Formed and Deformed Bodies: An Orientalist Criticism of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Assist. Prof. Ertuğrul Koç Çankaya University Department of English Language and Literature

ABSTRACT This article analyses the time of great social and political changes of the early nineteenth century (the time of industrial and scientific revolutions), which found expression in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The novel has always been a subject of criticism. Most critics took the novel to be a scientific dystopia, or saw the work as a great resource for the analysis of human psychology. However, a less psychological, and a more social and historical criticism of Frankenstein will demonstrate that Mary Shelley, in fact, aimed at lampooning the political and economic systems of the West. Stripping away the super-ego of an age, she attacks imperialism, and reveals it as a great danger for mankind for it creates “formed” and “deformed” bodies. The “formed” body (Dr. Frankenstein) creates the “deformed” body (the Monster), and the two clash in the novel, a struggle which ends in the Arctic (or ompholos) with the destruction of the two. If Frankenstein and his Monster are taken as metaphors (Frankenstein standing for the scientific, capitalist western Christian world; and the Monster, the “bricollage” creation that stands for the East), then Mary Shelley’s work can be read and evaluated as an allegory. Her message concerning the future is clear. The future is a neoimperialist dystopia. She reveals that the new socio-economic and socio-political orders of her time have already changed the natural frame of man and society, and this new world order will create a paradigm of conflict, leaving “civilisation” with little chance for survival.

‘Farewell! I leave you, and in you the last of human kind whom these eyes will ever behold. Farewell, Frankenstein! If thou wert yet alive, and yet cherished a desire of revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than in my destruction. But it was not so; thou didst seek my extinction that I might not cause greater wretchedness; and if yet, in some mode unknown to me, thou hast not ceased to think and feel, thou wouldst not desire

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against me a vengeance greater than death which I feel. Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine; for the bitter sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them for ever.’ (Shelley: 170) Such is the scene at the end of Frankenstein where the “monster” is soliloquizing upon the dead body of his creator. His regret unbearable, his remorse uttermost, and having lost his origin, or his father, and no longer in search of the means of survival, he, the orphan son, destroys his own existence. If the two are considered as allegorical figures, and if the clash between the “creator” and the “creature” is read as an extended metaphor, (Frankenstein, the father figure who created a “deformed new existence” out of the “dead,” and the “monster,” the son of Frankenstein, a bricollage creation formed and bestowed life in a modern laboratory) the nature of the conflict will assume new meanings. It is not a far-fetched comparison should these two figures be taken as the representatives of the two completely different paradigms (the defeated old East, and the pseudo-victorious new West) and hence, revealing the deconstructing clash between the industrial “liberal” paradigm, and the archaic, “illiberal” paradigm. The tension and mutual exclusiveness obtained between the two worldviews, one ancient, outmoded, and corrupt; the other ingenuous, arrogant and already decadent, leaves civilisation itself with little chance of survival. True, the novel is a warning for the future as most critics perceive. It is not a warning, however, as most critics take it to be a scientific dystopia, but rather it is a political one in which “science” is only a vehicle used by Shelley as a metaphor to represent the labyrinthine structure of power politics.

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Perhaps no work in Gothic tradition has permeated more fully into the popular imagination as Frankenstein did. It is partly and significantly because the novel is about power politics, revealing the imperialist paradigm of the nineteenth century western world, and an omen for the neo-imperialist future, which is the contemporary world. The simple theme of Mary Shelley’s work, that is, the struggle between a guilty creator and a demonic creature is, in fact, an allegory unfolding both Shelley’s time and today’s economic, political, religious, and cultural clashes. Considered as the last example of Gothic tradition, the novel is the culmination of what the previous examples have said about the arcane nature of man and society. If read within the scope of contemporary problems of the world like east versus west (or Christian world versus the Muslim, and the Buddhist world), poor versus rich, science and technology versus the archaic and the primitive, capitalism versus socialism, the novel will demonstrate that all the problematic can be reduced to a very basic struggle: the struggle between the “formed” and the “deformed”. The slippery nature of these terms makes every definition null and void. As such, the success of Frankenstein emerges here, for the novel asserts--by revealing the social and psychological reasons that lie behind the overt political action-that the conflict stems from the imperialist exercise of power politics. The ones creating the conflicts are concerned with only the creation and exploitation of the “other.” Mary Shelley’s curiosity about the origin of this “evil stimulus” takes her into the recesses of human psyche. She goes deeper into human psychology and analyzes the reasons that lurk beneath the conscious mind of the individual, and reveals the collective consciousness of society which creates the “system.” She does not only examine the reasons of the desire

