recognize that the complex unconsciousit harbors cannot be fully plumbed. As with Frankenstein, theattentive reader also encounters his creature "among theprecipices of an inaccessible mountain." To attempt the unconscious andforce an unmasking of its strange nature is "to overtake thewinds or confine a mountain stream with a straw" (p. 75). We finally cannotaltogether parse the deep language of the unconscious, even asVictor Frankenstein wants a language to express his hell. Butwe remain priviledged: as readers we see the obliquities ofdesire Mary Shelley spins out; and we can begin tracing a few ofthem into designs of half-knowledge, if only we allow the novelto speak what it will. Then, perhaps, we may transcend formula,engage something of the evil spirits and new deities encounteredby Mary Shelley in this her most profound descent "into the{337} remotest caverns of mind."4 Knowledge ofwhat our desires will sometimes bespeak, awareness ofsubconscious struggles for exclusive love, and recognition ofwhat Mary would require for health of mind and heart should comeof such engagement.
The unhallowed self projected in dream is displaced throughfiction from the waking self. There Mary would tame whatconsciousness finds repugnant even as the artist pursuesstructures for the expression of same. By looking at theprogress of this in the novel we discover interconnecteddomains: especially that of the psychic life which inhabits usin relation to the waking world of civilized affections weinhabit in turn. Frankenstein, alone throughout the novel,negates every important tie of that waking world in the pursuitof his desires. Everything he pursues is destructive ofcommunity, cooperation and the great public affections ofcivilization. He even destroys the veryfamily within which all hissublime pleasures are nourished. In doing so he destroys thesublimations of ideal family bonds and confronts us with theabsolutism of secret desire. The problem posed here ismomentous: how do we, at what cost, reconcile our most intensewishes with moderated life among men in open community? Maryanswers by dramatizing obsessive regression in Frankenstein'slife. She reveals the cost of failure to curb wishes of theunconscious. Implicitly, we must live a comparative moderationof our desires if we want sanity. To avoid self-destruction, wemust accept less than we would should our unconscious gainmotive access to the powers of waking mind. The entire focus onFrankenstein, then, is critical if sympathetic, negative andrevealing. And interestingly much is done in the fiction inmodes familiar to psychoanalysis: through dream andrecollection of childhood.
Turning first to dream, essentially to dream within dream, wegain enduring clues as to the significance of Frankenstein'screature. Having awakened his creature, Frankenstein flees,{339} his two-year pursuit yielding an experience of revulsion.But instead of a sleep of forgetfulness, which he consciouslydesires, he dreams of a blooming Elizabeth met with in thestreets ofIngolstadt. Sheis his dear foster-sister, whom he has not seen for two years.He embraces her, kisses her, and instantly her lips assume "thehue of death": "her features appeared to change, and I thought Iheld the corpse of my dead mother in my arms." Then awake, inhorror he beholds "the wretch -- the miserable monster whom Ihave created" (pp. 56-57).Is this the monster of incest? Yes, and more: "The wretch" isthe embodied life of Frankenstein's desire to possess themother, which has as its waking focus an intense possession ofElizabeth, the substitute mother, one's own peer, whom Victorlong ago considered his exclusive possession and whoseexistence, he later feels, is bound up in his (p. 87). That heshould dream of meeting, embracing and kissing Elizabeth afterfleeing from his quickened creature suggests a doubleconsciousness: waking thoughts flee the desires his creaturemanifests -- as signified by its physiognomy -- and whichFrankenstein has brought forth from the charnel house of hisunconscious. But the real wish gains partial beauty in dreams,yet under horrific censorship. Upon awakening, Frankensteinsees his creature, the now independent life he has broughtforth. But all he sees is physiognomy invested with his desire-- a physical correlation for his deep wishes projected, undercensorship through consciousness, onto the other.
The sequence of images, one fading into another, the thirdgrinning at him in waking sight, defines the objects of desireand the actuated desire itself. That Frankenstein would embracethe mother in Elizabeth, the dead mother, gives us a parameterfor his motives in creating life: he is possessed by thesubconscious need to repossess, that is, recover the mother.Indeed, he would recreate her for himself. This last desire isthe more primitive of the two: its roots antedate the mother'sliteral death and manifest themselves in a childhood urgency topenetrate the secrets of heaven and earth. The key in all ofthis is a desire to be loved, but loved alone, exclusively, andtherein to virtually possess the source of love. Suchpossession would inherently prevent any possibility of the lossof love {340} or denial of love by the object of love. Such amotive may suit the child who feels motherless or denied,perhaps like the motherless child inMary Shelley. ThroughFrankenstein she may live out her desires for the mother shenever had, even as she gains detachment from them in anauthorial otherness productive of wisdom. I think we can seeenough in her life that would call for the recovery of love andthe objects of love, crucially denied by death. Not only isher own mother a creatureof fantasy and image, dead before Mary is three weeks old, buther baby girl has died in the year preceding the writing ofFrankenstein. That death gave rise to a hopeless dreamin which Mary revives a merely cold baby by the fireside. She adjusts tothis loss, much as to more troubling deaths a few years later.But inFrankenstein I think the sex of the second monsteris not gratuitous. It is the female which Victor's creation,the creature of desire drawn from nightmare, demands foritself. Here, however, something fails Victor and perhaps Maryas well. The second creature, if realized into waking life,would bring wish and reality into shockingly closecorrespondence, even for fictional dream. So the fantasy,coming too close to consciousness, is prevented or aborted.Along the way much is revealed about the psyche Mary hasinvested in her central character.
