Frankenstein maybe writing sample I don't know.

Much of the psychoanalytical theory written about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein approaches the novel with Victor as the subject and addresses the Monster only in relationship to Victor. Though Victor is an interesting psychoanalytical case study I’m more interested in the psychologically exact nature of the Monster’s psychology. Instead of reading his development as a representation of Victor’s Oedipus complex or his search for his mother I read this psychology as an archetypal representation of the aspects of human consciousness. The qualities of consciousness are exposed when one reads the Monster’s narrative against the works of Jacques Lacan and John Locke, and in this context one may see the monster merely as an aesthetically unpleasing man as opposed to Denise Gigante’s view of him as the active pinochle of ugliness and Dean Franco’s assertion that he is merely a trope of language. The character of the monster is not only a function of device or authorial expression but has characteristics and independent psychological development. He deserves his own character study.

It’s easy to see the aspects of the Monster’s consciousness when reading his tale through the first year of his existence. He begins his narrative by stating that

It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct. A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses. (Shelley 367)

Although the Monster is aware of his sensations, events are blurred and indistinct. He is unable to make distinctions between his perceptions and is only vaguely aware of his existence. Like man, he has vague memories of sensation, of pleasure and pain, but he is hard-pressed to pinpoint specific locations, objects or experiences. He lives his life in a sea of emotions and can barely keep his head above water long enough to begin even acknowledging where these sensations have come from. At this point, he has yet to make any associations between ideas and he is only able to reflect upon these impressions in hindsight. At bottom of the same page we see his reflection from this later vantage point: “I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing; but feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept.” Much like a child he knows that pain hurts and it is unpleasant. He intuitively grasps that he is helpless and miserable and that all he can do is weep for his misery. Further, “No distinct ideas occupied my mind; all was confused” (368). Frustration is a natural emotion when a being is left to fend for himself, and all the Monster is aware of is these sensations of pain and uneasiness.

John Locke, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, concludes that

Our observation employed either about external sensible objects; or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that, which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring. (109)

These sensations that the Monster is experiencing, then, surely lead to his ideas of the world which then attach themselves to both the external objects and internal operations that caused them. As Locke continues on page 129, “Delight, or uneasiness, one or other of them join themselves to almost all our ideas, both of sensation and reflection: and there is scarce any which is not able to produce in us pleasure or pain.” Thus every single idea that exists in the human mind is accompanied by either positive or negative emotion. This is crucial to understanding the Monster’s psyche because it links him not only to his creator, but to all of mankind. This is what makes the character of the Monster interesting and creates a sympathetic bond between the reader and the Monster. When we look closely at his early experiences and understand the way his emotions and ideas interact it’s impossible to avoid sympathizing with him.

Locke continues, however, by stating that one must act accordingly regarding which objects give us pleasure or pain:

In which state, a man, however furnished with the faculties of understanding and will, would be a very idle unactive creature, and pass his time only in a lazy lethargic dream. It has therefore pleased our wise creator, to annex to several objects, and to the ideas which we receive from them, as also to several of our thoughts, a concomitant pleasure, and that in several objects, to several degrees, that those faculties which he had endowed us with, might not remain wholly idle, and unemployed by us.

Setting aside the notion of the ‘creator’ which raises a few questions, this also reinforces our sympathy based on moral rectitude. Of course the monster begins to understand which objects elicit uneasiness and which provide pleasure, and soon desires to act upon these feelings. This desire to act is accompanied with a sense of justice at some points in the novel, which I will address at a later point. He describes an experience when “ a gentle light stole over the heavens and gave me a sensation of pleasure. I started up and beheld a radiant form rise from among the trees. I gazed with a kind of wonder” (368). His perception of the moon encourages him to cease weeping and begin searching for food.

Soon, the Monster discovers fire and shelter, and learns how to make both. These processes are de-familiarized in a way that authenticates the original experience of them. They are described through the eyes of one who has never been exposed to them before. “One day, when I was oppressed by cold, I found a fire which had been left by some wandering beggars, and was overcome with delight at the warmth I experienced from it. In my joy I thrust my hand into the live embers, but quickly drew it out again with a cry of pain” (369). This is a classic demonstration of someone that has never seen fire before. Immediately, the sensations of heat and physical harm are associated with fire, and any actions he takes regarding this element are guided by these experiences. One resulting action from his discovery of the fire, the process of making the fire, is then described: “I contrived a fan of branches, which roused the embers when they were nearly extinguished.” He finds solutions to his problems rather quickly which suggests an intuitive problem-solving quality similar or identical to the one innate in human beings. He is inspired by his feelings of cold to keep moving, searching for warmth and when he finds the fire, he searches for a way to prolong his happiness.

