VICTOR’S RESPONSIBILITY AND THE MONSTER’S FAVORITE

BOOKS: ALLEGORY, TECHNOLOGY, AND ROMANTIC

IDEOLOGY IN FRANKENSTEIN

Stephen Dougherty

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is frequently read as a moral fable and a cautionary tale: Victor
Frankenstein fails to think through the consequences of his “experiment” in creating life
through science and technology, and catastrophe results. This strict moral dimension of the
novel rests uneasily alongside its allegorical dimension. My thesis is that there exists an infinite
distance between the novel as moral fable and the novel as an allegory of technology.
Frankenstein is both moral fable and allegory, but they are absolutely different stories. As
moral fable, the lesson of the novel is that the hideous creature might have turned out to be kind
and gentle and good, if only Frankenstein had not abandoned him. In the world of
Frankenstein as allegory, the question of individual responsibility possesses no value. Here,
Victor Frankenstein is up against something new, unanticipated, and clearly beyond his control
or cognizance. The hideous creature’s inception is a singularity – an event. In my reading,
Frankenstein is only cautionary through our willful occlusion of its allegorical dimension.
Frankenstein constitutes an aberration in allegory: not only is the allegorical story in
Frankenstein an ‘other’ story; weirdly, it also rivals the literal story, or delegitimates it.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein1 is frequently read as a moral fable and a cautionary

tale. Victor Frankenstein has a responsibility for his misbegotten creature’s
welfare, and he fails to live up to it. Frankenstein rejects any sense of obligation

1 All quotations from Frankenstein in this article follow the text of Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, The 1818 Text, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 1998). Subsequent page references appear in
parentheses in the text.

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toward his creation. He refuses its claim on his paternity; he refutes its insistence
on its original benevolence, or its plea for the simple compassion and respect
owed to it on the grounds of its liveliness. The novel dwells in part on the
damage Victor Frankenstein causes to himself and others, and it probes the
harmful psychological effects of not owning up to his responsibilities, not having
thought through the consequences of his experiment in creating life through
science and technology.
Victor Frankenstein creates his unholy progeny, his famous monster, and
then hopes it will just go away and die. He starts second-guessing himself about
his responsibility only after the creature starts avenging his abandonment by
murdering Frankenstein’s loved ones. Victor proclaims late in the novel, “I am
the assassin of those most innocent victims [murdered by the creature’s hands];
they died by my machinations” (156). Yet he also sees himself as a slave to the
creature. He longs for an accident that might “put an end to my slavery forever”
(126). On the one hand, Frankenstein accepts responsibility for the deadly
consequences following from his creature’s inception. On the other hand, he
insists that he is powerless in the face of it. This ambivalence only underscores
the inescapability of moral questions for the reader.
I wish to explore the relationship between this literal, or nominal, level of
meaning in Shelley’s novel, and meaning on another level, or, the ‘other’ level,
whose presence we associate with the term “allegory.” Frankenstein is famous for
the super-abundance of interpretations it has generated, and in this sense it is
supremely allegorical. Critics and other readers have interpreted the novel as
being about the French Revolution, slave emancipation, postnatal depression,
Enlightenment discourses of origins, socialism, environmental catastrophe, and
of course, the runaway danger of technological invention. As allegory, Mary
Shelley’s novel is contrived to operate on two, corresponding levels of meaning:
one literal, and the other conceptual, or metaphorical. Thus, if we consider the
novel as allegorizing the runaway dangers of new technology, the gigantic and
uncontrollable monster bodies forth the threat of diminished human agency. But
if that is the case, then what happens to the moral of the story? What happens to
Frankenstein as a cautionary tale stressing the fundamental importance of human
responsibility?
I will read Frankenstein as an allegory of technology because that is arguably
the most culturally resonant of allegorical readings. One thinks of Frankenstein
and its historical connection to fears of mass industrialization through the
nineteenth century, or the bomb in the mid-twentieth century, or bio-
engineering, as in “Frankenfoods,” in more recent decades. Just as importantly,
in the Preface to the first, 1818 edition of the novel, Mary Shelley herself

