"My Hideous Progeny"

In the back of our edition of Frankenstein, there are many critiques of the work both contemporary and modern. Ellen Moers' "Female Gothic: The Monster's Mother" particularily pertains to the motif of absent mothers we were discussing on Wednesday. Negative connotations in relation to birth also pop up, along with the missing maternity. The Monster, made in a "workshop of filthy creation", calls himself "miserable and abandoned". Examples such as those lead Moers to find Mary Shelley's "fanatasy of the newborn as at once monstrous agent of destruction and piteous victim of parental abandonment" (222 Mores), with personal conflict the source for such morbidity entwined with childbirth. At sixteen, Mary became pregnant with Percy Shelley's child, and gave birth prematurely. On the day her child died, only a month old, Mary simply recorded in her journal, "Find my baby dead. Miserable day" (221 Moers).

I had often wondered at Victor's obsession with re-animation throughout the novel, feeling that it wasn't properly explained (and even then, a bit underwhelming) until the end. Moers again looks into Mary's history for an explanation. Mary apparently dreamed of warming her child before a fire to bring her back to life, which Moer links with Victor's own ambitions: "I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption" (222 Moers). The forward to Frankenstein mentioned the richness found in the work when reading it in context of the political and social conflict of its time, as well as the author's own life. Knowledge of Mary does indeed make Frankenstein more powerful in its impact on readers. This being my first reading of the it, I sometimes found myself seeing the novel's events as uber-melodramtic '50s sci-fi. Still, my sparse knowledge of Mary Shelley helped in getting beyond the superficial or physical details of the plot.

One more thing: I think we were getting to it at the end of class last time, the trouble with sexuality in Frankenstein. A friend of mine wrote a paper last semester on the Monster as Victor's homosexual doppleganger, (which made no sense whatsoever as I was reading the book) began to make more sense on Wednesday. Its interesting to think on how in the 'human' relations in the novel there's hardly any suggestion of physical desire, even between Victor and Elizabeth, who plan to consummate a "semi-incestuous love" (224 Moers). The Monster actually exists as the most sexual being in the book (perhaps due to his 'animalistic' tendencies?), requesting a female counterpart.