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Frankenstein's DreamAn IntroductionJerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona
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| 1 |
In Mary Shelley's original Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818)—unlike nearly all of its many adaptations—there are at least two levels of "dream" for Victor Frankenstein, the title character. The first, which is given a dream-like quality by his insistence that it is not "the vision of a madman" (Shelley 47), is his hopeful daydream of what the creation of a human life through science might ultimately mean: 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. Pursuing these reflections, I thought, if I could bestow animation on lifeless matter, I might in the process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption. (Shelley 49)To be sure, it is this vision to which Victor refers, along with his hope that his creation might be "beautiful," when he later laments, on actually seeing his creature come to life, that "the beauty of the dream vanished" to be replaced by "horror and disgust" at a "wretch" more "hideous" than a "mummy again endued with animation" (Shelley 52-53, my emphasis). Even so, this daydream raises far-reaching questions on its own that persist in the Western world to this day, among the many reasons for the long survival of Shelley's arresting story. To what degree, as the biological sciences have developed (now quite rapidly in our age of biotechnology), is Victor's aspiration a valuable one, even within the long-standing middle-class ideology of men whereby the self-made individual achieves his potential in products of his ingenuity that can change the world? Exactly when does this dream, appealing as it was in 1818 and remaining in 2002, "cross a line" (and where is that line?) that separates worthwhile ambition from socially destructive obsession? Is there so much ego in Victor's hubris, with all the "I"s and "me"s in the above passage, that Frankenstein is primarily an attack on scientific aspiration as too often self-serving, as exploitative of manipulated "others" mainly for the sake of how they will reflect back on the scientist or discoverer? |
| 2 | Indeed, is such ego separable from
the aspiration? Are we looking at science "going too far," assuming a more
moderate and sociable version of itself, or is Mary Shelley exposing a dynamic
of selfish dominance that is endemic to such quests from their very inception?
After all, Victor tells his story using these words, among others, to Robert
Walton, the arctic explorer who "frames" Frankenstein's and his creature's
stories within a packet of letters sent from the ice-floes of the far North
to his sister back in England. Victor's stated purpose for his narrative
is to offer warnings to others who "seek for knowledge and wisdom," as Walton
is doing (Shelley 24), as though Frankenstein's desires and errors could
be universalized to apply to many individuals who have, as Walton has, dreamed
of an ultimate discovery (such as the North Pole) that "presents [itself
first] to the imagination as a region of beauty and delight" (Shelley 9).
Are the features of Frankenstein's daydream, then, too much those of Shelley's
contemporaries and too persistent even for many of us today? Is Mary Shelley,
as some have suggested (see Homans 100-19 and Mellor), writing a critique
of male or Romantic aspiration as she knew it, particularly in such poets
and dabblers in science as Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley (whom she
married in December of 1816)? Or are such longings bound up, at their time
and since, with our best ambitions for making the world a better place and
human life longer? Are the darkest and brightest sides of this dream inseparably
mixed together? Have they been so for almost two hundred years in Western
culture? And if so, why? |
| 3 |
The problems that Victor's conscious dream present, however, are greatly complicated when we recall that there is a second, more preconscious dream (really a nightmare) into which Victor falls in Mary Shelley's novel. Right after he recoils from the first sight of his finished, and now breathing, creation, at least as he remembers in his narration to Walton, Frankenstein "rushes" in frightened disgust from his makeshift laboratory and, finally giving way to exhaustion after long "depriv[ing him]self of rest and health" (Shelley 52), throws himself on his bed, with his most conscious thoughts of escape from his problems being focussed on his fiancee, Elizabeth Lavenza: I slept indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt [his present location]. 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 I beheld 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. I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window-shutters, I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. (Shelley 53)This stunning moment, virtually unique to the novel in the many versions of Frankenstein, has understandably provoked numerous and varied interpretations, several which I will review shortly. Its immediate effect, though, is to undermine Victor's lofty daydream by revealing a preconscious disposition towards a sort of necrophilia with his mother as what is more truly symbolized in the sewn-together features of the being he has created. Is this the real dream—the actual dark urges—at the foundation of Frankestein's project, a deeper motivation that is covered over and obscured by his conscious ambitions? Especially in juxtaposition to its hopeful counterpart, what does this dream tell us about the larger meanings and cultural resonance of Frankenstein the novel, about the wider Romantic quest for "brave new worlds" to which it clearly responds, and about the development of this story after the novel appeared in versions that are clearly based on this nightmare, even if (or perhaps because) they refuse to repeat it? In other words, what is "Frankenstein's dream" at bottom? What lies most fundamentally behind this tale's ongoing importance to us as a persistent Western myth? The essays in this collection all strive to answer these questions and to do so from very different perspectives that have rarely been applied to Frankenstein before now. |
