the romance, the double, the psyche

Although Frankenstein is constructed from many of the basic elements of the romantic novel, Mary Shelly seems to have raised her ‘ghost story’ (1) well above the level of mere occasional entertainment for which it was intended. Her importation of mythical strains and psychological insights which, however inchoate or unconsciously expressed, leave the novel still speaking meaningfully and tantalisingly to us today, long after serious interest in most supernatural horrors and Italianate castle-wanderings has faded.

The notion that her achievement is somewhat ‘accidental’ is suggested by the fact that the standard elements of romanticism are used in such a haphazard fashion. Some of them contribute to the strengths of the story, whilst others create its major weakness. But what elevates the novel, quite apart from its sheer narrative vigour, is the expression she gives to features of the conscious and the unconscious mind which lie deep beneath the surface of the story.

The most obvious of the standard elements of romanticism are The Romantic Hero, Nature, Sentiment, The Macabre, and Death. Frankenstein doesn’t have just one romantic hero – it has three. And yet this triplication is well enough controlled to constitute a strength in the narrative rather than a double redundancy. First there is the outer narrator – Walton, a self-educated and ambitious man, a disappointed poet who has inured himself to great hardship in order to undertake a dangerous journey of exploration. He feels solitary, lonely, and yearns for a friend, declaring to Frankenstein his ‘thirst for a more intimate sympathy with a fellow mind’. His declaration falls on fertile ground, since Frankenstein has had a close friend (Clerval) but lost him – one of the many ironic parallels and reversals in the novel.

Frankenstein himself is of course the central romantic hero – another intelligent and well-educated man who, out of noble if dangerous ambition to act in a God-like manner – creating life – brings misery, isolation, and eventually death upon himself and others.

We tend to forget Walton for most of the narrative, but the third hero is present from his ‘birth’ onwards in almost symbiotic relation to his creator. And the Monster is quite pointedly similar to the other two. He is sensitive and well-educated, and initially well disposed towards his fellow men. But he too feels a painful yearning for a ‘friend’ – in his case a mate – and because Frankenstein has both made him repulsive to other humans and refused to create a female companion for him, the Monster feels doubly excluded: ‘I am solitary and abhorred’. His acts of revenge set him eternally apart from society, and although we know that he still entertains high aspirations and delicate sentiments, his tragedy is to be doomed and self-destructive – just like his creator.

These three figures share in varying degrees one of the standard requisites of the romantic hero – an unfulfilled or incomplete relationship with the opposite sex. Walton is a twenty-eight year old bachelor whose only contact with women is that via correspondence with his ‘beloved sister’ – the chaste version of this phenomenon.

Frankenstein on the surface seems to be more healthy. He has an enthusiastic regard for Elizabeth, his ‘more than sister’ – the blue-eyed, high-born orphan who in the earlier version of the story was his cousin (2). But it is significant that Frankenstein puts a long delay on his marriage to Elizabeth, he never consummates it, and as Robert Kiely rather wittily points out, if Frankenstein labours for two years trying to create life ‘we may wonder why he does not marry Elizabeth and, with her co-operation, finish the job more quickly and pleasurably’ (3)

The monster is the more pitiable case. He longs quite explicitly for a mate with whom he can reproduce his own kind, but he too comes no closer to a sexual connection with Woman than the typically romantic union-through-death when he murders Elizabeth.

Another common feature of the romantic hero is shared by Walton, Frankenstein, and the Monster. All of them are powerful egoists who claim that their sensitivity and suffering is greater than that of others. Walton claims that he is different from ordinary mortals because of his solitary self-education, but he puts it in typically self-aggrandising form: ‘I have thought more, and … my day dreams are more extended and magnificent’.

Frankenstein takes this sort of claim merely as a starting point for himself. As soon as his troubles get under way he frequently claims to be the most accursed and tormented of all mortals. When Justine is about to be hung (for a crime for which he is indirectly responsible) he suggests that his pain is greater than hers:

The tortures of the accused did not equal mine; she was sustained by innocence, but the fangs of remorse tore my bosom, and would not forgo their hold.

