Frankenstein's Dream

Mocking Stupendous Mechanisms: Romantic Parody and Frankenstein's Dream

Matthew VanWinkle, Boston College

A provocative instance of this engagement occurs in Victor Frankenstein's immediate response to his unwelcome success. Reeling from the gruesome enormity of his handiwork, he plunges into a vexed slumber:

I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel. 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 (39).

"Christabel" encourages speculations on the relationship between parody and originality not only in the circumstances of its publication; the text itself may be read as an allegory of this relationship. The poem begins with our heroine venturing out into the "midnight wood" to pray on behalf of her absent "betrothèd knight." Her pious affections and her naïve disregard for the eeriness of her surroundings mark Christabel as a familiar Gothic figure: feminine virtue in distress. Yet her surreptitious excursion into the midnight wood violates conventional propriety and raises the specter of a less orthodox purpose. In risking the dangers of the forest unattended at the very witching time of night, Christabel may be attempting a fanciful conjuration of her absent lover. Such an attempt aligns her with a Romantic conception of poetry as vatic office, as a supernaturally transgressive invocation of desires (see Rzepka). And, in typically Romantic fashion, her effort produces an unexpected result:

The lady leaps up suddenly,
The lovely lady, Christabel!
It moan'd as near, as near can be,
But what it is she cannot tell— (ll.39-42).

If, in unintentionally conjuring Geraldine through the sheer ardor of her solitary call, Christabel becomes a figure for Romantic creativity, then Geraldine, simultaneously dependent and threatening in her potential malevolence, parodies this figure, embodying a revealing distortion of it rather than a simple departure from it. Initially so weak and compromised that she cannot cross the castle threshold unaided, Geraldine exaggerates Christabel's apparent helplessness, a helplessness rendered all the more suspect by the "might and main" (l. 125) with which she aids her guest. Once inside the castle, however, Geraldine exercises an insinuating power of her own, banishing the benevolent influence of Christabel's departed mother (ll. 206-208). No longer merely the unexpected respondent to Christabel's summons, Geraldine, in displacing the woman who brought Christabel into being, has achieved a common goal of parody: the reversal of creative priority. The brainchild has become the mother of the lady.

At its most extreme, parody silences its antecedent; its mocking exposure of its inspiration's characteristic flaws precludes any opportunity for rejoinder. Geraldine casts a spell over Christabel that is "lord of [her] utterance"; Christabel may not reveal the horrible discovery she has made concerning her guest. The conclusion to the first part of the poem reinforces the terror of Christabel's situation by pointedly contrasting it with her vigil at the old oak tree. Her silent prayer finds modest expression in "both blue eyes more bright than clear, / Each about to have a tear" (ll. 278-279). Coleridge immediately undercuts this vision of productive silence with a suffocating sense of confinement:

With open eyes (ah woe is me!)
Asleep, and dreaming fearfully,
Fearfully dreaming, yet I wis,
Dreaming that alone, which is— (ll. 280-283).

The Creature's unwanted (if not entirely unexpected) attempt at intimacy, then, reproduces many of the features of parodic menace we find in Geraldine. His emergence drives Frankenstein to a protracted, guilty silence, similar to Christabel's mute astonishment at Geraldine's machinations in the second part of the poem. But Victor's silence differs from Christabel's in one important respect. Christabel is forcibly deprived of her utterance by Geraldine's charm; Frankenstein's refusal to speak of his ordeal is ultimately his own choice. Nor is the result of his fated project the immediate cause of his silence. Rather, the pursuit of this project leads him to cease corresponding with his family, a lapse he repeatedly describes as an ominous "silence" (37,38). Unlike Christabel, whose creative power is intricately bound in her ability to speak, Frankenstein's creativity is predicated on a retreat from verbal articulation. His silence is partly a response to the Creature's parodic threat, but it is also a continuation of the conditions that initially fostered that threat. Frankenstein, embodying a Romantic original or target text, cannot bring himself to curtail his parodic double's activity. Whatever else the Creature is, he is Frankenstein's strongest guarantee of an audience, as Walton's fascination in the novel's outermost frame attests.

To this point, "Christabel" and Frankenstein alike might be read as utterly dismissive of a conventional Romantic poetics ideally conceived. It should not be overlooked that Coleridge's poem remains incomplete, and that Shelley's protagonist dies tormented in an arctic waste. But while this emphatic critique of solitary genius provides a formative impulse for these works, it fails to prove conclusive. Christabel and Victor Frankenstein recognize the unfortunate consequences of their misguided creative efforts, yet the revulsion that accompanies these recognitions fails to govern entirely our sense of what these author-figures have wrought. For if it is true, as Shelley contends, that authors do not create out of a void, it is also true that they do not send their creations into a vacuum. In "Christabel" and Frankenstein the distortions of an individual vision meet with further abuses in their encounters with the larger world. Ironically, in misconstruing the monstrous threats visited upon them, characters within these texts, as well as readers trying to interpret them from without, partially restore the degraded protagonists' original intentions. The result of this confrontation is neither the ideal vision of an autonomous author nor the simple mockery of a sophisticated, unsympathetic audience, but a curiously unstable and yet strangely vital collaboration between writer and reader.