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Most of the answers so far, of course, given the contents of Victor's second dream, have been psychoanalytic ones. Frankenstein unquestionably joins with other early nineteenth-century texts (see Ellenberger 143-215) in beginning to craft the ingredients of the unconscious and the interpretation of dreams that Sigmund Freud proposed as scientific truth by the 1890s. For most Freudian critics (see Tropp 19-33; Twitchell 46-60; and Veeder 112-17, for examples), Victor's pursuit of life's deepest secret by digging up body-parts in Mother Earth therefore stems, like his inconsistent pursuit of Elizabeth, from an unconscious desire for and a resistance to a reunion with the body of his deceased mother—the very feminine origin he has tried to avoid by producing a "child" without a woman or sexual intercourse. Indeed, Victor's mother in Shelley's novel, Caroline, dies shortly before he leaves for Ingolstadt because she catches scarlet fever from Elizabeth (the initial object of Victor's embrace in his dream), whom the older woman lovingly nurses in the Frankenstein household until her own "fever was very malignant" (Shelley 37). Her death, as Victor recalls to Walton by stopping his narrative cold at this point, is the most devastating event in the young scientist's life: 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 for ever—that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished, and the sound of a voice so familiar, and dear to the ear, can be hushed, never more to be heard. These are the reflections of the first days; but when the lapse of time proves the reality of the evil, then the actual bitterness of the grief commences. (Shelley 38)Still shattered by such an enormous loss for him, even when he speaks to Walton, Victor not surprisingly covers up his extreme longing in his supposedly very different process of creation. But the repressed manifestly returns the more his efforts come to fruition. Victor's finished product is revealed by his dream at the moment of "birth" to be a cover for his drive to return to his mother—to rejoin himself to her body, for which Elizabeth is but a displacement—and to do so by entering, Orpheus-like, into the world of buried dissolution (the charnel houses and graveyards from which he steals pieces of bodies) where his mother, like Eurydice, has been taken by Death itself and from which he longs to recover her (though with no more success than Orpheus had). |
| 5 | Such impulses turn out to be the
most fundamental of the infantile drives that Freud finds sequestered in
the human unconscious and describes as disguising themselves in half-conscious
displacements, especially in dreams. By these lights, Victor is continuing
the universal childish longing to return to the body of the mother from
which the infant has been thrust (one basis of all the longings of eros
in life) and pursuing that goal, more than most do consciously, by manifesting
a death-wish to re-enter his and everyone's intrauterine state prior to
birth (the drive of thanatos in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle
[1920]). Since such drives have to be radically obscured in any manifestations
of the unconscious for Freud, even in dreams, it is no surprise for the
psychoanalytic reader that they appear most overtly throughout Frankenstein
in figures that seem their opposite, in this case the fabrication of a male
body by a man that seems to avoid women and motherhood altogether while
supposedly making life out of death and not vice-versa. The hero's nightmare
in Frankenstein, it seems, is at least the Freudian displacement
where we are all shown to be concealing, in fact to be reversing,
infantile longings of both eros and thanatos (loving procreation
and death-seeking destruction) so that they are sublimated within our most
"adult" pursuits. Within this theory, the longings and violence in both
these deep drives, which Freud sees in some of his works as the drives of
the id, come out in Victor's creature as they do not in the creator
who has projected, even othered them, onto his creation as though
they all belonged "over there" and not in himself. Such a combination of
life-creating and life-destroying impulses in the "monster" is part of what
makes him enact the killings of little brother William, the servant Justine,
Elizabeth, and even Victor's best friend, Henry Clerval, that Victor subconsciously
wishes to bring about, both to dominate his world and to return it all to
death, the inclinations he is most unwilling to face as basic aspects of
his fundamental being (see Kaplan and Kloss 119-45). It is in this way,
after all, that Frankenstein's creature is a form of "the uncanny" as Freud
defines that feeling of profound revulsion and déjà
vu in his 1919 essay of that name. What Victor comes to call his "daemon"
(Shelley 94) is so abhorrent in its grotesque unfamiliarity, according to
"The Uncanny," because what it harbors is the deeply familiar, his
creator's own repressed and most infantile drives. |
| 6 | For several insightful feminist
critics, however, this Freudian scenario about Frankenstein's dream is a
cover for another hidden—and more widely cultural and political—unconscious.
