"My Accursed Origin": The Search for the Mother in "Frankenstein"

Author(s): Marc A. Rubenstein

Source: Studies in Romanticism , Spring, 1976, Vol. 15, No. 2, Psychoanalysis and
Romanticism (Spring, 1976), pp. 165-194
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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 "My Accursed Origin":
The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein
MARC A. RUBENSTEIN

THE primal scene imagery in Frankenstein is pervasive and

unmistakable. The scene of the monster's reanimation speaks
for itself, but the spirit of primal scene observation pene
trates into the very structure of the novel and becomes part of a
more deeply hidden search for the mother. One of Freud's earliest
thoughts about the importance of the primal scene provides a use
ful perspective on the connection between the sexual excitement of
the primal scene and the fascination with origins. He took note
of the "architecture" of the fantasies, in adults, which derived from
primal scene memories of childhood.1
In this early view of fantasy as a defense, he referred to them as
"psychical outworks constructed to bar the way to these memories."
At the same time, he was impressed by structural and functional
aspects of these fantasies which seemed to serve synthesizing, or
adaptive, ends as well as defensive ones. "Phantasies serve the pur
pose of refining the memories, of sublimating them. They are
built up out of things that have been heard about and then subse
quently turned to account; thus they combine things that have been
experienced and things that have been heard about past events
(from the history of parents and ancestors) and things seen by the
subject himself." He is, perhaps, anticipating later observations
about the genesis and function of the family romance, but his
emphasis on the spatial arrangement of fantasy and its relation
ship to the reworking of personal myth is particularly useful in
considering Mary Shelley and what she did with the impressions
she had of her dead mother as they evolved over the years of her
youth.
Frankenstein, for all its exclusion of women, is?among other
things?a parable of motherhood. If the novel's status as a myth
of procreation does not itself suggest the element of motherhood,
one should at least know that Mary Shelley was eighteen and the
mother of a six month old child when she began writing her story.

1. Sigmund Freud, "Draft L," The Origins of Psychoanalysis, ed. Marie

Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris (New York: Basic Books, 1954).

SiR, 15 (Spring 1976) 165

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166 MARC A. RUBENSTEIN

Her own mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft,

example of simultaneous childcare and literary produc
Shelley's accomplishment is no less impressive, and its sig
arouses our curiosity.2
Briefly, I propose an approach to the novel through its
tion, its narrative structure, in order to achieve a fre
tive on its meaning for Mary Shelley?and for us. This
it much easier to see the maternal imagery which runs t
story and to locate that aspect of the story's signific
author's life. Further, it will free us somewhat from the
which has persisted from the very beginning over t
status as a mere "passive reflection" of her circumsta
brain . . . magnetized" by Shelley.3
Nothing Mary Shelley wrote as a more mature woman e
captured the imagination the way Frankenstein did, alth
of her later work enjoyed some success in her own tim
self created the impression that Shelley and Byron were
responsible for the story. There is no question that Shell
better stylist. His imagery may be particularly in evid
final pages of Frankenstein, where he seems to have been

2. Only a single commentator, Ellen Moers {The New York Revie

21 March 1974, pp. 24-28) has dealt with this in any depth, refe
novel as "a woman's mythmaking on . . . the trauma of afterbir
tasmagoria of the nursery." Robert Kiely (The Romantic Nove
[Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1972], p. 165) has taken note of th
motherhood in Frankenstein's procreative act, though only in passi
stein's crime against nature is a crime against womanhood. . . ." Cu
has been little specifically psychoanalytic investigation of Mary
Frankenstein, and none which has examined the element of mother
Kaplan and Robert Kloss (The Unspoken Motive [New York: Free
attempted an examination from the perspective of the Oedipal con
content to make their interpretation "in the light of male psychol
Bond (Psychiatric Annals, December, 1973) considered the Oedip
Frankenstein in the light of Mary Shelley's relationship to her gelid
by leaving out the issue of procreation, finished with an interpr
appropriate to Mathilda (Mary Shelley's second novel, unpublis
lifetime) than to Frankenstein.
3. Mario Praz (The Romantic Agony, 2nd ed. [New York: Oxfor
1970]) and Richard Garnett (Mary Shelley, Tales and Stories, In
[London, 1891]) from whom these derogatory quotes derive, are ty
critics who, from the beginning, have been suspicious of Mary Shel
for originality.

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 FRANKENSTEIN: SEARCH FOR THE MOTHER 167

active in making manuscript corrections.4 Moreover, the first view

of the monster?one of the novel's most impressive moments?
seems directly derived from Shelley. Yet, even this apparent "in
debtedness" to a man's imagination is itself part of the novel's
texture, and thus, as I hope to show, a reflection of the very prob
lem of motherhood Mary Shelley was attempting to express in
the novel.
She was the daughter of an outspoken feminist who had died
giving her birth. The specialness of these origins is perhaps the
key to the novel. Still an unformed adolescent in many ways
when she began Frankenstein, she was already a mother and author
before she had established a fully coherent sense of identity as
either.
Her identification with her mother was at best a conflicting and
troublesome sense of destiny, with which she never fully made her
peace. Her mother's legacy, after all, was one not just of unusual
achievement but also of suffering for having dared too much. Mary
Wollstonecraft was not just famous, she was notorious. She believed
that women had a right to the development of their minds and to
the control of their bodies; to an extent unusual in her times, and
perhaps in ours, she practiced what she preached. We will observe
the author's preoccupation with her mother's sexuality and the
problem it raised for her in Frankenstein.5

4. James Rieger, Mary Shelley's modern editor and critic, has launched a
serious attack on her claim to sole authorship of Frankenstein (Frankenstein,
ed. James Rieger [Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company,
Inc., 1974], p. xviii). He suggests that the evidence of Shelley's notes and correc
tions in the original manuscript might well elevate him to the role of "minor
collaborator."
5. From the vantage point of the post-revolutionary moral reaction that pre
vailed at the turn of the nineteenth century in England, death in childbirth
may well have seemed a punishment that fit the crime of feminine forwardness.
Claire Tomalin ("Aftermath and Debate," The Life and Death of Mary Woll
stonecraft [New York and London: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1974])
offers an interesting examination of the moral tone which surrounded the death
of Mary Shelley's mother which would have directly colored her understanding
of her mother's past. Tomalin states, for example, "Of these women who now
took it upon themselves (after the death of Mary Wollstonecraft) to lay down
standards for their own sex, one after another approached the question of
women's rights, examined its various aspects, and retreated with expressions of
disapproval or contempt; . . . apparently sensible and well-educated women . . .
stressed the need for passivity in girls. . . ."