Several times after William's death, especially whenFrankenstein sees his creature in the space of a lightningflash, he nearly acknowledges its psychological relation tohimself. He has already half-betrayed himself to an unwittingClerval, his devoted friend (this during a fit of demonicpossession {341} [p. 60]). And now he considers the creature"nearly" his own vampire "spirit cut loose from the grave andforced to destroy all that was dear to me" (p. 74). A little later herecalls wandering "like an evil spirit, for I had committeddeeds of mischief beyond description horrible, and more, muchmore (I persuaded myself) was yet behind" (p. 86). The language reflectsFrankenstein's bare hold on a delusion of difference betweenhimself and his creature ("nearly," "I persuaded myself"). Italso reveals depths: the vampire spirit is "forced" bysomething deeper. "More was yet behind," as if no melodrama ofgothic possession canquite fathom what has happened. Perhaps we can begin a relevantdescent -- beneath the gothic horror of vampires and evilspirits -- by tracing the obliquities of desire revealed inFrankenstein's childhood, at first blindly by himself. Oneelement has already been anticipated: the need for exclusivelove. Recovery of the dead purposes a recovery of the mother;recovery of the mother means absolute possession and thereintotal love in return. It is this which provokes oddity inFrankenstein's recollections of familial love, especially hisprofessions of complete happiness in the face of contradictorymemories.
The mother, Caroline, is the daughter of the father's friend andpeer, Beaufort, a recluse in his broken fortune. In marryingCaroline, then, the father essentially marries a faithfuldaughter. It is as if Mary herself -- who treatsfather-daughter incest inMathilda -- calls out in muchof her fiction, 'Father, don't marry her, marry me' -- this toGodwin, her beloved father(who, incidently, has severe financial problems during Mary'sadolescence). The her in question is Godwin's second wife,Mary's stepmother from the age of four onward. An image ofMrs. Godwin will appear later in the novel as the characterJustine's unaccountably cruel mother. Caroline, poor and orphaned, isrepeated in Elizabeth (the foster-child Victor Frankensteinlater embraces in his dream). The one reincarnates the other.For that matter, Elizabeth virtually rings celestial in herangelic being. Both bespeak a double image: the idealizeddaughter and the angelic mother. As daughter-image, theybespeakMary the"abandoned" child, sent to Scotland at the request of a harriedand jealous mother-in-law. Such literal "abandonment,"however, doubtless follows upon years of psychologicalresentment and feelings of {343} displacement as Mrs. Godwintakes her place in the father's house, bringing with her twofavored children from a previous marriage. Mary would have lifewith father -- which she had for part of her early childhood --and eliminate the odious Mrs. Godwin (along withthose.children). But the melodrama in Frankenstein immediatelyreaches deeper than a girl's vengeful daydreams in love with herfather. Caroline repeated in Elizabeth is chosen by the mothernot the father and "given" to Victor Frankenstein -- who thinksof her as his "more thansister." Befriended by the mother, she is possessed by theson. Themother also befriends Justine, the third image of Mary andperhaps the closest to a disguised biographical sketch. Justine inturns loves Caroline, not her actual mother, but a true mother.And she so closely imitates the mother in manner and behaviorthat Elizabeth twice mentions it in a letter to Frankenstein.When we look closely we see everything revolving around themother -- including the father's protective attentions. Therelations depicted in the melodrama are characterized by filialdevotion. But underneath that melodrama, providing much of itsodd emotional intensity, lies a sexual infatuation which HeleneDeutsch understands as presupposing "a strong persistence of themother tie." Sexual infatuation would herebecome homosexual did it not reach to such deep levels that inFrankenstein's creature's profession of love for the sleepingJustine we have a primitive sexual wish which has no particularmale or female orientation. {344}
To summarize these relationships: the bad mother wantsreplacing; the good daughter would be mother, wife and daughterto the father. This requires identification with the belovedmother. But that identification is a double fantasy: based onpsychic wish and total loss of such a mother from one's life;which in turn touches a psychic cavern (to use aRomantic metaphor) withinMary's unconscious. She enters and finds herself in thepresence of infantile desire to possess the mother,exclusively. That desire gains embodiment in a nightmare ofrecalling the dead to life, of creating life from death. Inrelation to that nightmare, the desire to take the mother'splace with the father, and evict the bad mother, is real enough(even half-conscious) but only a disguise mechanism. Itrepresents the complete introversion of the desired, butidealized mother into the self. Thus the account of theBeauforts does not so much prepare us for the father'scharacter, as Frankenstein claims: it establishes the goodmother's centrality -- to a version of which in Justine thecreature of desire suddenly professes its desperate love.Taking all themotherfigures together we have the following: Caroline is thedaughter as mother; Elizabeth is the mother as babe, renderedone's peer, therein to be treasured and possessed; Justine isthe mother's daughter, the seeker for the idealized mother inrejection of the actual mother, and the mother imitated.
But we anticipate too much. Frankenstein recalls, "I, theireldest child, was born at Naples" (p. 33). Moreover, "I remainedfor several years their only child," born to a "fair exotic" ofa sheltered mother. The emphasis on "I" is not telling initself; but when compounded with assertions of priority of placeand exclusive status despite the parents' wish for a daughter,it becomes notable. "For a long time I was their only care"(p. 33); "I continued theirsingle offspring" (p. 33); "Iwas their plaything and their idol, and something better --their child" (p. 33); "theyfulfilled theirduty towardsme" -- these suggest more than neutral memory. They may recallMary's own early childhood with Godwin, before he remarried. Ina significant sense she was the only "child": Godwin's andMary Wollstonecraft's onlyoffspring {345} (her mother had another child, by a formerlover). Moreover, Frankenstein does not require such emphasesto tell the story he understands -- only Mary does. She locatesone "forgotten source" in early childhood, in the child's senseof exclusive adoration by its parents, without competitors. Buteven here all is not complete bliss, as Frankenstein wouldimagine. He forever betrays himself -- the role Mary givesVictor's memory, while she remains uncognizant of deepimplications in his betrayals even as she anticipates theireventual ripening into full-scale obsession.