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identifies the creature’s technological inception as “[t]he event on which this

fiction is founded” (3). However, I want to stress that in light of this event, which
is the event of the monster, the moralists’ question of individual responsibility,
or culpability, loses most of its relevance. After this event, Victor Frankenstein is
up against something new, unanticipated, and clearly beyond his control or
cognizance.
The creature’s technological inception is an event very much in the sense that
the philosopher Alain Badiou uses the term. Remember Mary Shelley’s use of the
word “event” in her Preface to Frankenstein. For Badiou, an event is something
utterly unaccountable, something that does not fit into a given historical
situation, and which, due to the trauma of its appearance, utterly changes that
given history. Any historical situation where some radical transformation is truly
possible is one which is exposed to what Badiou calls an evental site, one which
is, as Badiou writes in Being and Event, “in at least one of its points, on the edge
of the void.”2 This is an intriguing formulation that implicates the event as a
shock to history, a rough jolt out of the blue, as delivered not by a subject, or a
human agent, because for Badiou this does not exist in the way we normally
think it does. Andrew Gibson helpfully explains that Badiou’s event is “an
aleatory fragment, the chance occurrence of something that had no existence
beforehand, could not be predicted or foreseen, and had no prior name.”3 From
the standpoint of such an event, there is no strictly individual responsibility one
can assume or fail to assume, because one cannot exercise responsibility for a
strange attractor, a freak product of a technological singularity.
What this means is that the moralizing or cautionary reading, and the
allegorical reading of Frankenstein cannot be reconciled. Not only is the
allegorical story in Frankenstein an ‘other’ story, in keeping with the historical
nature of allegory. It also rivals the more straightforward, cautionary reading
about human responsibility. It seeks to conquer it, or displace it, in the same way
that the creature seeks to conquer and destroy its human maker. What makes
Frankenstein an enduringly strange and compelling example of allegory is the
extent to which it thematizes its own status as an allegory. This also means that
the novel is very much about reading, and the act of making meaning. Do human
readers bear sole responsibility for interpretation? Are they the singular makers
of meaning, or are they confronted in their relation to the technological medium
of written language with a counter-force, a competing power of signification
embedded in literary works themselves?

2 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006) 177.
3 Andrew Gibson, Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007) 16.

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II

Let us begin by turning to Angus J.S. Fletcher’s influential essay “Allegory without
Ideas.” Fletcher writes:

Allegory is a method of double meanings that organizes utterance (in any

medium) according to its expression of analogical parallels between
different networks of iconic likeness. […] Allegorical narratives […], lead
us to imagine a set of meanings located on the other side of this
hermeneutic wall. In political and cultural terms, these meanings lying on
the other side of the wall comprise parts of the whole of an ideology – its
commentary and interpretation.4

Normatively, this is how allegory works: it realizes an apparently systematic

correspondence between a story and its meaning, or interpretation. The
journeying protagonist Christian in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
allegorizes the everyman Christian seeking God’s redemption. This is why
Maureen Quilligan argues in The Language of Allegory for “the affinity of allegory
as literary criticism to allegory as literary composition.” 5 It is also why she
suggests that “the final focus of any allegory is its reader, and that the ‘real’
action of any allegory is the reader’s learning to read the text properly.”6 If, as
Fletcher puts it, there is a “hermeneutic wall” in between story and interpretation
in allegory, what happens on either side of this wall nevertheless makes up the
parts of something whole: “the whole of an ideology,” as he writes: the story,
“commentary and interpretation” wrapped into one.
Still, allegory is beset by an inherent instability. In the age of what we call
“theory,” from the late twentieth century on, allegory has come to present itself
as “the definitive mark of the contingency of language and its referential
claims.”7 That is something very different from the theological certainty it seemed
to pledge in the medieval world, when allegorical dramas, or morality plays,
presented simple and clear lessons to audiences, demonstrating to some degree
or other the ideological grip of the Roman Church. What connects these radically

4 Agnus J.S. Fletcher, “Allegory without Ideas,” Thinking Allegory Otherwise, ed. Brenda
Machosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992) 10.
5 Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1979) 23.
6 Quilligan 24.
7 Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck, “Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to Allegory,
ed. Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 10.