Egomania reaches a high point in Frankenstein, but it is outstripped by the Monster in the soliloquy on his creator’s death: ‘He suffered not … the ten thousandth portion of the anguish that was mine’ and ‘Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine’.

It is the interplay, the correspondences, and the conflicts between these three typically romantic heroes which gives the novel so much of its richness. The romantic mise en scène on the other hand tends to be rather commonplace except where Mary Shelley has the confidence to exaggerate it as a form of dramatic heightening. The Rousseauesque location of Geneva in which Frankenstein is raised seems nothing more than a conventional background, and the rural idyll of de Lacey’s cottage and its surroundings where the Monster is educated is somewhat schematic, a setting dictated by the notion of ‘natural man’ being expounded at that point in the story.

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Notes

1. Mary Shelley’s own introduction to the novel. Oxford University Press edition (2011) which reprints the 1831 text. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

2. James Rieger (ed), Frankenstein, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974, which reprints the 1818 text.

3. Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England, Harvard University Press, 1972.

4. Kiely gives an account of this reading, combining it with the Frankenstein/Shelly as Prometheus reading.

Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy, London: Gollancz, 1972, which also covers exhaustively the biographical readings of the novel.

6. Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self, New York: New York University Press, 1969.

7. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, London: Hogarth Press, 1962. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

8. Cited in David Punter, The Literature of Terror, London: Longman, 1980.

© Roy Johnson 2011

Frankenstein – study resources

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Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon UK

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Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon UK

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Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon UK

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the romance, the double, the psyche

The level of romantic conventionality dips even lower however in those passages which are not much more than a travelogue along the Rhine and through England to the Orkneys. This is perhaps the weakest point in the whole novel: there is almost no thematic connection between these travels and the plot: they stand out as fairly clearly descriptions for their own sakes, inserted to fit the conventions and as reflections of Mary Shelley’s own travels.

Where she succeeds magnificently in exploiting romantic topography is in those passages where she is prepared to heighten and exaggerate. Some of the most vivid scenes in the novel are set in the glacial wastes of the Arctic:

the ice began to move, and roarings like thunder were heard at a distance, as the islands split and cracked in every direction

This may have been achieved with the help of Coleridge, but she has the inventiveness and the eye for symmetrical composition to cast the other important confrontation (between Frankenstein and the Monster) in a similar setting – on the Mer de Glace:

The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits hung over its recesses. Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds

Some of the other romantic elements of the novel are similarly ‘mixed’ in the effectiveness of their contribution to it. Sentiment in the novel is couched in conventional terms of high-pitched emotions, crying, fainting, and illnesses. Walton’s early letters establish the tone of excitation as he sets out on his northern exploration: ‘It is impossible to communicate to you a conception of the trembling sensation, half pleasurable and half fearful, with which I am preparing to depart’, and as soon as Frankenstein boards the ship he brings with him emotions set an even higher level of fevered anguish:

tears trickle[d] fast between his fingers, – a groan burst from his heaving breast … the paroxysm of grief that had seized the stranger overcame his weakened powers, and many hours of repose and tranquil conversation were necessary to restore his composure’

Frankenstein falls ill on more than one occasion – after the creation of his Monster, and following the death of Clerval.There is a fairly conventional longing for death and contemplation of suicide, and much of the action is forwarded in a state of nervous excitation: ‘My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance, but then a resistless, and almost frantic, impulse, urges me forward’.

Even the Monster is pray to this use of Sentiment. Sometimes his feelings are justified: he weeps with sadness when he realises that he has been excluded from society. At other he joins the convention of sympathetic tears – contemplating the lot of the American Indians at the hands of the Europeans, ‘noble savages’ like himself. And he too comes almost unaided to the romantic conclusion that the only escape from the pain he suffers will be in death.

There is also no shortage of the conventional macabre. Mary Shelley follows the Romantic-Gothic formulas here. Frankenstein makes his studies at the outer limits of ‘anatomy’: ‘I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body’ and he assembles his Monster from unconventional ‘materials’:

I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay … I collected bones from charnel-houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame.

