Author(s): Sarah Canfield Fuller
Source: Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts , Summer 2003, Vol. 14, No. 2 (54) (Summer 2003), pp. 217-227
Published by: International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43308625
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Reading the Cyborg in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Sarah Canfield Fuller
In 1985, Donna Haraway announced her
"Manifesto for Cyborgs," a call for feminists to embrace the radically unsta- ble and destabilizing subject position of "a cybernetic organism ... a Creature of social reality as well as a Creature of fiction" (65). Haraway views the cy- borg as a figure that "is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities" (71), the short-circuit between the poles of many of
the cherished dichotomies of Western cultural discourse: "self/other . . . cul- ture/nature, male/female . . . whole/ part . . . maker/made . . . right/wrong ... to- tal/partial, God/man" (96). The cyborg, because it partakes of both sides of its own man/machine dichotomy, becomes the type for the trasgressive, the slash of postmodern discourse and the fusion of all polarities. Boundaries dis- solve, creating a fluid and unbounded space from which new, previously un- thought possibilities and subjectivities can emerge which are both dangerous and pleasurable, embracing contradiction and incompleteness. Haraway's po- sition assumes that the cyborg is a signifier that must be reappropriated and redefined to bring out its radical feminist potential. In the service of creating this new, radically postmodern feminist subject position, Haraway explicitly distances her theorization from the earliest and possibly most influential cy- borg figure in literature: "Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cy- borg does not expect its father to save it" (67). This rejection elides the significant resonances between Haraway's cyborg and Mary Shelley's Crea-
ture.
Often cited as a founding text of science fiction1 as well as the touchstone for any text on the creation of wholly or partially artificial beings, Mary Shel- ley's Frankenstein has yet to be considered fully in the light of Haraway's radical cyborgology. The Creature, assembled from the parts of humans and animals and animated through the miracle of modern science, appears in many ways to be just the sort of boundary-confusing cyborg Haraway finds so liberating. The fate of the "Frankenstein monster" as it makes its way into popular discourse suggests, however, that maintaining the radically subver- sive tensions necessary to the cyborg critique of binarism may be more diffi- cult than simply embracing the free play of fluid identity.
I
From its origins, the Creature exists as a being of mixture and indefinition. According to his own account, Victor Frankenstein "disturbed,
with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame
secting room and the slaughterhouse furnished many of [his] materials"
(Shelley 1818, 36-7). Despite the religious connotations of "profane," the 1818 text contains comparatively few passages suggesting that Victor tres- passes against a monolithic Christian God. The crossing of the species barrier constitutes the more significant profanity here. The practice of physiology in the decades around 1800 was notoriously grisly and disturbing, especially as students of anatomy applied the same dissection techniques to both animal and human cadavers - physically and conceptually blurring the lines be- tween the two. The pieces which Victor patches together in his "workshop of filthy creation" (37) may even come from both human and animal remains, committing the first of the "three crucial boundary breakdowns" in which Haraway locates the possibility of cyborg politics. "The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is trans- gressed" (Haraway 68).
Besides mixing species, Victor also mixes methods. In a process that has much to do with the novel's designation as science fiction, Victor turns from his early infatuation with "the search for the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life" (Shelley 1 8 1 8, 23) to study the modem natural philosophy and chem- istry that eventually lead to his breakthrough. Nevertheless, scientific dis- course is not as strong a presence in the novel as might be expected. The creation scene, so prominent in filmed versions of the text, gives remarkably little concrete detail; as Victor "collected the instruments of life . . . [to] infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing ... [his] candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, [he] saw the dull yellow eye of the Creature open . . ." (Shelley 1818,3 8-9). Although the Creature is a "technological artifact" (Hansen 581) characterized, despite its biological composition, by an "inorganic quality" (Rowen 1 76), the precise nature of the technology involved is unclear. Victor's very methods suggest that the at- tempt requires the violation of boundaries - without that mixture of the hu- man and the animal, the magical and the scientific, the Creature could not have been made. The complete absence of any convincing narrative of the creation denies Victor's desire for "an origin story in the 'Western,' humanist sense [that] depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror represented by the phallic mother" (Haraway 67) - the "phallic mother" that Victor himself would have become if his autonomous reproduction had achieved its purpose.