Frankenstein emphasizes himself, alone, exclusively loved by hisparents. He notes their parental fund of love; he remembersthat they loved each other, yet "seemed to draw inexhaustiblestores of affection . . . to bestow . . .upon me" (p. 33). Much liesbehind thatseemed. Mary intuits the child's attentivesuspicion. In part she no doubt fulfills a wish thatGodwin and his second wife hadtogether bestowed "inexhaustible stores of affection" upon her(which Mrs. Godwin apparently did not); in part she demandsabsolute love, that is, the primitive child in her does; in partshe may touch subtle resentments toward her dead mother forabandoning her, for remaining Godwin's beloved -- he kept aportrait of her in his study which did not come down when heremarried. But attentive suspicion controls all of thesefactors: the child wonders what the parents keep to themselves("Much as they were attached to each other"), when love willdiminish or be withdrawn. We already know that the fathershelters the mother, actively protects her as a gardener wouldfrom "every rougher wind" (p.33), and for whom? Certainly for himself, which is part ofhis benign character. The child, however, may interpret orsuspect otherwise. Sensing a parental attachment exclusive ofhim, he may see the father negatively, as a threatening guardianof the desirable mother. In the novel none of this becomesovert. Indeed, the primitive child accepts less than he perhapswould, but only as long as he remains the exclusive child andcenter of parental attention. Frankenstein remarks thatparental duties were fulfilled toward him, as if such were hisdue, as if feelings of neglect or incipient injustice wouldotherwise break the surface of {346} familial harmony. "Ireceived a lesson of patience, of charity, and of self-control,I was guided by a silken cord that all seemed but one train ofenjoyment to me" (p. 33).
Noting such lessons if nothing troubled one's consciousness ofthings would be odd. Of course, those lessons anticipate theirfailure inMary'splanning of the narrative, as well as in Frankenstein's. Butthey suggest more than convenient background or preparation fortragedy. Later Frankenstein will speak of a superlatively happychildhood with his ideal parents. But he will also speak ofgratitude assisting "the development of filial love" (p. 37). "Assist" would not benecessary if all was more than happy, if no ambivalence is felttoward parents who keep some "attachment" between themselvesundivulged to the child. Perhaps the singularly loved childnevertheless feels abandoned in some way, and his intense desireto know from what he has been excluded leads toa desire to know the secrets ofnature. Such a deflection from his real aim could derive fromthe strength of the parents' mutual attachment and any paternalthreat sensed or imagined by the child. In this we would expecthostility toward the father, especially as the pursuit o[ thosesecrets gains force. The apparent lack of a strong ambivalencetoward the father in Frankenstein, then, could prove dismaying.Mary's deep concern for the mother- child relation, along withher conscious need for love between daughter and father, mayaccount for this. Yet the primitive child in the daughter wouldcompete for the mother, imagining herself the beloved child.Perhaps Victor Frankenstein's sex reflects a disguise borne ofidentification with the father in a partial attempt to take hisplace. At least it disguises Mary's desires by projecting themonto an eventually obsessed son.
The novel does not fully resolve this problem, but neither is itcompletely mute. Twice Frankenstein implicitly blames hisbenign father, especially with reference to pursuit ofalchemical writings, andnowhere is he especially a male child, a boy among boys. Thefirst of these points is more important because it justifies thechild's sense of things: he sees himself as inexplicablyimpassioned, something the father neglects; the child thenthinks of himself as abandoned to {347} struggle as he will by ablameworthy father. A somewhat similar response comes from thecreature as it prepares to frame Justine, blaming her as thesource of its crime, its murder of William. But a closerconnection exists in Walton's account of his desire to undertakevoyages of exploration, which the father explicitly forbade. Inthis case the father is not blameworthy; he is openlyhostile.
Now the silken cord of restraint and seeming enjoyment notedabove becomes sensible: it marks a substratum of resentment, offeelings of exclusion and near abandonment tolerated only aslong as one is the only "child" (the sole child of theparents). The discovery of Elizabeth in a peasant's homethreatens this compromise; she, however, is dealt with by anadditional adjustment, becoming a mother-peer-possession inFrankenstein's imagination. She is a fantasy sister, "my morethan sister, since till death she was to be mine only" (p. 34). This is a displacementof attitudes borne of later developments to early childhood.And it marks Frankenstein's close relationship to the fantasysister. He never either desires or identifies with a malepeer: even his boyhood friend, Clerval, is mainly important asa nurse later in the fiction. Long after the mother's death,and upon inquiry from his father, Frankenstein confesses toloving no one else alive more than Elizabeth. (I think "alive"is telling in virtue of his nightmare: of those alive he bothloves and identifies most with Elizabeth; but his love here isonly next best to his desire for the beloved mother shereincarnates). In this sense Elizabeth becomes a means ofcircumventing the father-mother attachment and thereby gainingsole possession of the mother. A potential threat istransformed by extraordinary possessiveness into a consolation.Yet even as consolation Elizabeth reminds the subconscious ofthe true object: the fantasymother who would deny her childnothing, and whose image exists only in the dissolving spectresof nightmare.