Children and beautiful young women are murdered, an innocent girl is hanged, and the Monster, as one would expect, is frighteningly horrible. But it is to Mary Shelley’s credit that she does not overdo this aspect of the narrative: in fact there is perhaps less of the macabre than one might expect in a tale of this kind, which is possibly one further reason for us still taking it seriously almost two hundred years after it was written.

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Notes

1. Mary Shelley’s own introduction to the novel. Oxford University Press edition (2011) which reprints the 1831 text. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

2. James Rieger (ed), Frankenstein, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974, which reprints the 1818 text.

3. Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England, Harvard University Press, 1972.

4. Kiely gives an account of this reading, combining it with the Frankenstein/Shelly as Prometheus reading.

Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy, London: Gollancz, 1972, which also covers exhaustively the biographical readings of the novel.

6. Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self, New York: New York University Press, 1969.

7. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, London: Hogarth Press, 1962. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

8. Cited in David Punter, The Literature of Terror, London: Longman, 1980.

© Roy Johnson 2011

Frankenstein – study resources

Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

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Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon UK

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Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon UK

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the romance, the double, the psyche

Death too, as a convention, is observed without being too much exaggerated, even though there are a total of eight deaths in the story. Frankenstein’s mother dies of scarlet fever. Then the Monster murders William, Clerval, and Elizabeth: these are the most obviously dramatic and gruesome. The other deaths appear to follow as natural consequences: Justine’s execution (an injustice of society); the destruction of the female Monster (a ‘necessity’); Adolphe Frankenstein (grief at the sad progression of events); and Victor Frankenstein (terminal exhaustion in pursuit of the Monster). But there are sufficient hints in the text concerning responsibility for these deaths to indicate a possible interpretation of it.

The novel then contains many of the basic elements of the romantic novel and the Gothic horror story, but they are mixed in such a rich and densely patterned manner that a variety of readings are possible. The common interpretations are usually based upon either biographical evidence drawn from the life of Mary Shelley and her husband (4) or upon Promethean readings which the sub-title invites, the Faust legend, or the Satan-and-Adam possibilities which are suggested by the literary experience which both the Shelleys and Frankenstein and his Monster share in their readings of Milton (5).

There is also an interpretation which takes the novel as a critique of Godwin, Mary Shelley’s father, a cautionary tale on scientific experimentation (that is, the pursuit of pure reason) taken to extremes. This seems to be supported by Frankenstein’s own words to Walton: ‘Do you share my madness? Have you drank also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me … and you will dash the cup from your lips!’. But this possibility is undermined by the remarks which conclude his tale: ‘Yet why do I say [all] this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes [of scientific discovery] yet another may succeed’. There is also the possibility of seeing the novel as a cautionary ‘punishment of the outsider or the man who has gone too far’, with Walton as the man who turns back and lives to tell the story. But these seem rather hard on the Monster and leave the complexities of relations between Frankenstein and his monster unexamined.

What then is to be made of this curious relationship, along with the astonishing number of parallels, echoes, and inversions which surround it. A reading of the novel as an exploration of the Double or Doppelganger theme may well be supported with the observation that Mary Shelley dedicated the novel to her father, the author of Caleb Williams, one of the first novels to examine this notion.

Both Frankenstein and the Monster are very similar: they complement each other, exchange roles, and perform similar acts – whilst all the time seeming to be in violent opposition to each other. Both are intelligent and well educated, and both start out with the impulse to be good – Frankenstein as a dutiful son, and the Monster in his efforts to help the de Lacey family. Yet both end up as murderers, haunted and hunted by each other.

The Monster kills William, Clerval, and Elizabeth. Frankenstein feels himself (with some justification) responsible for these murders: ‘I not in deed, but in effect, was the true murderer’. And he is indirectly responsible for four other deaths: Justine is hanged because he keeps silent about his own creation; Adolphe Frankenstein dies broken by ‘the horrors that were accumulated around him’ – all of which are ultimately attributable to his son; the female Monster is destroyed by Frankenstein: ‘I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being’; and ultimately Frankenstein kills himself in his relentless pursuit of the Monster.

