The first thought that is triggered by Mary Shelley’s (1818) novel, Frankenstein, is the lumbering, patchwork of body parts brought to life by Victor Frankenstein. Eliciting at turn horror, pity or even compassion, one tends to think more of the “Creature” than its creator. However, here Victor Frankenstein’s character brings forth questions concerning procreation and where this urge to play at God or substitute the mother figure could stem from.
The narrative unfolds like a Fibonnaci sequence starting from Victor’s mother’s untimely passing. This was “the first misfortune of [his] life”. Tragedy would follow in his wake throughout his existence, but the death of the mother, the one who gave him life, had altered his being irrevocably. Her death seems to have left him as desiccated shell of a man. Hence, obsessive, and harbouring a growing passion for “natural philosophy”, Victor nurtured this idea of creating life all by himself as he grew up. The fact that he wanted to procreate through this reanimation process showcased an inordinate amount of hubris within him. The absurdity of his project was amplified since he was a student of the natural sciences and in simple terms, what he set out to do was everything but so.
Victor’s motivations were fueled by what Abrams (2005) defines as das Unbewusste or the ‘Unconscious’. The ‘Unconscious’ is further described by Meltzer (1995) as being concealed by the external actions of the subject which are however motivated by the desires of the unconscious side of the psyche. Externally, Victor’s actions appear to be motivated by a desire to surpass the limitations of science, imitating the “Alchemists” of yore, by trying to bring to life an inanimate body “eight feet in height and proportionately large” (pg34), working relentlessly for two years. It can even be the ambitious project of a young scientist, akin to Icarus flying too close to the sun and plummeting to his death. His could also be the hubris of Prometheus bringing the fire of life to humanity as the title of the novel indicates. However, these reasons appear far too shallow, compared to the complexity that Victor holds within himself.
This desire to create such a “Being”, appears to be linked to the identity of the mother. It is through motherhood that Victor could attain the level of Godhood that he aspires to. In the patriarchal world where he evolved, and when Shelley was writing the novel, motherhood remained an inaccessible, esoteric domain for them. By appropriating the role of the mother, erasing the woman from the equation of life, Victor would have not only conquered death but also life. Nature, creation and nurture are all closely linked to the feminine. The creation of his monster is the way for him to be beyond this limiting factor. The unconscious desire of Victor that motivates him to pursue such a scientific breakthrough is to mimic the role of the mother. Nevertheless, he makes sure that there are stark differences between the ‘birth’ of his creature and that of a child. For one, his ‘child’ would be comically large, falling into the grotesque, attesting to his folie des grandeurs. His hubris fanned the flames of his ‘Unconscious’ desires as he pieced together his “creature”.
The idea that Victor’s ‘unconscious’ desires contribute to the replacement of motherhood is exacerbated through the lexical field used by Shelley. At several key instances, she references words and phrases that are linked to pregnancy in the 19th century. Victor spends two years in quasi isolation working on his project. He would spend days with corpses, mutilating and reassembling them to fit his vision. That time of isolation was referred to as “confinement”. At that time, the word did not hold the same connotations of infection that we associate it to. In that era, being in “confinement” was used to refer to the time that women spent in isolation, away from society during their pregnancy, their gestational period. The parallels are obvious. Victor too, was staying away, slowly piecing together his very own child.
A particular quote from the novel, acts as a summary of what Victor believes of himself and his role in the creation of his “Being”:
“No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I deserve theirs".
This could be interpreted as his way of reappropriating the role of the mother in the procreation process, assimilating it into that of the father. In all, it leads us to wonder whether Victor’s creature was representative of Mary Shelley whose mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died giving birth to her, making her father her only parent, both mother and father, turning motherhood into a piece of fiction to her.