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168 MARC A. RUBENSTEIN

There is one additional factor to be kept in mind as w

see Mary Shelley's ideas about motherhood in terms of he
Her first child had died shortly after birth, fifteen mont
she began writing Frankenstein. It was a sobering and, fo
very depressing event for her. The entire novel?she ca
hideous progeny"?may be viewed as a guilty restitution of
baby. This child, born prematurely, and dead after two w
apparently erased from conscious memory soon after.
terization of Frankenstein as "the offspring of happy day
death and grief were but words which found no true e
heart," by referring so specifically to the misfortunes occu
after she wrote the novel, makes plain both the denial of
of the baby, which had occurred beforehand, and th
equation of baby and book. For Mary Shelley, author
motherhood were equivalent aspects of the same urge tow
tion and expression of the self. As such, they were the in
and in a way, the victims of what Mary Shelley took
mother's legacy. There was, for her, conflicted fusion of
with forbidden sexual forwardness and masculine preroga
At The Center
At the center of Frankenstein there is a curious distu
the narrative which illuminates some of the novel's un
plexity and digressiveness. The central portion of the
prolonged speech by the monster lasting fully six ch
seems wildly irrelevant. Ostensibly, it is the monster's ju
of his murder of Frankenstein's younger brother, littl
But the author permits the monster an improbable series
sions as he relates how he has passed the months since he
away from Frankenstein's laboratory on the day of his bi
The monster had become hopelessly lost in his fascina
a family he had been spying upon. He begins to tell Fr
the details of their past as though it were as important a
They, in turn, are equally entranced by the past of a
young woman alternately referred to as "Safie," or the "A
Safie's story, in turn, contains the past of still someon
mother?but before the monster relates it to Franken
narrative undergoes the peculiar disruption we have ment
Precisely like the patient in psychoanalysis whose flo
ciations is suddenly disturbed by a self-conscious awarene
listening analyst, the monster dramatically turns to

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 FRANKENSTEIN: SEARCH FOR THE MOTHER 169

Frankenstein who, until that moment, has seemed to merge pas

sively with the reader. Referring to some letters which Safie had
written to her fianc?, the monster says, "I have copies of these
letters. . . . Before I depart I will give them to you; they will prove
the truth of my tale." Since Safie's adventures could not have the
remotest interest for Frankenstein, the monster's seizing upon her
letters to prove the authenticity of his story strikes us as peculiar
and unnecessary.
What is developing beneath the surface is made clear in the very
next paragraph which takes us to the emotional, not to say the
geographic, center of the novel. We read:
Safie related that her mother was a Christian Arab, seized and made a slave
by the Turks; recommended by her beauty, she had won the heart of the father
of Safie, who married her. The young girl spoke in high and enthusiastic terms
of her mother, who, born in freedom spurned the bondage to which she was
now reduced. She instructed her daughter in the tenets of her religion and
taught her to aspire to higher powers of intellect, and an independence of spirit
forbidden to the female followers of Mahomet. This lady died; but her lessons
were indelibly impressed on the mind of Safie. . . .6

This is surely a cartoon, distorted but recognizable, of the

author's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. Safie's mother, though dead,
has "taught her to aspire to higher powers of intellect and inde
pendence of spirit forbidden the female." She is, for all practical
purposes, the author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Women."
Confirmation that Mary Shelley was thinking of her mother is
supplied shortly after.
As the monster completes the story of the family's life in the
cottage, he picks up the thread of his own adventures, but as he
does, there is once again a disturbance in the flow of narration.
For the second time, he addresses himself directly to Frankenstein
and again it introduces the matter of a written document. The
monster has finished describing the impact made on him by
Paradise Lost and how, like an Adam disappointed in his rela
tionship to God, he found in Satan "a fitter emblem of my condi
tion." He again speaks directly to Frankenstein, returning to the
6. All references to the text of Frankenstein are from the First Edition of
1818 (Rieger, 1974). The cited passages are virtually identical with the text of
the Third Edition of 1831, which has been the source of all popular editions
from that time to the present. There is, however, considerable difference over
all between the two editions, and the reader is alerted to the fact that the more
familiar version is the later one.

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 170 MARC A. RUBENSTEIN

issue of his creation and abandonment with which he

his long discourse:

Soon after my arrival in the hovel, I discovered some papers i

of the dress which I had taken from your laboratory. ... I began to
with diligence. It was your journal of the four months that pr
creation. You minutely described in these papers every step you
progress of your work; this history was mingled with accounts
occurrences. You, doubtless, recollect the papers. Here they are. Ev
related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin; be
of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it is set
minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is give
which painted your own horrors and rendered mine indelible. I
read . . .

It is a remarkable reference to the author's life. Mary Shelley is

indirectly betraying a fascination with her own conception, for what
the monster really refers to are the love letters Mary Wollstonecraft
wrote to Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin, during the first
four months of their relationship in 1796.
It must remain a matter of conjecture that Mary read the corre
spondence between her mother and father. We know that these
letters remained among her father's private papers following her
mother's death and did not revert to her until Godwin's death in
1836.7 However, Mary was a tireless and persistent necrophile when

7. See Godwin and Mary, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Lawrence: U. of Kansas Press,
1967). It is possible that Mary Shelley had made copies of these letters as a
young girl (as the monster had done with Safie's letters to her fiance^) which she
took along with her when she eloped with Shelley. One of Shelley's biographers,
Richard Holmes (Shelley, The Pursuit [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1974], p. 237) states unequivocally that this was the case, but the evidence is not
clear. The material Mary took with her, which Holmes has reference to, is
described by Shelley as "her own writings, letters from her father and her
friends, and my letters" (Mary Shelley's Journal, ed. Frederick L. Jones [Norman:
U. of Oklahoma Press, 1947], in the entry dated August 2, 1814). The only
specific reference to her mother's letters is in a letter to Shelley dated October
5, 1817 (The Letters of Mary Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones [Norman: U. of
Oklahoma Press, 1944]); while making reference to her step-sister Jane's child by
Byron, Mary writes, "I never see her without thinking of the expressions in my
Mother's letters concerning Fanny." This could be a reference to her mother's
correspondence with Godwin, but it is more likely an allusion to the letters to
Gilbert Imlay, an earlier lover of Mary Wollstonecraft and the father of Fanny.
These had been published by Godwin when Mary Shelley was still a little girl.
My thesis that Mary had access to her mother's letters to Godwin remains
entirely presumptive at this time?logical and tantalizing, but unproven.

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 FRANKENSTEIN: SEARCH FOR THE MOTHER 171

it came to her mother. Since she spent a good deal of time in her
father's library, it is likely that she searched among his papers for
traces of Mary Wollstonecraft, if indeed Godwin had not simply
shown her the letters. (Walton's interest in exploration is traced
on the novel's second page to "good Uncle Thomas's library"
where he became "passionately fond of reading . . . day and night.")
These letters could not help but stir a young girl's erotic fan
tasies, and they correspond exactly with the monster's indignant
reaction to the discovery of "the journal of the four months which
preceeded my creation." The courtship between Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecraft began in earnest in July 1796, and was soon sexual.
Mary would have read, in a letter from her mother to Godwin on
September 29, 1796: "I shall be with you at five. . . . Mais, a notre
retour, rien que philosophic Mon cher ami. fites-vous bien fache7
Mon bien-aime"?moi aussi, cependant la semaine approchant. Do
you understand me?" [But, when we come back, just philosophical
talk, my dear friend. Are you angry? My beloved. Me too, however
next week . . .]. Even a very young girl would have recognized the
regret over the interruption of a satisfying sexual relationship be
cause of a menstrual period?perhaps one of the "disgusting cir
cumstances" referred to by the monster. This would have placed
the next menstrual period in late October and a probable period
of fertility in mid-November.
An utterly charming note from her mother for November 10,
1796, suggests the "domestic occurrences" of which the monster
spoke:

I send you the household linen?I am not sure that I did not feel a sensa
tion of pleasure at thus acting the part of a wife, though you have so little
respect for the character. There is such a magic in affection that I have been
more gratified by your clasping your hands round my arm, in company, than
I could have been by all the adoration in the world, tho' I am a woman?and
to mount a step higher in the scale of vanity, an author. I shall call toward
one o'clock not to deprive the world of your bright thoughts, this exhilarating
day.

On November 13, 1796, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote to Godwin:

If the felicity of last night has had the same effect on your health as on my
countenance, you have no cause to lament your failure of resolution: for I
have seldom seen so much live fire running about my features as this morning
when recollections?very dear, called forth the blush of pleasure, as I adjusted
my hair.