While seeming to long for a reunion of himself with both his mother
and death, Victor in his usurpation of "making a baby" may be striving to
"kill" the feminine powers, from Elizabeth's to Caroline's, that threaten
male supremacy in ways quite apparent to Mary Shelley, the daughter and
namesake of Mary Wollstonecraft (best known then and now for A Vindication
of the Rights of Woman [1792]). After all, Victor's "researches into
[the] secrets [of the mother], to usurp her powers," be she Mother Earth,
his own, or any mother able to conceive a child, as Margaret Homans
shows, really "require that she be dead," that her literal body recede behind
and beneath Frankenstein's male metaphor (or substitute) for the process
of birth (Homans 142). Since well before Frankenstein's and Mary Shelley's
time, "woman" in the West has come to be associated with earthy "nature"
(as opposed to "culture"), "death" just as much as life (with Euridyce,
like Persephone, staying in the underworld as long as Death commands her,
while Orpheus ascends back to the earth), uncontrolled "emotion" or "sensibility"
(in contrast to masculine "reason"), and the "body" more than "the mind"
(especially as the birth-source of all human beings in their bodily forms).
All of that means that woman is too often "the literal," the possibly chaotic
and uncontainable "Real" or "Thing in itself," Kant's imperceptible and
irrational Ding an Sich (see Brown) of which only mental (and masculine)
Reason and Understanding can supposedly make some sense. The standard male
quest, taken to a revealing extreme in Frankenstein, is to contain
and distance that amorphous feminine Real by fabricating rationalized constructs
and symbols that seem to contain it, or even transcend it, by way of distinctly
male frames of reference (such as his male "demonstration" of fabricated
life) through which we glimpse the deep and primordial Feminine only "through
a glass darkly," preferably as though she were dead and the male constructs
that repress her were alive. It is this process that is the real monstrosity,
according to this important feminist view. The horror he faces there is
that the mother whose birth-powers he has sought to usurp, now joined with
death, is also the object of desire that he most wants and does not want
simultaneously. With this kind of unconscious as its real foundation,
then, "the novel is about the collision between androcentric [male-centered]
and gynocentric [woman-centered] theories of creation, a collision that
results in the denigration of maternal childbearing through its circumvention
by male creation" (Homans 105). |
| 7 | There is even a further dimension
in Victor's creature and his dream if we consider both from the perspective
of a pro-feminist psychoanalytic approach that is more recent—and far
reaching—than these others we have noted. According to the view of
"monstrosity" advanced by Julia Kristeva (herself a psychotherapist as well
as cultural theorist) in her Powers of Horror (1980, trans. 1982),
grotesque "others" in Western culture are really forms of the "abject" created
by the psychological process of "abjection." Literally ab-ject means
both "to throw off " and "to throw under," so Kristeva defines "abjection"
as a process of ejecting or displacing preconscious multiplicities
in the self into an externalized alter ego through which what is
preconscious, already quite disguised, is "thrown under" the eventual dominance
of sanctioned cultural discourses and other forms of social control. For
Kristeva, moreover, the multiplicities most abjected by us—the anomalies
we most want to "throw off" from the deepest roots of our being—are
the state of being half-inside/half-outside the mother at the moment of
birth (and thus self and other all at once) and the concomitant state of
being half-dead and half-alive at the same moment (thus intermingling in
our very foundations what are later thought to be total opposites). Such
primordial conditions of the self as "in-between . . . ambiguous . . . composite"
are for all of us an "immemorial violence" out of which any child strives
to become "separated from another body in order to be" and hence to be able
to construct a distinct public identity (Kristeva, 10). The thrown-off abject,
the product of abjection, is thus the symbolic and disguised repository
of that violence and basic otherness-of-the-self-within-itself, the means
for staking out a supposed identity over against it. The monstrous "other"
that uncannily seems to harbor all this ultimately exposes and conceals
it by being both highly compelling and highly repugnant at the same time.
