Was Dr. Frankenstein a Sinister, or Just a Broken-Hearted Child?

The book “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley is a significant example of gothic literature. It was written in the 19^th century, just a few decades after the Industrial Revolution and it was written by a nineteen-year-old woman which makes it quite marginal at the time of male dominance in Europe as well as in most of the world. The political critiques of this book are widely spread as ways of approaching the subject. Some critics take the book as an example of feminist approach to the time the author lived in; some critics are thinking about the book as a symbol of Marxist outbreak –at least on the level of ideas- against worsening living conditions of working class after the Industrial Revolution.

One cannot, of course, actually know what the author might have thought while writing this book, or what she wanted to impose on the audience, even whom she wanted to be the audience. The mostly known thing about the author is that she was a real intellectual compared to women at her age in the time she lived. She knew much about the recent history –of that time- and politics. That she knew much about politics and history and that she was a part of a quite marginal group of women in that time do not mean she wrote all the so-called symbols in the book Frankenstein on purpose. Because of the cultural properties of 19^th century Europe and because of the place of women among men in that time, it would be almost impossible to have an interview with Mary Shelley. This situation also makes it impossible to know whether she meant to approach the matters of the 18^th and 19^th century with a feminist or Marxist perspective. The seemingly most logical way of “guessing” the purpose of the author while writing the book Frankenstein is trying to analyze the book psychologically. We need to examine especially Victor Frankenstein to get more realistic ideas about the author’s thoughts.

While just skimming through the book, one would first realize the impacts of the monster Victor Frankenstein created on Victor’s and his family’s lives. But if examined deeper, it could be more obvious that those impacts were the effects of another impacts especially from Frankenstein’s childhood. The story in the novel ends with great problems and more complex consequences. But when we take a look at the book beginning from the end and going backwards, we can see that those great problems has much smaller but more important causes. The novel is a great organization of psychological and sociological disasters continuing one after another all the time. Maybe that is why Paul Sherwin says in his critique about the book Frankenstein: “Mary Shelley might well have titled her novel One Catastrophe after Another” (883).

The novel contains some figures related to famous concept of Oedipus Complex by Sigmund Freud. Oedipus Complex is described as a child’s sexual desire for their parent of the opposite sex, especially that of a boy for his mother in psychology.[1] In the article “Sibling Rivalry, the Oedipus Complex, and Myth”, it is suggested that Oedipus Complex is not only about the child’s sexual desire for his mother or his feelings of rivalry against his father, also about his father feeling the fear of replacement by his son (F. Herskovits; M. Herskovits 1). It is argued that boys -before a certain period- have feelings of sexual interest in their mothers and this makes them think that their father is an enemy wanting to take their mother away from them. The idea of Oedipus Complex was constructed many years after the book Frankenstein had been written. It shows the applicability of the concept on lives of the people in different periods of time. Frankenstein’s behaviors and decisions may as well be examined according to the concept of Oedipus Complex.

Frankenstein’s life has many figures indicating changes in his psychological state throughout different time periods. The most significant changes in his life seem to be originated from the process of creating the monster an
d the most obvious fact in the novel is the conflict of opposite emotions the “Creature” felt against Victor Frankenstein and vice versa. Victor wants to create life, and succeeds. He creates a living thing. While he is watching it in the process of constructing its body, he is all excited and seemingly proud of himself. But when he sees it, all of the excitement and happiness in his heart suddenly disappears. He starts to feel horror because of the ugliness he created. He created life, it is a great thing but he is also scared and in regret. He does not know what to do, and he escapes from the room the Creature was animated. The Creature is also confused. On the inside it is thankful to Frankenstein as he gave it life; but it is also angry against him because he does not want it. “While the unconsummated spirit raised by Frankenstein cannot be put to rest, one might suppose that das Unheimliche[2] can be contained within the spacious edifice of Freudian psychoanalysis” (Sherwin 884).