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for power, but also demonstrates that the psyche of the individual is a creation, the fabrication of the culture into which the individual is born. Mary Shelley concurs with Coleridge’s view that there is an innate evil in human nature waiting to be triggered once the appropriate circumstance emerges. In “The Ancient Mariner” Coleridge suggests that man has the power to destroy both his environment and himself. The catastrophes the mariners in the poem suffer from follow the wanton shooting of an Albatross. Walton’s promise that he “shall kill no Albatross” (Shelley, 18) is a reference not only to sailors’ superstition, but directly to Coleridge’s work. However, Shelley also shows that it is the hypocritical, sentimental culture that triggers this innate evil in man. This hypocrisy is best expressed in the novel through Victor’s interest in alchemy (thus he becomes an opportunist, and a pseudo-scientist), and through what his professor M. Waldman tells Frankenstein in public, and in private. In his lecture he says that “The ancient teachers of this science . . . promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera” (Shelley, 38). On the same day, when Frankenstein pays a visit to M. Waldman, Victor sees that he is a different person in private: On the same day, I paid M. Waldman a visit. His manners in private were more mild and attractive than in public. . .He heard with attention the little narration concerning my studies, and smiled at the names of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus. . .He said, that ‘these were men to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of the foundations of their knowledge. (Shelley, 39)

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Although his professor says in public that the alchemists produced nothing, in private he says just the opposite. This is the culture in which Frankenstein is educated. This is hypocrisy, and in the personality of the professor, who is the representative of an institution, Mary Shelley exhibits the moral hypocrisy of both the individuals and their institutions. M. Waldman is a metaphor that stands for the two-faced moral policies of the western world. Frankenstein, as the product of this hypocritical culture, has already symbolically shot his Albatross, spurred on to this act by the prevailing opportunistic and competitive ethos of his industrial (and industrious) society. The novel is the product of a political mind. “Mary Shelley was quite familiar with and sensitive to the actual conditions in England” (Bhalla, 121). Contrary to her neoclassical contemporaries, and like the other romantic poets and authors, she also knew a lot about world politics and the vast landscape she uses in the novel--the journey of Robert Walton to the undiscovered parts of the world, and Dr. Frankenstein’s chase of the monster through a great vista and finally reaching the Arctic--is a sign that her interest was not only limited with Britain. The novel was published in the second decade of the nineteenth century, the time when Britain was busy shaping the world order (Europe and Asia, specifically) in accordance with her own interests, and at the same time avoiding a revolution at home like the French Revolution of 1789. British General “Wellington’s advance from Spain, and the allied attacks on Paris” (Cook: 276) of 1814, and the Battle of Waterloo (1815), in which Napoleon was finally defeated, led to the strong determination of European governments (especially the British government) against revolutions:

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The growth of liberalism occurred, in part, as a reaction to the conservative policies adopted by frightened governments anxious to restore domestic and international order following the Napoleonic wars . . . The primary concern of governments was to ensure that Europe would never again fall prey to the sort of revolutionary upheavals which it had experienced during the preceding quarter-century.” (Burns: 770) Having settled her affairs in Europe, Britain could direct her attention to the East. Mary Shelley witnessed the wars fought in India (Carnatic, Mysore, and Maratha wars between 1744-1818). The last of these wars was in 1818, coinciding “strangely” with the publication of Frankenstein. Through these wars Britain took over almost half of the eastern world, and Mary Shelley observed that the East is about to be distributed among the strong, liberal states of the West. The Napoleonic Wars (ending with the final victory of Britain over France), The War of 1812 with the United States, Britain’s attempts to take control of the East India Company (chartered by Queen Elizabeth during the 1700s whose main objective was to make profit for shareholders by exploiting the abundant natural resources and gaining access to the markets of India), meanwhile, through some merchants, Britain’s importing highly addictive opium to China which will cause the Opium Wars (1839-42, 1856-60), and English missionaries spreading Christianity both in India and China, made Mary Shelley detest her own country. Furthermore, the cruelty of the rulers in an internal strife, (The Peterloo unrest in Manchester (1815), the result of economic depression because of two foreign wars, ended by a massacre of the labouring people, which found expression in Percy

