Frankenstein: Reproductive Mythologies and Genre
Frankenstein is a creation story which borrows from and responds to Judeo-Christian and
Greco-Roman creation myths -- both the tale of Prometheus’ fashioning of man out of clay and
the Genesis account. Mary Shelley was not the first to address the subversive and destructive
Western mythologies of reproduction. The foundational myths, with their tales of disruption,
apostasy and loss, also examine the sedition contingent on creation and the tensions, both explicit
and implicit, between creature and creator. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, however, makes the
horror inherent in these conflicts its central concern. The horror in Mary Shelley’s re-working of
the myth as an interpretation of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian stories arises from the
absence of the mother or of any female role in reproduction. Critics such as Anne Mellor, Judith
Weissman and Susan Gubar have elucidated ways in which Frankenstein subverts or challenges
patriarchal models of creation which obviate and evade both the maternal and the female. In my
discussion, I will argue that maternal absence in reproductive mythologies has ideological
implications directly connected to discussions of literary genre as well as to the political,
psychological and thematic ones frequently discussed. Fictional autobiography, like
autobiography itself, is a “reproductive genre” which enables Mary Shelley to critique
narcissistic and anti-biological models of reproduction in patriarchal creation stories.
Generically, Frankenstein has been classified and reclassified: it has been described as a
novel, with elements of epic, drama, poetry, romance, the gothic, and realism in it.
Autonarration, a kind of “fictionalized autobiography,” might also profitably be added to this
long list of generic attributes. Frankenstein is not an autobiography, but it offers a critique of
that genre. Mary Shelley exploits autobiographical conventions strategically to analyse the male
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autobiographical voice and symbolically to re-enact the process of patriarchal creation at the
heart her revisionist myth.
Autobiography, as established from Augustine through to the Romantics, was dominated
by the public male voice. Journals and diaries provided women with a different genre in which
to write about the self -- a present tense and private self unlike the retrospective and public self
of the autobiography. The female diarist seeks the self inwardly and the male autobiographer
projects the self outwardly onto a public who will receive his literary self-creation.
The
autobiographer engages in a process of symbolic self-authoring or self-creation, a theme at the
core of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Because autobiography is a genre which allows for selfauthoring, we may read Frankenstein as an allegory of autobiography.
Through a covert
assessment, Mary Shelley critiques both patriarchal myths of creation and their ensuing modes of
literary production.
Frankenstein reveals several pseudo-autobiographical structures that overlap and
interrupt one another, the first of which, in most editions of the book, is found in Mary Shelley's
1831 introduction. The famous paragraph, beginning "And now, once again, I bid my hideous
progeny go forth and prosper", links her life with the life of her book through the metaphor of
offspring. She explains the metaphor within the context of her life:
I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and
grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages
speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not
alone; and my companion was one who in this world, I shall never see more. But
this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations. (xii)
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According to this digression, Frankenstein performs the role of symbolic autobiography for its
author both in its associative effect on her memory and insofar as specific places and events in
the book are related to those which occurred in her life. Her assertion that her "readers have
nothing to do with these associations" denies the book's autobiographical elements with respect
to her readership, but this assertion is contradicted by the fact that she makes these personal
reflections to her readers and also by the history of the book's interpretation. Critics, past and
present, have variously explicated Frankenstein as a veiled autobiography in which Shelley
reveals anxieties about her husband, her father, her mother, and her children. It is unusual that a
gothic novel should attract such an array of psychological and biographical readings.
Furthermore, Shelley's attempt to detach her readers from the personal history in or "behind"
Frankenstein is a typical autobiographical convention. From Rousseau to the present, the
autobiographer frequently and intermittently suggests the reader has no interest in, tolerance for,
or patience with the details of his life, while he continues to address the reader on those very
subjects. One effect of such rhetoric is to give the impression that the writer is alone; he is
writing his life primarily for himself. Moreover, this sort of immersed autobiographical voice,
because it is private rather than public, was an option for women in the nineteenth century who
wanted to write about their lives. Their public personae did not carry the symbolic weight and
the culturally accorded significance of the equivalent male personae and the autobiographical
project lacked female antecedents.