Nor does the Creature even conceal its hybrid nature. In order to achieve
his desire more quickly, Victor magnifies the Creature, building into it the means of closely reading its body for faults and fractures (Shelley 1818, 35).
The result of this decision to sacrifice the illusion of humanity is predictable - when the Creature is finally animated, Victor is horrified by the monstrous amalgamation he has brought to life:
His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes ... his shrivelled complexion, and
straight black lips. (Shelley 1818, 39)
The parts he had intended to patch together into a whole being remain
separate, only emphasizing the impossibility of maintaining wholeness;
where he had hoped to create a human being, a thinking subject from his own hands, Victor finds instead fracture and fragmentation. Repulsed, he can only disown his misbegotten child, the "illegitimate offspring" (Haraway 68) of
his "potent and taboo fusion" (92) of science and alchemy.
The text repeatedly emphasizes the horror of looking upon this
patched-together Creature, this walking and talking embodiment of bound- aries. Not only does Victor recoil (Shelley 1818, 39), a similar scene of dis-
gust and violent rejection is enacted every time a human being sees the Creature. Victor sums up such reactions: "I compassionated him, and some- times felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred" (121). What is so terrifying about the Creature is not just its appearance, its fragmentariness, but that its lack of co-
herence does not preclude its existence as a subject, a being who can and does return the look of its maker, not as a reflection but as an independent identity.
Victor's Romantic ego, which envisions himself as the author of "a new spe- cies [that] would bless [him] as its creator and source" (Shelley 1818, 36), is unprepared for the reality of his "bastard race" (Haraway 95) and its radical disruption of familiar categories.
This focus on fragmented identity not only reinforces the sense of the in-
complete nature of Victor's egotistical attempt to create a unified subject (subject to himself as its creator and master); it also indicates the Creature's ambiguous gender location. Victor created his being as a male, and it is re- peatedly referred to as "he" throughout the text, yet more than one critic has noted its feminization (cf. Behrendt, Hollinger, Laplace-Sinatra, etc.). The
Creature is explicitly linked with the female characters of the novel, most viv-
idly in Victor's nightmare following immediately on the Creature's anima- tion. In a series of substitutions, the Creature takes its place among the most
significant women in Victor's life: "I thought I saw Elizabeth ... I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips ... I thought that I held the
corpse of my dead mother in my arms
... I beheld the wretch" (Shelley 1818, 39).
This double gendering might have the effect of canceling out, suggesting what Laplace-Sinatra terms "an ungendered Creature" (263). However, the critique of gender paradigms suggested by the substitution in Victor's dream for both sister/wife and mother, when placed against the other radical cri- tiques of science, Romantic ego, and even form embodied within the Creature and the novel, suggests that, instead of being without gender, the Creature is in Haraway's "post-gender world." The Creature is both masculine and femi- nine, but this does not produce "organic wholeness through a final appropria- tion of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity" (Haraway 67), for, as we have seen, the Creature does not have that unity; it is always fragmentary, in- complete. Instead, gendered identities coexist, overlap, mutate into each other as in Victor's nightmare, creating a fluidity which disrupts the comfortable bi- nary of gender.
The Creature clearly unsettles another distinction as well, that between good and evil. While Victor, with his numerous designations and descriptions of the Creature as "vampire, fiend . . . spectre" (Hirsch 60), clearly places it on the side of evil, the novel urges its readers to be highly suspect of those desig- nations and Victor's own ability to assign them. Even before the Creature speaks so eloquently in its own defense, Victor has revealed his own failures too clearly for unmediated acceptance of his words. His experiments have not only made him "profane" in his own eyes (Shelley 1818, 36), they have caused him to withdraw from the community. Despite persistent appeals to the ideal bourgeois family, his own actions subvert those appeals to reveal the failure of the domestic ideal and his own failure as the Romantic hero of the novel. Foremost in this undercutting of his protestations is Victor's rejection of the Creature, a clear failure of his parental responsibility. Even more tell- ing, perhaps, is his failure to speak in defense of Justine simply for fear that his words "would have been considered as the ravings of a madman" (Shelley
1818,61).