One of the most important things shaping Victor’s life is his mother’s death. As Sherwin dictates: “A reading of the oedipal drama the novel re-enacts can begin with a notice of the first overt catastrophe recorded in Frankenstein’s narrative: his witnessing, at fifteen, the terrible power of a lightening bolt during a thunderstorm . When the adult Frankenstein describes the event, which occurred at a time when his enthusiasm for alchemy had redoubled the urgency of his endeavors to penetrate nature’s secrets, his excited betrays the insistent presence of a forgotten childhood scene” (884). It is the beauty and the strength of the bolts of lightening what made Victor think about trying to learn nature’s secrets and control them. He was a young boy at his fifteen when he experienced this scene, but after his mother died he experienced the effects of his subconscious about his early childhood feelings. Maybe he was not aware of that, but he actually wanted to believe in controlling the power of the nature to bring his mother back to life. He first wanted to make sure inanimate things could be given life. “Waldman’s vision of the master who can refind the lost object and command limitless power has the characteristically unsettling impact of a pubescent irruption of libido, and the idea of the mother, set free by death for fantasy elaboration, becomes the focus of the regressive descent into phantasmagoria that constitutes Frankenstein’s reanimation project. … Having fully remembered the form of his desire, the mother restored by a far more radical rescue than the one by which the father claimed her, he is ready to draw rebellious Promethean fire down from the heavens and realize his grandiose conception, the creation proper” (Sherwin 885). He is kind of punished by seeing the ugliness of the creature and suffering the disastrous things it is doing; for not only playing with the secrets of nature, also having sexual feelings –subconsciously- about his mother. The details that remind us about the Oedipus Complex are not only in Victor’s mind or subconscious, they are also between the creature and Victor.

In his psychological critique about the book Frankenstein, Paul Sherwin claims that the animation of the creature symbolizes a sexual process –especially of men-. He argues that the monster is a beauty while it is sleeping, but the awakening of the monster erases all the beauty of the process of animation (885). Here, the process of animation and monster’s sleeping beauty symbolizes the act of sex, and the moment of animation symbolizes orgasm. In a very simplified perspective, Victor can be thought as a man who turns his back and sleeps after sex; and the creature can be thought as a desperate, unhappy wife who will consequently become an unfaithful woman seeking for attention. Victor’s feelings about the creature can also be connected to sexual thoughts in Victor’s subconscious. The creature’s extraordinary size represents the extraordinary degree of masculinity. And Frankenstein (the figure of a father) is upset about the Creature (the figure of a son) taking his place. This great symbolic masculinity of the creature may also be interpreted as a great power against Victor. So, the Creature could be examined as fantasy father (Sherwin 885). The relationship between Victor and the monster cannot completely be seen as a father-son rivalry. The monster wants to be seen like other people, wants to be recognized. It wants to live like a normal person, and it takes Victor as the closest example for himself. He wants to own things like Victor has; he wants to do things like Victor does. Rather than a father-son rivalry, it is more like a rivalry between the ones who are on the same level, like siblings. According to the article Sibling Rivalry, the Oedipus Complex, and Myth: “The father’s jealousy of the son can be conceptualized as that aspect of the sibling rivalry complex which, through projection, reactivates the infantile competition for the mother other in terms of competition for the affection of the wife, who is the mother of his son” (F. Herskovits; M. Herskovits 15). Especially after Victor promises to build a female creature to accompany the first he has created, the Creature calms down a little bit as it thinks it is approaching the life standards of normal people, especially Victor. But Victor goes back on his word and tears the female Creature. The moment that the creature gets closest to the life of normal people is destroyed. With this disappointment it wants Victor to suffer like him. “After Frankenstein breaks his word, mangling the half-finished monsteress in full view of the Creature, the Creature keeps his. The killing of Elizabeth is at once a way of establishing a relationship with the only human being to whom he can claim kinship and a desperately antierotic act designed to teach his creator what he suffers” (Sherwin 889).

The way Mary Shelley tells that Frankenstein’s childhood memories and the experiences which trigger his subconscious construct much stronger consequences and her consistent style show that Mary Shelley was really good at reading and communicating human emotions as if they were real. The psychological figures that we know with contemporary science can be experienced in all lines in the book Frankenstein. It cannot really be known whether she wrote this book to object a political idea or not. But it is obvious that she was very good at constructing realistic human lives in fiction.

Yusuf Salman

March 2008

Bibliography

Herskovits, Frances – Melville. “Sibling Rivalry, the Oedipus Complex, and Myth.” The Journal of American Folklore. Vol. 71, No. 279 (Jan. – Mar. 1958).

Sherwin, Paul. “Frankenstein: Creation as Catastrophe.” PMLA. Vol. 96, No. 5 (Oct. 1981).