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Sunday, December 13, 2009

Victor’s Abortion of Romanticism and Revolution

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.”

-Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Grappling with identifying characteristics of Romantic literature, our class definitely gravitated towards ideas revolving around the difficulties of assigning origins and the importance of renewal, of re-envisioning, through decay. Throughout this course, a multitude of works emphasized the importance of regeneration, of cyclicality, as a means of cultivating a broader sense of meaning that emanates from within, external forces first being internalized before instilling said meaning. As a means of approaching this genre, my group earlier on in the semester argued the importance of the French Revolution as the Romantic “spark” that urged the reconsideration of change and the means through which it occurs, disillusionment the result for some. Nobody could escape the internalized revolutionary fervor that variably affected the context of all of our assigned Romantic works.

Yet, it is precisely this escape from revolution, change, regeneration—whichever word one prefers to communicate this idea—that a certain fictional Genevese scientist attempts and arguably achieves: Victor Frankenstein. As can be seen in Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny” Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein’s refusal to adhere to his creation’s request for a female partner, though proving a moral struggle, challenges the importance of regeneration, openly defying this concern of the Romantics. And while readers may be tempted to isolate this refusal as a means for strengthening the argument that he stands as an “anti-Romantic,” Frankenstein’s creation of his monster certainly complicates and seeks to discredit any of his attempts to stop this cycle that he too is intimately involved. Keeping these complicating factors in mind, readers can still view Victor as an anti-Romantic literary figure—disastrous results occurring because of his refusal to allow for the possibility of monstrous regeneration: Revolution.

Neglecting to realize that his internalized ideas of life not only shape the physical, but also become the physical, Victor “fails to exercise such moral responsibility for the single life he creates because he regards creativity as an abstraction” (Hustis 853). Internal manifestations cannot be compartmentalized from what is presented to people in “reality;” all attempts of said divisions would certainly prove futile. Victor’s lack of creative responsibility becomes explicitly stated itself when Victor exclaims, “Wretched devil! You reproach me with your creation; come on then, that I may extinguish the spark which I so negligently bestowed” (125-126). The physical reality of Victor’s internalized obsession—the generation of life—points to the careless manner it was carried out within his imagination; Victor pays hardly any attention to detail as can seen in the monster’s sloppily sutured appearance.

His impatience was to cost him dear, for the less than perfect end-product would, in appearance at least, emerge as nothing less than a monster, an outcast from any natural species of being (Smith 53).

After cursing the monster upon their encounter while on an excursion to the valley of Chamounix, Frankenstein, though initially resistant, agrees to listen to his creature’s story, the monster’s attempt at persuading Victor to comply with its request: the creation of a female partner. “If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your friends” (125). After a few considerations, Victor finally decides to hear the monster’s tale of mental exhaustion and physical exclusion: “For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were…to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness” (128). The fact that Victor experiences these feelings of creative responsibility for the “first time” after all that has happened to his monster highlights Victor’s lack of personal responsibility from the moment he decided on his project; these feelings came far too late.

Frankenstein’s pity and compassion are purely intellectual responses to his creature’s helplessness and misery and thus cannot withstand the physical reality of the monster as a ‘filthy mass that move[s] and talk[s]’ (Hustis 848).

Yet, this shortcoming of accountability will later be the inspiration and foundation for Frankenstein’s eventual refusal to create “one as deformed and horrible as [the monster]” (168).

As the only person capable of bestowing happiness on his creation, Victor hesitantly listens to the monster’s need for a female partner, a request it considers “reasonable and moderate” (170); this description of its demand exposes the disconnect between the monster and Victor’s line of reasoning. On the other hand, Victor’s acknowledgment that the monster’s mate may too become a malevolent force reveals his growing sensitization to the destructive potentials of his mind, the growth of hesitancy when approaching change. Nonetheless, Victor complies with the monster’s demands, his promise weighing on his mind “like Dante’s iron cowl on the heads of the hellish hypocrites” (173). And while he attempts to mend and free his spirit while held prisoner by this burdensome promise, Victor simply cannot rid himself of the unbreakable link to the beast; his inability to cope with the cycle he so negligently started the moment his obsession with the creation of the monster began—not when the life physically enters the monster—drives him to make a costly decision.

As Frankenstein sits down to reflect one evening after laboriously working on the female creature, he suddenly has an epiphany as reasons for not completing his work flood his mind. Of the scenarios Victor paints in his mind, his reasoning that the female “might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation” (190) not only provides the strongest argument for the abandonment of this new monster, but also points to Victor’s urge for mental fortifications against foreign invasions i.e. the monster’s persuasive skills that stirred his emotions, compelling him to create yet another creature. No longer will what remains of Victor’s mental integrity be compromised and subjected by external manifestations of his mind. He also considers the possibility of procreation between the monsters and their spread of horror among mankind. All of these potential threats culminate into a refusal to permit life: an abortion.

Victor Frankenstein [struggles] with the ethical consequences of an “unwanted pregnancy” of sorts, particularly when he undertakes and then abandons the creation of a female mate for his monster (Hustis 846).

