What happens when you neglect a child? Specifically, what happens to the child? This is a question which we can only answer indirectly, because when the experience of childhood neglect is upon us in real time, we are unable to understand or deal with it, and by the time we are capable of dealing with it, it has receded into the bedrock of our consciousness, unreachable by any but the most profound psychological inquiries, yet leaving traces of its presence in the quirks and neuroses of the adult personality. Indeed, the process of healing or restoring the victims of this neglect is is today the province of a whole branch of medicine and various terrains of academia, not to mention a vast market of goods and services.
It is arguable that Frankenstein the novel and its many mind-children both legitimate and not so legitimate, have played a role in the rise of this aspect of the modern world, not to mention the theory of self and of human development on which it rests. First published in 1818, the novel predates the enormous strides in every branch of science and technology that were just around the corner as the nineteenth century began to unfold. Mary Shelley, through her father William Godwin, knew personally some of the figures of the day who were spearheading this intellectual revolution. She herself continued throughout adult life to share an interest in what we would today call science with her husband and friends. Yet her primary concern in this novel is to sound a warning, not against science itself, but what she astutely saw as the philosophy of science as it had been crystallised by the Enlightenment. Far from its self-trumpeted rhetoric of reason, fairness and the maximisation of good, we also know that the Enlightenment was also a time of rural impoverishment, burgeoning city slums, occasional famine, savage colonial expansion and a systematic exclusion of the non-male, non-white, non-upper class and non-hegemonic from the privilege of defining reason and its uses. It is no accident that the Age of Reason ended in a series of bloody revolutions. When your masters say that everything they say is reason and everything you say is unreason, then it’s either time to go mad or burn things down.
Mary Shelley was uniquely qualified and positioned to see very clearly both the good and the bad of her times. Indeed, she often came into brutal contact with both. What she saw was that the very beauty of the Enlightenment vision was its pitfall, because like Victor’s little science project, it sounds great on paper but leaves a somewhat bitter aftertaste in practice. To put it very simply, if all your interlocutors are white male wealthy sophisticates, it is very easy to imagine things like a free and fair exchange of ideas, a disinterested pursuit of knowledge, an ideal way to govern the state, or design prisons, or manage urban poverty. The reason being, so long as these ideas make your kind happy, any design flaws that make other people unhappy can be ignored, because the objections of such people do not come from reasonable men. Thus throughout the nineteenth century, lying-in hospitals had maternal and infant mortality rates far in excess of home births even as men of science talked up the wonders of the advances in medicine that they were discovering from this ready supply of corpses.1 It took quite a few revolutions before there could even be framed a discourse in which the mortality rates of maternity hospitals could be a matter of concern for the voting public, a category that now includes the women who would have been admitted to those hospitals. Mary Shelley knew the importance of such things, her own mother having been a victim of the ‘new medicine’, but the age was such that she could find no acceptable way to speak of it in public.
So, she did the next best thing: she wrote a story. A story about one such reasonable man who decides for reasons that bear very little close examination to create a child of his very own, except that, being in all important respects a child himself, he has no idea what a child is, what it needs and how it should be handled. Hence what he creates becomes a monster. Not out of choice, but through dire necessity: because his creator pushes him away. When, as an eight-foot-tall cold-hardy two-year-old, the monster finally encounters his creator, almost the first thing he tells him is that Victor owes him a debt of care and protection for creating him.2 This is the truth that every child knows, except no two-year-old can plead their case with any eloquence. This is where the monster surprises his creator. Parents rarely deal patiently with a kid who’s demonstrably smarter than they are, and Victor is no exception. He refuses to acknowledge the monster’s existence as if his ill-wishing can unmake the monster. Here his alchemical studies betray Victor: having taken recourse to technology to create the monster, he now falls back on the attitudes of magic to banish his creation like a demon. Needless to say, it doesn’t work.