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Shelley’s satirical poem “To Sidmouth and Castlereagh,” printed by Mary Shelley in 1839), and both Percy Bysshe Shelley and her strong reaction to this barbarity is a sign that she came to hate the imperialist system and its representatives who even did not hesitate to kill the labouring people of England. She saw that the new capitalist (and imperialist) paradigm gave no chance to the poor, but at the same time completely relied on the poor for its existence and survival. The traces of all these clashes, the cruelty, and the attempts of Britain to colonize most of the world through immoral and brutal means, can be found in Frankenstein. Hence, the novel, like the previous examples of Gothic fiction, is an allegory.

Unlike the previous examples,

however, this allegory is not only limited with England described under the guise of eastern Catholic countries as depicted in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, or Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. The early gothicists’ rejection of sentimental Englishness turns in Frankenstein into the rejection of British imperialism. For Shelley, science or scientific discoveries are the true signs of a liberal, capitalist economy. Critics agree that Shelley felt a great nuisance in the face of scientific discoveries, and therefore criticised the undisciplined, masculine aspects of science together with the irresponsibility of the scientist. However, critics ignore the core, the stimuli that paved the way for scientific discoveries. It was the new economic system, the new ways of production, and the never ending demands of the individual that replaced the old, the more “stable” order of the status-quo. Hence, through her criticism of science and scientific thought, Shelley, in fact, criticised the decadent capitalist order, and the fabricated individuals who carry in their psyche the evil epitome of

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imperialism. She saw how devastating a system it could be in/for the future of mankind for it had already created a new cultural paradigm. Mary Shelley’s representing the masculine socio-political and socioeconomic tendencies of her age through the “science” that the anti-hero is interested in is suggestive of the perverse enterprises of the capitalists of her age to exploit and possess more.

She consciously dwells on the

possessiveness of Frankenstein, revealing this as another form of hypocrisy engendered by the “sentimental culture” of the new economic and political order. Even as a child Frankenstein has a possessive character, reinforced by the responsibility towards Elizabeth with which his mother charges him. Elizabeth is first brought home and presented to him by his mother as a “gift.” His interpretation of this is quite literal: “And when, on the morrow, she presented Elizabeth to me as her promised gift, I, with childish seriousness, interpreted her words literally, and looked upon Elizabeth as mine--mine to protect, love and cherish” (Shelley, 29). Although he attributes such possessiveness to his “childish seriousness,” it seems that his early class consciousness also plays an important role in this. He says, “When I mingled with other families, I distinctly discerned how peculiarly fortunate my lot was” (Shelley, 30), a position he determines to maintain.

His altruism (as he

perceives it) is wide-ranging, but ultimately rooted in bourgeois confidence. Pragmatism underlies all his actions, “enlightened self-interest” though it may be. At the University of Ingolstadt Frankenstein studies chemistry. He studies a positive science, but later on deviates from the limited, positivistic principles of chemistry; he also makes use of an older and less responsible

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“pseudo-science”: alchemy.

This, the “chemistry” of the middle ages,

concerned primarily with attempts to transmute base metals into “gold” constitutes the core of a forbidden corpus of knowledge.

“Alchemists

assumed an intricate system of affinities between chemicals and other forms of being . . . alchemy rested upon philosophical principles most clearly and authoritatively stated by Aristotle and developed by scholastic philosophers” (Kieckhefer, 135).