Victor has Elizabeth, but his desires grow nevertheless. Perhapseach consolation only feeds the depths of desire it wouldmitigate. Suddenly we are told that Elizabeth "busied herselfwith following the ariel creations of the poets" andcontemplated "the magnificent appearances of things," while{348} Frankenstein remembers being "deeply smitten with thethirst for knowledge" (p. 36). Elizabeth's interestsare shadows of Frankenstein's benignly pursued, perhapsreflecting Mary's preoccupations as an adolescent girl inScotland.Frankenstein may represent thirsts Mary would never acknowledgeas part of her past or present, but which doubtless underlie herinterest in the appearances of things. Frankenstein is a figure out ofMary's nightmare; but his biography is a secondary inventionfrom which Mary distances herself, and through which she dealswith the desires he embodies. He ascribes his thirst forknowledge to his "ardour" -- a curious ascription of one emotionto another. Yet nothing in the novel is more suggestive forFrankenstein than his "ardour," and the word therefore holdsportents for us. It differentiates him from kindred spirits,and its repeated use in obsessive contexts recalls its ancientconnotation: a fierce and evil desire, while to consciousnessit retains the modern sense of a noble passion. InFrankenstein's case the aura of the word is uncanny, neverinnocent. He is possessed by his ardour, which leads him tothirst for knowledge beneath the appearances of things, and toapply himself thereto with strange intensity. Elizabeth issatisfied with ariel shapes and magnificent appearances -- notso with Frankenstein. Clerval pursues the moral relations ofthings and seeks his place in a high arena among similarlyminded men -- not so with Frankenstein, despite occasionalremarks to the contrary. He dislikes crowds, prefers asecluded, even reclusive life, chooses a few dear friends, butremains a separate reclusive barely tempered by Elizabeth'sbenign presence. And what does he pursue beneath theappearances of {349} things? He distrusts seemings, perhapsespecially that first seeming, his parents' "inexhaustiblestores of affection," and later the seeming pleasures of asilken cord of lessons. What is denied him? Why does he feelsullen? Neither Frankenstein nor Mary clearly knows the pointof those recollections. But the novel whispers their purport."The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine" (p. 36). Causes, laws inthemselves are not objects of rapture: only as they areuncovered, as they are part of the hidden and the secret. What,the child asks without knowing it, do my parents keep from me intheir attachment to themselves? What in their attachment toeach other? What are their secrets? How can I recover themother who kept no distance between herself and me, who was notthe father's wife? Elizabeth, the orphaned peer, the "wife"without a husband, the "mother" without a father, becomes thewaking embodiment of such amother -- the saintly "shrinededicated lamp" to the possessing self in Frankenstein. Victor,moreover, is her husbandman, not the father. We may now see thealchemical pursuit of thesecrets of heaven and earth as an obsession with secretspossessed by the parents, a desire to break their accord ofexclusion, thereby repossessing the mother and her soleattentions. This is Victor's ardour, his heated, alchemicalpassion. The full birth of such desire into waking day isFrankenstein's creature, who eventually demands a sexualpartner, who whispers to a sleeping Justine: "'Awake, fairest,thy lover is near -- he who would give his life but to obtainone look of affection . . . awake'" (p. 137). Howmuch would Mary have given to break the accord between herfather and Mrs. Godwin? How much more would she have given toobtain affection from her ideal mother, the beautiful MaryWollstonecraft?
Despite Frankenstein's remembrance of an idyllic childhood, thematerial of that childhood forms a queerly connected whole ofcontradictory feelings and confounded recollections.Immediately prior to a recollection of happiness, Frankensteinhints at the reclusive child he was, suggests a dark temper,later a violent temper. Were it not for Elizabeth he would havebecome sullen and rough in his ardour. Mary works intuitivelywith her character, and such work has led to a truism of {350}Frankenstein criticism which holds that Frankenstein lacks self-knowledge and any sense of responsibility toward his creature.The signs of inner disturbance are not recognized for what theyare by the narrating "patient." But then how can anyone otherthan a morally piggish critic expect a figure such asFrankenstein to be given full recognition and take fullresponsibility for the demons of his unconscious? Even hiscreature, much aware of the acts it commits, cannot fathom thedepths of passion which urge vengeance. The creature feelsmastered, much as Frankenstein's imagined vampire spirit isforced by something deeper. We should, then, takeFrankenstein's vagaries to heart: they indicate delusion,ignorance and helplessness as much in his life as in that of thecreature's.
Although the creature murders William and frames Justine, itcannot conceive of itself as other than good, as other thanbenign.Similarly, Frankenstein remembers a childhood of bliss, ofknowledge gained, nature explored and Elizabeth possessed as adear companion. Essentially he remembers his desires as good inthemselves and good in their satisfactions. He overlooksuntoward remembrances much as his creature dismisses murderousacts -- those momentary aberrations born of painfulfrustration. Neither has full knowledge of himself or of theother. But each expresses a truth: the deep wishes of ourunconscious are oriented toward unalloyed goods. In consequencethey can only be good wishes. Indeed, how can psychic desireconceive of itself as other than good since its object isgood?
Granting this as underlying the novel'sGodwinian idealism in theconception of the creature as a natural man, what do we make ofthe murders? The creature justifies itself and even assumesfull responsibility for deeds of vengeance, which it also findssearing of heart. Yet it cannot altogether answer for itself,especially as it too feels mastered, or ascribes {351} thesource of murder to the object of desire. And perhaps we can dolittle better than the creature in our rationalizations as wehazard the depths of this doctrinally influenced fiction. But Ithink the attempt is worthwhile, and has already yieldedsomething of the novel's psychodynamic.
