Description
1. In one-two paragraphs, summarize the essay “Mutant” by Nicholas Royle and Andrew Bennett (attached file). In this summary, you simply need to summarize the important points of the essay itself and explain why the monster in Frankenstein is a “mutant,” as outlined by Bennett and Royle. After you have written the summary, please write a 1-2 paragraph argument about how and why another character in Frankenstein (that is, not the monster) is also a “mutant,” as outlined by Bennett and Royle. In this argument, which should be character-driven, you must close read one or two key scenes involving your chosen character that proves your character is also a “mutant,” though perhaps not the same kind of mutant as the monster. 2. In 1-2 paragraphs, summarize the essay “Frankenstein’s Politics” by Adriana Craciun (attached). As above, you simply need to summarize the important points of the essay itself: what is the central argument or arguments of this essay and what evidence does Craciun use to prove this argument or argument? After you have written your summary, please write a 2-3 paragraph close reading of what you consider to be the most important political moment, scene, or sequence in the novel. In this close reading of the chosen scene, the argument can agree with Craciun by extending some points made in her essay or, on the other hand, disagree with Craciun by disagreeing with some of the points made in her essay. Consider, also, making reference to the appendices in the Broadview edition that provide you with source materials about the political influences on Mary Shelley. Also, I have included an essay by Andy Mousley to help sort out some of the finer political points Shelley is working with (human vs. posthuman).
ADRIANA CRACIUN
Frankenstein’s Politics
Frankenstein’s approach to the revolutionary politics of the early nineteenth
century was complex and ambivalent, making this novel a powerful touchstone
for subsequent eras. Mary Shelley crafted Frankenstein using a nested
set of narrative frames so that each frame’s protagonist –Walton, Victor, the
creature, and (via the creature) Safie – refracts the novel’s politics through a
different contemporary debate. The result is a kaleidoscopic political imaginary
that has helped regenerate the novel’s iconic status for new generations.
The political dimensions of Frankenstein were immediately apparent to its
original readers and reviewers, and have continued to evolve as new media
returned to Shelley’s iconic monster in particular, and his protean ability
to voice and embody a remarkable range of later political crises – from
revolutionary Marxism, Irish independence, abolition and slave rebellions,
to animal rights, human cloning and genetic research. This chapter focuses
on the original political concerns of the 1818 novel in Shelley’s day, as
channelled through its distinct frame narrators.
As the daughter of Britain’s leading radical writers of the 1790s – William
Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft – Mary Shelley inherited a radical political
legacy difficult to sustain, and one that overshadowed her writing throughout
her career. By dedicating the anonymously published Frankenstein to
‘William Godwin, author of Political Justice [and] Caleb Williams’, Shelley
situated the novel deliberately in this radical legacy of Godwinian radical
idealism and his novel of persecution and paranoia. In the 1790s, Godwin’s
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) had become the incendiary text
most identified with British radicalism – its combination of commitment to
austere justice, passionate denunciation of economic inequality and idealist
faith in the withering away of unjust institutions through rational enlightenment,
permeated public debates in the revolutionary decades and made
Godwin’s name notorious.
Godwin’s philosophy of perfectibility envisioned doing away not only
with the state but with sexual reproduction, perhaps even all sexuality and
84
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316091203.008
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Harvard University, on 28 Jun 2018 at 14:56:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
Frankenstein’s Politics
mortality, as he described in the famous section on ‘Of Health, and the
Prolongation of Human Life’:
The men . . . who exist when the earth shall refuse itself to a more extended
population, will cease to propagate, for they will no longer have any motive,
either of error or duty, to induce them. In addition to this they will perhaps be
immortal. Thewholewill be a race ofmen, and not of children. Generation will
not succeed generation, nor will truth have in a certain degree to recommence
her career at the end of every thirty years. There will be no war, no crimes,
no administration of justice as it is called, and no government . . . Beside this,
there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment.1
By taking to the (il)logical extreme Godwin’s faith in the potential for
human immortality through reason, Shelley uses Victor’s obsession with
creation without sexual reproduction to recast Godwin’s utopian vision as a
dystopian ‘usurpation of the female’.2 Had Shelley simply thus caricatured
Godwin and his utopian project, Frankenstein would have been a forgettable
anti-Jacobin screed, one of many. But instead, Shelley ingeniously imbricated
the novel’s inflammatory politics in a series of concentric narratives, so that
narrative authority is notoriously difficult to assign, making for a nuanced
and ambivalent political vision.
