Word Count - 1894
Compare Ideas about Death, Mortality, and Afterlife in Being Dead and Frankenstein
Moers proposed that Frankenstein was partially inspired by Mary Shelley's loss of her first
daughter, and the death of her mother eleven days after Shelley was born (Qtd. in MacDonald
& Scherf 11). From this pre-occupation, it is understandable why the theme of death
permeates the novel as a whole. The same motif of birth also explains the incorporation of
creation in Frankenstein, creating a binary which Shelley was troubled by in her own life.
Shelley's mother died soon after her birth, and a parallel can be drawn between Frankenstein's
disgust at his creation, and the suggestion that Shelly may have felt responsible for this event
(Seymour 33-4).
In Being Dead, death is also a permeating feature, bookending the novel, from the
murder of Celice and Joseph in the opening chapter (1) to their epitaph in the final line,
“These are the everending days of being dead” (210). Crace forms a binary opposition with
death, not, as for Shelley, in birth, but in life itself. Life and death spiral about each other in
the novel to form the “double helix of existence”, in which they are “inextricably entwined”
forces (Crace 40). Bal•eé suggests that as “one strand composes the narrative [of their
lives]...the other decomposes [them]” (519).
As Gothic novels, it is not surprising that both use death as a driving force of the
narrative. To motivate Victor Frankenstein, Shelley uses the death of those close to him, while
Crace retrospectively examines Joseph and Celice's lives, while also watching their corpses
decay with more than a tinge of dark humour. Therefore, as Victor travels in a straight path
through his narrative chronology, Being Dead turns in two directions for the dead. This
1/7
Word Count - 1894
duplicity of chronological trajectory leads to a symmetry between life and death. Tew
suggests this technique is used to reduce the negativity of death (136). Crace pulls no punches
while describing the decomposition of the bodies, and Syl's visit to the morgue spares
“nothing of...[death] and thereby we see our own” (Qtd. in Tew 137).
Lane regards the couples corpses as “doubly exposed to the elements, through sex and
violence” (Qtd. in Tew 141). The choice to present death so frankly and explicitly is in my
opinion not intended to instil horror into readers, it is not a heavy handed shock device.
Rather it is cathartic to the innate fear of death, because it does not hide the natural processes
that all dead organisms undergo, and balances the decomposition with a “quivering” (Crace
2).
Although the narrator of Being Dead points out that the tradition is dead in times that
are “hardly optimistic or sentimental” (4), the dead can be “rescued from the dunes by
memory” (5). We relive Joseph and Celice's final day, and their first meeting as doctorate
students through reading Being Dead, and it is these recollections that form the quivering. The
book is therefore a remembrance, a recognition of the popular gravestone commemoration:
“Gone but not forgotten”.
While speaking of tackling man's fear of death, I am reminded of Nietzschean
comments on mortality in Thus Spake Zarathustra. The prophet speaks “Of Free Death” (63).
“Death is not yet a feast” (63) says Zarathustra, and that man has only “achieved [when] he
dieth as a victor” (63). The idea of victory over death is not, as realised in Frankenstein a
resurrection, but a victory in life, that is, over the fear of death. Though death is inevitable for
every living organism, it is important that from death comes life for both authors. “Only
where there are graves are there resurrections-” says Zarathustra (103), while Crace continues
2/7
Word Count - 1894
his use of biological fact to reason death, “Hope springs eternal in the natural world” (209).
While for individuals, life ceases, life does not cease ultimately for the rest of the world.
Rejecting any sort of sentimentalism in favour of a biological scientific approach is the result
of Being Dead being an atheist text.
Victor Frankenstein is trained in the natural sciences such as biology, yet cannot shake
a love of alchemy, a widely renounced study. When M. Krempe discovers this, he declares it
“nonsense” (74), and says “in this enlightened and scientific age” (75) he did not expect to
find a “disciple” (75) of the alchemists. Therefore the grand ideas of the alchemists such as
seeking immortality have been rejected by the scientific community in which Victor finds
himself. It is interesting to observe the use of the word “disciple”, a charged term for Western
society, due to obvious Biblical links. This religious imagery is used to invert Christianity as
doctrine for Victor, because he is a student of alchemy, not a strict adherent of Christ.
It is his search for a reversal of death, a deeply unnatural occurrence, that leads Victor
to create his monster. Unlike Being Dead, in Frankenstein death can be remedied and life
instilled to an inanimate corpse. In toying with mortality, Frankenstein creates a monstrous
creature which is responsible for the deaths of some of his closest relatives. Clerval, on
learning of the death of Victor's younger brother says that the child now “sleeps with his angel
mother” (100). The figure of an angel is religious imagery, and therefore is suggestive of an
existence of afterlife. It is notable however that Mary Shelley's husband, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, was the co-author of a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism which employed
empirical reasoning to deny the existence of God (Greenblatt et al. 741). As a major figure in
the development of atheism, it is quite possible that his thoughts influenced his wife's own
beliefs and approach to religion in Frankenstein. The unjust execution of Justine Moritz, for
3/7
Word Count - 1894
example, is a critique of the “menacing” (113) Church. During her confession, she is forced to
repent for the murder of William, yet Justine later claims this confession to be untruthful,
forced by the priest who threatens her with excommunication and the eternity of “hell fire...if
[she] continued obdurate” (113).