Considering Victor's own culpability, the Creature's tale of injustice and betrayal cannot help but gain the sympathy of the reader. Its bewilderment upon first awakening, the violent rejection and utter ruin of its hopes, and the final horrified response to its saving of the drowning girl - no wonder "the feelings of kindness and gentleness, which [it] had entertained . . . gave place to hellish rage" (Shelley 1818, 1 16). Appalled though we may be at the Crea- ture's violence, we have to understand, if not take up, its point of view. Our sense of good and evil, right and wrong, is torn open much the way the Crea- ture's own body is torn open by the rustic's shot: 'The ball had entered [its]
shoulder, and [it] knew not whether it had remained there or passed through;
at any rate [it] had no means of extracting it" (1 16). No more can we assign fixed designations of good or evil to either Victor or his Creature once they have presented themselves in such a mixed fashion; nor can we easily extract the good or the evil in them to restore our sense of division between the poles
of the binary.
Returning to Haraway's terminology: "There are several consequences to
taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies" (99).
Shifting and confusing the center and the margins, the novel creates a space in which "it is the simultaneity of breakdowns that cracks the matrices of domi-
nation and opens geometric possibilities" (93). As the Creature moves from its fruitless attempts to join the familial ideal to the horrific yet strangely sym- pathetic quest to dismantle Victor's own ideal family and eventually Victor himself, it discovers a "subtle understanding of emerging pleasures, experi- ences, and powers with serious potential for changing the rules of the game"
(91).
II
Although the Creature is the center of the novel's cyborg critique, that cri- tique would be drastically curtailed if its revolutionary potential were limited by the boundaries of the Creature's own fragmented body and character. The ambiguity of the creature is "leaky" (Haraway 69), undermining conventional distinctions and spilling over from its own marginal position to have far-reaching effects. The impact of the Creature, its changing of the rules, spreads outward from the still center on the glacier of Chamounix to disrupt not only Victor and his family, but also the fundamental structures of society through its courts, such distant figures as Justine, and finally the text of the novel itself.
The first step in the Creature's war against Victor is the death of young William Frankenstein and the framing of Justine for his murder, but the result
of this attack is not limited to the lives of these characters or even to the dis- mantling of Victor's cherished position as a man who can take refuge in an ideal family: the progress of Justine's trial, and the inability of either Victor to speak in her defense or of the legal system to conceive of another culprit, dem- onstrate that the radical implications of the Creature's existence cannot be contained by notions of individual consequences. Victor approaches the trial with "no fear . . . that any circumstantial evidence could be brought forward strong enough to convict her" (Shelley 1818, 60), but when Justine enters the courtroom, "all the kindness which her beauty might otherwise have excited, was obliterated in the minds of the spectators by the imagination of the enor- mity she was supposed to have committed" (6 1 , my emphasis). The courts are predisposed against her, convinced by the horrific crime against the boy that no other explanation for the evidence can be possible. Every effort to clear
her, most especially Elizabeth's testimony, serves only to condemn her fur- ther. Justine herself, unaware of the existence of the Creature and the possibil- ities it embodies, becomes confused "until [she] almost began to think that [she] was the monster that [the confessor] said [she] was" (66). Unjustly cast- ing the supremely innocent Justine in the same monstrous light as the Crea- ture continues the process of throwing the reader's sympathy and
identification in line with what is supposedly outside the bounds but is in fact boundless - the cyborg Creature itself.
Justine's trial illustrates the proliferation of stories characteristic of the text, a proliferation which also aligns the novel with Haraway's cyborg writ- ing. As a shifting and multiplicitous identity, the cyborg reacts against the "plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature" (Haraway 67), the plot which designates that the only explanation for the evidence must be Justine's guilt. The court's primary purpose is to impose order by establishing a ratio- nal explanation for what happened based on the obvious explanation for the evidence at hand, not to go looking for those messy and incomplete complica- tions represented by the Creature. While her own acceptance of this unilateral viewpoint convinces Justine to confess to a crime she did not commit in order to save her soul, the multiple layering of narrative in the novel gives us, the readers, an alternative possibility "outside [the] salvation history" (67) which coerces Justine's confusion and confession and underwrites the court's con-
viction.