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172 MARC A. RUBENSTEIN

The modern Prometheus plays with fire and conceives the

Since she was born nine months later, Mary may have beli
she had come upon the scene of her own beginnings. It is p
her reading of this letter which intrudes upon the narr
perceived at the novel's center.
Many years after Frankenstein was published, Mary Sh
that she had begun writing the novel with the scene of the
reanimation which had appeared to her overnight in a
dream": "On the morrow [she wrote in the 1831 prefa
third edition of Frankenstein] I announced that I had th
a story [her italics]. I began that day with the words, It
dreary night of November, making only a transcript of
terrors of my waking dream." Here she refers to the begi
Chapter Four (in the original First Edition, Chapter Fi
more familiar Third Edition) and the memorable descr
the monster being brought to life in Frankenstein's labora
is a scene separated by many chapters from the monster's
tion of Safie's mother, the Turkish concubine who sounds
like Mary Wollstonecraft, and from his confrontation w
kenstein over the journal of his creation; but its meaning
Shelley becomes obvious. The "dreary day of Novembe
allude, in fact, to the moment of her own conception.

The Surrounding Fantasies

The novel's unusual narrative structure is well-known
sufficiently appreciated. It is a series of concentric rings
tion, each enclosing the next. Three of these rings, or
frames, are easily recognized as the voices of the novel's th
tors: Walton, whose account of his encounter with Fra
near the North Pole opens and closes the novel; Frankenste
tells his tale to Walton; and the monster, whose story
Frankenstein's.
In fact, a good many more such "frames" can be disce
is immediately apparent before the novel proper begins
script to the first page indicates that we are reading a
Mrs. Saville, England." The entire story is contained within
and journals Walton sends to his sister. Mrs. Saville never
upon the story. Just as Mary Shelley described hersel
Frankenstein by "making only a transcript" of a dream, M
evidently is making "only a transcript" of her brother's do

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 FRANKENSTEIN: SEARCH FOR THE MOTHER 173

Her presence is implied. She is a "devout but nearly silent listener"

(as Mary Shelley described herself, listening to Byron and Shelley
on the night before her famous dream), the passive but enveloping
and transmuting persona of the author herself creating the novel's
outermost narrative circle. The monster's narrative, with its divaga
tions into the lives of the DeLaceys (the family he had observed),
and of Safie and her mother, contains still more circles of narration,
forming the "geographic" center of the novel.
Remote as they seem from the "center," where the monster tells
his story, the peripheral structures correspond closely with it. The
entire novel is itself a collection of letters and journal entries, in
precise analogy with the monster's excited preoccupation with
Safie's love letters and the journal of his creation. The very sense
of Mrs. Saville reading her brother's letters corresponds closely
with the monster's spying, through a chink in the wall, on the
DeLacey family.8
The novel is marked by its frequent shifts in narrative focus, yet
each movement to a new narrator curiously repeats and re-estab
lishes what had gone before. Each narrator undergoes a character
istic oscillation between activity and passivity. The participant in
one tale becomes the observer?or listener or recorder?of the
next. It is, apparently, an endlessly repeated enactment of primal
scene observation, transliterated into the very structure of the
novel. The act of observation, passive in one sense, becomes
covertly and symbolically active in another: the observed scene be
comes an enclosing, even womb-like, container in which a story is,
variously, developed, preserved, and passed on. Story-telling be
comes a vicarious pregnancy.
These narrative frames recede toward an implied central point.

8. Notice also a certain complementarity between the highly sublimated affec

tion which seems to exist between Walton and his sister and the benevolent
tenderness which is described within the DeLacey family. We should note, if
only in passing, the importance of brother-sister relationships within the novel.
There is a curious approximation of this in the poem Shelley was working on
at the same time Mary was writing Frankenstein. Ultimately published as The
Revolt of Islam and somewhat cleansed of its explicit incestuous theme (in the
initial version, Laon and Cyntha) the piece dealt with the passionate love of a
brother and sister who eventually share immolation, burnt at the stake for their
revolutionary activities. (The monster, of course, seeks a death through immola
tion at the novel's end.) For an expanded discussion of this incest theme in
Frankenstein see Jean de Palacio, Mary Shelley dans son Oeuvre (Paris: Edi
tions Klincksieck, 1969), pp. 125-137.

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174 MARC A. RUBENSTEIN

It is there, of course, we discover the author's mother

forever at the "pole." This structure of concentric narra
implies the circumpolar geography which Walton is ex
the novel's beginning and end. While it is unlikely t
Shelley explicitly meant to emulate a map of the world,
the pole, in the design of her novel, it is possible that
lying preoccupation with the themes of exploration and
for knowledge impressed itself on the novel's structure
way as primal scene observation, which could itself be
a form of exploration.

The Search for the Mother in the Hyperborean Myth

To know that Mary Shelley's mother died giving bir
and that she herself lost her first child two weeks after i
is to know much about the origins of Frankenstein. O
intuitively the source of the great movement of ye
searching with respect to lost motherhood which pervades
even without any additional information about the e
life of the author which would more reliably sustain an
that she is "looking" for these "lost objects." This sear
mother is already apparent in the first passages of the
in the form of a "hyperborean" fantasy which resonates t
the novel. On the first page, Walton writes to his sis
intended voyage:

As I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern

upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves, and fills me with del
understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from
towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy
spirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more ferve
I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost an
it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty
There, Margaret, the sun is forever visible, its broad disk just
horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendor. There?for with yo
sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators?there snow
banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a lan
in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on t
globe. . . . What may not be expected in a country of eternal light?
discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle. ... I shal
ardent curiosity.

The final image has a phallic cast but it is not so much

that is sought in the sexual sense, but the maternal

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 FRANKENSTEIN: SEARCH FOR THE MOTHER 175

Walton seeks the fantasied mother locked within the ice. It is a

hyperborean fantasy of the maternal paradise beyond the frozen
north, and, at the same time, a special vision in which the cold
ness of death has been transmuted into a land of ice that is not
cold. The search for the Pole coincides then with a search for the
lost mother. Walton's conviction that the Pole is a land of "eternal
light" where "snow and frost are banished" is a momentary lapse
into wishful thinking, but one which exerts a powerful tug on the
imagination. As Walton points out, his belief is supported, beyond
all probability, by the reports of contemporary explorers who had
reason to believe an open water passage to the Pole might be
found.9 From that level of speculation to the imaginative convic
tion that the Pole itself was the seat of a warm land was not far.
Within several years, John Cleves Symmes was to form his "Hollow
Earth" movement in the United States, and Edgar Allan Poe would
write Arthur Gordon Pym and Ms. Found in a Bottle, both con
ceiving of a tropical Antarctica. The hyperborean myth in the
opening paragraphs of Frankenstein hinges on such a fantasy, a
"sun . . . forever visible." We sense the striving after the paradisia
cal illusion of endless maternal warmth and bounty.
Walton, temperate, reasonable and modern, never reaches the
Pole. It is Frankenstein and the monster who will find their
apotheosis there, the monster in particular realizing Walton's vision
of the "warm" Pole by immolating himself there. Monster and
maker are finally reunited. The two merge into the ice-mother at
the Pole. As we have noticed, the novel itself has its "Pole" at the
center of its narrative structure, again embodied in a setting of
maternal warmth, the Turkish harem where Safie's mother lan
guished. Each of these narratives literally takes place "on ice"?
Walton and Frankenstein in the warm ship's cabin locked in an

9. See, for example, the Edinburgh Review, June 1818, where a review of a
number of recent books relating to the North Pole and the northern waters
begins with the thought: "For these two or three years past, the captains of
ships employed in the Northern Whale Fishery have generally concurred in
representing the Arctic Sea as of a sudden become almost open and accessible
to the adventurous navigator. By the more speculative relators, it has been
supposed that the vast icy barrier which, during many ages, had obstructed
those forlorn regions, is at last, from some revolution of our globe, broken up
and dispersed. The project of finding a north-west passage to Asia?a project
so often attempted, and so long abandoned?has in consequence been again
revived; and the more daring scheme of penetrating to the Pole itself, has
likewise been seriously proposed."