William, the first victim, sees the creature as an ogre whowould devour him. He rejects the creature's friendly advancesand calls on his father's name in defense. The creature thinksVictor is meant -- "'you belong to him'" -- and takes itsrevenge. Bitter failure nourishes destruction: "'I too cancreate desolation; my enemy is not invulnerable'" (p. 137). The desolate,abandoned and vilified soul turns murderous. This, an overtmelodrama, expresses the latent thought of sullen impulses. Butbeneath latent thought is deep wish, which brings the wretch tocreate desolation. Rejected in love, in family andcompanionship, the creature is an outsider, the impulsive childwho feels excluded from the parents' mutual attachment --especially from the father's possession of the mother (thecreature has already been denied love from humans, especiallyfrom a beautiful woman, whose affection it would have secured bybefriending a blind old man -- her father). His response is toeliminate whomever would call in kinship on the simultaneouslybeloved and hated father. William, in the extreme moment, isperceived as unbearably priviledged -- exactly what one wouldwant for oneself. Moreover, he is the mother surrogate'sdarling, something Frankenstein knows before the independentcreature meets William (perhaps this reflects Mary's ambivalencetoward William, the only off-spring of Godwin and Mrs. Godwin.The sweet William is also Mary's babe, her second child withShelley. Godwin's William,of course, can be seen as unbearably priviledged, loved by thefoster mother). In calling upon the child's double adversary --he who withholds love and keeps the mother (in relation to hiscreature Frankenstein does both) -- the creature respondsappropriately on all levels of identification. Afflicted asFrankenstein is, his desire would be revenged on such a fatherand kill if not devour the rival, especially a rival in love, aboy who was Caroline's "youngest darling" as well as Justine's(the motif of oral hostility may {352} reflect archaic sourcesof desire). Significantly, Frankensteinreceives an important letter from Elizabeth, in which William isdotingly mentioned, after miserable failure in the outcome ofhis too successful creation.
Justine is a complete innocent. The creature frames her for arejection not made, but which it reasonably expects. Convictedby circumstantial evidence -- much as the creature thinks onlyappearances convict it -- Justine's case mocks the father's lawand, by implication, the hated bad father who would deny oneaccess to love. The surrogate mother is {353}sacrificed out of maliciousness, then, toward the father (whourged faith in the justice ofGeneva's laws), as if to say:'here, you take her, kill her as I know you will whereas I wouldlove her.' The creature is William's ogre; such a father is thecreature's, whom it disdains in consciousness. Yet we needfurther entry into this melodrama. Justine is a version ofMary, which requires more explanation of her significance thanwe have just given.
As an innocent, Justine pleads her case (before the father asjudge, with Frankenstein in complicity by virtue of his silence)and would identify with her true or fantasymother. Thus she would rejecther evil, but actual mother (a version of Godwin's second wife)yet be murdered in turn -- suggesting considerable hostilitytoward an imitation of the good mother, and therein the deniedmother herself. Initially, however, to love Justine is to lovethe self: an element of compensatory narcissism emerges. Thecreature would love Justine, whom it finds less attractive thanthe miniature of the mother. Yet to love the self whichimitates the mother is not sufficient -- this we know in virtueof all our desires. Moreover, we know that our conscience, ourwaking thought, would articulate those desires in horrificterms. Therefore we betray the mother-identified self we wouldlove and deliver it up a victim to the father's law.Simultaneously we demonstrate the paradoxical impotence of thatlaw and eliminate another rival for love of the mother --self-love. Elimination of that obstacle leaves Clerval andElizabeth, and of course the hated fantasy father who, as themost important antagonist, is most deeply repressed and dealtwith last. He is repressed into the disguise of ailingbenignity, but finally allotted a broken-hearted death. His deathsets Frankenstein free of the family. Only Ernest remains,apparently of no significance, as Victor madly pursues hispassion.
{354} The third victim, Clerval, has the misfortune ofprospering concurrently with Frankenstein's decline. Moreoverhe would draw Frankenstein away from the intimatefamily to a public family ofman. In Clerval, Frankenstein sees something of his formerself. That alone might arouse envy or hostility in the everconstant desirer. More disturbing, however, is Clerval'sinfluence: he would draw Frankenstein away from his narrowobsessions, nurse him to Clervalian health in the public worldof moral relations. This would mean the repudiation ofFrankenstein's basic desires. No wonder, then, that in a rageof loss and desolation Frankenstein's creature strangles thedear friend, the close companion of his childhood. Clervalwould become another silken cord of guidance; indeed, he wouldbecome what he never was in Victor's childhood -- a subliminginfluence. That place was and is still filled by Elizabeth.Clerval comes too close to Frankenstein's inner struggle and iskilled in a moment of rage following bitter frustration. Thecreature has just been rebuffed in its desire for the female,for love and possession. In response it fulfills Frankenstein'sforebodings with respect to Clerval. Pity the true friend whowould wean his friend from an obsession the former has noawareness of. Only Elizabeth remains, the center of childhoodsolace.
The next victim pitches Frankenstein into near insanity. Hisfather's death makes madness virtual: "I lost sensation, andchains and darkness were the only objects that pressed upon me"(pp. 188-189). If we pityClerval, what do we feel for Elizabeth? The murdered bride isvictim of a tempest of sexual desire and anxiety. For Victorthe wedding night is "dreadful, very dreadful" (p. 185). Elizabeth falls victimto incestuous desire for the mother she reincarnates.Frankenstein even thinks of her as his consolation prize for thetask of creating the female creature.