The use of a genetic metaphor to convey Mary Shelley's point is crucial. She is the
parent of the book Frankenstein, "her hideous progeny," and this statement has been taken to
suggest something about her attitudes toward maternity (Ellen Moers, Anne Mellor). I would
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argue, however, that the genetic metaphor establishes rather a paternal connection between her
and her book.
She echoes the voice of a paternal Judeo-Christian god in asking her
book/monster to "go forth and prosper." The generally acceded parallel between Shelley as
author of her book and Dr. Frankenstein as "author" of his monster further strengthens the
metaphor of Shelley as paternally connected to her novel.
In fact, the monster refers to
Frankenstein as "the author at once of my existence and of its unspeakable torments" (220), and
Frankenstein describes himself twice using the word "author" (12). Intertextual connections
between the plot and Satan's begetting of death or Prometheus’ creation of man strengthen our
mental associations with paternity rather than maternity.
Mary Shelley does not, however, simply and unequivocally adopt a male role and a male
voice. The paternal myths of creation informing her story constitute a dangerous repression and
perversion of the maternal. The repression of the maternal in Western myths of creation is in
fact a usurpation in which the masculine creator singly and solely becomes the author of human
life. Paternity is defined in these myths of God and Adam, Jupiter and Prometheus, Frankenstein
and the monster, not simply as begetting but as giving birth. The female body in each case is
symbolically present as nothing more than inanimate matter or mater -- clay or a corpse.
Fathering as a narcissistic act of self-love creating life in its own image and for its own glory
subsumes the biological reproductive process. The word "mother" is never mentioned in any of
the original myths, all the more effectively to repress her and deny a mother’s importance. Mary
Shelley highlights the irony of the sterility of such production by having Frankenstein deny his
monster a female mate and the subsequent ability to reproduce, just as his perversity denies
himself a mate and his creature a mother.
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So Shelley implicitly identifies herself as the father/creator of her book and this
identification too is a standard autobiographical trope, since literary production was assumed to
be a masculine prerogative and autobiography more than most other genres is a metaphorical
attempt to procreate or to recreate the self in an enduring form. Moreover, the paternal model of
creation has personal significance for Mary Shelley, inasmuch as her own mother died shortly
after her birth, and the models of creativity in both her life and in the literature she read were
predominantly men.
The "preface" is an obvious patriarchal intrusion, since it was written entirely by Mary
Shelley's husband in the first person, in order to look as though it was written by her. In other
words, Percy Shelley describes the way in which the novel came to him as though he was in fact
the novel's author in just such a usurpation of the feminine procreative role that the novel itself
dramatizes. This duplicity is solely a result of the preface's autobiographical pretensions, and it
thereby further problematizes autobiographical conventions. It underscores not only patriarchal
intervention or subversion of female creativity, but also the potential treachery of
autobiographical discourse. What is claimed as personal, historical and authentic may be and
frequently is invented, borrowed or stolen.
By letting Percy write her autobiographical preface, Mary Shelley re-enacts Dr.
Frankenstein's abandonment of his offspring by figuratively renouncing responsibility for the
fruits of her labours. At the same time, Percy Shelley acts out Frankenstein's denial of feminine
and maternal forces of creation. The by-pass of female creative ability in the Western tradition
of literature, as exemplified by our Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman creation myths, also
prefigures the tradition of critics, led by James Rieger (xviii), who maintain that it was really
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Percy Shelley who wrote most of or all of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley is strangely complicit in
the attack of male critics against her talents.
By allowing her husband to write the
autobiographical preface, she raises the question of authenticity of authorship. By adopting a
masculine narrative voice and by identifying herself with the male creative figure of
Frankenstein, who corresponds neatly to Percy Shelley and to William Godwin in many respects,
she sublimates her own identity into the identities of her male role models and into her myth.
The multiple narrative frames of Frankenstein manipulate a number of autobiographical
conventions.
The first frame, composed of four letters from Captain Walton to his sister
Margaret, superimposes the male narrative voice of Walton onto the voice of Dr. Frankenstein.
One effect of this layering of narrative is the illusion of objectivity that autobiography is
traditionally meant to convey.