Shelley’s approach to Godwin’s political philosophy is thus extremely
complex. While Godwin’s philosophical radicalism was associated by
counter-revolutionary writers with French revolutionary agitation and
English Jacobinism,Godwin himself had remained opposed to putting democratic
reforms in practice, taking issuewith associations like the London Corresponding
Society because he feared their populist appeals would unleash
‘disorder and tumult’ and drown out the sober reasoning of ‘persons of distinction’.
3 Godwin preferred that political change happen through rational
contemplation and ‘universal benevolence’ on the part of educated philosophers
like himself. This fundamental tension between Godwinian idealism
(‘metaphysics’, to use the language of his day) and its material and social
practice is central to Frankenstein’s politics – central to the novel’s critique
of radical philosophy and revolutionary change, and to the novel’s, and especially
the creature’s, two centuries of permutations as icon of revolutionary
philosophy gone horribly wrong.
From his inception in Ingolstadt, the legendary origin of the Illuminati
order, to his surreptitious education via the works of Volney, Goethe and
Plutarch, Frankenstein’s creature embodied revolution. But Shelley’s genius
was in elevating her revolutionary creature above the polarized visions of
the pro-revolutionary and anti-Jacobin writings on which she drew. Edmund
Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) had been the central
85
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316091203.008
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Harvard University, on 28 Jun 2018 at 14:56:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
adriana craciun
counter-revolutionary text of the 1790s, popularizing a highly charged language
of monstrosity, parricide and cannibalism when speaking of the
French Revolution. For Burke, the Revolution was ‘a species of political
monster, which has always ended by devouring those who have produced
it.’4 An even more sensationalized political inspiration was Abb´e Barruel’s
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797), a vast conspiracy
theory that located the philosophical origins of the 1789 Revolution in the
secretive Illuminati order founded in Ingolstadt, which ‘engendered that disastrous
monster called Jacobin, raging uncontrolled, and almost unopposed,
in these days of horror.’5
A favourite book of Percy Shelley’s, and one read by Mary Shelley in 1814,
Barruel’s Memoirs along with Burke’s Reflections provided the counterrevolutionary
landscape of paranoia and unnatural revolt that has long
associated Shelley’s romance with counter-revolutionary reaction against her
radical parentage. As Lee Sterrenburg showed in a groundbreaking essay,
Burke’s demonization of the Revolution as a monster saturated counterrevolutionary
narratives and became attached to William Godwin. For Sterrenburg,
Shelley ‘has appropriated the standard conservative portrayal of
Godwinism’ as monstrous, ‘but purges it of virtually all reference to collective
movements’, transforming it from political melodrama to ‘domestic
tragedy’.6 The result is that this domesticization and internalization effectively
depoliticizes the creature’s eloquent protests against class privilege and
inequality. But simultaneously, Shelley’s internalization of political debates
creates an original and more complex political dynamic, in which the monstrous
Jacobins imagined by Burke and Barruel are entangled with their
monstrous progenitors, the men of privilege like Victor, whose egocentric
rants against the creature’s demands for equality appear as diabolical as the
creature’s rationalization of violence.
In fact the language of monstrosity was used widely by counter-revolutionaries
and pro-revolutionaries alike throughout the 1790s. Godwin had
described the feudal system as a devouring ‘ferocious monster’, and Thomas
Paine in Rights of Man (1791) wrote of ‘exterminat[ing] the monster Aristocracy’.
7 Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley’s mother, whom she reread closely
throughout her life, voiced in 1794 a sentiment that may as well have been
spoken by the creature himself: ‘People are rendered ferocious by misery; and
misanthropy is ever the offspring of discontent.’8 As Chris Baldick shows
in In Frankenstein’s Shadow (1987), though it was Burke who ‘first recognized
and named the great political “monster” of the modern age’, the
language of monstrosity saturated the full spectrum of political discourse in
the revolutionary decades.9
86
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316091203.008
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Harvard University, on 28 Jun 2018 at 14:56:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
Frankenstein’s Politics
Ingolstadt, where Victor creates the creature and the epicentre of Illuminati
conspiracy according to Barruel, and Geneva, Victor’s and Rousseau’s
birthplace, anchor the political geography of the novel within this polarized
debate on the French Revolution. The creature’s origins in Ingolstadt and
Geneva fit well with the revolutionary questions he asks about privilege,
property and equality, as he gives voice to the Rousseauvian and Jacobin
critiques of his imagined birthplaces.
Educated by overhearing the lessons of the De Lacey family taken from
the works of Plutarch and Volney, two revolutionary favourites, the creature
learns of class inequality:
I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; of
rank, descent, and noble blood.