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opposing medieval and postmodern images of allegory is the issue of power. In

the way that it folds interpretation into itself, allegory is a literary mode that is
preoccupied with power. Fletcher writes, “the allegorist looks at life as if it were
a game of getting and exploiting power.”8
What is peculiar about Frankenstein is how the struggle for power is self-
consciously thematized; how levels of meaning within the text vie for power, or
for supremacy on their own competing terms, and how that struggle in effect
constitutes the novel as allegory. The literal story encodes the lesson about
responsibility, which is also code for the fullness and the centrality of the human
subject in history. It is a story about human power. By turns, Victor takes
responsibility for the incidents that make up the literal story, and he absolves
himself of it. The important point is that both claims keep the question of
responsibility before the reader. Victor refuses responsibility for the creature’s
actions; he insists he is not culpable for the deaths of his loved ones, though he
also claims otherwise. Indeed, these claims and counter-claims take up a
considerable amount of space in the narrative, reminding the reader constantly
of their presence. Victor takes responsibility for ensuring that the creature has no
mate: “I shudder to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose
selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price perhaps of the
existence of the whole human race” (138). He bears so much responsibility, as he
exclaims that “[t]he human frame could no longer support the agonizing
suffering that I endured” (148). As he sees it, the fate of the human race rests on
his shoulders. He sees himself as the human pivot upon which history turns.
If we focus on the allegorical level, however, Frankenstein is a story that
rejects the strong emphasis on human responsibility. The creature’s inception
marks the arrival of a power, or a force, that cannot be reckoned with, except in
its measurement against the human agency that opposes it. It is beyond human
control or even human cognizance, offering an image of a world one might justly
call posthuman, especially in light of the critical discourse that trails in the
novel’s wake, wherein, as Martin Tropp characteristically puts it in Images of Fear,
the creature “marries the horrors of Gothic ghosts and spectres to the goal of the
Industrial Revolution – science used to imitate and replace man.” 9 The Frankenstein
myth is still with us because the effects and affects of living in technologically
driven capitalist societies are arguably even more disorienting and chaotic today,
in our post-industrial era, as they were in Mary Shelley’s time. Hers was an age

8 Fletcher 10.
9 Martin Tropp, Images of Fear: How Horror Helped Shape Modern Culture, 1818-1918
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990) 30.

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Stephen Dougherty

of widespread industrial-technological changes which wreaked havoc on

traditional social and economic relationships, and which threatened the very
vision of a human-centered world.
How, then, did the Romantic ideology of Mary Shelley’s time position itself
with regard to this human-centered vision? Mainly, it constituted a vehement
defense of a human-centered world. Romantic literature would carry the banner
for a sacralized humanity as embodied in the singular figure of the genius,
though ironically, Romantic proponents would communicate their humanist
message to reading publics in an era of technological breakthroughs in printing
and distribution technologies: steam-powered and rotary bed presses helped to
increase print volume and reduce print costs from the early decades of the
nineteenth century, just as stereotyping did in the eighteenth century; rail- and
steam-based transport technologies would decrease distribution time. The
Romantic poet and reader alike became partisans in the struggle for the ideal of
human sacralization, which was historically conditioned not only by the rise of
industrialization, but also by new forms of class struggle born of industrial
capitalism, as well as increasingly rigid forms of gender and racial oppression
designed to turn the white European male into the ‘universal’ sacred human, or
the most perfect human. Frankenstein might well be a stunning example of
Romantic literature and its gendered and racialized humanist obsessions, but it
also demonstrates an ironic self-awareness that those obsessions are intimately
linked to technological circumstances. How else do we account for the fact that
the great proselytizer of the humanizing powers of literature in Frankenstein is
the creature, born, as he is, of technology?
The creature is a student of literature, and reading becomes an essential part
of his Bildung as he hides in a shed and steels himself to confront the De Lacys,
the refugee family he so admires. He reads Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s
Sorrows of Werther, and Plutarch’s Lives. As the monster attempts to explain:

I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books. They produced in
me an infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to
ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection. In the
Sorrows of Werter, besides the interest of its simple and affecting story, so
many opinions are canvassed, and so many lights thrown upon what had
hitherto been to me obscure subjects, that I found in it a never-ending
source of speculation and astonishment.
(103)

The creature learns not only how to read, but how to read “properly,” we must
even say allegorically, for self-revelation: “‘As I read, however, I applied much

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personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar, yet at the
same time strangely unlike the beings concerning whom I read, and to whose
conversation I was a listener’” (103-104). The creature may be born of technology,
but he is the great literary humanist in the novel – far more convincing in the
role than is his doppelganger Victor, or Victor’s literary fanboy friend Henry
Clerval: “Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my
destination?”(104). Such questions, inspired by reading, are precisely what makes
it so easy for us to empathize with the creature, to really feel that he is one of us.
This brings us back to my critical observation about allegory in Frankenstein.
Those scenes of reading and self-questioning cited above are not in keeping with
the creature’s allegorical significance, his embodiment, in other words, of the
idea of technology run amok. The allegorical message in Frankenstein is troubled,
and compromised: Victor Frankenstein is both responsible and not responsible
for the terrible events that occur; the creature is horrible and fearful yet worthy
of human sympathy. The defining feature of the narrative is this split between
the novel as a moral fable about human responsibility, and the novel as an
allegory about an event that exceeds responsibility. Furthermore, this split, or
fracture, cuts through and destabilizes the novel as allegory too. What I mean is
that we cannot simply decide to read the novel allegorically, and thereby spare
ourselves from the interpretive difficulties which the narrative seems to pose
inherently. Neither can we do otherwise and read it simply as moral fable; not, at
least, without willfully, and naively, reducing the complexities of the novel.
Frankenstein is utterly self-conflicted, but it does not allow the reader to get off
easy, by simply rejecting one side of its split identity in favor of the other. Still,
its self-conflictedness, or split personality, does nothing to diminish the
compulsive force of its demand. Frankenstein troubles the reader in a manner that
is in some ways typically Romantic. It is comparable to Charles Robert Maturin’s
Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) in its jagged synthesis of gothic romance and
allegory. However, Frankenstein is atypical and idiosyncratic as well.
Part of this must be chalked up to the fact that allegory undergoes
considerable changes during the Romantic period, acquiring something of the
nebulosity of the symbol, and simultaneously assuming realistic attributes which
seem antithetical to its conventional abstractionism. Thus, Theresa M. Kelley
writes of the way that Romantic allegory “tacks between realist narratives and
details and the abstractions with which allegory has long been identified.” 10
The fate of allegory during the Romantic period bears directly on our analysis of
Frankenstein, so now I want to take time to consider this fate through the lens of a

10 Theresa M. Kelley, “Romanticism’s Errant Allegory,” The Cambridge Companion to

Allegory, 211.

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well-known essay on allegory and symbolism in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, Paul de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” 11 My aim in
turning to de Man is to better appreciate what is especially weird and unsettling
about Frankenstein, in spite of what is typically, and reassuringly, Romantic
about it too.

