§ CONCLUSION

At the turn of the nineteenth century both fctional and medical texts were
rife with the notion that a woman was inherently responsible for any
problems in her pregnancy. Advice to pregnant women dictated that
they should exercise – but not too much, that they should have a vegetable
diet – with a little meat, and that they should be cheerful – but not
excessively so.35 Sentimental novels and poetry overfowed with plaintive
women who bewailed their regret over inadvertently or unavoidably defcient
pregnancies. Combined with natural psychological reactions such as
guilt and grief, to an abnormal pregnancy, the weight of cultural blame
becomes doubly oppressive. Such was the unforgiving form of maternal
imagination during the early nineteenth century.
Shelley’s 1831 “Introduction” suggests a key to Frankenstein when
she describes the tales which prompted Lord Byron to propose that each
member of the Villa Diodati party in Geneva write a ghost story. 36 The
story that Shelley recalls most clearly is “the tale of the sinful founder of
his race whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all
the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of
§ CONCLUSION 265
promise” (1831a, 7). This tale has strong similarities with the concept of
maternal imagination as it blames only one parent, in this case the father,
for the destruction of the child. Yet it is not Victor Frankenstein’s
paternal imagination that falls under scrutiny in the novel as Shelley
eschews any comment on Victor’s state of mind at the moment of the
creature’s conception. In fact the true moment of conception is deliberately
debatable: does Victor devise his experiment as a result of his
mother’s death, is the creature inspired by lightning or the teachings of
the ancient alchemists, is his work truly begun under M. Waldman, or
could the creature’s awakening be interpreted as his conception? Such
numerous possibilities make clear that there is no defnitive moment that
could be attached to Victor’s paternal imagination. Instead Shelley
invites the reader to view these incidents as part of the creature’s gestation
period, within which Victor’s hapless maternal imagination wreaks
chaos. It is as a maternal fgure therefore, that Victor receives guilt,
blame and punishment for his reproductive imagination.
Mary Shelley critiques the culture of maternal blame through Victor
Frankenstein’s blindness to the discourse of maternal imagination.
Unfortunately for Victor, ignorance is no excuse, and his story is shaped by
the postpartum guilt of a woman who has given birth to a child believed to
have been affected by maternal imagination. Oblivious to the consequences,
Victor becomes a mother without frst acquainting himself with imagination’s
dangers for a prospective mother. The result of such carelessness
becomes apparent through his child’s deformity and vice, for which Victor
is held solely responsible. Victor becomes plagued by the guilt of his maternal
imagination and therefore suffers the fate of the nineteenth-century
pregnant woman. This unjust and prolonged suffering is juxtaposed in the
novel with Shelley’s adoption and portrayal of the creative and physiological
Romantic imagination. Organic and fuid, the creative imagination’s fnest
quality is its ability to bring ideas to life. Victor’s creative imagination
climaxes when he literally gives life to his theories in the form of the creature.
This feature of creative imagination is precisely the aspect of maternal
imagination that brings deformity, destruction and guilt to the unwary
mother. Shelley’s substitution of maternal imagination for what Victor mistakes
as his creative imagination, highlights the way that cultural responses to
human and artistic progeny are deeply gendered. The mother of a deformed
child can expect to receive the cultural pressure of guilt and responsibility.
This guilt spills over into any creative offspring such as Frankenstein, as the
discourse of maternal imagination has overwhelmingly characterised female
266 6 ROMANTIC IMAGINATION AND MATERNAL GUILT IN MARY SHELLEY’S . . .
imagination as negative – which is perhaps one of the reasons why the novel
was initially published anonymously. A father however, is acknowledged for
happy births and is praised in reproductive terms when he creates successful
art: he is imaginatively fertile and has conceived a brainchild. In creating a
male character who carries the burden of maternal imagination, Shelley
unwraps the implications of this unfairly gendered, discursive exchange.
She invites sympathy for Victor’s maternal suffering, stressing the isolated
position of the “guilty” mother. Critiquing the predominant Romantic
assimilation of the positive, physiological creativity of maternal imagination,
Shelley also condemns Victor’s male egotism for literally appropriating
female reproductive powers. In this way Victor Frankenstein inhabits the
cultural role of imagination for both sexes; as although he is a man, he pays
the female price for creative imagination.