The words induced me to turn towards myself. 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 instances, as a
vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profit of the chosen
few.10
Seeking sympathy and equality, Shelley’s creature here also echoes Rousseau,
who like him had famously lamented in The Reveries of a Solitary Walker
(1782):
Here I am then, alone on the earth, having neither brother, neighbour, friend,
or society but myself. The most sociable and the most friendly of mankind
is proscribed from the rest by universal consent. They have sought in the
refinements of their malice to find out that torment which could most afflict
my tender heart; they have violently broken every tie which held me to them:
I had loved mankind in spite of themselves.11
The Shelleys were ‘immersed in both the literary as well as the literal
landscapes of Rousseau’s life and work’ in the summer of 1816, visiting
Lake Geneva and rereading La Nouvelle H´elo¨ıse (1761).12 The renowned
Genevan philosopher of sentiment, liberty, exile and education was at one
point described by Wollstonecraft as the ‘true Prometheus of sentiment’,13
and his influence is visible in Shelley’s characters’ intense experience of
Alpine nature and the creature’s development in solitude.
But Rousseau was also an infamous figure in counter-revolutionary circles
for his abandonment of his five children to a foundling hospital, seen as a
failure of revolutionary philosophy (and sympathy) that outdid Godwin’s.
By ingeniously overlaying this series of flawed father figures who neglected
87
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316091203.008
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Harvard University, on 28 Jun 2018 at 14:56:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
adriana craciun
their children (Victor, Godwin, Rousseau, God), Shelley is able to both
evoke their most powerful political claims while holding them subject to the
critique of the ‘domestic affections’ and of gender, which their consistently
masculinist political liberties denied.
Of all the voices in Shelley’s polyvocal text, it is the creature’s that captivates
us the most. The creature’s political education generates the novel’s
most radical provocations linking the oppression of gender, class, race and
empire together in such a way as to resonate with new audiences across
two centuries on a scale unknown with other Romantic-era works. Thus
the creature learns of the link between class inequality, racism and empire:
‘I heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere, and wept with Safie
over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants’ (p. 95). His own experience
is distinctly racialized and deliberately compared to that of African slaves:
I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was,
besides, endowed with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not
even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they, and could subsist
upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my
frame; my stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around, I saw and heard
of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all
men fled, and whom all men disowned? (p. 96)14
Burke had famously compared French revolutionaries to rebelling slaves
‘suddenly broke loose from the house of bondage’15 and unfit to rule
themselves, and as Malchow has shown, Shelley’s descriptions of the creature’s
size, strength and implied sexual threat would have been suggestive
of African racial difference to her British readers. The threat the creature
embodies thus included ‘the threat of non-white races’ claiming equality, at
a time when slavery continued in the British colonies.16
Frankenstein as a novel of racial panic was most famously evoked by the
foreign secretary George Canning in an 1824 parliamentary debate about
whether the children of West Indian slaves should be freed:
In dealing with the negro, Sir, we must remember that we are dealing with a
being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a
child. To turn the negro loose in the manhood of his physical strength, in the
maturity of his physical passions, but in the infancy of his uninstructed reason,
would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent
romance; the hero of which constructs a human form, with all the . . . sinews
of a giant; but being unable to impart to the work of his hands a perception
of right and wrong, he finds too late that he has created a more than mortal
power of doing mischief and himself recoils from the monster which he has
made.17
88
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316091203.008
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Harvard University, on 28 Jun 2018 at 14:56:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
Frankenstein’s Politics
Shelley had invoked slavery in the literal sense when contemplating the creature’s
abject disenfranchisement, as we see here in this 1824 political representation,
despite the stage version (Presumption) having already begun
the novel’s transformation into a narrower concern with an out-of-control
science. In subsequent decades, the monster’s racial otherness would resonate
more closely with the Irish working classes than with African slaves,
in further permutations throughout nineteenth-century popular culture in
Britain, Ireland and the US.18
If we start to look beyond the creature/Victor dyad discussed above (and
its Geneva/Ingolstadt geography) as the key to Frankenstein’s politics, we
see further signs of Shelley’s political complexity. As Fred Randel has shown,
readings of Frankenstein as broadly conservative tend to neglect the nuances
that Shelley suggests through the more diverse settings in which she situated
Victor’s travels and later his quest to create a second monster. Victor escapes
from the continent to Britain, echoing the earlier flights of Rousseau and
Voltaire to Britain in the eighteenth century, part of the ‘Anglomanie’ in
which the Britain of Newton, Locke and Hume was the beacon of enlightened
freethinking for continentals. In Victor’s sojourns in England, Scotland
and Ireland, Shelley contemplates the radical legacies of the British Isles,
before and beyond the French Revolutionary crises.