Just as Frankenstein curses the Monster almost as soon as he has finished making him, spurning his own creation (his ‘son’) so the Monster ends by cursing him, quite conscious that their respective roles have been reversed: ‘Slave … you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension. Remember that I have power … You are my creator, but I am your master – obey!’. There are other similar reversals in their individual destinies. Frankenstein, who sets out to create life, ends by destroying it. And the Monster, who ‘ought to be [Frankenstein’s] Adam … am rather the fallen Angel!’.

The Monster starts out hunting Frankenstein with revenge as his motive, but then it is finally Frankenstein who becomes the hunter, pursuing the Monster with the same motive – with the additional ironic twist that the Monster leaves ‘clues’ to his whereabouts, as if luring Frankenstein to his death. And just as Frankenstein does die as a result of this mad pursuit, the Monster vows that he will go out the same way: ‘I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame’. Both find rest only in death.

There are many other instances where they repeat, echo, or reflect each other – either directly or in mirror-inversion. Frankenstein is slight, ‘gentle’ with ‘fine and lovely eyes’ but a feeble disposition: the Monster is eight feet tall, powerful, violent, with ‘watery eyes’. Even though the novel is one of the earliest examples, this is in the classic tradition of the Double story.

Frankenstein and his Monster are like contradictory parts of the same person. The Monster is the active, physical side of Frankenstein (the scholar) but also more obviously the ‘evil’ side. He performs acts almost on Frankenstein’s behalf (to carry out his subconscious wishes) daring to do what Frankenstein can not. As Masao Miyoshi has observed ‘The common error of calling the Monster ‘Frankenstein’ has considerable justification. He is the scientist’s divided self.’ (6)

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Notes

1. Mary Shelley’s own introduction to the novel. Oxford University Press edition (2011) which reprints the 1831 text. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

2. James Rieger (ed), Frankenstein, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974, which reprints the 1818 text.

3. Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England, Harvard University Press, 1972.

4. Kiely gives an account of this reading, combining it with the Frankenstein/Shelly as Prometheus reading.

Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy, London: Gollancz, 1972, which also covers exhaustively the biographical readings of the novel.

6. Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self, New York: New York University Press, 1969.

7. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, London: Hogarth Press, 1962. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

8. Cited in David Punter, The Literature of Terror, London: Longman, 1980.

© Roy Johnson 2011

Frankenstein – study resources

Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Frankenstein – 1994 Robert de Niro film – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – 1931 original film with Boris Karloff – Amazon UK

Young Frankenstein – 1974 Mel Brooks spoof – Amazon UK

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the romance, the double, the psyche

For all the apparent antipathy between the two, Frankenstein feels himself closely linked to this other self. Immediately after his act of creation Frankenstein takes flight from the Monster, but still feels under its influence: ‘I imagined that the monster seized me: I struggled furiously, and fell down in a fit’. His meetings with the Monster are significantly private: nobody else is present on the Mer de Glace, in the Orkneys, or in his wedding chamber (Elizabeth is dead). That is, these are not so much ‘meetings’ as communings between the two battling parts of the one Self.

And when Frankenstein finally decides to pursue the Monster he swears ‘to pursue the daemon who caused this misery until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict … Let the cursed and hellish monster drink deep of agony, let him feel the despair that now torments me’. This is a very suggestive ambiguity, for Frankenstein is himself the person who has caused (that is, created) all the misery; he is feeling despair and agony, both in his own Self and as the Monster; and he will perish in the conflict between his two Selves.

The results of the pursuit which takes place are couched in similar terms. After months of searching and three weeks traversing the Frozen Ocean, he has his first sighting of the Monster:

Oh! with what a burning gush did my hope revisit my heart! warm tears filled my eyes, which I hastily wiped away, that they might not intercept the view I had of the daemon; but still my sight was dimmed by the burning drops, until, giving way to emotions that oppressed me, I wept aloud.

Quite apart from the watery-eyed similarities between them, we might be forgiven for reading this as Frankenstein’s being glad to be reunited with his Monster, and in one sense he is, for only moments after dying on Walton’s ship the Monster takes his place in the cabin. The evil Self in Frankenstein has triumphed over his good Self and finally usurped it.