The first part of "Christabel" presents an allegory of the relationship between original and parody, and the second half stages the variety of responses available in receiving parody and original alike. As Geraldine emerges into the light of day with a much-diminished Christabel in tow, these competing interpretive possibilities attempt to account for her. Bracy, forewarned by his dream of a concealed serpent strangling a dove, suspects that some malevolence is afoot without tracing it immediately to Geraldine's presence. Clearly a great deal in the poem supports Bracy's suspicions. Christabel would confirm them, could she work herself free of Geraldine's spell. As it is, she can only reflect the "look of dull and treacherous hate" of the apparition she had hoped would reflect her own virtue. Bracy's suspicions and Christabel's plight both cast Geraldine's parodic agency in the worst possible light, as the gleefully ungrateful destroyer of its antecedent.

But while Bracy gropes toward a discovery of Christabel's apprehensions of what her guest has become, Sir Leoline welcomes Geraldine in much the same fashion as Christabel does at the poem's beginning. In accepting Geraldine's improbable story of her abduction and abandonment, Sir Leoline, like his daughter, "recognizes Geraldine as a certain type of heroine and embraces her" (Swann 534). In overlooking what Christabel has come to see in Geraldine, Sir Leoline compounds his daughter's initial error, at considerable danger to them both. Yet in accepting Geraldine as the damsel in distress Christabel first thought she was, Sir Leoline also implies, in the calculated generosity of his response, that his daughter's creative efforts may not be as misguided as she now finds them herself. By offering a laughable distortion of Christabel's own revised sense of her achievement, Sir Leoline presents a more nuanced account of the effects of parody, one which allows for the possibility of parody encourages its antecedent's success as well as contributing to its decay.

In Coleridge's poem, this salutary potential of parody acts as a teasing counter-current to the menacing drift of the plot. In Shelley's novel, the brutal extent of the Creature's vengeance threatens to render parody's destructive qualities absolute. And a good thing, too, we might say, since Victor Frankenstein's model of exclusively male creativity could use a thorough demolition. Perhaps a grim satisfaction inevitably results from contemplating the fate Frankenstein has conjured for himself. Nevertheless, to indulge this response too extensively is to ignore what the Creature endures as the result of his own actions; in witnessing the demise of his creator, he discovers the exhaustion of his raison d'être. Like all parodies, the Creature must at least partially sustain his antecedent; otherwise his own existence becomes meaningless and untenable. Frankenstein may inadvertently reveal as much when he describes the fortuitous circumstances that sustain his pursuit of the Creature:

Sometimes, when nature, overcome by hunger, sunk under the exhaustion, a repast was prepared for me in the desert, that restored and inspirited me. The fare was indeed coarse, such as the peasants of the country ate; but I may not doubt that it was set there by the spirits that I had invoked to aid me (173).

Instead of locating Frankenstein's doom in the awful effort to bring something into existence, we might rather attribute it to his refusal to allow the results of this effort to have unanticipated, even comic, consequences. In assuming too readily that he has produced an irredeemable atrocity, Frankenstein refuses to consider how his Creature could, in spite of his deformity, satisfy his creator's ultimate ambition. This ambition, which Frankenstein expresses as he assembles the materials for his first attempt at bestowing life, is to foster "a new species [that] would bless [him] as its creator and source" (36). And, despite his initial murderous forays into revenge, even as he vows an absolute break with his creator and his creator's kind, the Creature partially restores the intention that conceived him. In demanding that Frankenstein provide him with a mate, he unwittingly seeks to establish the necessary conditions for the fulfillment of his creator's dream to stand as the origin not just of a being, but of a "species." This idea occurs again to Frankenstein himself as he labors to complete the Creature's bride; it culminates the train of thought that leads him to abandon the task: "one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth" (138). Like Christabel, unable to reconcile her fiendish vision of Geraldine with her initial expectation of a Gothic heroine, Frankenstein cannot recognize in his Creature's request an advance toward the success of his own grandest aspiration. The catastrophe that results from Frankenstein's refusal could be averted, were he only able to acknowledge the Creature's potential curséd race as his.

