Now more commonly associated with the stand-alone Gothic genre, the 1818 version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was written during the Romantic Era and a period of social unrest in Europe, making it a work of Gothic or Dark Romanticism. Still shadowed by the influence of the French Revolution, revolutionary and anti-revolutionary thought in Britain was made more prominent by the pamphlet debates between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, who respectively advocated for conservatism and liberalism, taking place only decades before Frankenstein’s conception. Transculturally, the idea of the monstrous has been seen as a subconscious reflection of that which we fear most in ourselves as well as our repressed desires. In many ways, the monster in Frankenstein can be seen as a representation of the anxieties of conservative England towards revolutionary movement influenced by the ideals of the Enlightenment but in her depiction of Frankenstein’s own societal and moral transgressions, Shelley illuminates in Frankenstein an equal embodiment of conservative fears and anxieties.
Through its marginality and the oppositional relationship between himself and Frankenstein who belongs to the middle class, the monster can very easily be seen as representative of the working class with his monstrosity rooted in his dissatisfaction with his status. Franco Moretti argues that in wishing “only to have the rights of citizenship amongst men” what the monster demands of Frankenstein is inherently “reformist”, emulating the behaviour of a previously repressed class in society demanding equality.1 This is supported by Shelley’s characterisation of the monster which suggests his social inferiority and the desire to match those he views as his superiors. From the outset, the figure of the monster is not a figment of Victor’s imagination but an amalgamation of suggestively criminal, working class corpses. Not only is he composed of bodies viewed by the Victorian middle class as inherently immoral and depraved, furthered by Shelley’s repetition of “wretch”, an adjective with explicitly working class connotations to describe him, he demands the right to mate, which could be seen as indicative of a desire for social reform through wider rights.2 This alongside his unnaturally large stature which presents him as more threatening portrays him as representative of a mobilised mass of people, symbolising the disenfranchisement and shunning of the working class by the ruling class who determine their lives. Because his destructive behaviour is propelled by his desire for companionship, the result of his indirect social education at the hands of the Delacey family, Shelley positions the social education of the lower classes as possibly dangerous to societal stability, reflecting a fear of working class upheaval through the monster’s mobilisation of his social knowledge into action.
This is furthered by the monster’s eloquence in his narration of events which, representative of an intellect perhaps rivalling Frankenstein’s own, could symbolise the surpassing of the middle class by a newly politicised class. Because the monster’s resentment for mankind is triggered by the self-awareness that comes with education, through the conflation of working class education with societal destruction, the monster can be seen as reflecting the anxiety of the ruling class towards societal upheaval by a suppressed class.
Further, the complicated portrayal of the monster could embody contemporary Victorian discomfort with the humanity of that which was viewed as ‘Other’. While Frankenstein neglects his family, friends and self in pursuit of his passion, the monster yearns for a sociality in the form of a female mate, demanding Frankenstein to “create a female for me, with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being… I demand it of you as a right which you must not refuse” (p. 101). To convince Frankenstein into compassion, the monster explains:
My companion will be of the same nature as myself, and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves: the sun will shine on us as on man, and will ripen our food. The picture I present to you is peaceful and human and you must feel that you could deny it only in the wantonness of power and cruelty (Frankenstein, p. 103.)
By creating a complete narrative for his prospective female companion and describing it as “reasonable and moderate” the monster both demonstrates an ability to reason and emulates the patriarchal subjugation of female bodies to male will prevalent in Victorian human society (p. 102). This denial of female autonomy even before conception positions him as a very human figure by recreating patriarchy in monstrosity, only highlighted by the glaring absence of patriarchal thought in Frankenstein. The monster’s desire for women or at least a female companion, furthered by the suggestion of his rape of Elizabeth before murdering her, implies through this desire for romantic success more social humanity in him than in his human creator. Through his desire for a female mate and eloquence rivalling other humans, Shelley suggests that the monster could be more human in principles and desires than Frankenstein himself, transgressing the stereotypical behaviour of the seemingly riotous working class. By depicting Frankenstein and the monster as the inverse of each other, Shelley perhaps reflects contemporary conservative fears of the humanisation of the working class, threatening to middle class respectability and societal prosperity through its disturbance of the middle class’s hegemonic claim on morality and intellect.