Alchemy is not the only factor to blame in Victor’s downfall. There are two questions we must ask about his project. One, why did he undertake it in the first place, and two, why did he then fail at it? In his oral recounting to Robert Walton, Victor states his research question (so to speak) as follows: ‘Whence … did the principle of life proceed?’3 He labours to discover the answer, and he succeeds: so, step one is theoretical. Step two is proof of principle: the building of a prototype. He tells us he decides to build his new human a little over scale, as, ‘the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed’ with blithe disregard for the inevitable consequences. He tells us that he collected his materials and began, and only after that does the thought come to him that ‘a new species would bless me as its creator…. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.’4
This is the only time he applies the word ‘child’ to the monster, and it might as well be ‘doll’ for all the meaning it carries. Victor himself has good reason to know what a father claiming gratitude is like. His father has given him much to be grateful for: wealth, servants, an education, a made-to-order wife-in-waiting, protection, nurture and a terribly swelled head. Everything except Daddy’s special toy: power. Poor Victor has no one to order around, and the moment Daddy’s back is turned he gets to work on remedying that omission. We don’t need to look far to see who’s on his mind as he ‘tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay’: when he’s not describing his methods, he’s worrying about his father’s prediction that if Victor neglected to write home he was probably up to no good. The mature Victor (on the point of death, speaking to Robert Walton) admits that his father was right to doubt him, but that knowledge is very dearly won.
Patriarchy, like all unjust systems, depends upon the indoctrination of both its victims and its future oppressors. Before they become oppressors, future patriarchs are given a little taste of what victimhood is like: it’s called childhood. In childhood, they are taught how they should not be. Weaker boys learn from stronger boys that softness, weakness, innocence and trust are punished unless one defends oneself. They either learn this through practical demonstration on their person, or they are told this by the stronger boy or man as he defends them from other stronger boys and men. Once grown, a boy may reject that idea, but they can only do so by becoming aware of it and rooting it out of their mindset, a task which nobody trains them to do. Victor does not fall within that group. He is such a perfect product of patriarchy that he cannot see beyond his father’s defending shoulder. Like the crown prince of a benevolent but long lived king, he grows itchy for his turn at the sceptre, seeing only the pomp and ceremony and not noticing the tax dollars that pay for it. So he takes a shortcut, but like the greedy baby he is, he wants mother’s share of the kudos as well. So rather than follow the more usual make-a-person route, he decides he wants a designer baby. Or thinks he does, until the creature wakes up, Victor realises there is a consciousness in the room with him and no Daddy to make it behave, and suddenly Victor wants the genie put back in its bottle. But is his reaction really that illogical? In truth, Victor reacts to the monster exactly as if he had made a person by mistake with some unfortunate woman of Ingolstadt’s inns and markets and is now outraged at the suggestion that he take responsibility. Gone is all thought of proving the miraculous principle of life. The monster stands before Victor as living proof that he is the greatest scientist in the world, but all Victor can say is ‘Begone!’ So much for ‘the magnitude and complexity of my plan’.5 Like a child attempting to impress her friends at hide and seek by locking herself in the deep freeze, Victor fails precisely because of his success.
Patriarchy is an oppression specifically geared towards controlling human reproduction by controlling women. Victor may have attempted to reconfigure it by removing the woman from the equation, but his solipsistically formed mind-child is just as much a patriarchal property as a natural child. The fact is, under patriarchy, all children start out slaves, constrained to follow orders and forbidden to exercise their will in all but the most trivial matters. All of the people surrounding Victor are there to serve and protect him, to give him what he needs and cushion him from the shocks of the world as securely as if he were a fetus in the womb, and he expects it to be that way. When he encounters two men who stand outside this system, namely Professors Krempe and Waldman, he picks the latter as his surrogate father, rejecting Krempe as ‘uncouth’. This is partly due to Krempe’s unprepossessing appearance, but also due to Krempe’s willingness to needle the son of Alphonse Frankenstein.
Free will is precisely the quality that Victor lacks yet craves. His only act of disobedience to his father is his secret monster-creation project, yet the disobedience remains incomplete, because Victor never lifts the veil on it, not even when his brother is murdered, and an innocent girl is condemned for the crime. Victor’s failure to take responsibility for his actions is the litmus test that shows his adulthood to be fake, as the monster surmises. In truth, Victor’s project to change humanity fails because what he really wished to do, what he desperately needed to do, was change himself. Yet when the moment of confrontation comes, when the monster stands before him daring him to admit to his obligations, pleading with him to redeem himself and rebuild the monster’s world, Victor is blind. In this, Victor has misunderstood the nature of creation. It is only in play that we can knock down all our toy houses and rebuild them just as easily. In the adult world, such acts leave a mark.
Jo Murphy-Lawless,
Reading Birth and Death: A History of Obstetric Thinking, Indiana University Press, 1999.
Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, Norton Critical Edition, ed. J. Paul Hunter. Norton 1996, p. 66.
Ibid., p. 30.
Ibid., p. 32.
Ibid., p. 31.