According to this view, Frankenstein's creature is a quintessential example
of the abject in being a highly differentiated and horrifying double
of his creator. The strongest evidence of that in Mary Shelley's novel is
Frankenstein's "monstrous" dream of being re-enveloped by his mother and
death simultaneously, since there the creature's revolting visage is shown
to be ultimately based on the two deepest anomalies that Kristeva sees as
the most abjected of all: the visceral sense of being both separate from
and absorbed into the mother and the sense, both fearful and seductive,
of being embraced by death right at what seems the birth of a new form of
life. In addition to being a return of the primally repressed and the "uncanny,"
then, Victor's non-waking dream is also the exposure of an abjection and
the abject, in which the irreconcilable deep differences in the self are
made to seem outside it in a pasting-together of bodies as manifestly different
from each other as the abjecting subject really is at its most underlying
levels. |
| 8 | Victor's creature and dream
as containing the abject, in fact, allow both of them to harbor numerous
thrown-down anomalies basic to Frankenstein, Walton, and their readers well
beyond those that Powers of Horror emphasizes. The creature, as the
many studies on him have shown, is a throwing off social and cultural
intermixtures that are just as repugnant as the anomalies in Victor's dream—and
consequently as fully abjected -- because they are just as basic to the
sources of Victor's (and any middle-class Anglo male's) construction of
a self, even as it wants to leave those very sources behind more than most
others. That is why the creature is as racially mixed as Victor claims
not to be, pointing to the interdependency of white and other races in a
colonial economy (see Shelley 52; Spivak 248-54; and Malchow 9-31); as working
class (indeed, as like the "wandering beggars" of Shelley's time) as
Victor tries to avoid being in his aspirations to scientific supremacy,
thereby showing how the managerial middle classes are creating the
"monstrosity" of the industrial working class they claim to rise above (see
Shelley 99 and O'Flinn); as partly self-educated in his accidental
reading of older books, as Victor works to be formally educated,
indicative of Victor's own early process of learning that he falsely claims
he transcends at the time he makes his creature (see Shelley 32-37 and 122-26);
as artificial and industrial as well as organic while Victor claims
to be only organic and able to keep these domains entirely distinct; and
as rebelliously uncontrollable in his insistent and increasingly
independent multiplicity, while Victor, without admitting as much, consequently
denies the vision in his lofty daydream. The mix of supposed opposites in
the creature is the mix in Victor that the young scientist, again and again,
tries to deny but can only "abject" onto an other who is pointedly not
him and very much him (or at least the many anomalies on which he
is really grounded) at the same time. |
| 9 | Frankenstein's preconscious dream,
though it reveals less of these mixtures than the creature does, at least
shows the abjection of deep Kristevan levels of somatic memory as the fundamental
throwing-off-and-under that makes all of the other abjections possible in
one terrifying and sympathetic creation. The dream even includes
its own dimension of socio-cultural abjection in that it throws off Frankenstein's
(and many men's) extremely mixed attitudes towards women as objects of desire
and domination, mixed with fears of and longings for reabsorption by the
mother, in a scene of symbolic shiftings where attraction changes into the
repulsion connected to it and sexual longing becomes a death-wish both for
the self and for the fundamental Femininity that is so basic to male existence
that men often believe they must throw it off to be really masculine beings.