The alchemists never considered themselves as

magicians. It was in the following centuries that they were considered as sorcerers with the talisman in their hands. Mary Shelley’s use of this motif is not a coincidence: She took it to be a perverse attempt for she knew that this magic might was a violation of the concept of labour and manpower, and thus amoral, as the military superiority of Britain over the helpless Indians, Chinese, and other “primitive and backward” countries was. She knew that the alchemists like Paracelcus, Albertus Magnus, and Cornelius Agrippa were after gold, and through such figures she provides an allegorical critique of the nineteenth century’s idee fixe in which man is an economic and political unit. She saw how her country, with the obsession to control and exploit the world, fought to acquire more wealth by turning the “base” countries into colonies that meant “gold” for England. There is a parallel between Frankenstein’s optimistic views concerning his creation, and the nineteenth century England’s confident and assured stance in the face of colonization process. Frankenstein says, A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I

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should deserve theirs. Pursuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption. (Shelley: 43) Frankenstein sees a great resource in the dead just like the nineteenth century imperialism found the same resource in the politically and culturally defunct, bygone lands which, to the European eyes, is no more than a cemetery. His optimism reflects the naive, ignorant, wishful sentimental worldview of the nineteenth century people who believed that their organised scientific society was a model for the alien, foreign, despotic dead cultures and systems. Frankenstein’s, and in his personality the West’s interest in the “dead” is best revealed with the scene in which Victor is searching for the body parts in cemeteries and charnel houses: . . . I pursued nature to its hiding places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble and my eyes swim with the remembrance; . . . I collected bones from charnel-houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. (Shelley: 43) “Mature” Frankenstein sees his early experiments with these body parts as “disturbing the human frame.” In this confession of Victor can be found Mary Shelley’s stance against the violation of the “formed” West over the natural frame of the East and making it “deformed.” Frankenstein’s dual identity as

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both a positivist scientist and an alchemist also shows the solid but unverifiable power politics of the West, which have created today’s world of chaos. The creature is, in fact, a metaphor for its own model: This deformed, necromantic assemblage of body parts, created in a laboratory, suggests the artificial states whose borders were drawn with a ruler. The Monster is a powerful image. The unsettling aspect of this construction is that it openly, obscenely (in its literal sense), reveals a ghastly picture. Even Victor fears his own creation: “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful

(emphasis mine). Beautiful!-Great God! His yellow skin scarcely

covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath.” (Shelley: 45) Like Dr. Frankenstein’s creating the Monster, the West has created its own monster(s) by designing states whose borders were artificially drawn. The picture of the East is still obscenely ghastly for there are ongoing conflicts on account of the “collage” which the West has designed. The omen came true: those regions are the ones in today’s world continually creating problems, and/or monsters. Both “paterfamilias” and “orphan” err in the novel. The Monster’s evil is overt (though his suffering is too pathetic), whereas, Dr. Frankenstein’s is a covert, and a more dangerous one. The Monster (or the creature) is the poor, the archaic (for the body parts have been collected from the cemeteries and charnel houses and belonging to the past, dead paradigm), the socialist, the Muslim, the Buddhist, representing the “deformed” archaic East.

Dr.

Frankenstein, however, is the rich, the scientific, the technological, the capitalist, the Christian, representing the “formed” West. Hence, the Monster, from the viewpoint of Dr. Frankenstein, who is the embodiment of the West, is

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the cultural “other.” Edward Said in Orientalism has described how the Orient, the source of one of the West’s “deepest and most recurring images of the other,” has “helped define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (Said, 1-2) “European values of self-restraint, progress, democracy, scientific precision, and rationality contrast with what is perceived as the sensuality, primitiveness, despotism, superstition, and slovenly mentality of the Orient.” (Hurley: 126)

In creating t/his “other,”

Frankenstein, who has already lost his mother (suggesting the loss of motherly love, and the dignified values of Enlightenment and Humanism), and hence his origin, is after an identity. Without an identity, he suffers from a moral lacuna. What Edward Said has said goes in parallel with the pursuits of Victor, for the creature will be just the opposite (and strangely the similar) of Frankenstein, and the paradigm he represents. By defining the “Monster” as evil, Frankenstein defines himself as “good” and purges himself of his sins. He cannot, however, treat the Monster as anything other than a misbegotten botched experiment, as the West has never accepted the independent existence of the eastern world for the countries are just the products of laboratory experiments. Frankenstein rejects the Monster after defining himself as “good” and ignores the fact that he is a living, sentient and passionate being.