III

“[T]he change that takes place in the latter half of the eighteenth century,” de Man
writes, “when the word ‘symbol’ tends to supplant other denominations for
figural language, including that of ‘allegory’” (RT 188) is keenly apparent in
Shelley’s novel. Frankenstein is replete with literary symbolism, where material
objects and figures are used to represent abstractions and concepts: light and fire
for intellectual illumination, darkness for ignorance, geographical discovery for
self-discovery, natural scenes as repositories for human value. However, de
Man’s well-known argument in “The Rhetoric of Temporality” is that the
Romantic symbol did not displace allegory in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries so much as allegory contaminated symbolism. De Man
takes Hans-Georg Gadamer’s question more seriously than Gadamer himself:
“‘Is the symbolizing activity not actually still bound today by the survival of a
mythological and allegorical tradition?’” (RT 191). De Man’s answer is yes, and
he goes so far as to argue that the European novel’s historical development
required a dialectic between the metaphorical modes of allegory and symbolism.
As he writes of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, the novel

shows that we are dealing […] with the rediscovery of an allegorical

tradition beyond the sensualistic analogism of the eighteenth century.
This rediscovery, far from being spontaneous and easy, implies instead
the discontinuity of a renunciation, even of a sacrifice.
(RT 205)

The ideal of wholeness and plenitude bodied forth in the Romantic symbol is
ultimately sacrificed to the fatality of time, “the originary constitutive category”
(RT 207) of allegory. What de Man calls the “secularized allegory” of the
Romantics thus always contains a “negative moment.” If in Rousseau that

11 Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 187-228. Subsequent page references (marked RT)
appear in parentheses in the text.

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negativity takes the form of renunciation, in Wordsworth it is “the loss of self in

death or in error” (RT 207).
De Man’s account marks an inversion of the way allegory was typically
conceived in the critical tradition. Allegory was widely considered to be
motivated by the notion of the eternal, the unchanging: allegory as indexing the
religious (and Platonic) conviction in the eternal realm of ideas. For the sake of
telling a very different story about allegory in the Romantic period, de Man re-
interprets allegory as a temporal, and historical, mode of figuration, not an
atemporal one:

In the world of the symbol it would be possible for the image to coincide
with the substance, since the substance and its representation do not
differ in their being but only in their extension: they are part and whole of
the same set of categories. Their relationship is one of simultaneity,
which, in truth, is spatial in kind, and in which the intervention of time is
merely a matter of contingency, whereas, in the world of allegory, time is
the originary constitutive category.
(RT 207)

This is so because the allegorical sign always refers to a preceding sign; it always
refers to another meaning. De Man continues by explaining that this
temporalized allegory bore important affinities with irony, and that it served as a
bulwark against the Romantic symbol, whose ahistorical and mystifying powers
de Man insisted upon for the sake of playing up to the hilt its dialectical
antithesis to allegory. For de Man, allegory in the Romantic period operates as a
means of resistance against the world of the Romantic symbol where image and
substance, fiction and reality, coincided. Insofar as symbolism and allegory
partook of one another, with symbolism in ascendancy, this allegorical point of
resistance became internalized in the symbol; and so, “this symbolical style will
never be allowed to exist in serenity” (RT 208). It will always be self-conflicted.
De Man shows us how the interface between allegory and symbol makes up a
central part of Romantic literary history. The poetics of allegory, based on
temporal dislocation and the non-simultaneity of the literary artefact, disrupt the
poetics of the symbol, based on self-plenitude and the self-referentiality of the text.
With de Man in mind, we can say that Frankenstein is typically Romantic in
the way that it is traversed by these competing aesthetic aims and historical
impulses. Yet there is still something quite different about Frankenstein,
something that makes it peculiarly monstrous and weird. It comes down to its
lack of proper responsiveness to itself, or its failure to read itself coherently. This