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176 MARC A. RUBENSTEIN

Arctic ice-floe, and the monster in his warm cabin high o

glacier?impressing us more with the persistence and un
author's thought, and its secret reference to the maternal
There is an implied pun, well hidden within the sto
makes this point with marvelous succinctness. Althoug
named in the novel, the glacier where the monster has be
to tell Frankenstein his story is unmistakably La Mer

The Creation of the Monster

From the perspective of its narrative organization, this

of the novel has one particularly unexpected result. Its m
scene (and almost a myth in its own terms), the anim
Frankenstein's composite corpse, is reduced to a relativ
position. It becomes part of the periphery that surrounds
tral scene of the mother and retells in a particularly poin
a fantasy of procreation and of primal scene observat
may be something useful in this downgrading, since
some distance to be taken from a scene that is so fam
mythic position in our culture has all but cut it off from
text of the novel. This famous episode, in all its fascin
perhaps served more as a defense against meaning tha
pression of meaning itself. The image of the reanimate
is so arresting, particularly when rendered visually, that
to obscure the very sources of its fascination.
Perhaps there is a warning in this not to take the s
literally. Mary Shelley clearly suggested, after all, that th
"perhaps a corpse would be reanimated . . . perhap
ponent parts of a creature might be manufactured," was
in her by the discussion she overheard between Byron and

10. The glacier is well-known and is clearly located in the nov

references to Chamonix, Mont Blanc, and the river Arve, of wh
source. Mary Shelley visited La Mer de Glace a month after
Frankenstein and took special note of it in her journal referring
most desolate place in the world." "Mother of ice" and "sea of ic
course, homonymous in French?"La Mere de Glace." Rieger has
equation of ice and intellect (The Mutiny Within [New York: Geor
1967], p. 85) and turns our attention toward that embodiment of
Mary's father William Godwin. Since Mary had no mother duri
three years, one wonders how much Godwin was the original "ice-m
her. We would be remiss not to direct attention to the role of Mary
her emotional and intellectual development.
11. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Introduction to the 3rd Ed. (18
in Rieger (1974), but also published with all popular versions of th

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 FRANKENSTEIN: SEARCH FOR THE MOTHER 177

There is no problem in establishing the rightful place of this idea

in Mary Shelley's imaginative life (though this would require a
separate study), but her disingenuousness on this score is a fasci
nating issue in itself. If the opening pages of Chapter Four (Chap
ter Five in the Third Edition [1831]) are approached from the
point of view of her disclaimer of originality it can be discerned
that the entire episode of the monster's animation is as much a
"manufacture of component parts" as the monster himself.
The stage is set in Chapter Three (Chapter Four in the Third
Edition). Frankenstein has already spun out the series of mother
less family romances which form the substance of his past. As a
premonition of the punishment which will follow his forbidden,
Promethean quest for knowledge, his mother dies as he is about to
leave for the university. Following completion of his formal studies,
he attempts to discover no less than "whence . . . did the principle
of life proceed?" He soon reduces the problem to the issue which
lies at the heart of all mysteries: "To examine the causes of life,
we must first have recourse to death." He is thus forced?like the
adolescent author, passing her afternoons at her mother's grave?
"to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel houses." He is
successful and he remarks on the uniqueness of his destiny, "I was
surprised . . . that I alone should be reserved to discover so aston
ishing a secret."
At this point there occurs another of those perturbations of the
narrative which signal a special preoccupation of the author. A
cryptic allusion is made to "the Arabian who had been buried with
the dead and found a passage to life, aided only by one glimmering
and seemingly ineffectual light"; and then Frankenstein, who until
that moment seemed to have forgotten the listening Walton as he
addressed himself directly to the reader, turns to Walton to say,
"I see by your eagerness and the wonder and hope which your eyes
express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret
with which I am acquainted: that cannot be. . . ." "The Arabian"
in this passage alludes to the fifth voyage of Sinbad, in the Arabian
Nights, where Sinbad, buried by virtue of an unfortunate local cus
tom with his dead wife, became?like Frankenstein?a ghoul before
he eventually found his way out of the funeral vault. We recognize
in this allusion, and in the narrative disturbance which follows it,
an anticipation of the later scene in which Safie, another "Arabian,"
appears. It is Safie, we have suggested, who seems to point to the
"mother" at the structural center of the novel.
Indeed, motherhood has been introduced; the "secret" is the

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178 MARC A. RUBENSTEIN

manufacture of a baby. "I began the creation of a h

... As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hind
speed, I resolved ... to make the being of gigantic
I pursued nature to her hiding places." The pursu
place which bears a remarkable resemblance to a wo
ductive anatomy: "In a solitary chamber, or rather
top of the house, and separated from all the other apa
a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy c
enfolding, circular narratives of the novel have found
precise, and literal rendering in the architecture of Fr
laboratory. It is, as is the entire novel, a womb.
Frankenstein is well aware of the fascination of his s
is "the most interesting part of my tale," and that he i
reveal it. He will, of course, go on to describe the mon
at the beginning of the next chapter, but he reserv
the secret of how he did it. This, "a sight to dream of
Mary Shelley took great pains to disclaim any role
imagination in what follows. In 1831, describing the b
written as a "young girl," in 1816, she was establish
as author. But, she is ambiguous even in this: "At fi
but of a few pages, of a short tale, but Shelley ur
velop the idea at greater length. I certainly did not
gestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of fe
husband, and yet but for his incitement it would neve
the form in which it was presented to the worl
declaration, I must except the preface. As far as I c
it was entirely written by him."
What did she refer to when she spoke of incitem
already given several examples, perhaps unintended
Introduction. "I am very averse to bringing mysel
print," she wrote, ". . . My husband, however, was fro
very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of
and enroll myself on the page of fame. He was forever
to obtain literary reputation." She went on to describe
in which Frankenstein was conceived?the rainy
Shelley, and Byron passed in June of 1816, near Ge
casional movie version of Frankenstein which has incor
account into the story proper has, I suspect, correctly
its significance; it functions, in effect, as still anot
fantasy narrative surrounding and enclosing the entir
she wrote is almost as well-known as the novel (indeed

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 FRANKENSTEIN: SEARCH FOR THE MOTHER 179

regularly printed with it since 1831). Because of the bad weather,

the vacationers read a French edition of some ghost stories. Byron
said, "We will each write a ghost story," and she found herself
unaccountably inhibited.
She dwells at some length on her "blank incapability of inven
tion." " 'Have you thought of a story/ I was asked each morning,
and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying nega
tive." Her mortification is of course relative, as she well knew in
1831, for of this group of famous people she alone created an
enduring story. There may have been some passing wish to scant
the achievement of John William Polidori, who had been present
at the time as Byron's physician. Polidori later took Byron's
fragment, written on that occasion, and enlarged it into a book,
The Vampire, which, for the short time it was believed to have
been written by Byron, had a success rivaling that of Frankenstein.
Like her claim that she would not put herself forward without
being pushed, her protestation of incapability may mask a certain
spirit of rivalry. Her assertion that she was asked "each morning"
if she had thought of a story is puzzling, however. It appears to
relate to the eventual discovery of her story in a dream, but it is
surprising that she would have us believe that Byron and Shelley,
serious and professional writers, would have confused the waking
task of writing with the involuntary activity of the imagination
that takes place overnight.
There is another possibility. Mary Shelley unquestionably
equated "thinking of a story1' (she italicized the expression through
out the Introduction) with producing a baby?she referred to it as
"my hideous progeny . . . the offspring of happy days"?so that
we are justified in imagining that the spirit of inhibition she at
taches to the writing of her story derives from the sexual sphere.
If the sense of the question she was asked were "Have you con
ceived?", we would better understand its relationship to nighttime
activities. This impression is supported by her description of how
the inhibition was overcome.
She turned first to a theory of creativity: "Invention, it must
be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but
out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it
can give form to dark, shapeless substances but cannot bring into
being the substance itself." Then, in the spirit of true psycho
analytic free-association, she said, with respect to the working of
her imagination, "we are continually reminded of . . . Columbus

