A Vindication of the Rights of the Dead: Mary Wollstonecraft, Alchemy and the Crypt of Frankenstein
James Landau (English Literature: New York University)
"Only that which we have killed, killed a second time, can we successfully mourn." -Laurence Rickels, Cryptology
| 1 | Sometimes paintings swivel to reveal secret passages. In Frankenstein, for example, we encounter a painting that harbors behind it - or more accurately within it and across it - the entrance to a forgotten crypt. For as we 'gaze' at the image of Caroline Frankenstein née Beaufort "in an agony of despair, kneeling by the coffin of her dead father," (Shelley 79) we discover the text's central thematic tableau: the scene of mourning. Serving as a backdrop to familial prehistory, this tableau also patterns the future: for as Christine Berthin argues, the painting "functions like a frame around the novel which seems to duplicate compulsively the set-up of the picture" (57). Upon closer inspection, however, this scene of mourning reveals itself as a dissimulation, as a melancholic fetish reeking of morbid disavowal inasmuch as it represents a balking before absence, a refusal not only to acknowledge the dead as dead, but also to perform their last rites. |
| 2 | As horror fiction has taught us, though, those who do not receive a proper burial, often return to demand one. In Frankenstein, these demands emanate from a crypt expertly hidden behind the scene of mourning. Inhabited by the living dead, this crypt stands as a testament to secrets and ghosts, to hauntings in need of an exorcism. An attempt to decrypt this crypt, this paper assumes, along with George Levine, that "the hero and his antagonist are one ... are doubles, two aspects of the same being" (18). Opening the door to psychoanalysis, this view permits a reframing of the text in terms of madness and pathology, such that symptomatology becomes analytically indispensable. Recasting Victor's bed-stricken narrative as a 'talking cure,' I begin by situating Frankenstein in terms of the libidinal economies postulated by Sigmund Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia." Having established a psychoanalytic terrain, I then track Victor's trajectories of grief into the 'crypt,' a psychic territory charted by Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham. As I discuss below, crypts hides secrets, usually traumatic ones; that said, crypts do not represent a typical case of Freudian repression, of denial and forgetting, but rather an attempt to secretly preserve via encryption, a process that speaks not only to the 'spatial' isolation of the safe or vault, but also to linguistic encipherment. As Laurence Rickels explains, the "crypt can only keep up disappearances, its utter concealment from view ... through the generation of diversionary signs or whole discourses in the secret service of detour" (192). Reading Victor's narrative as just such a diversion, this paper does not understand the monster as a merely a diversionary element, but rather as the phantom of the crypt - the encrypted and camouflaged amalgam of two lost love-objects, the first being Victor's mother, the second being the alchemical epistemology of his youth. |
| 3 | Having sketched the boundaries of Victor's crypt, I then turn to Frankenstein's other crypt: Mary Shelley's. Convinced that the text would not spontaneously generate a crypt ex nihilo - that it would need an authorial precursor or pattern - I contend that Frankenstein deploys a maze-like narrative structure of nested stories and protective prefaces in order to encrypt Shelley's secrets as well, secrets inscribed laterally and invisibly in the text's silences. Attempting to unearth the unspoken, to translate the hieroglyphic traces scattered in the text's lacunae, this paper argues that just as the phantoms of Caroline Beaufort and Cornelius Agrippa haunt Victor, so Mary Wollstonecraft haunts her daughter. |
| 4 | Performing a crucial role on this melancholic stage, the monster, I ultimately argue, effects an exorcism of these ghosts (and thus of itself) through the transferential untying of both Victor's and Mary's melancholic knots. Concurring with Avital Ronell that the monster acts as a 'technology of mourning,' I explore how it performs this function through an examination of Heidegger's notion of the 'Enframing,' which reinforces, I contend, the economy of mourning itself. The monster, I demonstrate, simultaneously represents, on the one hand, a melancholic refusal of the Enframing, and, on the other, an alchemical technology of mourning. |
| 5 | Like many imaginary worlds, Frankenstein can be entered through a looking-glass, in this case the trope-door of the doppelgänger. A mirror-duplicate, a double or 'extra' self initially intended to provide immortality for the 'original,' the doppelgänger inevitably goes bad, becoming an arch-nemesis, an interloper, a demon. First discussed by Otto Rank, the doppelgänger appears in Freud's seminal work "The Uncanny" as a striking example of the return of the repressed. Triggered by the sudden appearance of something normally 'hidden and secret,' the uncanny necessitates an interrogation of images. In the monster's case, we must accordingly identify not only its uncanny visage, but also the repressed signified toward which this visual signifier points. |
| 6 | Noting the dea(r)th of living mothers in the text, many critics, in their search for this signified, have focused on the traumatic loss of the maternal, whether in Victor Frankenstein's life, or Mary Shelley's. With Victor, critics often cite the textual adjacency between Caroline's death and Victor's creation of the monster as evidence of what Ronell calls a "dissertation in [the] studied denial of a mother's departure" (144). Mulling over Victor's explicit hope to someday "renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption" (53), we cannot help but detect an echo, an omen, of something resembling an unhealthy devotion. |