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is what I have referred to as the antagonism between its literal and ideational
levels, between its tale of human responsibility on one hand, and its tale of
threatened and diminished human agency on the other hand. The creature may
set out to read in proper Romantic fashion, wherein the aim is to reinforce
through reading a strong sense of self-coherence, or selfhood. Ultimately,
however, it will not succeed, in part because the Romantic message that reading
great literature is always reading about oneself is already contaminated by
allegory; and there is another reason for the creature’s failure, dealing with the
technological nature of its being, as I will soon discuss.
Recalling Fletcher’s terms, the acutely self-conflicted and self-aware allegory
of Frankenstein does not encourage the reader to imagine a set of synchronized
meanings on both sides of the hermeneutic wall. Fletcher refers to this kind of
allegory as “allegory without ideas,” a phrase which invokes the medieval (and
traditional) notion of an allegory of ideas, or with ideas. Fletcher’s concept of
allegory without ideas stands squarely within the critical history running from
A.O. Lovejoy to Walter Benjamin to de Man, which pictures allegory from the
seventeenth century on chiefly in terms of fragments and ruins, connoting its
declining fortunes in the context of widespread cultural secularization. Allegory
without ideas is thus a mode of allegory that persists after the nominalist
questioning of universals starts hollowing it out, and after the Romantic symbol
begins to displace it as the very figure for literariness.
Historically speaking, Frankenstein counts as one of Fletcher’s allegories
without ideas. Indeed, Fletcher refers to such allegories written in post-
allegorical times in a manner that specifically conjures the example of
Frankenstein, and the awful image of Mary Shelley’s creature. Allegory without
ideas, Fletcher writes, is a “surgically disformed allegory [which] could never
appeal to any hierarchic system defined in terms of the perfect.”12 What makes
Frankenstein most peculiar in the world of Romantic allegory is the manner in
which, as Fletcher’s notable description suggests, it exemplifies his allegory
without ideas so perfectly as to count as a unique case. It is the exemplary
allegory without ideas: not only does it not operate in the relatively stable and
authoritarian manner of medieval allegory; not only does the fiction address the
techno-secularization of society in incredibly resonant terms, but over the
centuries it has also demonstrated a uniquely remarkable power of generating
heterogeneous interpretations. Mary Shelley’s fiction proliferates meaning in a
manner that is as far from the didactic and univocal ideal of medieval allegory as
you can get. Allegory in Frankenstein may be in ruins, as indexed by the

12 Fletcher 20; emphasis added.

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wretched and blasted figure of the creature; it may be involved in power

struggles that blur its “political” impact and its aesthetic force, even as it persists
in transformation, as de Man charts, but it is also a crucial component in a kind
of textual machine possessing an uncanny autonomy.
We must return once again to “the event on which this fiction is founded,” as
Shelley writes, and we must remember its technological status: it is a technological
event that redounds on the narrative of Frankenstein and exposes its own
technological conditions as a work of popular writing, where figurative language
– allegory, symbol, personification – function like components of a machine. In
the very plot of Frankenstein, as I have foregrounded in the preceding discussion,
the human interpreter is partially displaced from the center of meaning-making,
to make way for the creature.
Let us, then, consider allegory in Frankenstein as a part of the machine that
produces friction. The creature allegorically embodies a new technological
ascendancy. Fitted into the framework of this textual machine, which is mainly
designed (à la Romanticism) to churn out human images of self-plenitude and
self-mastery, even hinting at the self’s divine transcendence of history and
technology, the allegorical part of the machine produces friction which subverts
the Romantic-symbolist precepts of the novel.
Since what we are talking about is the production and consumption of
reading affects, the best way to illustrate the point is to turn back to the novel
and further consider the creature and his reading. I will consider Victor’s reading
too, of books and other cultural monuments, and ask, what sort of reading
lessons did Romantic ideology promote, and how does Shelley’s novel deliver or
fail to deliver the proper lessons?
As the creature explains: “‘I learned from Werter’s imaginations despondency
and gloom: but Plutarch taught me high thoughts; he elevated me above the
wretched sphere of my own reflections [...]’” (104). Learning “high thoughts” is
akin to learning the transcendence of selfhood, which in Romantic poetics, is the
very point of literature. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in “Circles” (1841) that
“Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle through which a new one
may be described. The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may
command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it.” 13
We can only assume, from the proper Romantic perspective, at any rate, that the
creature’s immense powers of self-possession are nourished though his reading
experiences. He feels his own wretchedness reflected back to him in poetry, and

13 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles,” The Portable Emerson, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Viking
Penguin, 1981) 234.