These mixtures repeat themselves, we should remember, in Victor's later
waking nightmare when he attempts the creation of a female mate for his
monster and feels he must finally destroy her instead, killing the potential
of her life both for increased female independence and for the reproduction
of a different race that could challenge white, as much as male, supremacy
(see Shelley 162-64). The dream behind Frankenstein's conscious hopes, it
turns out, underwrites his aspirations with several repressed—and abjected—levels
of personal and cultural contradictions, many of which remain as basic to
us today, fortunately or sadly, as they were coming to be in 1818. One reason
that Frankenstein and the creature in it have become such lasting
and important cultural touchstones since the novel appeared is that Victor's
creation, with its foundations in the conflicts animating his dream, has
become a symbolic focal point for the abjection of a great many cultural,
as well as psychological, inconsistencies and quandaries basic to us all
since the Enlightenment, if only so that these anomalies can be both addressed
and disguised in a way that allows us to face them or avoid them, as we
choose. Frankenstein, from the novel through all its adaptations,
may well be our modern world's most lasting dark dream, the one that most
consistently haunts the industrial and post-industrial West with the many
consequences of our fear (or is it sometimes our desire?) that mechanical
reproductions of various kinds may replace or threaten the forms of human
reproduction in many different ways. |
| 10 |
After all, we might say, it all began as a dream, one that occurred right at the juncture where the rising industrial world and the science connected to it were now clearly replacing, while many were still upholding older economies and the social orders that they sustained. If we can believe Mary Shelley in her Preface to the 1831 revised edition of Frankenstein, her title character's visions, both conscious and preconscious, look back to one dream she claims to have had herself in 1816 near Geneva, Switzerland. There, while staying near and often with Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati, she agreed, as many of her readers know, to join a ghost-story writing contest between herself, P.B. Shelley, Byron, and the latter's live-in physician and occasional lover, Dr. John Polidori. At first she says she made no connection between this group's nocturnal readings in Gothic tales of reanimated portraits or specters—such as those in Jean Baptiste Eryiès's Fantasmagoriana (1812), which is heavily indebted to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764-65; see Shelley 7n. and Hogle 205-06, n.8)—and the many other conversations she recalls overhearing between Byron and Percy Shelley on "the nature of the principle of life" and on whether it was possible, based on the surmises and experiments of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, Charles's grandfather, that "a corpse would be re-animated" by "galvanism" or some other method (Shelley 227). She states that she heard Byron and Shelley, themselves rebellious descendants of a fading aristocracy, say that it was possible that the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth" (Ibid., my emphasis). She then goes on: Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest. When I placed my head upon my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose to my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful it must be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; that he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes. I opened mine in terror. . . . On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. (Shelley 227-28)To be sure, we should not simply take this account to be absolutely true, since it is hardly immediate or objective. Given its "witching hour" and "possession" by the "imagination"—quite conventional literary figures by 1831—it is quite clearly heightened for its new readers fifteen years after the events recalled. It is also quite selective in its memories—and repressive in being so. The dream that arises when Frankenstein sleeps, our principal focus here, is completely absent from Shelley's initial dream. Was something like Victor's embrace of his dead mother, and thus the immediate connection of birth with death, too painful to be admitted to consciousness then, considering that Mary Shelley still blamed herself somewhat for the death of her mother just a few days after Mary Wollstonecraft gave birth to her in 1797 (see Rubenstein) and was still in great pain from the death of her own first infant shortly after it was born to herself and Percy Shelley in 1815 (see Moers 217-23 and Johnson)? Did the disguising of these dimensions in Victor's dream come after this story was much more developed, or was such nightmarish dream-work already behind the initial conception of the idea and therefore repressed beneath its remembered surface? |
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We will never know for sure, but we can say, given the above passage's
oscillation between age-old Christian images of the "unhallowed" and the
far more recent "mechanism" of the "spark of life," that it does mark,
as a dream, the psychological and symbolic effects of a major transition
in Western history as many of its elements became "galvanized" together
in a well-focussed fictional image. While it may "throw off" what is most
abject for Mary Shelley herself by 1831, this remembered or reconstructed
or constructed dream at least abjects the irresolution in Western
culture around 1818 (and since) between hearkening back towards old Christian
prohibitions about human presumption that might claim the life-giving
powers of God and aspiring towards scientific advancement and early industrial
technology that could allow human beings to improve their lives themselves.