That is, Frankenstein's story appears true, because Walton
believes it to be so. As interpreter of Frankenstein's narrative, Walton also acts as a figure for
the uncritical reader of autobiography, one who accepts the factuality of the account and who is
compelled to write about his own life because of his sympathetic identification with the
autobiographer. Outside this structure of male reader identifying with male author is the silent,
absent female reader, Margaret, who is implored for her support: "And now, dear Margaret, do I
not deserve to accomplish some great purpose? . . . Oh, that some encouraging voice would
answer in the affirmative" (17). However, while desiring Margaret's approval, Walton has
distanced himself from the company of women in order to avail himself of an encounter with his
narcissistic double, in much the same way that Frankenstein distances himself from Elizabeth in
order to conjure his own monstrous shadow. Reproducing the masculine self entails a distancing
from the female other.
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Margaret and Elizabeth are effectively silenced by this intercourse between two dominant
male characters, and Margaret is the novel's most obvious gesture toward female absence. The
country in which Walton becomes half conscious of a need for female companionship and
maternal solicitude is a clime of cold sterility and the absence of human life. Although Walton,
as a naive implied reader, is unaware of the ironies of his situation or Frankenstein's, a more
perceptive reader should be able to critique Walton's expressions of self-doubt and selfglorification. Walton's rhetorical question, "What can stop the determined heart and resolved
will of man?" is addressed to Margaret, whose response we do not know. But in the context of
the novel as a whole, which is also addressed finally to her, she and we should be able to discern
the pitfalls of masculine drives.
By placing Walton, with his unspoiled idealism and the obvious parallels between him
and Dr. Frankenstein, at the beginning of her novel, Mary Shelley foregrounds the issues of
reading and interpretation in autobiographical co-production.
Included in the first person
account of one man's destiny is another man's analogous destiny. Mary Shelley's characteristic
ambivalence about the value of autobiographical writing may be discerned from this structure.
On the one hand, she detects in the genre a means of understanding and creating a textual self
who is a psychologically revealing companion to the "actual" self. But on the other, she
demonstrates the ways in which autobiography reflects a destructive and repressive narcissism -a narcissism at the heart of patriarchal repressions of the feminine.
As a reader Walton
temporarily displaces Margaret, putting as much distance as possible between him and her
throughout his morbid journey to the North Pole, a journey that accompanies and reflects his
"reading" of Frankenstein's story.
His decision to return to the land of the living seems
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unmarked by any particular consciousness, but is perhaps an indication of his unconscious
absorption of the meaning of his encounter with Frankenstein's own life story. Because both
autobiographical strains are addressed from Walton to Margaret, the absent, silent reader, it is
she who becomes the textual figure most identified with us as we read the story.
Chapter One of the novel begins in the vein and tradition of autobiography:
Frankenstein's origins, his place of birth, a brief history of his parents and his feelings about his
childhood.
As in the beginning of Rousseau's Confessions, this story of origins, with
Frankenstein's idealized account of his brotherly relationship with Elizabeth, is notable for its
total denial and repression of negative moments. Feminine and masculine forces of creativity
work in perfect harmony with one another in a scenario more romantic than realistic. Elizabeth
is more angel than human; the nuclear family is constituted of cardboard archetypes with no
individuating characteristics. From these banal origins and after a conventional account of the
death of the mother, Frankenstein evolves into a young person obsessed with three occult writers,
Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus, all of whom believed in the discovery and
creation of human life in the absence of natural reproductive forces. Paracelsus, for example,
firmly believed that sperm could be magnetized into life without the presence of an egg to
fertilize (Florescu, 222). Thus begins the fantasy of self-propagation that leads directly into
Frankenstein's creation of a monstrous human, and also into his autobiographical enterprise -- the
story of self-justification addressed to Walton.
Because Frankenstein is narcissistic, self-
enclosed, detached from the natural world and in search of his own glory, he is unable to accept
responsibility for his offspring. Ironically, the process of writing or telling his autobiography
entails the same level of self-consuming introspection as the creation of a being in his own image
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did.
Walton's eager response to Frankenstein's confession that he discovered "the cause of
generation and life" suggests that he too seeks this knowledge. The only mention of the feminine
in Frankenstein's process of creation is found in a trope of nature as woman. Frankenstein
exploits the metaphor of "pursu(ing) nature to her hiding-places" (53) as a way of implying his
desire for a maternal procreative force, while divesting her of human significance. Nonetheless,
even when reduced to a series of nature tropes, the maternal is a threatening and frightening
force.