Indeed, although the Creature begins its life with the intention of discov-
ering its origins, it comes to embrace the tormented position of having no original explanatory story at all. Through textual layering such as that in the multiple perspectives on the Justine episode, the novel suggests that any such search for an originary moment or ultimate explanation is doomed to blind- ness and failure. The Creature learns the same lesson through its vain attempt to have a mate constructed. The cyborg is "needy for connection" (Haraway 68), but in this case must learn that connection does not mean recreating the disrupted community in translated guise. The new relationship would have been a distorted mirror image of that between Victor and Elizabeth, but Vic- tor's destruction of the half-made female is the final straw that sets the Crea-
ture firmly in the cyborg camp - denied its own version of wholeness through the domestic idyll, the Creature finally accepts its own ruptured, incompletable state (Haraway 67). It becomes precisely the daemon Victor feared, invading even the marriage chamber and pursuing another sort of con-
nection, their doppelgänger relationship. In the process, the final distinctions between them dissolve, reversing and confusing such distinctions as mas- ter/slave, pursuer/pursued.
The presence of Walton's framing letters, especially when placed against the inability of narrative and testimony to arrive at the truth in Justine's trial,
moves the uncertainties and instabilities generated by the Creature beyond the limits of the text. Even considering only the most significant levels of narra- tion, Frankenstein contains a minimum of three layers - the Creature's story as recounted by Victor as rewritten by Walton - but this elides the numerous other instances of narrative, from the papers the Creature uses to find Victor to the letters of Elizabeth and Safie and the story of the De Lacys embedded within other narratives. The "tale-within-a-tale structure demonstrates that no
one 'original' story exists" (Satollo 198), as we see the Creature's words me- diated by the obviously biased Victor and the admittedly imprecise Walton.
Nor can we limit our consideration to the texts within the novel, for Shel-
ley's "hideous progeny" (1831, 23) is also an unstable text, existing in dis-
tinctly different manuscript and published editions, with little clear evidence for precisely which elements are Shelley's own, which the contribution of Percy Shelley, and which derive from other editors (Smith 122, Ketterer 58).
While conventionally in literature "the author functions as a limit to the text, a
limit that constrains and enables literary interpretation" (Botting 56), in the case of Frankenstein the novel itself undercuts attempts to establish its mean- ing through a reading of one or more of its Prefaces. The 1818 Preface asserts that the novel's "chief concern . . . has been limited to the avoiding of the ener-
vating effects of the novels of the present day, and to the exhibition of the ami- ableness of domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue" (1818, 4). But the consistent sympathy for the Creature, the apparent failure of do- mestic institutions, and the relative lack of virtue exhibited by Victor despite Walton's hero-worship suggest the inadequacy of this authorized interpreta- tion. In addition, according to the 183 1 Preface, this first reading of the novel
was Percy Shelley's, "as far as [Mary Shelley] can recollect" (1831, 23) - suggesting that readers should not assume a direct expression of the author's intentions in prefatory material. In the first preface, the explanation of the text's meaning comes from someone other than the putative author while in the second, the putative author herself admits that she cannot be entirely cer-
tain that her memory of events over a decade old is accurate.
The meanings and possibilities of this text, apparently patched together
and assembled from disparate parts that do not coalesce into a clear whole, nonetheless powerful in its fragmentation, thus cannot be constrained by the author's framing statements: "there will always be an excess of meaning (em- bodied in the creature) that upsets the notion of a unitary identity, thereby dis- turbing the notion of origins or closure" (Salotto 199). This lack of closure - either in the novel, which omits both the Creature's death and the closing of Walton's final letter, or in interpretation, whose unifying authority is consis- tently undercut by the text - creates what could well be the first instance of "cyborg writing" as well as of science fiction, "not about the Fall, the imagi- nation of a once-upon-a-time wholeness . . . [but] about the power to survive,
not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other" (Haraway 93-4).
Ill
The cyborg potentiality within the novel suggests possibilities and revo- lutions that the conservative society of Britain in the 1820s was not ready to accept, and which may only now, in the postmodern era, become more than potential. Because of such constraints, the novel can only gesture towards Haraway' s "lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently par- tial identities and contradictory standpoints" (72). Even in the version of
1818, the Creature can appear only as a thing of nightmares - not only is it monstrous in itself, but it also represents what must be constructed as mon- strous by the social order which it threatens to disrupt. This may be one expla- nation for the fate of Frankenstein as it quickly made its way into the public imagination. The standard interpretation began within a month of its publica- tion (Laplace-Sinatra 254, Forry 14), an interpretation that has dominated popular and academic considerations of the novel for over 175 years: the Frankenstein monster has become the touchstone example of what happens when a scientist "plays God," and the horrifying destruction that inevitably results.