It even abjects the indecision of the eighteen-teens between the source
of life as an infused and infusing principle outside any single body,
advocated in England by Dr. John Abernathy, and the opposing materialist
view that life is generated by the structural interrelation of organic
and circulating elements within bodies, argued by Sir William Lawrence
(Percy Shelley's physician), all of which was debated quite publicly from
1816 on (see Butler). Which of these is the "powerful engine" in the stretched-out
"phantasm": a "spark of life" which might just be left to go out or a
"vital motion" stirring from within the body dreamt of as coming to life?
Moreover, is the use of "engine" here a suggestion of organic vitality
or of the ultimately mechanical and industrial possibly taking control
of the biological, especially since woman, even here, is pointedly left
out of the birth process? If Mary Shelley's inaugural dream contains (as
some Freudians might say) the wish-fulfillment of at least giving artificial
birth to a story in the face of the deaths of both her mother and her
child, it also registers the cultural nightmare of being caught at a crossroads
of historical tendencies pulling at each other in the early nineteenth
century—and still drawing us into a tug of war today. Whether or
not we accept this authorial dream as the "source" of the dreams—and
especially Victor's dream—in Frankenstein the novel, it joins
these others in showing that all these dreams have profound psychological
and cultural dimensions, layer upon layer, ones that still need more of
the further exploration attempted by the essays in this collection for
the Romantic Circles Praxis series. |
| 12 |
What I have tried to provide here, with occasional intrusions of my
own perspective, is a coalescence of the dominant existing interpretations
of Victor Frankenstein's dream as Mary Shelley renders it. After all,
it is this previous range of responses to that rich symbolic tangle, along
with the novel and its many adaptations, to which the scholars in the
accompanying essays react by pointing to several possibilities that remain
unexplored in Victor's dream and the others connected to it. All
of these expert contributors, like myself, are not so much out to undermine
the interpretations I have summarized or interfaced here as to expose
what is so abjected in Frankenstein's dream that it has not yet
been accommodated by analytical criticism. Though we have not worked towards
any uniformity in this collection, the general argument advanced by the
included essays is that Victor Frankenstein's dream, despite all that
has been said about it, still reveals to us some as-yet-unexamined relationships—ones
that go to the heart of both Romanticism and Gothic writing, it turns
out -- between literary forms, conflicting cultural agendas, psychological
anomalies, and functions of language and images. The need to study Frankenstein's
dream remains as ongoing and pressing as it has been for decades because
it still causes us to confront what Victor Frankenstein's and the
reader will not face steadily: the unaccommodated tugs-of-war between
cultural tendencies that have been and remain "cathected" onto Frankenstein
and the endless adaptations of it. |
| 13 |
If I could recommend an order of reading these all-new interpretations,
I would urge proceeding from my overview of the interpretive tradition
here to the provocative piece by Anne Williams, author of the important
Art of Darkness (1995) on the roots of Gothic fiction and their
reappearance in Romanticism. In the key dream in Mary Shelley's novel
and much that surrounds it, Williams recovers the interplay so many of
us have forgotten—or repressed?—between the established eighteenth-century
tradition of sentimental fiction in England and France, well known
to, and often used by, Mary Shelley in ways that very few have discussed,
and the dimensions of Frankenstein that are genuinely sadistic
in the quite literal sense that they recall the fictions (and even the
life) of the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814). These seemingly opposite registers
of emotion, vision, and writing, Williams shows, surprisingly interpenetrate
each other throughout Shelley's novel and especially in Victor's dream.
