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Frankenstein: Creation as Catastrophe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Paul Sherwin
Paul Sherwin*
Affiliation:
City College, City University of New York, New York, New York
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Abstract

Much in Frankenstein suggests that the novel and classical psychoanalysis are meant for each other. The creation becomes a significant act, at once paradigmatic and intensely human, when viewed as a repetition of Frankenstein's primal-scene trauma, with the Creature emerging as a representation of the scene and the related oedipal complex. A psychoanalytic interpretation, however, requires a drastic secondary revision of Frankenstein, and not enough insight is purchased by so much blindness. The analyst repeats, yet fails to elucidate, the misreading of world, self, and Creature that renders Frankenstein a tiresome neurotic. But before this personal collapse Frankenstein achieved the sublime. His catastrophe of origination, engendering a creative self that anxiously pursues an impossible desire and an artifact that both represents and eclipses the creator, serves as a paradigm of the genesis of any sublime artwork, any uncanny reanimation project.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 96 , Issue 5 , October 1981 , pp. 883 - 903
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1981

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References

1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. M. K. Joseph (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969); all page references to the novel, unless otherwise noted, are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.

2. See Morton Kaplan and Robert Kloss, The Unspoken Motive: A Guide to Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (New York: Free Press, 1973), pp. 119–45; J. M. Hill, “Frankenstein and the Physiognomy of Desire,” American Imago, 32 (1975), 335–58; Gordon D. Hirsch, “The Monster Was a Lady: On the Psychology of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,” Hartford Studies in Literature, 7 (1975), 116–53; Gerhard Joseph, “Frankenstein's Dream: The Child as Father of the Monster,” Hartford Studies in Literature, 7 (1975), 97–115; and Marc A. Rubenstein, ‘“My Accursed Origin’: The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein” Studies in Romanticism, 15 (1976), 165–94. Interpretations largely or partly indebted to orthodox psychoanalysis include Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 79–89; William A. Walling, Mary Shelley (New York: Twayne, 1972); John A. Dussinger, “Kinship and Guilt in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein” Studies in the Novel, 8 (1976), 38–55; and Martin Tropp, Mary Shelley's Monster (Boston: Houghton, 1976).

3. James Rieger, ed., Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), p. 35.

4. Both the mother and Elizabeth are orphans, one “adopted” by Frankenstein's father, the other by Frankenstein as his “more than sister” (p. 36). The mother, on her deathbed, urges the Frankenstein-Elizabeth union, and after the mother's death Elizabeth assumes the maternal role in the household. It is noteworthy that the first Gothic tale mentioned in the Introduction is “the History of the Inconstant Lover, who, when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted” (p. 7). If Elizabeth is the mother's corpse, Justine is a miniature of the mother, the incriminating object the Creature plants on Justine's person (see pp. 65, 143).

5. See Peter Brooks, “ ‘Godlike Science/Unhallowed Arts’: Language, Nature, and Monstrosity,” in The Endurance of Frankenstein.' Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979), p. 213.

6. Levine, “Frankenstein and the Tradition of Realism,” Novel, 7 (1973), 25.

7. Levine, “The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein” in The Endurance of Frankenstein, p. 15.

8. See Harold Bloom, “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus” in The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 121–22. On Mary Shelley's psyche see Hirsch; Rubenstein; Susan Harris Smith, “Frankenstein: Mary Shelley's Psychic Divisiveness,” Women and Literature, 5 (1977), 42–53; Ellen Moers, “Female Gothic,” in The Endurance of Frankenstein, pp. 77–87; and U. C. Knoepflmacher, “Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters,” in The Endurance of Frankenstein, pp. 88–119.

9. Cf. Mary Poovey, “My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley and the Feminization of Romanticism,” PMLA, 95 (1980), 337.

10. On the traditional daemon see Paul Sherwin, Precious Bane: Collins and the Miltonic Legacy (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1977), pp. 67–75. In Sec. 2 above I use the term “daemonic” in Harold Bloom's sense; see esp. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 99–112.

11. Rubenstein finds here a representation of the uterus (see p. 178).

12. See the second section of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle for the fort Ida (gone/here) interplay.

13. S⊘ren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1941), p. 26.

14. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in Shelley's Prose Works, ed. Harry Buxton Forman, 4 vols. (London: Reeves and Turner, 1880), iii, 137.

15. See Geoffrey Hartman, “The Voice of the Shuttle: Language from the Point of View of Literature,” in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 337–55.

16. See Christopher Small, Ariel like a Harpy: Shelley, Mary and Frankenstein (London: Gollancz, 1972); Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1974); and Peter Dale Scott, “Vital Artifice: Mary, Percy, and the Psychopolitical Integrity of Frankenstein,” in The Endurance of Frankenstein, pp. 172–202.

17. Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), p. 156.