And one could push this reading further. Perhaps Frankenstein and his Monster can be seen as one and the same person – just like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dostoyevski’s Golyadkin and his Double, and Poe’s two William Wilsons. It is significant that Frankenstein repeatedly falls ill or disappears in some way at those junctures when evil is to be performed by the Monster. This reinforces the notion that the Monster is Frankenstein’s evil Self and adds the suggestive possibility that Frankenstein commits these acts himself, and has to invoke the Monster as a form of self-justification.

Frankenstein is ill for some time after the creation of the Monster, which gives it the opportunity to murder William. He is adrift in a boat (‘every thing was obscure’) and thinking of the possible murder of Clerval when his evil Self does the job for him. And he is conveniently absent from the bedroom when Elizabeth is murdered. In other words, fictional credibility for Frankenstein’s innocence is created whilst letting an apparently independent other Self commit the crimes.

But do Frankenstein and the Monster in fact exist independently? Almost not – for nobody else in the novel ever sees Frankenstein and the Monster together at the same time. The Monster appears to have an independent existence at the de Lacy cottage, but this whole episode is told to Frankenstein by the Monster during their interview on the Mer de Glace – at which nobody else is present.

That is, it could be seen as an invention of Frankenstein’s. He tells this tale to Walton in self-justification. He is riven by evil passions and in guilt over what these have led him to do, he has invented the fiction of an autonomous Monster to justify himself to the outside narrator.

But even if nobody else in the novel actually sees the Monster (there are only various ‘reports’ of his doings) surely Walton is a witness to its independent existence? Not really, Frankenstein gives up the ghost and dies on board. In Walton’s words ‘his voice became fainter … and his eyes closed forever’ [my emphasis]. This is almost immediately followed by ‘again there is the sound as of a human voice, but hoarser: it comes from the cabin where the remains of Frankenstein still lie’. The Monster and Frankenstein are one and the same person: the evil Self has merely triumphed over and replaced the good Self.

One could even argue that for good measure Mary Shelley has added a reflection of the good Self in the divided Frankenstein in the character of Clerval, a man who does no wrong and acts like a conscience to Frankenstein. As Frankenstein sinks morally in this story, he remarks that ‘In Clerval I saw the spirit of my former self’ and has to get rid of him in order to work on the creation of the female Monster, something about which he feels guilty.

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Notes

1. Mary Shelley’s own introduction to the novel. Oxford University Press edition (2011) which reprints the 1831 text. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

2. James Rieger (ed), Frankenstein, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974, which reprints the 1818 text.

3. Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England, Harvard University Press, 1972.

4. Kiely gives an account of this reading, combining it with the Frankenstein/Shelly as Prometheus reading.

Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy, London: Gollancz, 1972, which also covers exhaustively the biographical readings of the novel.

6. Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self, New York: New York University Press, 1969.

7. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, London: Hogarth Press, 1962. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

8. Cited in David Punter, The Literature of Terror, London: Longman, 1980.

© Roy Johnson 2011

Frankenstein – study resources

Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Frankenstein – 1994 Robert de Niro film – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – 1931 original film with Boris Karloff – Amazon UK

Young Frankenstein – 1974 Mel Brooks spoof – Amazon UK

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the romance, the double, the psyche

However, the Frankenstein-Clerval-Monster conjunction immediately suggests yet another step in this interpretation – a reading of the novel based on the classical Freudian trinity of the Ego, the Super-Ego, and the Id as the structure of human consciousness itself. It is certainly not difficult to see that the three characters correspond closely to the three Freudian categories.

Both Clerval and Frankenstein’s father act as representatives of the Super-Ego. Indeed Freud’s view is that the father is the origin of an individual’s Super-Ego. The two characters are present as a reminder to Frankenstein of what is good, proper, and socially desirable. Frankenstein himself represents the Ego – the pursuer of his own wishes and ends, the experimenter who uses reason even whilst feeling guilty about it. Freud defines his concept in just these terms: ‘The ego represents what may be called reason … in contrast to the id, which contains the passions’ (7). The Monster, as Id, certainly contains passions – the often irrational, unconscious urges fuelled by libidinal energy which are essentially amoral, but which it should be noted can be just as easily the source of good impulse as bad ones.