Shelley's own reaction to her novel's reception, by turns bemused and peeved, offers a glimpse of what such an acknowledgment might look like. On August 29, 1823, she attended a performance of Richard Brinsley Peake's Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein. This stage adaptation proved popular, "initiat[ing] enough interest in Mary Shelley's novel that less than one month after its debut a second edition had been published" (Forry 3). The evening's playbill recorded the Creature in the dramatis personae as "------by Mr. T. Cooke," which, Shelley says in a Sept. 9 letter to Leigh Hunt, "amused [her] exceedingly . . . this nameless way of naming the unnamable is rather good" (378). Like many who saw the play, Shelley was impressed by Cooke's acting, though her admiration for James Wallack's performance as Frankenstein was not widely shared. Her letter to Hunt generally expresses approval of the production, with the surprisingly unruffled qualification that "the story is not well managed."

Peake's melodrama introduces several features that have become commonplace to audiences of subsequent adaptations of Shelley's original, among them a servant employed for comic relief who provides the inspiration for countless future lab assistants. More tellingly, however, Presumption inaugurates a long tradition in which the Creature remains silent. In Shelley's novel, the Creature's improbable rhetorical skill provides an important element of the tense equilibrium that balances his claims on the reader's sympathies with those of Frankenstein. While Cooke's performance compensates for this loss in other ways, the confrontation between creator and creature becomes slightly asymmetrical. Frankenstein, often inept at crucial moments in the novel, assumes a greater competence (if not a corresponding practical efficacy) on stage.

One other change marks Frankenstein's barely perceptible advance in status within the play. Though much of Shelley's first description of the Creature is reproduced verbatim in Presumption, the dream which immediately follows it is not. Peake's production relocates Frankenstein's vision to a much earlier moment in the story. Fritz, the excitable servant, reports on his master's unquiet sleep:

[Frankenstein] was asleep, but frightfully troubled; he groaned and ground his teeth setting mine on edge. "It is accomplished!" said he. Accomplished! I knew that had nothing to do with me, but I listened. He started up in his sleep, though his eyes were opened and dead as oysters, he cried, "It is animated—it rises—walks!" (Forry 138).

Mary Shelley dispenses a similar blend of shudders and chuckles, and toys with a parallel shift toward Romantic conventions, in her 1831 introduction. Her description of the waking dream that delivers the core of the novel to her famously rehearses Frankenstein's horrified recoil from his dreadful accomplishment shortly after its animation. By presenting her inspiration as a version of Frankenstein's first encounter with his Creature, Shelley declares an affinity with her protagonist. This moment reads less as a triumphant breakthrough, however, and more as a kind of imaginative arrest, similar to what Christabel experiences at the conclusion to Part I. Shelley's vision arrives "unbidden," her authorial task reduced to "making only a transcript of [her] waking dream" (197). Although Shelley's reluctance to admit any deliberate craft in producing her tale might be taken as a coy preclusion of any further inquiries by a curious readership, it serves an additional purpose. The simple equation Shelley offers between authorial intention and the reception of an obedient audience reads as disingenuously naïve: "What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my pillow" (196-197). Shelley hesitates tauntingly between identifying with her surrogate author and exposing the shortcomings of his creative process.

The odd humor of this introduction changes from biting satire to jocular burlesque when Shelley shifts her attention from Frankenstein to the Creature: "And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper." As well as alluding to the very real financial pressures that prompted the 1831 edition, the substitution of "prosper" for the more Biblically precedented "multiply" suggests that Shelley may share some of Frankenstein's reservations about any offspring the Creature might sire. More importantly, though, the rueful chuckle implied by the phrase concedes that the uncanny sympathy the Creature elicits at the novel's center will have more to do with its continued success than the author could have anticipated. Readers of Victor Frankenstein's narrative, it would seem, find in the fruits of his labor the achievement he hopes for but cannot comprehend.

Until recently, critical accounts of parody in the Romantic era have tended to emphasize the practice's antagonistic energies, the ways it appropriates from and ridicules its antecedents. In Frankenstein, the monstrous consequences of a distorted authorial intention demonstrate the nature of this threat. At the same time the Creature, menacing as he is, unerringly (if inadvertently) continue to preserve, even restore, the kernel of a vision his creator has given up as lost. If parody often "wrongs" the text it targets, exposing its characteristic flaws, it often redresses these flaws, too, in unexpectedly sympathetic ways. As parody, Frankenstein invites further rejoinders, even stranger turns on its target and on itself. This invitation, taken up by the near-constant reinterpretation of Shelley's novel on stage and screen, provides an alternative to the "myth of solitary genius" that has long haunted Romanticism and its critics. The writers of the Romantic era, this alternative model proposes, engaged their audience in comic and complementary ways, anticipating in turn a potentially derisive but ultimately salutary response to this exchange