It was while travelling through Oxford with Clerval that Victor contemplated
‘the most animating epoch of English history’, the civil war, and its
greatest revolutionary hero according to the Shelleys, John Hampden:
We visited the tomb of the illustrious Hampden, and the field on which that
patriot fell. For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable
fears, to contemplate the divine ideas of liberty and self-sacrifice, of which these
sights were the monuments and the remembrancers. For an instant I dared to
shake off my chains, and look around me with a free and lofty spirit; but the
iron had eaten into my flesh, and I sank again, trembling and hopeless, into
my miserable self. (pp. 133–4)
Doubling the creature’s similar evocations of the language of enslavement
(here, in a psychological sense, compared to the creature’s more profound
experience of physical and psychological enslavement), Victor briefly
reconnects to the spirit of political radicalism indigenous to England.
Hampden was arguably ‘the ideal male revolutionary’ for both Godwin and
Percy Shelley, and in 1817 Mary Shelley and Godwin had visited together
Hampden’s monument.19 In 1817 radical Hampden Clubs, a legacy of the
disbanded 1790s societies like the London Corresponding Society, gathered
hundreds of thousands of signatures advocating universal male suffrage
and annual parliaments, prompting a serious governmental crackdown on
89
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316091203.008
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Harvard University, on 28 Jun 2018 at 14:56:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
adriana craciun
reform, including the suspension of Habeas Corpus.20 A year after the publication
of Frankenstein, Percy Shelley wrote of the Hampden Clubs in ‘A
Philosophical View of Reform’, that ‘the petitions of a million of men [were]
rejected with disdain. Now they are more miserable, more hopeless, more
impatient of their misery.’21 Victor’s admiration of Hampden is thus one of
the many shared affinities between him, his creature and ‘the divine ideas of
liberty’ that initially inspired all of them. Visiting Hampden’s tomb fails to
reawaken in Victor ‘the free and lofty spirit’ of liberty, but Shelley’s highlighting
of this English revolutionary tradition in 1817 is ‘a political act
implying just the reverse of the conservatism now sometimes attributed to
Frankenstein.’22
While the creature’s and Victor’s narratives have enjoyed the most attention,
they are framed from without and within by those ofWalton and Safie,
which as we shall see significantly shape how we read them. Because ‘Walton
both begins the story and ends it’, his narrative provides ‘The broadest, most
comprehensive, most universal narrative viewpoint’ according to Franco
Moretti.23 For Moretti, Walton’s narrative frame subordinates those of
Victor and the creature, and effectively erases the political conflict embodied
in Victor’s and the creature’s dialectic of mutual pursuit and class antagonism.
Lee Sterrenburg had made the most powerful case for the impact of
Shelley’s device of psychologically internalizing politics, as we saw earlier.
ButWalton’s narrative does not remove the novel’s politics from a collective
to a psychological setting – it extends them to a newly contentious collective
context, that of geographical exploration.
Walton’s narrative on board a voyage to the North Pole is often seen in
largely symbolic terms, as a high Romantic fantastic voyage that parallels
Victor’s Promethean quest for discovery in science. Traditionally, Walton’s
Arctic voyage has been read by literary scholars through the lens of literary
influence; namely, Walton’s early interest in poetry and specifically in
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and its ‘land of mist and snow’.
Seen this way, Walton’s pursuit of a ‘paradise of my own creation’ remains
primarily a mythic and literary pursuit, one that ties his idealism closely to
Victor’s, Godwin’s and Percy Shelley’s, but largely through an apolitical and
internalized poetic frame.
But readers of Frankenstein and of contemporary periodicals would have
seen Walton’s expedition not as a throwback to Coleridgean or Miltonic
symbolism, but as a companion voyage to the two Admiralty voyages that
in 1818 set off for the North Pole and North-West Passage. In four ships
that departed with much fanfare in the popular press, the 1818 Arctic naval
expeditions promised much and ultimately delivered nothing. Walton’s private
voyage in search of the North Pole and open polar sea, while set in the
90
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316091203.008
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Harvard University, on 28 Jun 2018 at 14:56:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
Frankenstein’s Politics
1790s like the rest of the novel, sought a similar geographical discovery but
by a different route than did the 1818 British voyages (through the Russian
Arctic, less familiar and thus probably more intriguing to Shelley’s readers).