Creating the female to satisfy the first creature is a givingway to those "sympathies" which result in children. This isthe most trying of all in that it arouses every sexual anxiety,desire and hope. We have moved from the creature's adoration ofJustine to its sexual demand for a female mate, and beyond toFrankenstein's sexual anticipation of love for Elizabeth. {355}If he was hypersensitive, guilt-ridden, unholy and profanebefore -- when creating the first creature -- what must he feelnow as he contemplates the second one, the essential fulfillmentof his nightmare desires? He feels as if he has struck ademon's bargain, and when "enfranchised" from his "miserableslavery," would claim Elizabeth and "forget the past" in unionwith his more than sister. Yet the prospects ahead become hisonly reality. All else seems a lifeless dream. Far fromforgetting the past he is mastered by its desires. Distance andisolation displace recognition of what he does -- attempt therecreation of the mother who could never deny her creator-son.This is, I think, the basic significance of recovering andthereby recreating themother -- the archetypal female-- to love. However, Frankenstein fails. He cannot steelhimself to this "detested" toil. He knows too much despite hislack of all but fevered insight. Indeed, he sees the verycreature whose presence he had suspected for some time, completewith its ghostly grin, just as he emerges from a crisis ofguilt. Recoil from that physiognomy brings Frankenstein todestroy the creature "on whose future existence" the wretchdepended for happiness (p.159).
What has happened? The ultimate object has been relinquished asunrealizable, but desire still lives, although receiving itsmost bitter wound. InMaryShelley's allegory of psychic caverns, evil demons fly loosewith a howl. Clerval is the first victim; Elizabeth the next.In strangling her the creature essentially says toFrankenstein: 'if I cannot love and possess, neither can youwho would have your wife and deny me, to whom you oweeverything.' This is id having its vengeance upon the ego. Inthe midst of this we find the last childhood compromiseremoved. Elizabeth's death frees Frankenstein from hischildhood agreements. But such freedom is not happiness orhealth. Frankenstein pitches into a final process ofself-disintegration, in which he pursues his own obsessions tothe death. As it were, one obsession seeks the death ofanother. Elizabeth, the nearest to mother alive, is killed inan overdetermination of desires. Anxiety, jealousy,frustration, revenge -- all sexual -- join the still virulentwish for the "real"motherno actual or surrogate or compromise {356} mother can satisfy.The result is a nightmare pursuit, after the father's contingentdeath, of self after self in an ice- bound but fragmentedpsyche. Frankenstein never heals, never recovers. He isrestored long enough by Walton -- to whom the entire centralnarrative is told -- to tell his story of disintegration. Asfor Mary, in Elizabeth's death she seems to sacrifice an imageof herself as composite daughter, wife and mother to thecreature's rage and Frankenstein's obsession. In doing so sheremoves herself from any obvious role in the final course of thenarrative. Her position in subconscious desire of the father isleft behind -- although a ghost of it may remain in therelationship between Walton and his beloved sister, to whom hereturns -- and her deeper orientation toward the idealizedmother drops out of fictional view. Now we will face only themain conclusion to Frankenstein's obsession: from which Mary haslargely distanced herself.
Throughout the novel, Walton serves as a potential Frankensteinwho remains redeemed. By heeding his crew members (who defiedFrankenstein's desire to push on into the icecap in search ofthe creature) Walton eschews Frankenstein's fate without everbringing the deep lessons of Frankenstein's narrative toconsciousness. But perhaps the latent listener in Walton hasheard enough of Frankenstein's unconscious, has penetrated thedream Frankenstein recalls. Whatever the case, Walton consentsto return from his own pursuits, to eschew his voyage offantastic discovery to the north pole (thereby saving his lifeand his crew from the severe cold, starvation and crushing icewhich would have been their fate) and return to his dearsister. Walton finally chooseshuman connection as againstpsychic glory. His is the wise choice, Mary would have usbelieve, one for which he has been fit all along. Despite hissimilarities to Frankenstein, Walton has never either lostconnection with other humanity or developed an uncannyobsession. Perhaps the two figures manifest concomitant aspectsof the same spiral: Frankenstein spins regressively intomadness; Walton grows into a moderate sanity. He is not fullypurged of hisprometheandesires -- perhaps we never are (which underlines the tragedyinherent in Mary's criticism ofRomantic quests) -- but hesomehow {357} turns away from a regressive pursuit into madnessand reasserts human connection. Apparently Mary finds thatcivilized affections, however much they appear as the shadows ofdangerous loves (Walton's compensation is the love of his "dearsister "), can sustain us this side of despondency.
If Mary offers an antidote to Frankenstein's fate, it is neitheran obvious nor an easy one. She glimpses the intractability ofpersonal desire in contradistinction to the humane tractabilityof participatory community -- if only with one other person.Perhaps this is part of her insistence on what we might callhippocratic love: manifested in those devoted attentionscertain characters show to others -- Caroline to her father,then later Elizabeth, then Justine to Caroline, and Elizabeth tothe doubly stricken family after Justine's death. Often thewomen wouldnurse their menand the redeemed men -- Clerval and Walton -- are nurses toFrankenstein. In psychic allegory, one reading of a nurse'ssolicitous love for the patient answers to the child's demandfor singular attention and therein possession of the mother inher devotion. In this even Walton and Clerval become versionsof the desired mother for Frankenstein. But they are more for MaryShelley: they hold the promise of redemption from psychictyranny in a turn outward from the self toward others, towardthe wide world of men and women in communities of achievement.Perhaps, as we recover from Frankenstein's catastrophe, this isnot enough. Of course we would have more. Why or how are we tosettle for less than our desires demand? Mary's answer, Ithink, is that we have little choice: if we continue to pursuewhat we have lost -- our mothers, our babies, our archaic lovesand hates -- we shall never grow up, indeed, we shall grow mad.This, however, is held in the face of another recognition: thatWalton as a solution is only a framework, an idealized endingwhich by the very force of idealization reveals the strangeattraction of promethean desires. Walton too would defy hisdenying father, consign his crew to death, and even abandon{358} his sister -- with whom he has an incestuous relationshipsublimated into epistolary tenderness. And though he relents,against Frankenstein's wishes (hisdouble), those desires havenot been either plumbed to the fullest or happily resolved: onlybanished from the healthy ego in anything like their originalform. That banishment is good if we would not murder theClerval in us; but those desires still haunt us in their distantexile. The creature Frankenstein pursued does not die atnovel's end: it disappears into the darkness.