The key example of his sensation and reflection at this stage of his life is, of course, his realization of his power over the people he comes across. On page 131 of his text, Locke states that

Power also is another of those simple ideas which we receive from sensation and reflection. For observing in ourselves, that we can, at pleasure, move several parts of our bodies, which were at rest; the effects also, that natural bodies are able to produce in one another, occurring every moment to our senses, we both these ways get the idea of power.

This passage is especially helpful when one reads it next to the one in Frankenstein after the Monster finally gains entrance to his beloved cottagers:

I could have torn him limb from limb, as the lion rends the antelope. But my heart sank within me as with bitter sickness, and I refrained. I saw him on the point of repeating his blow, when, overcome by pain and anguish, I quitted the cottage, and in the general tumult escaped unperceived to my hovel.

The Monster has undergone too many rage-inducing confrontations to enumerate, and they’ve all given him a sense of his own power. However, since he is able to resist acting upon his anger against the cottagers, reflection and ultimately reason rise above the idea of power. His advancement along the path that Locke circumscribes is methodical and fully developed.

In Locke’s treatise, Of Identity and Diversity, he asserts that “one thing cannot have two beginnings of existence, nor two things one beginning, it being impossible for two things of the same kind to be or exist in the same instant, in the very same place or one and the same thing in different places” (296). Though Frankenstein is hardly purporting to be a realistic novel, this passage is important to my argument when considering other readings of the text. I’ve already shown the Monster’s narrative to be consistent with Locke’s theories of sensation, reflection, and power, and so it stands that the narrative may also fulfill Locke’s other conditions. When considering the internal framework of this narrative in relation to the previously quoted passage, both Franco and Gigante’s arguments can be discounted.

Denise Gigante essentially uses the Monster’s aesthetic value to argue that he is merely a figure of Victor’s repressed desires: “That same transition from the archaic-chaotic to a post-archaic, symbolic order is one the Creature cannot seem to accomplish for himself. He remains stuck, striving for subjective completion in the fermenting crack of the ugly” (581). Since the Monster is not fully allowed to escape his early stage of chaos and sensation, and cannot place his origin, he must be a figurative representation of Victor’s self, he cannot be a subject. Gigante calls Freud to her side,

That which the subject suddenly fails to contain in representation appears as a traumatic excess—a sudden intrusion of what should not be there. In this sense the ugly constitutes a ‘return of the repressed’ more radical than the Unheimlich, for it does not merely threaten to unsettle the subject; it threatens to destroy it. (578)

The Monster is merely the overflowing of Victor’s repression. Though she makes the case quite thoroughly, Gigante fails to recognize that the Monster does experience a Lacanian mirror stage of his own when he looks into a pool which establishes him as his own subject. If, then, he is his own subject, then Locke’s notion of identity and diversity holds true. The Monster not born at the same time and thus cannot be the same as Victor. Though he is Victor’s creation, he is also able to exist in separate places which is another fact that Gigante seems to have missed. If the Monster is a figure of Victor’s repression, it follows that he is the same person as Victor and should not be found in places that Victor has never been, such as the north pole. The Monster’s mirror stage is, however, a consideration that Dean Franco takes up.

Dean Franco’s argument toward the end of his essay, “Mirror Images on Otherness in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” is that though the Monster undergoes his own stages of Lacanian development, he can still be boiled down to a trope. He considers that “as a trope, the Monster is the figuration of disfiguration, or of the cleaving of sign and signified. The Monster at once undermines meaning and acquires meaning unawares” (6). Again, the Monster is given absolutely no autonomy but is a representation of meaning whether he knows it or not. This quote implies that the Monster’s only purpose in the text is to illuminate Victor’s psychology. Though he represents a doubling of sign and signified in that he attempts, through language, to repeat the parental gaze that was bestowed upon him by Victor, he is not acknowledged as a subject in himself.

According to Lacan, however, the completion of the mirror stage necessarily results in the “ideal-I” which does, in fact, establish the Monster as a subject separate from Victor: “This form would, moreover have to be called the ‘ideal-I’—if we wanted to translate it into a familiar register—in the sense that it will also be the root-stock of secondary identifications” (Lacan 76). After his gaze into the pool, the Monster recognizes his self and begins to contemplate more intensively who he is and why he’s an outcast. As we’ve seen earlier, the Monster struggles with secondary identifications in that he desires to be like his creator, he mimics the cottagers, and attempts to unite himself with Adam through his reading of Paradise Lost. For the same reasons stated above for Gigante, Franco’s argument is incompatible with a Lockean reading of Frankenstein.