Shelley had begun writing Frankenstein in 1816, and added Walton’s Arctic
frame around 1817, after she had begun reading the Quarterly Review’s
accounts of Arctic exploration written by contributor and Second Secretary
to the Admiralty John Barrow.
Writing in the October 1816 Quarterly Review (actually published in
1817), Barrow provided a detailed history of British attempts to locate the
North-West Passage and North Pole, arguing that ‘the polar regions of
the globe within the arctic circle offer a wide field for the researches of a
philosophic mind.’24 Barrow described the voyages of famous explorers like
the Elizabethan John Davis, who named southern Greenland the Land of
Desolation but also waxed lyrical about the extraordinary sights awaiting
Englishmen who dared to reach those latitudes. The most ‘sanguine’ seeker
of the North-West Passage according to Barrow was Charles Duncan in the
early 1790s, one of the inspirations for Walton, whose crew were ‘terrified
at the idea of going on discovery’ and mutinied, precipitating the captain’s
mental breakdown.25 Duncan’s was the last Arctic expedition before the
outbreak of war in 1793, meaning that the governmental reward of £20,000
for traversing the Passage, and £5,000 for reaching within 1 degree of the
North Pole, remained unclaimed when Shelley’s imaginary voyage and the
naval voyages set out in 1818.
Walton’s speculations about the Arctic are wholly in keeping with the
voyage literature that Shelley would have read in periodicals and compilations
like John Pinkerton’s fourteen-volume General Collection of the Best
and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels (1813).26 As Walton writes to
his sister:
I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation;
it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.
There, Margaret, the sun is forever visible; its broad disk just skirting the
horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There – for with your leave, my
sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators – there snow and frost are
banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in
wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe.
Its productions and features may be without example, as the phænomena of
the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitudes. What
may not be expected in a country of eternal light? (pp. 5–6)
Walton describes his Arctic speculations originating in his reading ‘with
ardour the accounts of the various voyages which have been made in the
91
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316091203.008
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Harvard University, on 28 Jun 2018 at 14:56:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
adriana craciun
prospect of arriving at the North Pacific Ocean through the seas which
surround the pole’ (p. 6). His language reflects experienced Arctic voyagers
like John Davis, who sailed three times in search of the North-West Passage,
and made repeated visits to Greenland. Noting the profusion of animal
life and human occupancy that challenged his expectations of the Arctic
as a desolate environment, Davis imagined that Greenlanders even farther
north would enjoy ‘a wonderfull difference from al the rest of the world’,
experiencing:
life, light, and comfort of nature in a higher measure then all the nations of
the earth. How blessed then may we thinke this nation to be: for they are in
perpetualle light, and never knowe what darknesse meaneth, by the benefit of
twylight and full moones.27
Walton’s first love may have been poetry, but his fascination with the Arctic
as a wondrous place of perpetual light and vibrant life is drawn from this
long history of Arctic exploration and science. Thus Walton’s confidence
that the North Pole is habitable and a land of perpetual enlightenment is
resonant with Romantic idealism and literature, but it is not derived from
it. Shelley’s originality is in forging this new connection (between the long
history of exploration and the recent history of literature) through the three
male narrators’ interleaved quests, through which we are invited to see
Britain’s Arctic fever in 1818 as part of the modern landscape of utopian
thought.
More naval Arctic voyages followed in quick succession in 1819, 1821 and
1824, led by William Parry, John Franklin and others. While Frankenstein
began its new life on stage in 1823 in Peake’s Presumption without Walton’s
Arctic frame, the connections Shelley had forged between Walton’s and
Victor’s projects remained intact in the popular imagination. In The Spirit
of the Age (1825), William Hazlitt had connected the Admiralty voyages of
Arctic discovery to Godwin’s exploration of ideal reason in Political Justice:
Captain Parry would be thought to have rendered a service to navigation and
his country, no less by proving that there is no North-West Passage, than if
he had ascertained that there is one: so Mr. Godwin has rendered an essential
service to moral science, by attempting (in vain) to pass the Arctic Circle
and Frozen Regions, where the understanding is no longer warmed by the
affections, nor fanned by the breeze of fancy! This is the effect of all bold,
original, and powerful thinking, that it either discovers the truth or detects
where error lies.28
For Hazlitt, Godwin’s and Parry’s voyages are valuable as negative discoveries
– in Godwin’s case, of the undesirability of reason ‘no longer warmed
92
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316091203.008
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Harvard University, on 28 Jun 2018 at 14:56:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
Frankenstein’s Politics
by the affections’ as a foundation for political justice. Frankenstein had first
made this now commonplace ‘use of polar cold as a metaphor for emotional
coldness.’29 Thanks to Hazlitt we can see that Shelley’s brilliant, implicitly
feminist critique of the denial of the ‘domestic affections’ in Godwinian radicalism
was inseparable from the debates surrounding the high-profile but
repeatedly unsuccessful attempts in Arctic discovery promoted by Britain’s
Tory government and press.