NOTES
1. I have chosen to use the 1818 edition of Shelley’s novel as it is closer to
other texts dealt with from the Romantic period.
2. The mother of A Declaration of a Strange and Wonderful Monster gives
birth to a headless child after thinking and declaring that she would rather
give birth to a headless child than a cursed Roundhead. The mother of
Prides Fall gives birth to a two-headed child due to her vanity, as she
continually looks in a mirror.
3. I will discuss Huet’s observation in more detail later in this chapter.
4. As I shall go on to discuss, my reading of the novel owes a large debt to
feminist scholarship of Frankenstein. For an excellent overview of the extensive
feminist criticism of the novel see Diane Long Hoeveler (2003).
5. Gigante argues against Slavoj Zižek’s aesthetic theory that claims ugliness is
excess and says in Frankenstein, Shelley posits the creature as an aesthetic
impossibility, as a lack, absence or blank, and the “positive manifestation of
ugliness” (2000, 567).
6. Huet describes the distinction between Plato’s defnition of “eikastiken art,
exact in all dimensions, devoid of interpretation, and semblances produced
by phantastiken art, in which the artist selects the best possible proportions
to produce a beautiful work of art” (24–25).
Clare Hanson also discusses the possibility that Frankenstein is about the
“potentially destructive power of an inadequate uterine environment”
(2004, 49), but this is less directly connected to my study as she does not
link her theory of epigenetic development to maternal imagination.
Nevertheless Hanson does show that Shelley depicts fear that a negative
action of the mother’s will harm the child within the womb. Barbara Frey
NOTES 267
Waxman (1987) discusses Victor Frankenstein’s “pregnancy” in essentialist
terms and therefore does not consider the potential cultural implications of
maternal imagination discourse.
7. It is worth mentioning that Mary Shelley’s parents were signifcant fgures in
literary and philosophical history; her father William Godwin was a radical
political thinker, philosopher-atheist and novelist; her mother Mary
Wollstonecraft was a pioneering feminist and writer. After Mary’s birth
caused puerperal fever and the subsequent death of her mother, Godwin
remarried a widow named Mary Jane Clairmont, who already had two
children. At sixteen Mary eloped with the young – and already married –
poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and travelled in Europe accompanied by her stepsister
Claire Clairmont. This scandalous decision resulted in two illegitimate
pregnancies for Mary, however neither offspring of these pregnancies would
survive for long.
8. See for example Marc A. Rubenstein (1976), Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar (1979).
9. Musselwhite (1987, 62–65) disagrees with this statement and in an interesting
approach reads Victor’s creation of the creature not as pregnancy, but
as masturbation.
10. See the opening quotation in Moers (1976) which describes the appearance
of newborn babies.
11. William D Brewer (2001) explores the links between Shelley’s and Godwin’s
understanding of the mind and the passions, as evidenced in their texts;
U C Knoepfmacher (1979) argues for the autobiographical implications of
omnipresent fathers and absent mothers; and Elisabeth Bronfen (1994)
explores an autobiographical approach. Ellen Moers (1976) also emphasised
the fact that Shelley was frequently pregnant and surrounded by illegitimate
pregnancies during the writing of Frankenstein; her step-sister Claire
Clairemont was carrying Lord Byron’s child Allegra, Percy Shelley’s frst
wife Harriet committed suicide whilst pregnant with another man’s baby,
and Mary Shelley’s half-sister Fanny Imlay committed suicide after the
discovery that she herself was illegitimate. In a more holistic approach
Margaret Homans (1986) combines biographical detail with Lacanian theory
and argues that the story of Frankenstein’s pursuit and subsequent
neglect of the object of his desire – the creature – is a mirror of Percy’s
treatment of Mary Shelley; Mary Jacobus (1982), among others, counters
this position and argues against reducing Frankenstein to biology or biography.