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 180 MARC A. RUBENSTEIN

and his egg. Invention consists in . . . fashioning id

to it." Her thought touches briefly on a fertile m
returns to the conviction that, for her, the imagin
create with what has been put in it. It is a passive
which derives from Erasmus Darwin's theory of the
in procreation.
"Many and long were the conversations between Lord Bryon
and Shelley to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener.
During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were dis
cussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life. . . .
They talked of Dr. Darwin . . . who preserved a piece of vermicelli
in a glass case till by some extraordinary means it began to move
with voluntary motion. . . . Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated
. . . perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manu
factured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth." She is
describing the overheard conversation to which she attributes the
dream of that evening in which the Frankenstein story appeared
to her. At the same time she was weaving among these thoughts
Darwin's theory of sexual reproduction, in which the woman is
essentially passive, providing a womb to nourish the embryon
actively implanted by the man. For Darwin, as described in his
Zoonomia, the woman's influence over the formation of the con
ceptus in her womb was at best a distant reflection of her emotional
and imaginative life; it was through the imagination of the
male, particularly what was on his mind at the moment of ejacula
tion, that the characteristics of the fetus were determined.12

12. For example, Erasmus Darwin wrote (Zoonomia, Dublin, 1794), "I would
conclude, that though the imagination of the female may be supposed to affect
the embryon ... it does not appear how any sudden effect of imagination of
the mother at the time of impregnation can produce any considerable change
in the nutriment already laid up for the desired or expected embryon (i, 565).
... I conclude, that the imagination of the male at the time of copulation, or
at the time of the secretion of the semen, may so affect this secretion ... as to
cause the production of similarity of form and of features, with the distinction
of sex; as the motions of the chisel of the turner imitate or correspond with
those of the ideas of the artist (i, 569). . . . the real power of imagination, in
the act of generation, belongs solely to the male" (i, 570). With respect to
monsters, Darwin also thought that "monstrous births . . . which appear to be
new conformations . . . may depend on the imagination of the male parent . . .
(i, 566)." Mary would have also been familiar with the argument advanced in
The Eumenides of Aeschylus concerning masculine primacy in procreation.
There, tellingly, Apollo attempts to exonerate Orestes of the crime of matricide
by demonstrating that there is no blood-tie between mother and child:

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 FRANKENSTEIN: SEARCH FOR THE MOTHER 181

She is trying to draw for us a picture of her imagination as a

passive womb, inseminated by those titans of romantic poetry,
Byron and Shelley: "Night waned . . . the witching hour had gone
by ... I did not sleep; nor could I be said to think. . . . My imagi
nation, unbidden, possessed and guided me." She attempts to dis
claim responsibility for the fantasy of conception and birth which
she then had; her insistence on the passivity of her imagination
is incessant, reflecting great conflict over taking too active a role
in the creative process, whether writing or making a baby. Her
famous "waking-dream" in fact portrays a man who does the job,
single handed:

. . . images [she wrote in the 1831 Introduction] . . . arose in my mind with

a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw?with shut eyes, but
acute mental vision?I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling
beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man
stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of
life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. . . .13

She means to imply, in one ambiguous statement, that it was her

idea and that it was not: if this scene is the product of her
imagination, she can be accused of no more than stitching together
the ideas suggested to her by Byron and Shelley. She had over
come her inhibition:

I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only de
scribe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow. On the morrow I
announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words It
was on a dreary night of November, making only a transcript of the grim
terrors of my waking dream. [Her italics]

The moment she describes is the opening of Chapter Four. The

The mother is no parent of that which is called

Her child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed
That grows. The parent is he who mounts. A stranger she
Preserves a stranger's seed. . . .
Aeschylus, The Eumenides, Oresteia, trans. Richard Lattimore
(Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1953), 11. 558-661.
13. Christopher Small has expanded in great detail the ways in which Mary
submerged herself in Shelley as she fashioned her novel (Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein: Tracing the Myth [Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1972],
Ch. 5). Clearly, "the pale student of the unhallowed arts" suggests Shelley. As
Small so aptly puts it, "If he is not Shelley he is a dream of Shelley" (p. 102).

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 182 MARC A. RUBENSTEIN

author's "dream" is narrated from within by one of

pants, Victor Frankenstein:

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomp

my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I coll
struments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being
less thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morn
pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly
when ... I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breath
a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

The ideas of reanimation had a legitimate and un

in her own fantasy life, but it may be characteristic o
she would prefer to hide her own originality within
else's imagination. The vivid, and virtually explicit, se
the scene might well inspire this form of defensive dist
is as though she wishes to proclaim: "It is my dream,
for one thing, only an observer and transcriber of i
another, the imagery is only borrowed."
The same formula is followed in the second par
Chapter Five, where the monster is first described an
stein begins to recognize, a bit belatedly, the horror
has done:

His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath;
his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness;
but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes,
that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they
were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

This description seems borrowed from a passage written by Shelley

to announce Mary's first pregnancy in the journal he and Mary
had been keeping since their elopement two years before. On
October 7, 1814, Mary had gone to bed early while Shelley stayed
up talking with her stepsister, Jane. Shelley, a connoisseur of
ghostly happenings, steered the conversation toward the super
natural in the early hours of the morning and the impressionable
Jane compliantly responded with an hysterical seizure:

. . . her countenance was distorted by horrible dismay?it beamed with a

whiteness that seemed almost like light; her lips and cheeks were one deadly
hue; the skin of her face and forehead was drawn into innumerable wrinkles?
the lineaments of terror that could not be contained; her hair came prominent
and erect; her eyes were wide and staring; drawn almost from the sockets by

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 FRANKENSTEIN: SEARCH FOR THE MOTHER 183

the convulsion of the muscles; the eyelids were forced in, and the eyeballs,
without any relief, seemed as if they had been newly inserted, in ghastly sport,
in the sockets of a lifeless head. ... I informed her of Mary's pregnancy.

Shelley's hope that this announcement would calm Jane down

was vain; her "horrors" began again.