Freud’s basic notion is that these three components of consciousness represent different types of morality which are in potential conflict with each other:

From the point of view of instinctual control, of morality, it may be said of the id that it is totally non-moral, of the ego that it strives to be moral, and of the super-ego that it can be super-moral and then become as cruel as only the id can be.

In this Freudian reading, the novel expresses the tragedy of conflicts within an individual consciousness. Frankenstein is riven by the competing forces of his social conscience (his Super-Ego), his conscious desires (his Ego), and his unconscious wishes (his Id). It will not be difficult (bearing in mind the Double reading) to demonstrate the competition between Frankenstein and the Monster as dramatic representations of the Ego-Id conflict – but first it is necessary to produce a reason, or an origin for the essential divisions which break Frankenstein apart.

The simplest explanation seems to be straightforward Oedipal rivalry coupled with sexual fear and guilt. To begin with, Frankenstein’s father is considerably older than his mother – a man of ‘upright mind’ [my emphasis] ‘who had filled several public situations with honour and reputation. One does not need to labour the point that Adolphe Frankenstein represents throughout the novel a public rectitude and standard of correctness from which his son steadily falls. Moreover, his father repeatedly urges marriage upon him – something which Victor fears. And if the son has sufficient reason to feel rivalry with him for the attention of the younger mother, he has later even further evidence of his father’s sexual potency with the arrival of two younger brothers – Ernest and William.

But his parents wanted a daughter as well, so one is supplied by the adoption of Elizabeth – the sister/cousin figure on whom Frankenstein’s sexual fears and desires are ultimately focussed. She becomes a central source of anxiety for him: he is attracted to her, but takes great pains to avoid and then put off marriage to her – a marriage which his mother wished for on her death bed.

Thus one does not have to go far in search of the origin of Frankenstein’s psychological conflicts, or his mental association of sex and death. The object of his unconscious sexual desire (his mother) is removed before he can transfer it as a conscious desire onto someone else (Elizabeth). Moreover, his mother’s death from scarlet fever was contracted from Elizabeth herself. She has ‘killed’ the object of Frankenstein’s desire – and will ultimately die herself as a result.

Frankenstein therefore has subconscious reasons for every one of the murders which follow – even the most shocking and paradoxical. In William’s case it is sibling rivalry and the fact that the boy is a reminder to Frankenstein of his father’s sexual potency. Both Adolph Frankenstein and Clerval are Super-Ego figures, constant reminders of what is correct social behaviour. It is Elizabeth’s case which is most complex: at one level she represents the threat of sexuality which Frankenstein fears, at another she is an object of forbidden desire (as his sister/cousin), and at a third she is the ‘murderer’ of his mother.

The progress of Frankenstein’s psychological tragedy thus runs as follows. Following the death of his mother by a disease caught from his fiance, Frankenstein leaves home, his father, Clerval, William, and Elizabeth – all of whom are to die. Knowing that neglect of his friends and family is wrong and that his father would disapprove, he ‘creates life’ on his own. It is not difficult to see the Monster as an image of Frankenstein’s secret sexuality: ‘it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs’ – especially when the description of the Monster itself is suggestively close to what might be the implement of Frankenstein’s sexuality, complete with its appurtenances and products:

Beautiful! – Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath: his hair was of lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness.

The Monster is thus simultaneously a phallic image, a representation of Frankenstein’s conscious sexual guilt and fear, and an embodiment of his Id – the unconscious irrational impulses, the amoral libido-fuelled forces which can act either for good (creation) or evil (destruction and death).

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Notes

1. Mary Shelley’s own introduction to the novel. Oxford University Press edition (2011) which reprints the 1831 text. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

2. James Rieger (ed), Frankenstein, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974, which reprints the 1818 text.

3. Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England, Harvard University Press, 1972.

4. Kiely gives an account of this reading, combining it with the Frankenstein/Shelly as Prometheus reading.

Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy, London: Gollancz, 1972, which also covers exhaustively the biographical readings of the novel.

6. Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self, New York: New York University Press, 1969.

7. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, London: Hogarth Press, 1962. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

8. Cited in David Punter, The Literature of Terror, London: Longman, 1980.

© Roy Johnson 2011

Frankenstein – study resources

Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Frankenstein – 1994 Robert de Niro film – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – 1931 original film with Boris Karloff – Amazon UK

Young Frankenstein – 1974 Mel Brooks spoof – Amazon UK

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the romance, the double, the psyche

Immediately the Monster has been created, Frankenstein falls into a guilt-induced dream which wonderfully combines all his sexual anxieties – conscious and unconscious:

I saw Elizabeth in the bloom of health … 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.

Here we have his desire for Elizabeth, his vision of her as a source of disease, the association of disease and death with sexuality, his notion of Elizabeth as his mother’s killer, and the Oedipal desire for his mother herself – all in one brief tableau.

The dream is so disturbing that Frankenstein awakes – and is described in almost exactly the same terms as the Monster – ‘a cold dew covered my forehead … and every limb became convulsed’ – whereupon the Monster appears to him – ‘He held up the curtain of the bed … and his eyes were fixed on me’ which is another stunning image of the Monster as Frankenstein’s sexual guilt. One notes that it is then Frankenstein who runs away from the Monster – that is, releases it to perform his unconscious wishes. Frankenstein himself falls ill, and is nursed back to health, back to social normality by his ‘conscience’, his Super-Ego figure, Clerval.

The id-Monster is now at liberty as an amoral force, but with explicitly sexual impulses. Since he is ugly (which is Frankenstein’s notion of sexuality) and knows he will never be loved by a woman, it is a mate he requires of Frankenstein: ‘I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself’. He also knows that if this ‘passion’ is not gratified it will turn from a desire for ‘the interchange of … sympathies’ into a wanton destructiveness. That is, the unconscious libidinous impulses of Frankenstein’s he represents will, if not properly gratified, turn from positive creative ones into something negative and destructive.

Following his illness, Frankenstein receives a letter from Elizabeth telling him that his father’s health is still ‘vigorous’ that another daughter-figure (Justine) has been adopted by the family, and that William is ‘tall of his age, with sweet laughing blue eyes’ ans ‘already one or two little wives‘ [her emphasis]. As if that wasn’t enough, she concludes with a list of local marriages as a hint to Frankenstein. The communication is almost a catalogue of his worst psychological fears.

There follows the murder of William – the removal of Frankenstein’s sibling rival, and the accusation of Justine who is convicted on the evidence of possessing a portrait of Frankenstein’s mother. Here is an interesting case of psychological transference. Frankenstein would ideally remove Elizabeth, but the similarly adopted daughter is substituted. Justine is killed in the same way that Elizabeth will be (by strangulation) and Frankenstein is responsible for her death: he leaves the court in a hurry when he might have revealed who the true killer was – his own Id.

The battle between Frankenstein’s Ego and Id then moves into its next phase. The Id has been released: it even justifies the nature of its claim during the interview on the Mer de Glace. Frankenstein at first agrees to create a female Monster, but before he can do so he has to fight against further counsel from the Super-Ego. His father suggests that he should waste no more time and marry Elizabeth. Frankenstein’s reaction is telling: ‘to me the idea of an immediate union with my Elizabeth was one of horror and dismay’. He takes flight from this threat by travel abroad – knowing that marriage awaits immediately on return. Another representative of his Super-Ego (Clerval) travels with him – ‘how great was the contrast between us’ – but is shaken off (despite his entreaties) in Scotland – so that Frankenstein can again do his work in secret.

The psychological battle within Frankenstein now rises to its peak. Freud summarises the process in these terms:

we see this same ego as a poor creature owing service to three masters and consequently menaced by three dangers: from the external world, from the libido of the id, and from the severity of the super-ego’

He knows that he is doing wrong in performing further experiments, and he also fears the consequences – for sexual reasons: ‘one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children’. It is easy to see how Frankenstein (himself afraid of sexuality and procreation) feels threatened by the creative potential of the id-Monster.

He refuses to create a mate for the Monster, who then turns his libidinous energy into a negative direction. And even this is expressed in directly sexual terms: ‘I shall be with you on your wedding night’. This will undoubtedly be the climax of their struggle in more senses than one.