By firmly deciding to abandon his project because the “hour of [his] weakness is past” (192), Victor enrages the monster and thus brings an end to any degree of anticipation or sense of possibility for both physical and spiritual regeneration.

This refusal to fulfill his promise points directly to Victor’s unwillingness to bring about any more change regardless of the ideal situation it could potentially bring about; he firmly resists the beauty, no matter how destructive, in the breakdown. Had everything gone according to the monster’s plan, he and his new mate would have quit the world of men and potentially lived “happily ever after,” leaving Victor the opportunity to reclaim what life remained, potential happiness. On the other hand, had one of Victor’s many predictions occurred, humanity could have been literally and figuratively swallowed by his monsters: “I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price perhaps of the existence of the whole human race” (190). Instead of risking either, instead of allowing for change to occur, Victor aborts the project all together so that the “stability” of his situation will take its toll (I chose to scare quote stability here because Victor’s unwillingness to be moved nonetheless results in turmoil).

Through his abortion of the female monster, Victor arguably suspends the master/slave relationship that had characterized his relationship with the monster as can be seen by the fact that the monster’s existence consumes and controls Victor’s mind. Watching the possibility of its future happiness quickly slip away, the monster desperately exclaims, “You are my creator, but I am your master; -obey!” (192) Yet, Victor firmly denies this order. And while this denial doesn’t necessarily reverse their relationship—Victor now the master and monster the slave—it certainly places Victor in a position that permits resolution, no matter how disastrous it may turn out: "I had before regarded my promise with a gloomy despair, as a thing that, with whatever consequences, must be fulfilled; but I now felt as if a film had been taken from before my eyes, and that I, for the first time, saw clearly" (195).

Once again the explicit mentioning of the “first time” proves important, for it does not indicate the beginning of progression, of revolution. Instead it marks the moment that any potential for change becomes suspended, denied; Victor will suffer whatever consequences this decision brings about. From this point in the narrative, one may argue that Victor’s continual, obsessive attempts to rid himself of the monster and its deadly burdens indicate a complete loss of control to his creation. On the contrary, these attempts simply act as coping mechanisms that distract readers from the fact that Victor has brought motion he recklessly started to an abrupt stop. Victor’s mental state now remains static upon the destruction of the creature that he naively created in a period “animated by an almost supernatural enthusiasm” (79), radical disenchantment.

Because Victor does not allow for potential regeneration with his defiant refusal to create his monster’s mate—however catastrophic or ideal the results—he in return is denied entrance into the cycle of life, denied the ability to decay and be reabsorbed. Kept figuratively and literally preserved in a state of icy suspension, Victor’s life comes to an end in the Arctic Circle near the North Pole.

Much how Frankenstein creates the monster from the remnants of once-living beings, so too do people experience and create revolution from the lingering remnants of politically, socially, and economically held beliefs—the reorganization and recycling of ideas spurring new, sometimes-hideous thoughts and actions. As Mary Shelley states in her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, “Every thing must have a beginning…and that beginning must be linked to something that went before” (356). With this in mind, Victor should not be considered the origin for the monster, but merely a stepping-stone towards something monstrous, and it is his realization of this role as a step towards something potentially greater—though initially realized in the monster—that now frightens him. This fearful resistance drives Victor to abandon his promise to the monster that in return permits Victor’s removal from a potentially monstrous cycle, an anti-Romantic move on the protagonist’s part. Once caught in the whirlwind of revolution, people cannot simply elude its events or escape the emotions spurred; they must choose how to internalize their feelings and shape reality even if it stares back with “yellow, watery, but speculative eyes” (357). Victor resists the process of shaping reality when he aborts his second monster and brings about a definite ending: the challenging of the pervasive, uninterrupted nature of Romanticism and Revolution.

Sources:

Hustis, Harriet. "Responsible Creativity and the "Modernity" of Mary Shelley's Prometheus." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 43.4 (2003): 845-858. Print.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, David Lorne Macdonald, and Kathleen Dorothy Scherf. Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. Broadview literary texts. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview Press, 1999.

Smith, Crosbie. “Frankenstein and Natural Magic.” Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity. Ed. Stephen Bann. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 1994. 39-59


1 comment:

  1. I like very much that you have positioned Victor Frankenstein as the “challenge” to/of Romantic revolution/regeneration. This certainly strikes at the heart of the debates and discussions we had as a class throughout the semester—only now we have a figure to which to adhere these conflicts. But are you saying that revolution be defined as “monstrous regeneration”? And, if so, does this make Romanticism monstrous in its very nature? And how important is it, for your specific argument, to maintain Victor as an anti-Romantic? In this light, is he not perhaps a Romantic archteype? Clearly, you have submitted a thought-provoking piece. Be careful, however, that you do not allow the voices of other critics to speak for you. While you have found some appropriate material from secondary sources to support your ideas, it appears as if you simply agree w/ these opinions—as if we should “take their word for it,” as opposed to being convinced by you in your own words (and then augmented by others). “He firmly resists the beauty, no matter how destructive, in the breakdown.” → This is a wonderful statement! It speaks volumes about Victor’s predicament, as well as that of Romanticism (in the terms we emphasized this semester).

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