Our candles burned low; we feared they would not last until daylight. Just
as the dawn was struggling with moonlight, Jane remarked in me that unutter
able expression which had affected her with so much horror before; she de
scribed it as expressing a mixture of deep sadness and conscious power over her.
I covered my face with my hands and spoke to her in the most studied gentle
ness. It was ineffectual; her horror and agony increased even to the most
dreadful convulsions. She shrieked and writhed on the floor. I ran to Mary. . . .
(Journal, October 7, 1814)

The parallel is unmistakable. One doesn't know whether to be

more impressed by the complexities of Shelley's relationship with
Jane or with the mastery of the prose with which he rendered
this piece of midnight stagecraft, but it is a matter of Mary
silently taking something in (as her own laconic journal entry of
the next day suggests, Journal, October 8, 1814) and making use
of it when the occasion arose. Shelley made of Jane's face a kind
of composite corpse, "eyeballs . . . newly inserted ... in the sockets
of a lifeless head," to which the monster's "watery eyes . . . the
same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set" may
readily be compared. Similarly, Jane's "dreadful convulsions," so
clearly a hysterical sexual response to the announcement of Mary's
pregnancy, may be considered one of the progenitors of the mon
ster's "convulsive motion" as it came to life. (Jane, who was with
the vacationers, was at a comparable point in a pregnancy of her
own when Mary began writing Frankenstein. One wonders how
much that contributed to the apparent return in Mary's thoughts
to the passage in her journal Shelley had written.)
With the third paragraph, Mary Shelley turned once more to the
imagination of still another man to express her thought. For the
first time Frankenstein recognizes the sheer horror of what he has
done; the moral repugnance of his act is embodied for him in the
grotesque ugliness of the being he has created. He chooses to
escape the whole matter by falling asleep:

... I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing
life into an inanimate body. . . . [B]ut now that I had finished, the beauty of

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 184 MARC A. RUBENSTEIN

the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my hea
to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of th
continued a long time traversing my bed-chamber, unable to co
mind to sleep.

The 1831 Introduction makes clear that we are to view this de

velopment as part of the continuing "waking dream" and at the
same time spells out the thought behind the wish to sleep: "His
success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious
handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself,
the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade,
that this thing . . . would subside into dead matter, and he might
sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench
forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had
looked upon as the cradle of life." Frankenstein, filicide in his
heart, finally falls asleep and dreams. In his dream he encounters
his fiancee:

Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss
on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared
to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my
arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in
the folds of the flannel.

It is a troubling dream, more dream-like certainly than the

"waking dream" in which it resides (and seems to parody, since
both deal with quasi-acts of love which lead to a breach in the
boundary between life and death). The comments from the 1831
Introduction make virtually explicit its expression of Faustian
guilt and retribution. Its significance to Mary, as a nightmare of
sexual guilt, is suggested by an event which she does not mention
in the 1831 account. Within a day or two of her first efforts at
writing Frankenstein, she was present when Byron recited Cole
ridge's Christabel. John William Polidori, Byron's travelling com
panion and physician recorded the event in his diary on June 18,
1816:

. . . Twelve o'clock really began to talk ghostly. Byron repeated some verses
of Coleridge's Christabel, of the witch's breast; when silence ensued, and
Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the
room with a candle. Threw water in his face and after gave him ether. He
was looking at Mrs. Shelley, and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of
who had eyes instead of nipples, which taking hold of his mind, horrified him.i*

14. The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori, ed. W. M. Rossetti (London:
Elkin Matthews, 1911).

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 FRANKENSTEIN: SEARCH FOR THE MOTHER 185

Shelley's frightened and guilty behavior may have provided, at

least superficially, the model for Frankenstein's agitation after the
monster had been brought to life and abandoned. Further,
Shelley's outburst, in the context of the midnight "ghostly talk,"
would have inevitably reminded Mary of Jane's flamboyant mid
night hysteria two years before, when Shelley had "ghosted" her
by way of announcing Mary's pregnancy.
Shelley's "horrors" were apparently precipitated, in this ghostly
ambience, by Byron's recitation of Christabel. It is Coleridge to
whom Mary turned as she constructed Frankenstein's nightmare.
The lines of the "witch's breast" which Byron recited (probably
from memory) were:

Behold I her bosom and half her side,

Hideous, deformed, and pale of hue?
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
And she is to sleep by Christabel! 15

The scene suggested in Coleridge's lines involves Christabel, "the

lovely lady . . . whom her father loved so well" who, like Mary,
has lost her mother at birth, and Geraldine, an equally beautiful
but mysterious woman who has appeared like an apparition out
side the castle that evening. The dream-like and transitory vision
of Geraldine's hideously deformed breast may suggest, in Cole
15. This is how the passage read at the time Mary heard Byron recite. In the
ultimate published version Coleridge dropped the line, "Hideous, deformed,
and pale of hue," and altered the last line to read, "O shield her, shield her,
sweet Christabel!" In this way there is only the dreamlike hint, rather than
the explicit vision, of Geraldine's witch character. Two-hundred lines further,
the postponed description finally appears, "Again she saw that bosom old,
again she saw that bosom cold," strengthening the suggestion of something that
has been dreamt but not told. Byron had seen the earlier manuscript the pre
ceding autumn. Whether he had it, or a copy, with him at Villa Diodati, or
simply recited it from memory is not clearly established. For the details of the
manuscript familiar to Byron, see The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), i, 213
214 and 224. The possible derivation of Frankenstein's nightmare in the Gothic
themes and stories of Mary's time has been considered by Palacio, p. 105.
Palacio seems dissatisfied, however, with his review of the sources and the
significance of this dream: "L'utilit6 dans le roman n'apparait pas imm6diate
ment; la raison m?me en est peu claire, si Ton se refuse a toute interpretation
psychoanalytique." A surprising outburst of indebtedness to Coleridge appears
on the page after Frankenstein's nightmare, where Mary Shelley chose to use a
verse from the Ancient Mariner and then give attribution for it in one of the
novel's rare footnotes. One wonders how much this scholarly zeal reflects the un
attributed influence of Coleridge on the preceding page.

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 186 MARC A. RUBENSTEIN

ridge's uncompleted poem, that she is some manner of

haps connected with the ghost of Christabel's m
shrouded figure hovers about. The mother had anno
death bed that she would return when her daughter
indeed Christabel is engaged. There is an implic
ghostly, homosexual initiation is to take place, as G
represented simultaneously as a defiant, possessive
hour is mine!", and as a gently protective materna
"Still and mild, as a mother with her child."
Shelley's hallucination of the "eyes instead of nipp
quality of maternal reproach, suggests the conflicte
which he was capable at the time of pregnancy and
as Mary was only too painfully aware. In transmutin
lines into Frankenstein's nightmare Mary captured
of her own conflict. The dead mother, hideous and gho
at the moment of symbolic inauguration of creativ
life to take the lost child in her arms and to return
the grave. The mother's return, the fulfillment at a
of an old wish, is precipitated by the child's daring
motherhood and becomes instead a punishment for
rivalry.
When Mary had Frankenstein flee into sleep, in the hope that
the monster "would subside into dead matter," she provided him
with a nightmare directly modeled on Byron's reading of Cole
ridge's lines ". . . livid with the hue of death; her features ap
peared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my
dead mother in my arms. ..."
The scene described by Polidori is one which Mary evidently
regarded with intent but passive interest. She took it in and then,
several days later, allowed it to reappear as she wrote. It became
still another sexual fantasy of procreation to which she relates as
a hidden or silent observer.
"Mrs. Shelley looking philosophically upon this interesting scene"
is virtually paradigmatic as a characterization of Mary Shelley with
respect to the crucial moments of her adolescent emotional life
and, particularly, to her stance as author vis-a-vis the most intense
scenes in Frankenstein.1*

16. Cited by Holmes (Shelley, p. 708), and written by Edward Williams when
he described Shelley's bloody return from the scrape between the "Byron
brigade" and an Italian militiaman in Pisa in 1822. It is to be found in Maria
Gisborne and Edward E. Williams: Their Journal and Letters, ed. F. L. Jones
(Norman: U. of Oklahoma Press, 1951), p. 137.