The Id is now gaining ascendency over the Ego, but before its power can become effective the Super-Ego’s hold must be weakened. Clerval, as its closest representative, is murdered, after which Frankenstein falls into another two month swoon, exhausted by the psychic conflict taking place within himself. During the swoon he raves ‘I called myself the murderer of William, of Justine, and of Clerval’. One notes how well the Double and the Freudian interpretation of the narrative dovetail at this point.

Following Frankenstein’s rescue by his father (a late rallying of the Super-Ego) he can put off his marriage no longer: ‘My father … talked of … Elizabeth … but these words only drew deep groans from me’. But his Ego cannot face the sexual consequence of the marriage: the Id takes his place instead, but having now become a permanently negative force the result is that combination of sexuality and death which the Id represents. The Ego politely leaves the bed chamber to let the Id do its work, the outcome of which is represented in unmistakably sexual terms:

she was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair.

Only now that she is dead is Frankenstein able to embrace her ‘with ardour’ – just as he embraced his dead mother in the dream – before seeing the Monster grinning and pointing at the corpse. The scene as an image of Frankenstein’s fear of sexuality is quite clear. And the Id is now triumphing over the Ego. As Freud puts it:

Eros and the death instinct struggle within [the id] … It would be possible to picture the id as under the domination of the mute but powerful death instinct, which desire to be at peace and (prompted by the pleasure principle) to put Eros, the mischief-maker, to rest.

The battle appears to be over, but there is one further stage to go. The forces of the Super-Ego have their representative on hand. Immediately after recovering from his second swoon of the night, Frankenstein invokes the murder of his father, who ‘might even now be writhing under [the Monster’s] grasp. That is, the Super-Ego’s last hold must be shaken off. And it is: Adolphe Frankenstein dies on the next page – in his son’s arms.

The Id has finally triumphed. The amoral forces which contain that element of sexual desire which Frankenstein fears have been thwarted in finding their natural outlet and have simply become destructive. Detached completely, and freed from the possibly compensating influence of the Super-Ego, they go on to destroy the Ego itself. Frankenstein is lured into the mad pursuit across the northern wastes and ends up dead, leaving the Id-Monster to continue on his own journey in the same direction of utter negation:

I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames.

In both the Double and the Freudian readings of the novel, it is the Monster who triumphs in the end. The force of evil in Frankenstein overcomes the force of good; the irrational impulses of the unconscious trample over conscious desire and social conditioning. Seen in this sense, the novel is a cautionary tale, recommending that these anarchic and irresponsible forces should be recognised within the individual. After all, if they are not recognised they will be left free (as the Monster is) to do whatever evil they wish. Frankenstein’s tragedy is that his sexual fears and guilt, and his unconsciously evil impulses are repressed – that is, transferred onto the Monster – when he ought to have recognised them in himself. Karl Mannheim has argued that the romantic tried to rescue ‘repressed irrational forces [and] espoused their cause’ (8) – and in the light of similar tales written (Poe’s, Dostoyevski’s, and Stevenson’s heroes too are all overthrown by their psychological doubles) there seems no good reason why a psycho-analytic reading which claims Frankenstein as an expression of conflict within the individual psyche should not be added to the long list of possible readings. The only mystery remaining, at which we might marvel, is how this wonderful tale came to be written by a young woman barely out of her teens.

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Notes

1. Mary Shelley’s own introduction to the novel. Oxford University Press edition (2011) which reprints the 1831 text. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

2. James Rieger (ed), Frankenstein, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974, which reprints the 1818 text.

3. Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England, Harvard University Press, 1972.

4. Kiely gives an account of this reading, combining it with the Frankenstein/Shelly as Prometheus reading.

Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy, London: Gollancz, 1972, which also covers exhaustively the biographical readings of the novel.

6. Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self, New York: New York University Press, 1969.

7. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, London: Hogarth Press, 1962. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

8. Cited in David Punter, The Literature of Terror, London: Longman, 1980.

© Roy Johnson 2011

Frankenstein – study resources

Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Frankenstein – 1994 Robert de Niro film – Amazon UK

Frankenstein – 1931 original film with Boris Karloff – Amazon UK

Young Frankenstein – 1974 Mel Brooks spoof – Amazon UK

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