Central to Frankenstein’s political charge was its intervention into the
polar politics and print culture of its day. The naval voyages were combined
with a robust publication programme that together portrayed the Arctic
as a new potential imperial front extending British national interests north
from its existing British North American colonies. Shelley’s first choice publisher
for Frankenstein had been John Murray, who held the legal rights
to publishing all official Arctic exploration accounts and also published the
Quarterly Review, but he had turned the manuscript down.
On the disastrous 1819 Franklin overland expedition to the Arctic Ocean,
Franklin’s naturalist Dr John Richardson had imagined one of their indigenous
female guides as ‘a fit companion for Frankenstein’s chef d’oeuvre’,
having crossed out ‘monster’ in his letter.30 He could imagine Frankenstein’s
creature at home in the Arctic because Shelley had already imagined
him promising ‘to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new
world’ with his female companion, before Victor reneged on his promise
to create her, fearing they would propagate a new ‘race of devils’ (p. 138).
Frankenstein’s racial politics emerged even more provocatively later in the
nineteenth century, as its creature was taken up in popular political commentary
as an avatar of Britain’s racialized others like the Irish and Africans,
as we have seen. But the creature’s racial otherness was clearly visible
in 1819 to this naturalist, who imagined the monster as a version of the
ignoble savage in the North American Arctic, with an imperial politics at
odds with Shelley’s critical version. Shelley’s creature had ‘wept with Safie
over the hapless fate’ of the ‘original inhabitants’ of the Americas, and
imagined an alternative history in which they could ‘have been discovered
more gradually’ (p. 95). Typically we have read this imperial dimension
of Frankenstein solely through its later evocations in abolitionist and Irish
colonial debates, or through Henry Clerval’s commitment to Orientalist
study, which Shelley upholds as a preferable (commercial) alternative to the
violence of Victor’s egotistical pursuit of scientific knowledge. But in 1819
the creature’s racial difference was fully visible in the Arctic of Shelley’s narrative
setting and the Admiralty’s theatre of exploration. Walton’s Arctic
frame thus provides much more than a cultural or symbolic imaginary of
ice or the Arctic sublime. Even though Shelley is clearly not interested in
93
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316091203.008
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Harvard University, on 28 Jun 2018 at 14:56:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
adriana craciun
the specifics of any Arctic places or people, she is deliberately setting the
novel within the contentious political dimensions of Arctic exploration in
her day.
Frankenstein’s innermost narrative frame is that of Safie, which many
scholars identify as the feminist core of Shelley’s novel. The daughter of
a ‘Christian Arab’ mother and Muslim merchant father, Safie has fled her
father’s control and taken refuge with the De Laceys. It is her radical education
via the works ofMilton, Volney and Plutarch that the creature overhears
and shares, aligning his rebellion with her own. Mellor argues that ‘Safie,
whose Christian mother instructed her “to aspire to higher powers of intellect,
and an independence of spirit, forbidden to the female followers of
Mahomet,” . . . is the incarnation of Mary Wollstonecraft.’31 In the highly
gendered world of Frankenstein, Shelley had already shown how the doctrine
of the separate spheres destroys the women – Elizabeth, Justine, Caroline
Lavenza – who rely upon it. But Safie is different because, as Wollstonecraft
had advocated in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and in the
example of her own extraordinary life, Safie pursues physical, intellectual,
romantic and spiritual liberty outside the literally patriarchal limits set by
her father and his culture.32 Like Wollstonecraft herself had done in her
voyage to Scandinavia (secretly pursuing her lover Gilbert Imlay’s business
interests), Safie travels unchaperoned to Switzerland in order to reunite with
her beloved Felix De Lacey, whom her father has forbidden her to marry
because of his religion. ‘Mahometanism’, the code word for the nadir of
women’s oppression throughout British eighteenth-century writing, including
that of Wollstonecraft, is incorporated by Shelley in Safie’s narrative in
order to explore through a safely distanced context her own culture’s sequestration
of women in the so-called private sphere. Thus, like Wollstonecraft,
Safie was accustomed to ‘grand ideas and a noble emulation for virtue’,
not the ‘puerile amusements’ reserved for women of her class (p. 99). In
educating Safie and enabling her flight from her father and his religion, the
unconventional De Lacey family put into practice Wollstonecraft’s radical
ideas about the rights of woman to education and public agency, making this
central narrative of Frankenstein one that works against the male narrators
(Walton, Victor, creature) and their disastrous separation from the women
in their lives.