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 FRANKENSTEIN: SEARCH FOR THE MOTHER 187

The Search for the Mother and the Primal Scene

It is a special form of irony that the feminist's daughter would

write a parable of motherhood entirely in terms of men. The
novel's heritage of masculine creation?in The Book of Genesis,
in Paradise Lost, and, of course, in The Myth of Prometheus?is
plain enough, but the exclusion of women from Frankenstein seems
a direct rebuke of Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein is a male God
breathing life into his inert Adam, bringing him singlehanded
into a world where women are an afterthought.
Yet, for all the disclaimers, Frankenstein is a woman's book.
Mary Shelley is the animator and progenitor of her story; if it is
a retelling of Prometheus, it does so by recasting the legend in
terms of conception, pregnancy, and birth. The monster, as aban
doned baby, is the voice of a mother's conscience (perhaps herald
ing the guilty conflict of modern women between child-rearing and
professional ambitions). The mother and the problems of mother
hood are never far from hand in the novel, even if they are highly
disguised or seem to recede into the very design of the story.
Like any adolescent girl attempting to consolidate her identity
as a fecund and sexual woman, Mary was "searching" for the
mother of her origins?a process of unconscious return to the
mother through resurrection of early fantasy and memory about
her. Despite a certain precocious air of gravity and maturity,
Mary Shelley was still very much an adolescent when she wrote
Frankenstein. The tumultuous events of two years before?an elope
ment and two illegitimate pregnancies?were hardly behind her,
though it is likely that the memory of them was undergoing active
repression and revision. By the Spring of 1816, her life had a
temporary quality of relative stability and calm; her second child,
William, had survived childbirth in January and the pleasure of
caring for him, despite a period of intense depression, contributed
to her general sense of well-being as she began the composition of
Frankenstein. William helped efface from conscious thought the
memory of the death the year before of the unnamed newborn baby
girl. She was in a position of sufficient strength and tranquility
to complete the mourning of her baby's death and complete some
of the postponed psychic work of adolescent development. In par
ticular, she was coming to terms with her conflicted identification
with the fantasy of her dead mother.
The importance to her of this mother she could know only in
fantasy is suggested by the problematic nature of the mothering

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188 MARC A. RUBENSTEIN

she actually received in her first years. Mary Wollston

giving birth to her, and her father married Mary Jan
when she was three.17 The general significance of
fantasies and of the myth of her origins can readily b
terms of the probable narcissistic injury her father's
and the subsequent birth of her half-brother William,
for her: her earliest sexual curiosity may have been
time of sharply heightened jealous rivalry and narcissi
ability. In her later years her status as the only daugh
and Mary Wollstonecraft was unquestionably part o
heritage. The spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft was pro
Mary's earliest awareness of the world. Her father sp
years of her life collecting and publishing her mot
family friends had known Mary Wollstonecraft and mu
commented on her; even perfect strangers were a
curiosity about the fate of the great feminist's daught
Her first ideas about Mary Wollstonecraft were proba
idealized, colored by a certain spirit of sainthood an
which existed in the Godwin house because of her m
and untimely death. Author, social reformer, philosoph
wife, mother, and, ultimately, heavenly body?the
been the stuff of the earliest impressions. Years later,
had met the daughter, he referred to the memory o
as "a setting planet mild," probably capturing the
dened tone of idealization with which Mary grew
about her mother. However much of a fantasy this
mother might have been, it served as a form of narcissi
ment, a bastion against the insults and envies of Oedip
ment on the one side, and an invulnerable anchor
for the entitlement she felt to a unique and noble d
own. She wished to identify herself with this myt
Mary Wollstonecraft as perfect mother, faultless autho
ture of destiny. Something of this wish, and of the h
17. Her situation is mindful of that described by Anna Freud
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child [New York: International U. P
266) with respect to certain orphaned children who are "depriv
ship to a stable mother figure in their first years. This lack o
tion . . . constitutes a real danger to the whole inner coherenc
ality during adolescence. In these cases, adolescence is preceded f
frantic search for a mother image; the internal possession and c
an image seems to be essential for the ensuing normal proces
libido from it for transfer to new objects, i.e., to sexual partne

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 FRANKENSTEIN: SEARCH FOR THE MOTHER 189

alence which interfered with it, is to be seen in the romantically

idealized rendering of Frankenstein's mother.
From this perspective, Frankenstein is a novel of high ambition.
Victor Frankenstein's sense of his own specialness and chosen pur
pose?"I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a
secret. . . . Some miracle might have produced it . . ."?was the
expression of Mary Shelley's own conviction of unique destiny and
creative potency as mother and as author. The writing of Franken
stein, which she carried on with quiet and persistent industry for
the ten months from June 1816 to May 1817, was an act of firm
purpose and intense ambition. Although we might marvel that she
was able to do this while caring for an infant, while shepherding
Shelley, and herself, past the stark guilt of his wife's suicide, while
absorbing the suicide of her half-sister Fanny (the other daughter of
Mary Wollstonecraft, whose sense of destiny obviously was much
different) and the illegitimate pregnancy of her step-sister Jane?
to touch on just a few of the features of a crowded year?we must
recognize in this essentially unwavering productivity (generally
representative of her approach to novel writing in later years)
its deeply entrenched meaning and purposiveness for her. The
image she later tried to create of the "Darwinian" woman, passively
responding to the governing activity of the male imagination, can
not be sustained in the face of the prolonged and lonely labor that
her writing so obviously was. Despite disclaimers, despite a certain
tendency to present herself as cat's-paw to Shelley's genius, the
evidence of her firmness of purpose is inescapable. She felt destined
to become an author, and Frankenstein was the instrument by
which she accomplished that destiny.
However, Mary Shelley was not simply a writer whose ambition
rested on hidden bedrock of narcissistic self-confidence. The ex
clusively masculine facade of Frankenstein and the horror and the
retribution attached to the procreative act in the novel make plain
the conflicted dimensions of her identification with her mother,
and with being a mother and an author.
The image of Mary Wollstonecraft at the novel's center is ex
pressive of the conflict: the mother, while superficially revered, is
represented as defeated. She is depicted as a harem slave and, like
all mothers in the novel, she is dead. Her daughter, on the other
hand, is subtly androgynous: independent, determined, and lib
erated. The concentric circles of narration which help us to locate
this image of the mother and comprehend her significance also

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190 MARC A. RUBENSTEIN

serve to isolate and entomb her. The mother is both d

and feared.
For her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft was not si
idealized figure. As she grew older, it became clear that he
solidly nineteenth-century English middle-class, were at o
her mother's, though even in the semi-privacy of her jo
was not entirely direct in her opposition to Mary Wollstone

... on some topics (especially with regards to my own sex), I am

making up my mind. I believe we are sent here to educate ourselve
self-denial, and disappointment, and self-control, are a part of our
that it is not by taking away all restraining law that our improveme
achieved. ... If I have never written to vindicate the rights of wom
ever befriended women when oppressed . . . those who love me her
that I am not all to blame, nor merit the heavy accusations cast on m
putting myself forward. / cannot do that; it is against my nature. A
me from a precipice and rail at me for not flying. (Journal, October

The rejection of her mother and the insistence on her

bition with respect to forwardness is unambiguous. Ho
had come from the elopement with Shelley, who loved her
for what he had seen in her of her mother. One hears in
ment the same note of disclaimed responsibility that pe
1831 Introduction. Forwardness?sexual, social, and cre
precisely the issue, and it had come to be equated with f
rejected aspects of her mother, at least as she understood he
fantasy that was largely unconscious.
The love letters between Mary Wollstonecraft and her
dealing so explicitly with her mother's sexual life, may
another aspect of her conflict with her mother's forward
letters would have been, of course, the measure of her fat
loyalty to her and, as such, would reflect Oedipal disappoi
and defeat. They would also establish the mother as r
foundly disruptive of efforts to identify with her, and w
vivid reminder that her mother's sexuality had led to t
The idealized fantasy of the mother has, as its darker u
a ghostly rival with unlimited retributive powers to be
upon those who would dare the same measure of sexua
creative forwardness.
We have already taken note of the appearance of this
Frankenstein's nightmare. When he had completed his
successfully brought the monster into the world, Franken

