Victor & 'Frankenstein': The Monster Within Us

(The essay is a part of NYU's COREUA-400: "Making Sense of Doubles and Masks" by Prof. Judith Miller)

When I say Frankenstein, do you think of the creature, or the scientist who created him?

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Finishing Mary Shelley's ‘Frankenstein’, there was a pervasive sense of melancholy. It was hardly from sympathy for Frankenstein or his creature; both had done diabolical things, and exhibited humanity's worst characteristics and sins: Frankenstein's obsession with immortality in obstruction with God, the creature’s murder of Elizabeth, the professor's patronization of woman figures in his life, the engagement with or lack of consideration for taboos, etc. But I could not help feel creeping sadness when reading the creature's morose reflection on Frankenstein's death, and in turn, the fate the monster imposes upon himself:

“My work is nearly complete. Neither yours nor any man’s death is needed to consummate the series of my being and accomplish that which must be done, but it requires my own. Do not think that I shall be slow to perform this sacrifice. I shall quit your vessel on the ice raft which brought me thither and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch who would create such another as I have been. I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish”.

The concept of doubling is ever present in this beautifully written passage: Frankenstein and the monster’s demises have morphed the creature into a manifestation of Frankenstein's innate fears and feelings of solitude, remorse and hatred; it is an observation that closely aligns with Freud's concept of the double (doppelganger), which represents the ego's negative and unacceptable traits, as well as its utopian hopes and dreams, both of which have been repressed by society and reality.

In this poetic reflection on death and finality, the concept of doubling becomes more complex: The very first sentence, “My work is nearly complete", if taken out of context and associated with the novel in general dialogue, would probably be misunderstood as a quote from Frankenstein, not the creature's. This strengthens the notion that the creature is, or has become, a double of Frankenstein. Elaborating on what had happened before this fateful prose, Elizabeth had been killed by the creature during her wedding night with Frankenstein, ironically, after he had sent her away to safety in order to kill the monster first; Frankenstein would then vow to devote his life to exacting revenge on the monster, tracking it around the world and even to the northernmost ice, before falling ill and dying. At first, it seems a logical motivation: the monster killed the woman he had grown up with, and it was natural for Frankenstein to blame the creature for Elizabeth's death. But in the context of the book, Frankenstein was never truly in love with Elizabeth. It could also hardly be understood that his feelings pushed him to devote his entire life to destroying the monster, as he had exhibited a lack of human compassion up to that point. Rather, her death only served to enlighten Frankenstein to what the creature inherently is and always has been: the representation of his repressed traits and fears.

Frankenstein is consumed by his own self-interest and a perceived god complex, in which life can be created through science. But Frankenstein's deepest fears and insecurities in his subconscious mind are unconsciously transferred to the monster, whom he despises and seeks to destroy: The creature is innately gentle and kind-hearted, as it is a human's creation, and it is believed that no human is born evil. But without proper guidance, disgusted by society for his appearance and raging over his existence and creation, Frankenstein's creature becomes a monster, and attaches himself to the doctor's fate and reputation. The monster, thus, becomes a contrasting extension of Frankenstein's ego, one that is animalistic, lacks humanity and common sense, yet is driven by human desires of happiness and companionship. This was why a man as solitary and single-minded as Frankenstein decided to kill the monster: it was not love or remorse that spurred him on, but it was how Frankenstein could not bear to see this despicable version of himself be allowed to live. This is illustrative of Freud's theory on the double and the uncanny, as Frankenstein's monster is everything that is unacceptable to the ego of Frankenstein, but it is also the hopes and dreams of the ego being destroyed by social encounters: Frankenstein shunned outer human contacts for fear of being unaccepted or an inability to integrate; in engaging with society, only to be shunned and beaten, the creature has become Frankenstein's deepest fear and embarrassment, living in a reality of unfulfilled desires and despair:

“I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched”.

In hindsight, then, we could place the blame on Frankenstein himself: the doctor had created the creature, pushed it to this act by destroying the creature's only companion-to-be, and released it into nature without warning anyone, resulting in William's, Clerval's and Elizabeth's deaths. In this observation, where Frankenstein became the bearer of his own losses, the creature did not kill Frankenstein's loved ones to exact revenge or out of animalistic needs; rather, it was to invite Frankenstein's attention towards him, for him to be its “companion" replacement for the rest of their lives. This need for a companion is subconsciously Frankenstein's own hope of bliss, confirming the second part of Freud's double: Frankenstein had always acted on logic and science, avoiding companionship from women, and boxing the women of his life into matriarchal molds for him to easily understand; we could also understand why he decided to destroy Frankenstein's “bride", as he feared the female sexuality much more than he did the male's. The creature, on the other hand, sought for love and acceptance: he begged for his “bride” to be created, and unwittingly forced Frankenstein into his own companion mold, out of an innate desire to feel connected to someone.

In the final sentence of the passage above, “He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish”, the creature reflected on his own being, functioning as a remembrance, or a double, of what Frankenstein once was, now that all who remembers the doctor have been killed by the creature, and by extension, Frankenstein himself. Freud's theory on the double of how hopes and dreams functioned was elaborated through how elegant and well-thought the creature truly is, as he considers the notion of legacy and memory; these are concepts which Frankenstein, a man of science, had not considered, despite the nature of scientific progress predicating legacy and memory itself. Could we understand that, if not for his appearance and the resulting societal disdain, Frankenstein's monster was actually a more evolved version of the mad scientist?

Mary Shelley could no longer answer that question, but just as how Freud found the "unheimlich" in the "heimlich," we can always find the monster in humans, and vice versa. As the book ended, and the double between Frankenstein and his monster became the final note of our remembrance, I would pose a question for further consideration: who was the “monster", he who created it, or he who did not want to be it?

By Chi Tran.