Thus, he has to shoulder the

responsibility of this rejection. Because the novel is an omen for the future, today’s political acts by the western governments should also be taken into consideration. Against the “super science and super technology” of the western liberal economies, there is the “super terror” of “Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster.” Within the limits of

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the world depicted in the novel, the Monster creates terror not only for its creator, but also for the creator’s “servants and relatives.” Dr. Frankenstein’s opportunistic, utilitarian, and unethical researches suggest that the dominant values of the western world are not only artificial, but also hypocritical. The psychological degeneration of Frankenstein (for he creates a warped creature, and against natural order) is a strong symbol of the degenerate culture that the new liberal world has created. Concerning the political themes in Frankenstein Alok Bhalla remarks that “The monstrous themes with which the Gothic writers preoccupied themselves were neither different from those employed by the political theorists and the radical poets nor separable from various actions of repression and lawlessness in the daily political conduct of the age” (10). The Monster’s choice of victims is not arbitrary.

He targets the

relatives and confidantes of his creator. Victor’s little brother, William is his first victim. Then follows Justine, the servant girl of Frankenstein family, unjustly accused of William’s murder and so executed (just like some eastern countries unjustly accused and executed by the superpower). The monster then demands that Victor create a female counterpart, to provide him with the company and solace that the society has denied him. At first Victor agrees, but later fears that “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth” (Shelley,

127),

and

destroys

the

half-completed

female

Monster.

Frankenstein is afraid that he will permanently change the power politics if he creates another Monster, and the future generations “might curse [him] as their pest” (Shelley, 127). This suggests not only the forlorn rejection of a helpless scientist, but also the power politics of the West for it has never

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allowed the assemblage (the deformed body) to act independently, and naturally.

Hence, the “Monster,” full of rage, targets both its creator, (the

imperialist powers, the West) and its relatives and servants (the allies of the West, and the countries that serve the ulterior motives of the imperialist). One might not believe that a twenty-one year old woman was able to write such a political novel about the permanent power politics by the help of astounding metaphors. That Frankenstein has never been out of press is a strong sign of the work’s universality for there has always been the conflict between the haves and the have nots. Being the daughter of the radical feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, and a political philosopher, William Godwin, and the wife of the Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and having acquainted with Lord Byron, Samuel T. Coleridge, and other literary figures such as Charles and Mary Lamb, it is not surprising that as only a young woman she could write Frankenstein.

In the novel is seen the traces of her

parents’ radical beliefs, especially the political thoughts best expressed in Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, and Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning the Nature of Political Justice. Mary Shelley had the courage to tell the “truth” about man, society, and socio-political systems contrary to what her polite society deemed unspeakable. Like her parents she was a reformist, a revolutionist, in short, a Romantic, and she never hesitated to lampoon the imperialism of her own country. Gothicists are rarely instructive in the sense that Augustan writers are: they simply present the moral dilemmas and hypocrisies of their age resulting from rapid social and individual changes.

However, Gothic certainly

establishes in the reader a certain heterodoxy concerning the ethics. Mary

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Shelley, through Frankenstein, not only depicts the moral lacuna of her age, but also foreshadows the ethical and spiritual lacuna of the future and warns against the danger awaiting mankind. This danger is imperialism (and neoimperialism) which is the embodiment of the evil in human nature. In today’s world this evil belongs to the West. In the future, perhaps, it is more likely to belong to the East as it was once so in the past.

Works Cited Bhalla, Alok. The Cartographers of Hell. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Ltd., 1991. Burns, Edward McNall., ed. Western Civilisation. New York: Norton, 1984. Cook, Chris and Stevenson, John. The Longman Handbook of Modern British History 1714-2001. Malaysia: Longman, 2001. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body. Cambridge: Cambridge UP., 1996. Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge UP., 1989. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth,1999.

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