A Reading of Frankenstein as the Complaint of a Political Wife

Colby Quarterly, Dec 1976

By Judith Weissman, Published on 12/01/76

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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 - 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 171 172 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)


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Judith Weissman. A Reading of Frankenstein as the Complaint of a Political Wife, Colby Quarterly, 1976, Volume 12, Issue 4,