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at the same time he learns to acknowledge it, and elevate himself above it for the
sake of action. He reads Milton too: “Paradise Lost excited far different and
deeper emotions. I read it, as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into
my hands, as a true history” (104). The creature, in other words, deems
substance and representation as differing only in extension and not in being –
epic poetry and true history are the same. The utterly Romantic conviction
informing the monster’s statement is that language is imbued with spiritual
powers that make it interpenetrate the world of history and material things.
Whether the creature really believes this, at the very least he knows how to
manipulate such belief, which accounts for his peculiar eloquence and his
immense powers of self-assertion.
Yet the creature is the wrong character to have absorbed these reading
lessons. He is, after all, a product of technology – a piece of “high-tech,” born in
a laboratory – and so the process of his humanization, which would presumably
follow from an achievement of literacy conditioned by Romantic biases, must
fail. This is a crucial point supported by the fact that the creature is never
perceived by other characters in the novel as being human, even though the
traumatization by his failure to gain human acceptance might convincingly
argue for his humanity. Such is the troubling ambivalence with which the
question “what is human?” is treated in Frankenstein. In his subjection to trauma,
and in his sensitivity to his alienation, the a-human creature is the most human
character of all. The utter ambivalence of the situation helps to explain why the
humanities-inflected reading lessons go wrong.
It is no less the case with Victor, who is chiefly characterized by his absolute
failures of self-transcendence. As he explains after consenting to the creature’s
demand for a female mate:

The promise I had made to the dæmon weighed upon my mind, like
Dante’s iron cowl on the heads of the hellish hypocrites. All pleasures of
earth and sky passed before me like a dream, and that thought only had
to me the reality of life. Can you wonder, that sometimes a kind of
insanity possessed me, or that I saw continually about me a multitude of
filthy animals inflicting on me incessant torture, that often extorted
screams and bitter groans?
(123)

In Victor’s case, his literary-inspired visions (from reading Dante’s Inferno) do

not coordinate with reality. They simply override reality and become a prison
house. Thus, Victor is constantly subject to ennui, describing himself as “a miserable

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spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others, and abhorrent to myself”

(133). His “little voyages of discovery” with Henry Clerval in England help, but
only briefly. The two friends take in monuments and museums like dutiful
tourists, but such cultural uplift is never enough to overcome the shadow over
his life cast by the creature:

We visited the tomb of the illustrious Hampden, and the field on which
that patriot fell. For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing
and miserable fears to contemplate the divine ideas of liberty and self-
sacrifice, of which these sights were the monuments and the remem-
brancers. For an instant I dared to shake off my chains, and look around
me with a free and lofty spirit; but the iron had eaten into my flesh, and I
sank again, trembling and hopeless, into my miserable self.
(134)

In his essay on Frankenstein and Romantic poetics, Mark Hansen argues that
Shelley’s novel stages a “confrontation with the ideology of romantic poetics,”
and that this confrontation manifests itself primarily as parody of the sublime,
which is ultimately “a failure of the [Romantic] poetic to carry out its
performance.”14 Thus, Hansen approvingly quotes Barbara Freeman, who claims
that the geography of sublime alpine and polar settings in Frankenstein
“produces neither peace of mind nor aesthetic pleasure, but rather a vision of
and an encounter with monstrosity. Each time a sublime landscape is depicted, it
is linked to the Monster’s appearance;” and so the sublime in Frankenstein is
uncoupled from any attitude of transcendent self-composure and instead aligned
with “monstrosity gone awry.”15
According to Hansen, yet another aspect of this failure of the Romantic
sublime in Frankenstein deals with acts of reading, and writing. If there is
Romantic parody in Shelley’s novel, surely the scrambled relationship between
reading and self-transcendence, or even reading and pleasure, counts as part of
it. Reading for uplift does not work in Victor’s case, just as it cannot work in the
monster’s case. Neither does Romantic writing. Hansen observes that Victor, the
creator, figures in the novel more significantly as a Romantic writer, not reader:

14 Mark Hansen, “‘Not Thus, after All, Would Life Be Given’: ‘Technesis,’ Technology
and the Parody of Romantic Poetics in ‘Frankenstein,’” Studies in Romanticism, 36.4
(1997): 595, 596.
15 Hansen 596, 595.