On July 28, 1823, the first dramatization of the novel premiered: Pre- sumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein. The show was a great success, quickly followed by a host of imitators (Forry 13). In each case, the stage versions simplified the conflict and the characterizations to focus on the most comfort- able, least revolutionary of the novel's themes. The role of the supernatural is enhanced, the scientific downplayed, transgression against God becomes a central concern - and the monster is mute, an incarnation of science gone awry rather than a speaking subject in his own right. The implication of these early interpretations is that rather than subverting the binary oppositions of maker/made, whole/part, good/evil, the tale should instead be read as a clear illustration of the strict conflict between those polarities. Although the drama- tizations do not deny the Monster sympathy, it can no longer be the eloquent spokesbeing for a revolutionary new way of seeing the world and its possibili- ties - the willfully proud Victor must be punished for his crimes, and the Monster must be the "incarnation of Frankenstein's vice" (Forry 23).
By the time Mary Shelley came to publish the revised edition oi Franken- stein: or, The Modern Prometheus in 1831, this interpretation of the text as a moral fable about religious transgression was firmly entrenched. Despite the claim of the 1 83 1 Preface to "have changed no portion of the story, nor intro- duced any new ideas or circumstances" (Shelley 1 83 1 , 24), the modifications introduced in this version (documented in Marilyn Butler's edition) and the
new origin story in the Preface itself attempt to reduce, constrain, and redefine
the implications. Most significantly, the revisions follow the new emphasis on the religious significance of Victor's undertaking, moving beyond the atmo- spheric but relatively non-Christianized allusions to "profane fingers" (1818, 36) to the realm of souls, angels and miracles. When Victor abandons the
metaphysical studies of his youth, he interprets the events in the light of the di- vine providence of a morality play and the good offices of his "guardian an- gel" (Shelley 1831,46).
Besides playing up the religious aspects of the struggle, these changes
also create a more sympathetic Victor, fated to transgress but less culpable in that blasphemy both because it is fated and because he is the victim of his own
ignorance and the misguided teachings of the professors at Ingolstadt to
whom the "Angel of Destruction" had led him (1831, 49). This Christianizing and softening of Victor's character continues throughout the substitutions in the novel, especially in the final section of direct conflict with the Creature (Butler 199). For example, where in the earlier version Victor broods on his own "bad conscience" when he leaves the Irish prison ( 1 8 1 8, 1 54), in the later
version his thoughts are focused on the duty, "which finally triumphed over selfish despair," to protect his family by "put[ting] an end to the existence of the monstrous Image which [he] had endowed with the mockery of a soul still more monstrous" ( 1 83 1 , 1 54). In addition, the 1 83 1 text omits two important passages in which Elizabeth explicitly condemns the administration of justice (I.V.48 and I.vii.67-8), the second associated with the trial of Justine (Butler 200).
The Preface to 1831 also revises and limits the text, providing it with a purportedly definitive origin story of its own and thus distancing the novel from the ambiguous Creature it encloses. "Everything must have a beginning . . . and that beginning must be linked to something that went before" (Shelley 1 83 1 , 22). The famous narrative of scientific discussions and ghost-story con- tests, which speaks of "the pale student of unhallowed arts" (22) and the "su- premely frightful . . . effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world" (23), has been the originary text by which the novel has been interpreted ever since. Despite the changes to the text and the apparent finality of the Preface, however, the radical implications of the text are still not contained.
Although the revisions do reflect the dominant cultural interpretation of Victor's crime against God and nature, as an attempt to limit the radical cy- borg implications of the text they fall short of the mark. The Creature remains sympathetic, even if we as readers are less inclined to find Victor's actions condemnatory. Justine still remains a figure of tragically miscarried justice, even if we do not have Elizabeth telling us so. And the instability of narrator and text remains, an instability which makes it impossible to accept the "I" of the 1831 Preface any more easily than we could accept the "I" of 1818. The
text remains a "hideous progeny" (Shelley 1831, 23), displaying the frac-
tured, fluid identity of the constructed, ambiguous, yet still powerful cyborg Creature and text.
Notes
1 Shelley's novel was one of the first to focus on the extrapolation of scientific principles, and to center its plot around scientific experimentation (Clute).
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