1. Avoidance is characteristic of criticismdevoted to the novel. SeeGeorgeLevine, "Frankenstein and the Tradition of Realism,"Novel 7 (1973), 14-30 for an awareness of the familypatterns;Christopher Small,MaryShelley's Frankenstein:Tracing the Myth (Universityof Pittsburg, 1973) for the suggestion that Victor's dreamemerges, "so to speak from her [Mary's] mother's grave" (p.191); and William Walling,Mary Shelley (New York:Twayne, 1972) for an awareness of connections between biographyand Mary's fiction generally. The only concerted effort at apsychoanalytic reading is Morton Kaplan's "Fantasy of Paternityand the Doppelgänger: Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein,"inThe Unspoken Motive: A Guide to Psychoanalytic LiteraryCriticism (New York: The Free Press, 1973), pp. 119-145.Despite sensitive commentary on the Doppelgänger effect inthe novel, Kaplan deals poorly with the fiction as expressingobsessions with paternity through Frankenstein. He must resortto Freudian formulae much too often in the face of a too denseand sometimes disparate text. No doubt fantasies of paternity,especially fantasies of body creation, along with other materialaccompany the dominant strand I will attempt to explicate insome of its complexity. But other material cannot be explicatedin its own right without a conditioned understanding of some ofthe centers around which a good deal of sometimes contradictorymotive material clusters.
2. This is true for Kaplan as well as othercritics. The tendency is to interpret psychological material byformula, by fiat.Levine provides ageneral case in point: "where did his decision to create themonster come from? Mere chance. Evil is a deadly and fascinatingmystery originating in men's minds as an inexplicable butinescapable aspect of human goodness" (18). Lowry Nelson, "NightThoughts on theGothicNovel,"Yale Review, 52 (1963), 236-257, attributesit all to "some inner perversity" by way of explaining thedesire "to be loved alone or an urge toward narcissism." Heends with the safety of "fascination with the gratuitous pursuitof one's evil nature" (247).
3. All citations are from Mary Shelley,Frankenstein Or, The Modern Prometheus (New York: Signet,New American Library, 1965) with an Afterword by Harold Bloom.Page references will be given in the text (p. 74) in parentheses. Thepresent citation is indicative of the novel's invertedlandscapes: heights suggest depths, walls suggest spaces,mountains suggest immaterial force.
4. A phrase taken from Mary Shelley'sJournal, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Norman: University ofOklahoma Press, 1947), entry for February 25,1822, p. 236.Frankenstein may not be Mary's first attempt at suchdepths: her first novel undertaken after eloping with Shelleywas calledHate. And by her own account in the1831 preface toFrankenstein, she indulged in day-dreams duringadolescence which interested her far more than self-consciousintrospection -- this while in Scotland: "I could people thehours with creations far more interesting to me at that age,than my own sensations."
5. Of course, Mary does not write because of hernightmare: it forms the central inspiration for a competitiveproject she had already undertaken -- writing a horror story incompetition againstShelley,Byron andPolidori. Her critique ofthepromethean spiritreflects a subconscious reply to much of Shelleyan excess,idealism and dissatisfaction. Perhaps Mary -- who in1814 thought of herselfas bereaved without Shelley's love -- competes inFrankenstein against Shelley's ideologies of love andimpassioned human nature, as well as his genius itself. But thedream and therefore the central event of the novel remains herown nightmare. To fully engage it, we need to know much morethan we do about female creation and birth fantasies, as well asfemale psychology generally. The level of desire I attempt toplot goes deeper than superficial masculine or femininepatterns. It touches, I think, on the primitive child not yetfully engaged in oedipal conflict, possessed still ofconsiderable oral hostility and body destruction anxieties: thelatter two surfacing in the making of the creature fromdismembered bodily parts and in William's attribution ofhorrific orality to the creature. Mary's nightmare seemssparked mainly by notions of reanimating the dead. I think itpurposes a recovery not only of archaic wishes but the objectsof those wishes especially. Perhaps the motif of oral hostilityreflects a primitive desire to ingest the love object, rage atbeing denied, and a projection of the entire complex onto thebad parent -- the ogre who would devour one.
6. Mary often expressed intense dislike forMrs. Godwin, who seemed to favor her own two children from aprevious marriage, never became a mother to Mary, and of courseusurped the father's attentions. (Mary also blames Mrs. Godwinfor either precipitating or aggravating her father's financialtroubles as well as his often cruel treatment of herself andShelley). A portrait of Mary's mother, however, always hung inGodwin's library and Mary, in adolescence, used to study by hermother's grave -- a quiet place away from domestic strife in theGodwin household. It is there by her mother's grave that shefirst receives Shelley's professions of love and listens to histales abouthis ogre of afather and his troubles withHarriet.
7. See Mary'sJournal, entry for March19,1815, p. 41.Also note her dream of the dead coming to life, mentioned in aletter dated March 5,1817. The novel iscompleted by this time, but clearly much of its centralpsychological material has not been fully worked through.
8. Mary sees herself as essentially innocent inthese fictional projections; more, as abandoned in the midst ofdevotion. Her relation to Mrs. Godwin is that of thestep-daughter to her cruel step-mother. See Helene Deutsch.The Psychology of Women, Vol. II (New York: Bantamedition, 1973), pp. 453-475 for an account of daughterstep-mother conflict given both psychological strife andcultural expectations conditioned by pervasive fairy-talemodels.