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 FRANKENSTEIN: SEARCH FOR THE MOTHER 191

tempted to sleep. He was not only disappointed and repelled, he

was depleted. His "post-partum depression" (actually very graphi
cally described as a recognizable clinical condition on the following
pages) is the first step toward his eventual death, from exhaustion
and exposure, near the North Pole. In the larger terms of the novel's
hyperborean metaphor of heat and cold, the creative act has
drained him of his own vital warmth. He seeks renewal, dreaming
of reunion with his mother to replenish his own depleted maternal
resources. Fear of punishment for having trespassed, apparently
upon the maternal prerogative of procreation, and the literal fact
of his mother's death, make the dream a nightmare. Clearly, at
that point in his dream, he fears that he will die in her embrace.
(The passing view of the "fiancee," Elizabeth, who becomes the
horrific dead mother as she is embraced is perhaps a momentary
glimpse of Mary's adolescent fear for herself.) Upon awakening and
seeing his monster?his baby?beckoning to him, Frankenstein
flees, thus performing, then and only then, the symbolic and fatal
act of abandonment upon which so much of the story hinges. He
has seen the fate which ultimately awaits him at the Pole, the re
union with the ice-mother, and he attempts to save his own life by
sacrificing the child.
Because of the novel's unique narrative design, we are able to
see this act of abandonment from the "other side," from the per
spective of the abandoned child, permitting yet another view of the
feared mother. The monster was able to postpone his original
sense of abandonment so long as he felt vicariously attached to the
DeLacey family; he could fantasize that eventually they would love
him. Inevitably he was disappointed: "When I reflected that they
had spurned and deserted me, anger returned, a rage of anger. ..."
In an orgiastic scene, curiously related to the setting of the moon,
he burned their cottage down. "A fierce wind . . . tore along like
a mighty avalanche and produced a kind of insanity in my spirits,
that burst all bounds of reason and reflection. I lighted the dry
branch of a tree, and danced with fury around the devoted cottage,
my eyes still fixed on the western horizon, the edge of which the
moon nearly touched. . . . [I]t sunk, and with a loud scream I
fired the straw. . . ."
We come with this to appreciate the great rage of jealous re
sentment which burns within the monster. Shortly after, he en
counters the young brother of Frankenstein and, not surprisingly,
murders him. "I gazed on my victim, and my heart swelled with

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192 MARC A. RUBENSTEIN

exultation and hellish triumph: clapping my hands, I

'I, too, can create desolation. . . .'" This might remin
creativity is not always the sacrosanct life-force we w
think it is. Indeed, the monster almost fancies himsel
of destruction when he says, "My enemy is not impregn
Edition: "invulnerable"]; this death will carry despair t
a thousand other miseries shall torment and destroy him
It is at this point that Frankenstein's dead mother appe
Still speaking of his first victim, little William, the mon
"I saw something glittering on his breast. I took it; it was
of a most lovely woman. In spite of my malignity, it sof
attracted me. For a few moments I gazed with delight on
eyes, fringed by deep lashes, and her lovely lips; I remem
I was forever deprived of the delights that such beautifu
could bestow; and that she whose resemblance I cont
would, in regarding me, have changed that air of divine
to one expressive of disgust and affright. Can you wond
thoughts transported me with rage?"
The image of the mother, beautiful this time, remai
nantly destructive force. Driven by a species of bad cons
monster attempts to deflect his guilt by implanting t
nating portrait on an innocent young woman while sh
action entirely analogous to Frankenstein's flight from
mare and subsequent abandonment of the monster). In th
palimpsest spirit of autobiography which runs throu
novel, we have no doubt that in the martyred Justine
whom it was said, "her mother could not endure her
glimpsed the author's identification with the monster an
to displace her own guilt?guilt which may have in
memory of murderous rage over the birth of her ha
William.
At that point in her life, Mary stood in the dual positio
monster and Frankenstein: looking backward, she wa
doned, displaced child; looking forward, she was the n
whose children might die or be the death of her. Eith
raged and murderous jealousy of the monster or the guil
tiveness of Frankenstein suggests the aggressive and leth
the author's fear of "forwardness." It is as though to
in creation, let alone take the initiative in it, is to partic
two-sided struggle where one party must die.
We cannot overlook the equation of forwardness

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 FRANKENSTEIN: SEARCH FOR THE MOTHER 193

linity. Probably Mary could indulge as an adolescent in a limited

amount of expression of some of her masculine identifications,
though she was extremely defensive even then about any outright
accusation of masculinity in her thinking (see her letter to Shelley
for October 7, 1817). She could, temporarily, benefit from the
fluidity of fantasy and the flexibility of identifications which char
acterize that phase of life.
There is a hidden spirit of androgyny in her story. The creation
of the monster might even be considered a hermaphroditic act.
The monster himself seems transiently a woman in the throes of
orgasm as Frankenstein applies "the instruments of life." In her
imagination, for a brief period, Mary Shelley could freely be a man
and a woman, and it may be from this direction that she began,
unconsciously, to fear punishment. After Shelley's death, while
she was still in her twenties, her character would take on its final
stamp of cool, conservative, "feminine" reserve, as though the fear
of death forced her, once and for all, to eradicate any trace of
masculine forwardness from her outward being. Since she equated
so much that was creative with the realm of "forwardness" it is
not surprising that she was later to complain, when Shelley had
died, that "my life continues its monotonous course within sterile
banks" (Journal, October 19, 1822). His presence, and the possi
bility of a certain identification with him, must have been protec
tive, as well as inspiring. Frankenstein, as an act of imaginative
daring and "forwardness," was possible, further, because the fear
some aspects of creativity and motherhood had not yet fully
coalesced for her at that adolescent point in life. We have noticed
them gathering force, however, in this reading of the novel.
Frankenstein's refusal to create a female monster, a decision which
seals his fate, speaks powerfully to Mary's fear of the mother and
of motherhood: ". . . obscure forebodings of evil . . . made my heart
sicken in my bosom. . . . she might become ten thousand times
more malignant than her mate."
The pursuit of a coherent maternal identity was expressed and
served by the unique structural organization of the novel. The
"search for the mother" was not merely the expression of a longing.
It was also an effort in the direction of self-definition, particularly
in terms of sexuality. It is here that the dual implications of the
narrative design become clearest; the search for the mother is cast
in the form of primal scene observation. The quest for origins
("who made me, where did I come from?") inevitably leads to a

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194 MARC A. RUBENSTEIN

fantasy of observed parental sexual activity and p

bidden imaginative participation in it. In Frankenstein
of a story?the return to a beginning?involves eac
both observer and actor.
The spirit of stories within stories, or dreams wi
which pervades the novel is also restitutive and p
lost baby is found through the writing of a book
structed like a pregnancy, the feared experience of m
repeated in the relative safety of authorship, the d
resurrected?temporarily?within the heart of the s
the most curious aspect of all: the author, in looking f
has in a sense found herself, for she has literally con
own conception and thus becomes her own "hideou

Yale University

18. I am not alone in assigning this preoccupation about on

tion to an author. Richard Ellman (Golden Codgers [New Yor
Oxford U. Press, 1973], p. 48) said of John Ruskin, who arbi
"fall" of Venice to a specific day in 1418, "I venture to propo
so carefully selected was, putatively, four-hundred years to th
own conception?that act so impossible for him to meditate
nimity." For this reference, as well as for the restrained and b
attention afforded me in the conceiving of this essay, I am dee
of Geoffrey Hartman.

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