As a racial and religious outsider, Safie is embraced by the De Laceys
in a way that gives the creature hope that he too may find acceptance at
last, as he does at first with the blind grandfather. But Shelley denies the
creature a lengthy stay in this utopian vision of an egalitarian society and
unconventional family. As Kate Ferguson Ellis argues:
94
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316091203.008
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Harvard University, on 28 Jun 2018 at 14:56:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
Frankenstein’s Politics
Shelley seems to be suggesting that, if the family is to be a viable institution
for the transmission of domestic affection from one generation to the next,
it must redefine that precious commodity in such a way that it can extend
to ‘outsiders’, while at the same time proving hardy enough to survive in the
world outside the home.33
ForMellor, Shelley’s revision of the egalitarian family does not go far enough
politically because it upholds the private/public dichotomy in order to maintain
‘domestic affection’ as a class privilege: ‘Mary Shelley grounded her
alternative political ideology on the metaphor of the peaceful, loving, bourgeois
family’ and ‘therefore implicitly endorsed a conservative vision of
gradual evolutionary reform, a position articulated most forcefully during
her times by Edmund Burke.’34 But the egalitarian, feminist (and arguably
Orientalist) idyll at the heart of Frankenstein’s works is designed as an
ephemeral counterpoise working against the other concentric narratives,
not a utopian synthesis meant to sustain Shelley’s final vision.
In the shared desires and similar barriers to belonging of Safie and the
creature, Shelley connects political claims across racial, sexual and class
differences that the novel explores, in ways inconceivable to followers of
Burke, who had literally demonized political radicals. The Orientalism of
Safie’s plight, her dread of ‘being immured within the walls of a haram’
(p. 99), like that of Clerval’s fascination with Eastern knowledge, is highly
conventional, unlike the striking originality of Shelley’s imagination in linkingmedical
and geographical discovery. But in placing this dramatic example
of feminist cultural rebellion at the heart of this novel littered with the bodies
of ineffectual, passive or self-sacrificing women, Shelley expands the revolutionary
political critique of her time, reviving a radical case for the rights of
woman that had been vilified along with Wollstonecraft’s reputation. ‘Conservative’
remains an anachronism in Romantic-era political discourse, and
counter-revolutionary or reactionary likewise do not serve Frankenstein’s
politics well. Mary Shelley is, rather, ‘an informed, critical observer and
liberal sympathizer who wishes to prevent both continued injustice and revolutionary
violence.’35 As such, she fashioned an intricate and deliberately
fugitive political imaginary in Frankenstein, one that continues to inspire
new possibilities in radically different times and places.
NOTES
1 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 2 vols. (London: Robinson,
1793), Vol. II, pp. 872–3.
2 See Chapter 6 in Anne Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, HerMonsters
(New York: Methuen, 1988), pp. 115–26.
95
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316091203.008
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Harvard University, on 28 Jun 2018 at 14:56:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
adriana craciun
3 William Godwin, Political Justice, p. 288. On Godwin’s resistance to politics in
practice, see Kramnick’s Introduction to Political Justice, pp. 32–50.
4 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Frank Turner (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 179.
5 Abb´e Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (London, 1798)
3:414.
6 Lee Sterrenburg, ‘Mary Shelley’sMonster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein’, in
George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (eds.), The Endurance of Frankenstein
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 143–71, pp. 148, 157.
Sterrenburg’s brilliant essay appears to have introduced the widely repeated error
that Walpole called Godwin ‘one of the greatest monsters exhibited by history’,
when in fact Walpole was referring to Condorcet (letter to Hannah More, Jan.
1795, in Private Correspondence of Horace Walpole, 4 vols. (London: Rodwell
and Martin, 1820), Vol. IV, p. 545; see Sterrenburg, p. 146. Sterrenburg seems
to have misread Ford Brown’s Life of William Godwin (London: J.M. Dent &
Sons, 1926), p. 154n.
7 Godwin, Political Justice, Vol. II, p. 475; Tom Paine, Rights of Man (Dublin,
1791), p. 34.