In the novel's structural interior we encounter the autobiographical narrative of the
creature himself, encircled by the life stories of Frankenstein and Walton. This story, like the
others, proceeds from the creature's account of his origins and develops chronologically through
to his present condition. In the context of the creature's lack of a mother or any other responsive
parent, his attempt at self-authoring through autobiographical narrative feels both more urgent
and more poignant than the tales of Frankenstein and Walton. In this autobiography lies a
response to and a commentary on the other characters' life histories.
Such psychological
commentary is the most significant feature of autobiography for Mary Shelley, which she
suggests in describing Rousseau's Confessions as "an invaluable book, [that] disclose[s] the
secret of many hearts to those who have courage to penetrate into the recesses of their own"
("Rousseau" 126). Her view of autobiography is that it is productive and effective when looked
into as a psychological mirror. The great value of the genre is not so much for its writer (who is
usually deluded) but for its reader, if the reader will approach the narrative as a vehicle toward
self knowledge. When Frankenstein hears his creature's narrative, he beholds a mirror in which
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he should be able to glimpse himself. The fiend's tale of the self affords Frankenstein the
possibility of self knowledge, as long as Frankenstein proves to be an open and perceptive
"reader." He is given the opportunity to identify sympathetically with the creature, and he is also
given a chance belatedly to bring the feminine back into balance with the masculine by creating a
companion for his "child." If he identifies with and accepts the creature's own desire to create
and to procreate, Frankenstein will be left in peace. Unfortunately, although Frankenstein is an
autobiographer who effectively captivates and finally instructs his listener/reader Walton, he is a
flawed and incompetent reader. He does not ultimately succeed in identifying or sympathising
with the life story told to him.
In Frankenstein each superimposed autobiographical narrative is a critique of the life of
its foregrounded reader. The creature's story is an indictment of Frankenstein's failure that
Frankenstein fails to understand. Even the multiple ironies of Percy Shelley's ventriloquist
preface about Mary may have escaped her acumen. Margaret's reception of Walton's letters
containing the tales of both Frankenstein and the creature is left as a textual enigma. And yet
she, as a reader of autobiographical writing, is surely meant to penetrate "the recesses of her own
heart" as we are. Insofar as the book dramatizes several characters' and even Mary Shelley's
failure to read, we should not be too optimistic about Margaret's chances of success or our own.
It appears, however, that the successive failures to read and to understand autobiography are
linked to the repression of the maternal at the basis of the genre's creative impetus. Without an
acceptance of the full sexual complement of human creativity, the act of reading as eros, as
binding with another soul, autobiography is flawed, partial and confounded.
Margaret Saville is the one woman who survives, ever-present by implication and yet
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totally absent throughout the novel. It is of perhaps more than incidental importance that she is a
mother.
Because she is voiceless, faceless, and because she is not involved in a literary
recreation of the self, we may easily project on to her the role of reader. In Frankenstein the
interpretive function is deferred from one reader to another until it resides with her and with us,
the only remaining interpreters whose stories remain untold. It is perhaps only by identifying
with Margaret's "untold" narrative, the tale of human reproduction and actual birth, that Mary
Shelley's readers may hope to gain understanding.
Works Cited
Florescu, Radu. In Search of Frankenstein. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975.
Guber, Susan. "Mother, Maiden and the Marriage of Death: Women Writers and an Ancient
Myth." Women and Men: The Consequences of Power. Eds. Dana V. Hiller and Robin
Ann Sheets. Cincinnati: U of Cincinnati P, 1977.
Homans, Margaret. "Bearing Demons: Frankenstein's Circumvention of the Maternal."
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 13353.
Knoepflmacher, U.C. Ed. The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's
Novel. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1979.
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---. "Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters." The Endurance of Frankenstein. Los Angeles:
U of California P, 1979. 3-30.
Levine, Goerge. "The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein." Knoepflmacher. 3-30.
Mellor, Anne. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Moers, Ellen. "Female Gothic." Knoepflmacher, 77-87.
Rieger, James. ed. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus. New York: Signet, 1965.
---. Mathilda. The Mary Shelley Reader. Eds. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. 175-246.
---. "Rousseau." Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France. London:
Longman, 1839.
Veeder, William. Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: The Fate of Androgyny. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1986.
Weissman, Judith. "A Reading of Frankenstein as the Complaint of a Political Wife." Colby
Literary Quarterly. 12(1976): 177-85.
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