31
Stephen Dougherty

In his attempts to flee his responsibility to and for the monster,

Frankenstein stands as an apt type for the high romantic poet. Following
an ascent through an explicitly self-referential sublime landscape – one
populated, in typical 18th-century fashion, with ruined castles and
towering precipices […] Frankenstein beholds the Mont Blanc in its
“awful majesty” and feels an upsurge of joy.16

Victor’s heart swells while he utters “a well-nigh Shelleyan apostrophe to the

wind.” 17 Immediately thereafter he confronts his horrible progeny, which
effectively kills the Romantic mood.
On Hansen’s account, the creature is that element of the text which short-
circuits the production of the transcendent effects that reinforce the central belief
in the power of the imagination. He is an allegorical beast whose ghastly image
is an affront to the Romantics’ vision of the divine purity and the transcendent
power of the human. This jibes with my understanding of the creature as the
part in the Romantic textual machine that creates friction, or that sets up
resistance to the Romantic-humanist thrust of the novel. However, my account
differs from Hansen’s in that I also see productive possibilities born of this
resistance.
Since the event of the creature in Frankenstein deals with contemporaneous
historical experiments and discoveries leading to the harnessing of electrical
power, I will offer a final, concluding analogy that invokes this electric history.
I have compared the novel to a textual machine that produces friction; now let
me suggest that the novel takes the form of an electric circuit. The creature is the
resistor in the circuit, the material element through which the current, of ideas, of
ideology, must pass for it to be regulated and harnessed for use. On this analogy,
the confrontation between Victor and his creature dramatizes the frictive
synthesis of human and technological forces in the industrial era. The potential
and real productivity of these forces is signaled in and through the narrative by
its power to proliferate meaning, or to possess significance for readers living
through great changes and seeking means of understanding. Frankenstein reveals
the close integration between the circuit of literature and other circuits of energy
flow and distribution that helped to define its industrial times.
As I have argued in this essay, there is much about Frankenstein that is unique
in literary history. However, the central, fraught, yet productive inter-relation
between the human and the technological that it thematically foregrounds, and

16 Hansen 596.
17 Hansen 596.

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 Victor’s Responsibility and the Monster’s Favorite Books

which is formally encoded into the novel in the rich and strangely inventive
ways that it blends allegorical, symbolist, and realist modes of representation,
also establishes Frankenstein as belonging to a type: it is the precursor of a new
kind of fiction – science fiction. First popularized by Brian Aldiss in Billion Year
Spree, 18 the claim that Frankenstein inaugurates modern science fiction is now
conventional, and therefore worthy of suspicion. But let me end by suggesting
how my approach to Frankenstein can help us to appreciate this origin myth in a
new light. What does Shelley accomplish in Frankenstein? She ramps up the
power of Romantic imagination at the same time she emphasizes the
inescapability of historical and material forces (i.e., industrial-technological
conditions) as allegorized by the creature. She shows that these material forces
(i.e., technology, history) were not really impinging on imagination in the modern
world, or limiting it, as the Romantic poets generally insisted, so much as they
were conditioning it, and enabling it. It is as if Frankenstein signals the awareness
of a new techno-culture system in the making. In this new dispensation, the
brute reality of a technologically driven history, clearly having reached a kind of
singularity threshold with the dawn of industrial capitalism, supercharges
literary imagination, which in turn affects both the state of technology and our
human experiences of it, and with it. In other words, such literature conditions
the way its consumers live those technological circumstances and make them a
part of being human. Let us, then, continue to read and appreciate Frankenstein,
both for what is common and uncommon about it.

18 Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (New York: Doubleday,
1973) 20.

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