A Reading of Frankenstein as the Complaint of a Political Wife
A Reading of Frankenstein as the Complaint of a Political Wife
Judith Weissman
Recommended Citation
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A Reading o f Frankenstein
as the Complaint of a Political Wife
by JUDITH WEISSMAN
ANY TWENTIETH CENTURY horror movies, as we all know, are
M metaphorical warnings about some political danger, usually com
munism. The makers of movies like The Green Slime and It Conquered
the World certainly know what they are doing as they disguise the
political idea as some kind of monster that destroys men or takes over
their minds, and apparently they feel no guilt or ambivalence about their
villains. Frankenstein, the ancestor of all the stories of mad scientists
and their monstrous creations which have haunted us since the beginning
of the nineteenth century, can also be seen as a disguised political warn
ing. Mary Shelley, the daughter of one radical man and the wife of
another, who adored and was influenced by both,l was certainly no
cynical right-wing propagandist; but her book nevertheless suggests a
distinct, though perhaps unconscious, unhappiness with the revolution
ary politics of her husband and his political predecessors.
Many critics have pointed out that Victor Frankenstein resembles
Percy Shelley, and Christopher Small has studied the similarities ~x
haustively, even noticing such details as that Victor was a youthful
pseudonym of Shelley's and that Elizabeth is the name of both Franken
stein's adopted sister and Shelley's favorite sister;2 but no one has really
discussed the hostility, on Mary's part, which is implied in the resem
blance. Mary makes Frankenstein moody, wild, delicate, excessively
sensitive, and enthusiastic, as Shelley is supposed to have been. Franken
stein even describes himself with one of Shelley's favorite images for
himself, the wounded fawn: "the wounded deer dragging its fainting
limbs to some untrodden brake there to gaze upon the arrow which had
pierced it, and to die-was but a type of me."3
Even more significant and striking than the general similarities in
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temperament between Shelley and Frankenstein are their similarities as
scientists. Frankenstein tells Walton about his childhood fascination
with magic and the writings of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and AI
bertus Magnus: "under the guidance of my new preceptors, I entered
with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher's stone and
the elixir of life; but the latter soon obtained my undivided attention.
Wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the dis
covery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man
invulnerable to any but a violent death" (p. 40). He says that he was
also fascinated with the power of electricity and with necromancy: "the
raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my
favourite authors, the fulfillment of which I most eagerly sought; and if
my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather
to my own inexperience and mistake, than to a want of skill or fidelity
in my instructors" (p. 40). Frankenstein's descriptions of himself are
practically a paraphrase of Thomas Jefferson Hogg's descriptions of
Shelley:
He [Shelley] was passionately attached to the study of what used to be called the
occult sciences, conjointly with that of the new wonders, which chemistry and
natural philosophy have displayed to us. His pocket money was spent in the pur
chase of books relative to these darling pursuits-of chemical apparatus and
materials. The books consisted of treatises on magic and witchcraft, as well as
those more modern ones detailing the miracles of electricity and galvanism. Some
times he watched the livelong night for ghosts. At his father's house, where his
influence was, of course, great among the dependants, he even planned how he
might get admission to the vault, or charnel house, at Warnham Church, and
might sit there all night, harrowed by fear, yet trembling with expectation, to see
one of the spiritualised owners of the bones piled around him.... No ghost ap
peared, but for the credit of glamour-books, he did not doubt that the incantation
failed from some mistake of his own.4
After a period of disillusionment with science, Frankenstein, as he
tells Walton, regained his interest in it at the University of Ingolstadt,
where he discovered that being a modern scientist did not mean giving
up the grandiose dreams of the ancient occult philosophers. Christopher
Small suggests the political and philosophical significance of the place
where this change occurs in Frankenstein when he observes that "Ingol
stadt ... was the university where the revolutionary secret society of the
Illuminati, a romantic conspiracy which exercised a strong fascination
upon Shelley especially, was formed in 1776."5 It was there, after two
years of ceaseless study and labor, that Frankenstein discovered the
secret of life which enabled him to create a living being, a being which
he hoped would be a blessing t (...truncated)