This critique is not as open and obvious as Percy's The Necessity of Atheism, and this
is likely due to Shelley's prevalent contemporary belief system of Christianity. On the other
hand, while writing Frankenstein, Shelley would have found herself constrained by the
condemnation of atheism. Percy had been thrown out of Oxford University for his pamphlet
and non-malleable views on the subject, so it stood to reason that Mary should choose to
present a less obvious criticism of Christianity, through attacking a specific priest character in
her novel. Being Dead escapes the restrictions of prevalent Christian doctrine, because it was
written in a time where atheism had already been accepted as a major belief.
While both are texts are influenced by an atheist background, there are major
differences in the way their characters and narrators approach death. As has been discussed,
Shelley's negative view of death is likely the result of circumstances in her own life, which
may be reflected by Victor. When he meets the monster on Montanvert, he says “a mist came
over my eyes, and I felt a faintness seize me” (125), foreshadowing his later descent into
absolute delirium after the death of Clerval, where he is carried out of the room “in strong
convulsions” (200). The monster is the bearer of death in Frankenstein, and Victor is
addressed by the monster as “Slave” (192), displaying his powerless nature when dealing with
death.
Joseph and Celice, on the other hand approach death from the approach of Darwinism.
Celice considers the Academic Mentor's suicide as possibly “nothing more than chemistry and
4/7
Word Count - 1894
genes”, or his “programmed death” (63). This view seems a rather fatalist view for a scientist,
but Celice “could persuade herself” that the suicide was “neo-Darwinist” (63). By reasoning
with scientific terminology, she is able to cope with the death of a friend, though she cannot
be satisfied with this cold approach. Instead, she finds comfort in superstition from a book
given to Joseph by Syl, which talks of the dangers of sleeping underneath pine trees, which is
where the Mentor was found.
Death is represented in the novel by the concept of “Mondazy's Fish” (Being Dead
62), another superstition which is held by locals in “Wetropolis” (105), the nickname of a city
where it is often raining. Since it is always raining in Wetropolis, I believe Crace is making
somewhat of a mockery of the Gothic Tradition's use of pathetic fallacy. The manipulation of
the natural environment to foreshadow death is seen in Frankenstein, after Victor's marriage
to Elizabeth. A sudden “heavy storm of rain [descends]” (217), shortly before Victor discovers
Elizabeth's “lifeless and inanimate” corpse (218). Crace parodies the use of pathetic fallacy as
a modern Gothic writer, and this parody is significant, as the permeating rain represents of the
acceptance of death as a commonplace event. The Fish swims through the drenched town,
darting into the “less resistant moisture of the streets” (106), causing the deaths of the old and
the young without prejudice, a watery Grim Reaper.
The presence of folklore in a novel which is so explicitly atheist with a penchant for
scientific explanations sets up a dialogue between the two, non-exclusive worlds.
Frankenstein holds a similar discourse between the natural sciences and the outdated art of
alchemy. It is religion that had been outdated by the time Being Dead was written, and
therefore the use of superstition is a method of humanising characters, making them more
than two-dimensional figures such as M.Krempe of Frankenstein, whose “repulsive
5/7
Word Count - 1894
countenance” (75) is echoed in his abrasive personality and closed mind.
The significance of death by water, or Mondazy's Fish, for Celice and Joseph is
pertinent because they first meet in the study house next to Baritone Bay (16). Though they
are killed on dry land, it is the Fish which swims up out of that same bay thirty years later to
brutally lay them to rest on the dunes, “death was fast approaching...with its plunging snout,
blindly [breaking the] surface of the pool” (37). The ironic choice of a Fish to be the one to
end the lives of a pair of marine biologists is another example of Crace's dark humour.
The “Fish's rakish protégé” (137) , a morgue employee who Syl encounters on her
search for her parents aids the Fish's work, by dealing with the corpses it leaves behind itself
(137). This once again highlights the intertwining of death with life in the text, holding a
human who deals with death as a direct parallel to Mondazy's Fish. Victor perpetuates the
dread of death for humanity, by instilling the power of murder and death into a monster, death
becomes unnatural and abhorrent. The embodiment of death, or Fish, in a human is the
realisation of death's naturalness – everyone has to die, eventually, but this is not something to
be feared. For Crace, it is acknowledgement of the fact that we have no control over our everticking biological clocks that frees us from the final despair of an afterlife-free death, because
it is an inescapable, universal occurrence.
6/7
Word Count - 1894
Works Cited
Bal•eé, Susan. “Review: Maximalist Fiction” The Hudson Review. Vol 53.3, Autumn, 2000:
518-519. JSTOR. Web. 11 Mar. 2011.
Crace, Jim. Being Dead. 1999. London: Penguin, 2000. Print.
Greenblatt, Stephen, et al.“Percy Bysshe Shelley”. The Norton Anthology: English Literature,
Eighth Edition. Ed. Greenblatt, Stephan et al. Vol. 2. London: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2006. 741-744. Print.
McDonald, D.L & Kathleen Scherf. “Introduction”. Frankenstein. Ed. Macdonald , D.L. &
Kathleen Scherf. Letchworth: Broadview. 2000. Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. 1891. Trans. Tille, A. Ed. Bozman, M. London:
Heron Books.
Seymour, Miranda. Mary Shelley. London: John Murray. 2000. Print.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. Ed. Macdonald , D.L. & Kathleen Scherf. Letchworth:
Broadview. 2000. Print.
Tew, Phillip. Jim Crace. Manchester: Manchester UP. 2006. Print.
7/7