Franco’s argument about the importance of language is significant to a thorough reading of the novel. On page five of his article, he acknowledges that “the Monster is a studious inquisitor, and his reading list suggests both structuralist and post-structuralist understandings of language.” In his desperation to assimilate with the cottagers, the Monster’s linguistic studiousness becomes obsessive and the early stages of it show Lockean influence:

God having designed man for a sociable creature, made him not only with an inclination, and under a necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind; but furnished him also with language, which was to be the great instrument, and common tie of society. (361)

Though the Monster is created by Victor instead of God, he demonstrates the inclination to socialize with human beings and has an immense amount of faith in the powers of language. He first attempts to talk to villagers, and moves on when he finds that they’re terrified of him. His inclination urges him to try again with the cottagers after he’s gained skill in language.

Like any normal human child he is determined to learn to speak in order to appeal to the ones he loves: “These thoughts exhilarated me and led me to apply with fresh ardor to the acquiring the art of language” (380). When the Monster stumbles upon copies of Lives, Paradise Lost, and The Sorrows of Young Werther, he applies all of his energy to learning this language and fully expects to be able to use it to achieve this goal of fellowship with the cottagers. On page five, Franco begs us to consider the Monster’s understanding of how language functions: “He [the Monster] says he wants to ‘discover’ himself, implying that language will remove his cover, or hideous form, and reveal an inviting interior.” After finally gaining an opportunity to speak with the father of the cottage, he approaches and believes that he “should be able to use these sounds, as signs of internal conceptions; and to make them stand as marks for the ideas within his own mind, whereby they might be made known to others, and the thoughts of men’s minds be conveyed from one to another” (Locke 361). Since the father is blind and cannot see the Monster’s deformity, the true power of language is tested and prevails. DeLacey is fully convinced of the Monster’s good intentions: “I am blind and cannot judge of your countenance, but there is something in your words which persuades me that you are sincere. I am poor and an exile, but it will afford me true pleasure to be in any way serviceable to a human creature” (401). What is incredibly interesting to note is DeLacey’s categorization of the Monster as human. In the Monster’s appeal to DeLacey, we can see the following Lockean precept: “they [men] suppose their words to be marks of the ideas in the minds also of other men, with whom they communicate: for else they should talk in vain, and could not be understood, if the sounds they applied to one idea, were such, as by the hearer, were applied to another” (365). The Monster’s ability to use words to signify his emotions is a human trait, and his specific use of DeLacey’s own language creates a sympathy between the two that is only broken when the children discover the Monster’s deformity. Though this sympathy is created, it is hastily broken and the Monster is left alone once agian.

Finally, exasperated, he begs Victor to create a partner for him: “I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create” (411). Needless to say, this being’s defects will necessitate conversation and commiseration between the two creatures, and though the Monster is unable to determine whether or not he will even harmonize with this mate, he would like to try.

Looking back at page 368, it’s clear that the Monster’s relationship with language is significant in his development and this says a lot about his status as an autonomous character. At this early point, the Monster informs us that “sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again.” The Monster is desperately trying to express his emotions and articulate his frustration but he is unable to do so in a coherent manner. Though the “uncouth and inarticulate sounds” that seem to explode from his mouth seem to be far from a baby’s cry, they are similar in that they are a poor attempt at communication and social interaction. Eventually, though, he masters this the way he masters his sensations, reflections, and power the same way each human does.



So, what is the point of establishing the autonomy of the Monster? Though reading his character as an expression of Victor’s psychological repression provides a much more complexly thrilling experience, it barely touches upon the sympathy that one feels for the Monster when engrossed in his narrative, and it also makes sympathy with Victor nearly impossible. While this psychoanalytical reading might be what determines it as a Gothic novel, it’s not necessary for a useful reading of it. Understanding the Monster in terms of Lockean development makes it clearer that this being, though disfigured, is capable of emotion and intelligence. Of course, this might lead to a reading that suggests a fable begging that one ought to past physical difference. The Monster begs for sympathy throughout the entire novel: “I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me, and finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees” (Shelley 403). He only wants fellowship and emotional connection and it is a shame that this desire of his is ignored even by the readers of his intimate tale of toil.