That established, this essay goes on to reveal what is repressed behind
and within this combination. Why, Williams asks us, would these symbolic
strains be so interrelated, despite their apparent rejection of each other?
For her, we discover, their interaction, itself long repressed, serves
to both cover and articulate an even deeper abjection enacted by them
both: the "throwing off" and "under" of a broadly Feminine set of biological,
social, and linguistic levels on which Western culture, like Frankenstein
and Sade, is far more dependent than almost anyone wants to admit. |
| 14 |
The next essay I would recommend is Matthew VanWinkle's, since it builds
so well on his established expertise with the parodic side of Romantic
literature in England. This piece joins Williams' in explaining the intertextuality
of Shelley's original novel—very extensive in the book and thus a
rich subject for interpreters already—by focusing, not only on its
parodies of several texts prior to it, but how it also imports parody
into the very core of its story and thereby foregrounds a deep parodic
strain in a "second generation" Romantic literature that has long been
separated from such impulses except in analyses of Byron. Lest we take
"parody" in too simple a sense by emphasizing only its satirical dimension,
which is also there in Frankenstein in its jibes at solipsistic
Romantic aspiration, VanWinkle grounds his discussion helpfully by showing
us a fuller range of what parody can embody in writing prior to and in
Frankenstein itself. He then demonstrates that Victor Frankenstein,
as much as the novel about him, is driven by parodic "demons" against
his conscious intentions, enough that the creature he makes is itself/himself
a parody both of contemporary biological debates and of
the several texts it/he reads and half-imitates in order to, among other
things, come into discourse—a process VanWinkle therefore finds parodic
of standard human discourse in the end. Parody even extends to Frankenstein's
dream, VanWinkle argues, in the way it persistently echoes and plays off
of Coleridge's "Christabel" (first published in 1816) and in that fashion
intensifies what is already parodic in Coleridge's most openly Gothic
poem. Though many have explored Frankenstein's allusions to The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner as the main key to the novel's extensive
conversation with Coleridge, VanWinkle reminds us of a quite different
interchange between two Gothic renditions of a deeply parodic dreamscape.
He thereby reveals that this kind of nightmare, albeit in several different
forms, is one that troubles and underlies much of Romanticism in general
far more than most of us have realized. |
| 15 |
In the next essay I would recommend in this itinerary, the remarkable
piece by John Rieder, author of Wordsworth's Counterrevolutionary Turn
(1997), we return to the perspectives of psychoanalysis, but in a strikingly
different way from any of the readings I have recounted above. This analysis
probes the most "disgusting" aspects of the creature and Victor's dream
in Shelley's novel and then shows how these are altered and/or avoided
in later adaptations ranging from R.B. Peake's play Presumption
(1823) to George Romero's film Dawn of the Dead (1978). Rieder
thereby exposes the basic story's links to what Freud in 1916 saw as the
child's frequent impulse to duplicate the powers of the mother by imaginatively
"giving birth" through the bowels, thus producing the abhorrent but fascinating
"fecal child." We are then shown, not surprisingly, how Victor's original
creature and his dream embody many more dimensions than any other adaption
has suggested of what the 'fecal child' abjects, in part because of a
strong cultural resistance since 1818 to facing those very dimensions.