However, Frankenstein himself can also be seen as the embodiment of the conservative Victorian society’s anxiety towards Romanticism. His ambition is symbolic of the perception of Romanticism’s effect on the family and social cohesion, with the deaths of William Frankenstein, Henry Clerval and Elizabeth representing the erosion of traditional values at the hands of individualism. Elizabeth’s marginal presence in the book demonstrates a traditional course of life; not only is she dutiful in manner by adopting the maternal role following the death of Frankenstein’s mother, her predominantly epistolary existence in the novel emphasises her humility, fulfilling the role of the idealised middle class woman of nineteenth century conduct books. Frankenstein notes that “I never beheld her so enchanting as at this time, when she was continually endeavouring to contribute to the happiness of others, entirely forgetful of herself” (p. 26). In his pedestal-like admiration of her self-sacrifice Frankenstein imposes a male gaze on Elizabeth, foreshadowing a traditional patriarchal family unit. However, this prediction of the functional nuclear family is destabilised by his ‘perverse’ desire for science which is both self-alienating and socially depriving, culminating in the symbolic death of the family through Elizabeth’s death which is furthered by the suggested failure to consummate their marriage. His research which he undertakes with “unremitting ardour” and “unrelaxed and breathless eagerness” usurps his ‘natural’ love for a romantic female partner, acting additionally as a romantic pursuit rather than a solely intellectual one. By narrating the story through the privileging of Frankenstein’s perspective and the marginalisation of Elizabeth’s, Shelley demonstrates the domineering will of men to focus on themselves at the detriment of others, suggesting that excessive desire for self improvement is destructive to wider society. This privileging of science over a mate, demonstrates a rejection of traditionalism, embodying possible conservative fears of the destruction of social cohesion and the family through individualism.
Not only does Frankenstein displace the family’s significance in society in his pursuit of science, he also obscures the boundary between the middle and the working classes by delving into an almost criminal underworld in his association with presumably criminal working class bodies. Shelley demonstrates this through the vivid sensory descriptions of Frankenstein’s exploits in graves and the process of merging the bodies together to create one being:
Darkness had no effect upon my fancy; and a churchyard was merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel houses… I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. (Frankenstein, p. 31.)
Through the morbid and macabre details, Shelley demonstrates Frankenstein’s grotesque obsession with overturning nature, emphasised by the juxtaposition of life and death through repetition of underground worms mingling with the human body. By employing imagery of death and decay, Shelley highlights the transgressive nature of Frankenstein’s work, creating a semantic field of secrecy and depravity, with the excessive punctuation mimicking his enthusiasm for this transgression. At a later point in his narration, Frankenstein also tells of how he “disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame” (34). Shelley’s choice of the verb ‘disturbed’ is particularly resonant for the theme of transgression and transcending nature in its implications of tampering unnecessarily with something, most likely yielding negative results. This is furthered by his infiltration into prison, deemed a working class sphere, as an unanticipated consequence of his exploits. Shelley depicts the unsavoury nature of this environment through Frankenstein’s perception of the people there which reveals his class prejudices. While Frankenstein perceives the nurse’s countenance as expressing “all those bad qualities which often characterize that class” and labels her as a person “accustomed to see without sympathizing in sights of misery”, he fails to recognise the same pattern of behaviour in his parental abandonment of the monster, putting his own humanity into question. (128). This blindness to his hypocrisy, almost tragic in nature, demonstrates a moral debasement, symbolically justifying his position alongside those he views as less than. By depicting moral and social decline as the result of excessive ambition, Shelley conflates depravity with individualism, suggesting through Frankenstein himself a contemporary fear of middle class downward mobility, characterised by a development of depraved interests.
Through the parallels between the monster’s lack of social and economic capital and the experience of the working class in Shelley’s society, the monster can clearly be seen as symbolic of this class, with his neglect by Frankenstein representing the inept governance of the masses by an unift minority. Thus by refusing to accept the perceived injustice against him and executing this through violence, the monster does perhaps embody a conservative fear of radicalism in the form of a mobilised resisting class. However, while the monster may more clearly embody these anxieties and fears, Frankenstein’s own desires may better embody the deeper horrors of the conservatives of Shelley’s society. At a time of bourgeois headed revolution, perhaps more terrifying for Burkean conservatives than a politicised working class would have been the idea of a member of the middle class with ‘perverse’ interests. Therefore, in his unobstructed ambition and bastardisation of nature, Frankenstein represents the middle class subversion of societal conventions by endeavouring in base activities; while the monster may be the vehemently indignant working class, Frankenstein is the morally bankrupt middle class man, ideologically more dangerous to conservative interests than his working class counterpart for his power to overturn the status quo.
Bibliography
Moretti, Franco ‘The Dialectic of Fear’ in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, (London: Verso, 1983) pp. 83 – 108
Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, (New York: W.W Norton & Company, 2012) ed. Hunter, J. Paul