Bewell also objects to overly biographical readings with the argument
that “Mary Shelley’s experience of pregnancy and loss was not simply a
biological matter, but also a social and discursive event” (1988, 107). Huet
(1993) observes that biographical readings of Frankenstein erase Percy
Shelley and the fgure of the father from the text, as they overstate Mary
268 6 ROMANTIC IMAGINATION AND MATERNAL GUILT IN MARY SHELLEY’S . . .
Shelley’s model of monstrous motherhood. Bette London (1993) makes a
similar point when she claims that feminist theory overlooks the fact that
both protagonists of the novel, Victor and the creature, are not mothers, or
even women.
12. Mellor in particular, has linked the novel’s preoccupation with pregnancy
and birth to Shelley’s description of her inspirational waking nightmare
of “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had
put together” (1831a, 9.) Mellor writes “this dream economically fuses
Mary Shelley’s myriad anxieties about the processes of pregnancy, giving
birth and mothering” (1988, 41.), and Barbara Frey Waxman has compared
Victor’s experiment with the double-edged experience of a pregnant
woman:
His ambition is not dissimilar to a frst-time pregnant women’s pride and
grandiose hopes for her unborn child, as western culture frames those
feelings; she is intimately linked to the creative process, and she may fantasize
that she is carrying the next leader of the nation, the savior of a people.
Yet even the frst-time pregnant woman’s rosy hopes are not unalloyed with
fears: that she may miscarry, that she may not survive the labor and delivery,
that the child will be stillborn, and that she is carrying a malformed child or
even a non-human being, a “hideous progeny”. (1987, 19)
13. Although Shelley does not record reading Tristram Shandy until January
1818, it is likely she would have been familiar with its content.
14. Waxman (1987) sees Victor’s experiment as a poorly conducted pregnancy;
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar saw the novel as a grotesque parody of a
woman’s reproductive role in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979); Robert
Kiely (1972) discusses Victor’s usurpation of woman; and Esther Schor calls
Frankenstein “the century’s most blistering critique of Romantic egotism”
(2003, 2).
15. Amanda Vickery notes this belief in the letters of late eighteenth-century
women; “ill health in the pregnant mother was long seen as a good omen,
proof of a thriving foetus within” (1998, 100). Linda A Pollock also argues
“a healthy mother, rather than being a cause of satisfaction, could be a
disquieting indication that the foetus was not thriving” (1990, 46).
16. Victor himself, though he is not conscious of it, therefore attributes the creation
of the monster specifcally to his imagination, in the same way that a woman’s
birth of an abnormal child would be attributed to her maternal imagination.
17. The above quotation is made in reference to the deaths of Justine and
William, however at this point in the novel Victor supposes, rather than
knows, that the creature is responsible. Consequently his remorse applies
less to his assumption that the creature is a murderer, and more to the
original instance of creating the creature’s life.
NOTES 269
18. James Whale’s (1931) flm Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff as the creature,
is the most famous cinematic representation of the creature’s awakening.
When the creature’s hand frst twitches, Frankenstein, played by Colin
Clive, shrieks the line, “it’s alive!” This scene is repeated in Whale’s 1935
sequel The Bride of Frankenstein and within both parodies and serious
responses to Whale’s original flm. In the most recent Hollywood incarnation
of the novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) directed by Kenneth
Brannagh, the frst sign of life in the creature – played by Robert DeNiro – is
also a convulsive twitch of the hand. The movement of the creature’s hand is
mixed in popular culture with Mary Shelley’s 1831 account of the creature’s
awakening, which described “signs of life . . . uneasy, half-vital motion” (9).
19. Mellor also confuses conception with gestation when linking Victor’s
experiment to Darwin’s theory of paternal imagination. As Chapter 4
shows, the theory of paternal imagination pinpointed the moment of imagination
to conception. Mellor mistakes Victor’s long period of fevered
imagination during the creature’s construction for the moment of conception.
(1987, esp. 299).
20. After the death of Shelley’s unnamed daughter, William was born on 24th
January 1816. Clara Everina was not born until 2nd September 1817,
several months after the completion of the novel.