With this point made, however, Rieder then follows its implications out
to expose the as-yet-unseen social critique that Mary Shelley is
unleashing through her novel's use of the fecal child. Such a figure,
as Freud saw, defies traditional male-female distinctions and the patriarchal
order that sustains them. Some possibilities of this defiance are thus
embedded in Frankenstein's positive dream, as well as in his nightmare
and Mary Shelley's novel. It is above all this set of potentials,
Rieder shows, that adaptations of Frankenstein have tried to occlude
by effacing, while still dimly recalling, the fecal child of the original
book. |
| 16 |
The concluding essay in this recommended succession, the highly arresting
contribution by Marc Redfield, shifts the focus quite radically by working
backwards from a major adaptation—James Whale's Frankenstein
film for Universal Studios in 1931—to the movements of phrases and
images in Mary Shelley's text, particularly the progression of dissolves
in Victor's maternal nightmare. Building on modes of analysis already
used suggestively in his prize-winning Phantom Formations (1996)
and his forthcoming Politics of Aesthetics, Redfield exposes how
self-reflexive Whale's film really is and thus how it foregrounds the
fundamental process of mechanically reproducible image-production and
the sheer positioning of manufactured motion pictures prior to any narrative
or meaning, though the audience is admittedly most conscious of these
latter levels in viewing the film. Despite all the differences between
the 1931 film and the Shelley novel in plot-elements and characterizations,
this essay argues that the strongest resemblance between the two, not
much noted until now, may appear in those dimensions—most revealed
in Frankenstein's dream, the many artificial composings of the creature
(including his learning of language), and the movement of doublings across
characters and descriptions in the book—where the "work in the age
of mechanical reproduction" (echoing Walter Benjamin) announces its emergent
and relentless process of self-duplicating manufacture. It is this
"monstrosity," given the rise of industrialism and its post-industrial
successors, that may be the most feared and resisted of all the horrors
that appear in the novel and its film adaptations. If there is a repressed
level in Victor's aspirations of both desire and death-wish associated
culturally and psychologically with the deeply Feminine (as Redfield suggests),
that level is made possible, as well as partially concealed, this final
essay shows, by the moving "technics" of images becoming other images
that not-so-subliminally enable and threaten our modern and postmodern
lives. As much as abjections of feminine foundations appear in the creature
and his creator's dream, so do the most basic modes of image-production
that we fear, but in Frankenstein we are forced to recognize them
as the means by which we construct ourselves and our extensions of our
manufactured beings in our post-"Enlightenment" world. |
| 17 |
These arguments, to be sure, are not the end of the debate over Frankenstein's
multiple dreams and therefore make no pretense of being "last words"
on a subject that still bedevils us, as it should. Indeed, by highlighting
levels in Mary Shelley's novel and its progeny that have not yet been
clearly exposed amid the barrage of readings that have interpreted this
cultural phenomenon, this collection shows the wide range and still-burning
urgency of the issues that Frankenstein has raised and continues
to raise for us as as the most reproduced and studied Romantic and
Gothic story in the history of published literature and Western film production.
Because of the questions raised here, as in Frankenstein, these
essays are pleased to claim that we are thrown back on the most basic
kinds of reflection on Western self-representation, on how "we" have come
to be and remain what "we" think we are in the Anglo-European-American
West. To be sure, like many readers and viewers, we can ignore these unsettling
revelations and let them recede behind the words and images that have
vividly articulated them since 1818 in version after version of Frankenstein.
The collective hope of these pieces, however, is that Western minds will
not continue to "throw off" these several anomalous tangles that ground
and disturb our modern lives. In our view, we should face them and their
consequences, if only to refuse their most destructive possibilities,
so that they will not finally be "lost in darkness and distance," as Shelley's
famous creature threatens to be (Shelley 221) but in fact has never been,
we are happy to say, since Frankenstein began haunting us at the
height of English Romanticism. |
| 18 |
In any case, I am deeply grateful to all the contributors here, who
made special efforts within their many commitments to bring this collection
about; to Jay Salisbury, my excellent Research Assistant on this and other
projects at the University of Arizona; and to Orrin Wang, the brilliant
General Editor of the Praxis series, who proposed the original
idea while inviting this collection, as well as to the helpful staff and
most able web masters at Romantic Circles. It is a delight to be able
to do this kind of work with such extraordinary and dedicated collaborators.
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Notes
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Romantic Circles - Home / Praxis Series / Frankenstein's Dream / Jerrold E. Hogle, "An Introduction" |