8 Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress
of the French Revolution (London: Joseph Johnson, 1794), p. 71.
9 Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-
Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 20.
10 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. and Intro. Marilyn Butler (Oxford University
Press, 1998), 96. Future references will be made parenthetically.
11 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of J.J. Rousseau with The Reveries of
a Solitary Walker (London: J. Bew, 1783) Vol. II, 1.
12 David Marshall, Chap. 6 in The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux,
Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (University of Chicago Press, 1988),
pp. 178–227; 183. Mary Shelley wrote a lengthy essay on Rousseau in her
Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France (1838–9).
13 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Romantic hero Darnford writes this in The Wrongs of
Woman (1798) from Michelle Faubert (ed.), Mary, A Fiction and The Wrongs
of Woman, or Maria (Peterborough: Broadview, 2012), p. 177.Wollstonecraft’s
relationship to Rousseau’s diverse writings was famously conflicted, and she
issued a blistering critique of his gendered educational theories in A Vindication
of the Rights of Woman.
14 On race and slavery in Frankenstein, see Howard Malchow, ‘Frankenstein’s
Monster and Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Past and Present,
139 (1993) 90–130; Anne Mellor, ‘Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow
Peril’, Nineteenth Century Contexts, 23(1) (2001) 1–28; Elizabeth Young, Black
Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (New York University
Press, 2008).
15 Burke, Reflections, p. 31.
16 Malchow, ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’, p. 127.
17 George Canning,March 1824, as quoted in Malchow, ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’,
p. 122. The British slave trade had ended in 1807 but slavery in its colonies was
permitted to continue until 1833.
96
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316091203.008
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Harvard University, on 28 Jun 2018 at 14:56:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
Frankenstein’s Politics
18 On Frankenstein’s creature as Irish, see Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow,
pp. 90–91; Fred Randel ‘The Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein’, ELH, 70(2) (2003), 465–491, 482–3.
19 Randel, ‘Political Geography’, 479.
20 Ibid., 479.
21 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’, Shelley’s Prose, ed.
David Lee Clark (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1954),
pp. 229–60, p. 255.
22 Randel, ‘Political Geography’, 478. For a more ambivalent reading of Hampden’s
role, see Iain Crawford, ‘Wading Through Slaughter: John Hampden, Thomas
Gray, and Shelley’s Frankenstein’, Studies in the Novel, 20(3) (1988) 249–61.
23 Franco Moretti, ‘Dialectic of Fear’, Signs Taken for Wonders (London: Verso,
1983), pp. 83–108.
24 John Barrow, rev. of Thomas Selkirk’s Sketch of the British Fur Trade and
Voyage de la Mer Atlantique `a l’Oc´ean Pacifique, Quarterly Review, 16 (1816),
129–72; 170. The Quarterly Review was typically published late – the October
1816 issue appeared in February 1817.
25 Barrow, ibid., 166. On Duncan and Walton, see Adriana Craciun, Introduction
to Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration (Cambridge University
Press, 2016).
26 John Pinkerton, General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages
and Travels (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1813).
27 John Davis, The Worldes Hydrographical Description (1595) in The Voyages
andWorks of John Davis, ed. Albert Hastings Markham (London: Hakluyt Soc.,
1880), pp. 191–228, p. 223. Davis had been reprinted in Pinkerton.
28 William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (London: Henry Colburn, 1825), pp. 47–
48.
29 Francis Spufford, IMay Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London:
Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 87.
30 Richardson, unpublished letter, as qtd. in Adriana Craciun, ‘Writing the Disaster:
Franklin and Frankenstein’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 65.4 (2011),
pp. 433–80, p. 452. Richardson’s extensive reference to Frankenstein is the
only known one in contemporary Arctic exploration texts, and was censored
by Richardson’s Victorian editor when his correspondence was eventually published,
which is why it has only surfaced recently (see Craciun, ‘Writing the
Disaster’, 452–6).
31 Mellor, Mary Shelley, p. 118.
32 Shelley was rereading Rights of Woman while writing Frankenstein; The Journals
of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, 2 vols., eds. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-
Kilvert (Oxford: The Clarendon Press. 1987), Vol. I, p. 97.
33 Kate Ferguson Ellis, ‘Monsters in the Garden: Mary Shelley and the Bourgeois
Family’, in The Endurance of Frankenstein, pp. 123–42, p. 140.
34 Mellor, Mary Shelley, p. 86.
35 Randel, ‘Political Geography’, 488.
97
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316091203.008
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Harvard University, on 28 Jun 2018 at 14:56:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/