21. As early as 1727 James Blondel remarked that the child might suffer from
the mother’s actions, “by dancing, running, jumping, riding” in The
Strength of Imagination In Pregnant Women Examin’d And the Opinion
that Marks and Deformities in Children arise from Thence Demonstrated to
be a Vulgar Error (1727, 10).
22. Victor’s initial illness after the creation of the creature is followed by a
lingering melancholy after Justine’s execution, an attack of madness after
the death of Clerval, nervous distress during his engagement to Elizabeth,
and fainting and fever after her murder.
23. If, instead of his back-to-front treatment, Victor had guarded his imagination
correctly, his creature would perhaps have been created with fewer
monstrous aspects.
24. Victor’s laboratory has also been compared to a womb.
25. However, it is worth noting that Percy Shelley inserted this word. See Anne
K Mellor (2003).
26. Feminist scholars such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979) and
Gordon D. Hirsch (1975) have identifed the creature as female. Poovey
(1985) and Barbara Johnson (1987, esp. 144–154) have seen the creature as
the woman writer. Others have read the creature as representative of revolution
or social upheaval, see Lee Sterrenberg (1979) and Martin A Danahay
(1993). Joyce Zonana (1991) reads the creature as representative of both
Adam and Eve. Many critics view the creature as Mary Shelley’s alter ego, for
270 6 ROMANTIC IMAGINATION AND MATERNAL GUILT IN MARY SHELLEY’S . . .
example U C Knoepfmacher 1979) argued that Shelley split her identity
into the characters of the aggressive monster and the sweetly yielding
Elizabeth. Anne Mellor (1988) has also claimed that Shelley identifed
strongly with the monster-child, as although Percy Shelley’s revisions are
frequent in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s voice is strongest in Volume II of
the novel, which contains the monster’s narrative.
27. Shelley uses the word “imagination” twenty-six times in both the 1818 and
1831 texts.
28. This idea strikes Victor in view of the mountains Jura, Mont Blanc and the
Môle. Huet notes that “mole” was also a condition related to pregnancy;
shapeless body (1993, 136).
29. Homans reads this dream as a critique of the phallocentric attitude that
brings the creature to life, as it omits the female and is therefore the
equivalent of killing Elizabeth and Victor’s mother (1986, 103). I agree
with Hanson’s reading, which instead of focusing on male desire and fear,
views the dream in terms of female desire of creating life and female fear of
maternal failure (2004, 50).
30. This is also shown through Victor’s unwillingness to make a female creature,
which I shall discuss in more detail below.
31. E J Clery has examined the androgynous aspects of Clerval’s character and
suggested that his persona is “strangely mutable” (2004, 131). I wish to
extend the possibility that Clerval represents “a utopian androgyny that
transcends normal distinctions of gender” (Clery 2004, 131) to a representation
that allow his character to be read as both an adult and an impressionable
infant.
32. There are many references to this “cause” of harelips such as Aristotle’s
Masterpiece (1717, 24) and Nicholas Culpeper (165, 122).
33. It was thought that if the baby had been born alive, its lungs would foat
in water, if it had been stillborn, the lungs would sink. Hunter claimed
that this test, so often used in infanticide cases, was unreliable.
Incidentally, the test had also been used on the bodies of Mary Toft’s
rabbits in 1726.
34. The creature’s deformed appearance and “watery eyes” (86) imply his
Piscean conception, see my Chapter 4.
35. William Moss (1800, 360) argues for several pages about the necessity of
exercise but stipulates that “exercise may be begun with and continued
during the whole time of the pregnancy, or when, and as long as, it will
be acceptable, and can be borne with ease and pleasure”. John Grigg
prescribes hardy women “full” meat diets, but stresses that delicate
women should restrict themselves to vegetables (1789), 93. Almost all
midwives stress the importance of a cheerful disposition but warn against
exciting the passions of a pregnant woman.
NOTES 271
36. These ghost stories are usually cited as a French translation of a German
collection by Jean Baptiste Benoît Eyriés, Fantasmagoriania, Ou
Receuil d’histoires d’apparitions, de spectres, de revenans, fantômes &c
(1812).