France. Horace Walpole called Godwin “one of the greatest monsters exhibited by history.” In 1800, The AntiJacobin Review, which championed the attack upon William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, denounced the couple’s disciples as “the spawn of the monster.”
Frankenstein does not directly approach its true focus; instead, it tells the story as a depoliticized family drama or a family myth. The characters of the novel re-enact earlier political polemics on the level of personal psychology. In the 1790s, writers such as Edmund Burke had warned of a collective, parricidal monster—the revolutionary regime in France; in the aftermath of the revolution, Mary Shelley scales this symbolism down to domestic size. Her novel re-enacts the monster trope, but it does so from the perspective of isolated and subjective narrators who are locked in parricidal struggles of their own. In this way, the novel can maintain its true topic at a distance, invisible. As we have noted, this is also the standard Marxist critical point about Frankenstein: it is focused on the dense family-and-sexuality network in order to obliterate (or, rather, repress) its true historical reference.
But why must Frankenstein obfuscate its true historical referent? Because its relationship to this true focus/topic (the French Revolution) is deeply ambiguous and contradictory, and the form of the family myth makes it possible to neutralize this contradiction, to evoke all these incompatible attitudes as parts of the same story. Not only is Frankenstein a myth in Lévi-Strauss’s sense, an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. One should also follow Lévi-Strauss when he claims that Freud’s analysis of the Oedipus myth is another version of the Oedipus myth, to be treated in the same way as the original myth: further variations of a myth try to displace and resolve in another way the contradiction which the original myth tried to resolve. In the case of Frankenstein, one should therefore treat as part of the same myth, as its further variation, the cinematic versions (of which there are more than fifty), and the manner they transform the original story. Here are the main moments:
1. Frankenstein (the best-known, James Whale’s classic from 1931, with Boris Karloff as the monster): its main feature is that it leaves out the subjectivization of the monster (the monster is never allowed to tell the story in the first person, it remains a monstrous Other).
2. In Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), Frankenstein creates a handsome young man whom he educates for society, but the creature’s body begins to degenerate, turning him against his maker.
3. In The Bride (1985), after Frankenstein abandons his original creature as a failure, he creates a beautiful female and educates her to be his perfect mate; but she also escapes his control.
4. In Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, after the monster kills Victor’s bride, Victor in a desperate move reassembles and reanimates her (the scene culminates in Victor dancing with his reanimated wife).
5. Finally, although it does not directly refer to Frankenstein, in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Police Lt. Deckard is assigned to hunt down and eliminate a group of “replicants,” super-human creatures genetically engineered for slave labor, who have rebelled against their creators and are hiding in Los Angeles. The showdown between Deckard and “Batty,” the replicant leader, obviously refers to the conflict between Frankenstein and the monster—here, Batty, in the final act of reconciliation, saves Deckard from certain death.
What all these films have in common is that they all reproduce the basic prohibition of the original novel: none of them directly approaches the political topic (the “monstrosity” of social rebellion); they all tell the story through the frame of family/love relations. So in what does the novel’s contradictory attitude to its central topic consist?
The motif of the monstrosity of the revolution is a conservative element, and the novel’s form (a confession of the principal character at the point of death) is clearly related to a conservative genre popular in Shelley’s time, in which, after they are forced to confront the catastrophic results of their dreams about universal freedom and brotherhood, repentant ex-radicals renounce their reforming ways. However, Shelley does here something that a conservative would never have done: in the central part of the book, she moves a step further and directly gives a voice to the monster himself who is allowed to tell the story from his own perspective. This step expresses the liberal attitude of freedom of speech at its most radical: everyone’s point of view should be heard. In Frankenstein, the monster is not a Thing, a horrible object no one dares to confront; he is fully subjectivized. Mary Shelley moves inside the mind of the monster and asks what it is like to be labeled, defined, oppressed, excommunicated, even physically distorted by society. The ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself to be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love.
So it is crucial to see in what consists the monster’s own story. The monster tells us that his identity as a rebel and murderer was learned, not innate. In direct contradiction to the Burkean tradition of the monster as evil incarnate, the creature tells Frankenstein: “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.” Surprisingly, the monster proves to be a very philosophical rebel: he explains his actions in traditional republican terms. He claims to have been driven to rebellion by the failings of the ruling order. His superiors and protectors have shirked their responsibilities towards him, impelling him to insurrection. Monsters rebel not because they are infected by the evils of the godless radical philosophy, but because they have been oppressed and misused by the regnant order. Mary Shelley’s source was here her own mother’s study, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), in which Mary Wollstonecraft, after agreeing with the Burkean conservatives that rebels are monsters, resolutely insists that these monsters are social products. They are not the living dead, nor are they specters arisen from the tomb of the murdered monarchy. Rather, they are the products of oppression, misrule, and despotism under the ancien régime. The lower orders are driven to rebellion, they turn against their oppressors in parricidal fashion. It is here that the novel comes closest to politics: the monster develops a radical critique of oppression and inequality: “I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; of rank, descent, and noble blood.” He speaks in the manner of revolutionary-era radicals:
I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow-creatures were, high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these acquisitions, but without either he was considered, except in very rare occasions, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profit of the chosen few.
Here Mary Shelley effectively develops the “dialectic of Enlightenment” 150 years before Adorno and Horkheimer. She goes much further than the usual conservative warnings about how scientific and political progress turns into nightmare, chaos, and violence, how man should retain proper humility in the face of the mystery of creation and not try to become a master of life, which should remain a divine prerogative.
The monster is a pure subject of the Enlightenment: after his reanimation, he is a “natural man,” his mind a tabula rasa. Left alone, abandoned by his creator, he has to re-enact the Enlightenment theory of development: he has to learn everything from zero-level by reading and by experience. His first months are effectively the realization of a kind of philosophical experiment. The fact that he morally fails, that he turns into a murderous vengeful monster, is not a condemnation of him but of the society which he approaches with the best intentions and a need to love and be loved. His sad fate illustrates perfectly Rousseau’s thesis that man is by nature good, and that it is society that corrupts him.
The very fear of progress is not necessarily a conservative motif. Recall that, in Mary Shelley’s England, “Luddites,” gangs of desperate workers, were destroying industrial machines in protest against the loss of jobs and the greater exploitation that machines meant for them. Furthermore, feminists read Frankenstein not as a conservative warning about the dangers of progress, but as a proto-feminist critique of the dangers of masculine knowledge and technology which aim to dominate the world and gain control over human life itself. This fear is still with us today: the fear that scientists will create a new form of life or artificial