9. By this time, Mary is in early adolescenceand competitive conflict between herself and Mrs. Godwin isovert. Perhaps we should not overlook the presence ofFanny Imlay either, though Maryis clearly the father's favorite. She is also more likeFrankenstein than Elizabeth: "my daughter is the reverse of her[Fanny] in many particulars. She is singularly bold, somewhatimperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge isgreat, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almostinvincible. My own daughter is, I believe, very pretty" (quotedby Eileen Bigland,Mary Shelley [New York:Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1959], p. 32). Bigland suggeststhat Mary occasionally gives way to persecution mania throughouther life -- perhaps related to projected hostility and feelingsof abandonment.
10. Posession (sic) by Victor suggestssomething of the father by sexual identification. But since wemainly understand Victor as desiring the mother, his intensityof possession means to be possessed by that desire. Moreover,he displaces the father here -- as Mary would for love of heridealized mother. As we might also expect, Mary's firstchildhood friend is a girl, Isabella Baxter, who also comes (soMary thinks) to reverence Mary's mother.
11. Justine is the third of four children; hermother prefers the first two and takes an irrational dislike tothe child. Mary no doubt feels Mrs. Godwin's favoritism towardher own two children as dislike for herself, the third of fourlegitimate children in a mixed household -- though I suspectMary in this projection of herself counts the four children asexclusive of William, Godwin's child by his second wife. FannyImlay would then be the fourth child. Moreover, Justine'smother seems a representation of Mary's occasional hatred ofMrs. Godwin. The Portrait of the benign family probably drawsa superficial reality from Mary's life with the Baxters inScotland.
12. Deutsch,The Psychology of Woman,Vol. I, p. 124.
13. She apparently wrote romances, poetry andstudied the picturesque countryside. Both levels of interest,however, may exist in her daydreams. Such a split may alsodistinguish Mary from Fanny Imlay as well as Mary Shelley fromher husband. We haveGodwin's testimony for the oneand Mary's implied critique of Shelleyan excess (in the figureof Frankenstein himself) for the other.
14. Her notebook with Percy Shelley testifiesto this. She likes to describe what they have seen, but rarelyseeks to penetrate deeply. However much she also feelspromethean urges, she would separate herself (sometimesstoically) from Shelley's enthusiasms, especially those dartingvagaries which never find satisfaction -- even reflected in hismundane life, such as suddenly taking a long walk.
15. We must credit its self-portrait. Thecreature, although finally an unknown -- seeL.J. Swingle, "Frankenstein's Monsterand Its Romantic Relatives: Problems of Knowledge in EnglishRomanticism," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 15(1973), 51-65 -- is meant seriously in its professions of basicgood.
16. See the novel, pp. 70, 75 for links betweenCaroline and William. The question of devouring is significantfor the creature. William imputes horrific orality to adominantly philosophical being. Perhaps this is not far-fetched given the distinctive negative "philosophy" of "Evilthenceforth became my good," which the creature adopts after its"rape" -- murder of Elizabeth. Oral hostility may touch deepbody anxiety material such as castration fears, which thecreature in part substitutes for. Its creation defies not onlyemotional loss but may represent a desire to give birth in wholefrom out of oneself. From one perspective this may looksymptomatic of penis envy; from another perspective this maylook like a desire to create oneself independently of one'sparents -- those who so deeply divide one's emotional life. Themotive to repossess the mother through a recreation of archaicdesires along with their objects, however, gains the dominantground for all of this.
17. Just prior to receiving Elizabeth's letter,Victor is deeply agitated by the thought that Clerval is goingto allude to "an object on whom I dared not think" (p.61). The creature as secret ismuch with Victor in the following days of recuperation.
18. Justine, the outsider, may also in partreflectFanny Imlay --Mary Wollstonecraft'sillegitimate daughter. Fanny is dutiful, domestic, quiet --quite unlike Mary Shelley. Mary and Shelley would befriend herin their happiness but were taken by surprise when she committedsuicide in October,1816 (perhaps afterdiscovering her illegitimacy). By thenFrankenstein isnearly half finished, but guilt over Fanny's forlorn death mayhave formed itself into some of the sketch devoted to Justine.Fanny, a potential rival for the father's love, nevertheless isalmost mocked byGodwin (butthis is unknown to Mary until Godwin writes to her shortly afterFanny's death). Justine's circumstantial victimization mayreflect Mary's feelings of guilt; such victimization alsoexpresses something of Mary's own feelings about her life. Inthe love connection, especially if for a moment we entertainFanny's expressed admiration of Shelley, we might also noteHarriet's death -- a moresignificant rival -- as a factor in Mary's psychic wars.Shelley long ago bared his disappointment in Harriet when he andMary regularly met at Mary Wollstonecraft's grave-side. In1814 Shelley became acomposite object of love for mother, father and lover in Mary'sworship of him. But I think the deaths in the family inFrankenstein are much more tied to the Godwin householdthan to Shelley's biography. Harriet is the more significantrival in love in an ordinary romance (Shelley even invites herto join himself and Mary inGeneva) but Fanny orClaire Clairmont may strikemore deeply and therefore closer to home in Mary'ssubconscious.
19. Clerval may in part bespeakClaire (Jane Clairmont) -- theShelleys' companion on two trips to the continent, mother to achild byByron,Shelley's walking companionduring Mary's confinement in anticipation of her first child,and a locus for conscious jealousy in1815 on Mary's part.The broken father no doubt reflects something of a degenerateGodwin whom, despite allappearances, Mary could not long despise -- no matter how badlyhe treats her and Shelley.
20. Thenursemotif, however, has its yet darker side. All those nursedeventually die, whether of disease, madness or old age, whichsuggests considerable hostility toward the object of solicitude-- the good father, mother, or friend.