| 7 | Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" provides an introductory schematic for (this) pathological grief. In his model, the mind attempts to recall libido from a love-object after losing it; against this demand, though, resistance ensues, since after all "man never willingly abandons a libido-position, not even when a substitute is already beckoning to him" (Freud 1959: 154). Normally the mind detaches its libido 'bit by bit' through the gradual processing of memories and emotions associated with that object. In a healthy libidinal economy, this mourning-work ultimately permits the transference of emotional-investment from the lost object to a new one. In Frankenstein, Alphonse repeatedly urges Victor to embrace transference, to "enter the house of mourning" (75). This paternal imperative - for the sake of the living, you must 'let go' - finds its primordial pattern, I believe, in the Lacanian Law-of-the-Father inasmuch as it is always-already the paternal that demands substitution for a lost object, i.e. the m/Other. Formalizing loss through its interruption of the Imaginary dyad, the Law-of-the-Father introduces the child to a Symbolic order whose signifying chains hold out the illusory promise of a real, fully present Other at the end of the metonymic road, an Other that can be reached if one just mourns and moves on. |
| 8 | Against this imperative, the melancholic, though, refuses to budge. While often though not always aware of the object lost, he or she, at an unconscious level, actually disavows the loss and its concomitant metonymy. The bearer of a stalled libidinal economy, the melancholic, refusing the object's absence, introjects it into the ego in the form of an identification. Because the object has been internalized, however, the normal processing of memories and emotions cannot occur; subsequently the melancholic can only accomplish her mourning-work through an intra-psychic assault on that object, an object now lodged in the ego. This appears symptomatically in the form of verbal self-reproaches. |
| 9 | Labeled melancholic not once, but twice by his analyst Walton, Victor is text-book perfect: he exhibits lethargy, sleeplessness, disinterest in the world, incessant self-reproaches, and, most importantly, an inability to transfer his affections. Even when nearing death, he declares to Walton, "but when you speak of new ties and fresh affections, think you that any can replace those who are gone?" (214-215) On her deathbed, Caroline declares: "Elizabeth, my love, you must supply my place" (44) - a request everyone honors, except Victor. Encapsulated in his oft-cited dream, Victor's inability to substitute Elizabeth for Caroline becomes morbidly clear as he embraces his 'cousin': "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" (59). Melancholically introjected, Victor's mother returns as the repressed. Yet while the corpse of Victor's dream bears Caroline's uncanny image, the monster itself, the fantasmatic symptom of her disavowed loss, exhibits no maternal traces apart from its brief possession of her cameo. How then to account for the monster's uncanny form? |
| 10 | Not denying the pivotal importance of the mother, I would like to search elsewhere to explicate the monstrosity of the monster's frame. Keeping in mind that mourning can also occur for the loss of an abstraction or concept, we must examine the sudden obliteration of Victor's early devotion to the alchemists Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. Like the oak tree "reduced to thin ribbons of wood" (Shelley 42), Victor's 'forbidden knowledge' receives a fatal electrocution after science accounts for lightning much better than Agrippa can. After M. Waldman's first lecture, though, Victor finds himself thrown into another state of turmoil as if "grappling with a palpable enemy," (49) only to awaken the next day determined to return to his alchemical studies. While Victor subsequently embraces natural philosophy, this post-oneiric resolution points to the continued albeit repressed 'presence' of Victor's alchemical interests. The question remains, however: what uncanny imago does alchemy offer the monster? |
| 11 | Before answering that question, I must first follow a series of detours through the labyrinthine topography of the crypt as explicated by Abraham and Torok. An update of Freud's models, cryptology understands introjection as the normal healthy process by which the ego extends itself through the symbolic internalization of objects; supporting Reality, defined here as anything that alters the psychic topography, introjection thus longer serves pathologies of grief, but rather the process whereby "grief is overcome through the gradual replacement of the lost object by signs that symbolize it" (Berthin 55). On the other hand, however, incorporation - of the order of Fantasy - represents an essentially conservative, "sometimes hallucinatory" (Derrida xvii) maneuver that attempts to change the 'world' rather than accept it. In rejecting introjection, all fantasies are therefore rejections of loss. |
| 12 | Fantasies of incorporation in particular occur when the lost object was one of forbidden desire. Abraham and Torok offer the classic example of a boy seduced by a sister who later commits suicide: unable to verbalize and thus 'work-through' the desires attendant to the lost object exactly because those desires are prohibited, the boy could not introject the object, and thus disavowed the loss altogether. In turn, a crypt formed. Abraham and Torok explain:
Safe within the crypt, the lost object, now known as the phantom, haunts a fantasmatic and encrypted scene. Understanding the monster's tale as the fantasy world of Victor's phantoms, especially Caroline, we must nevertheless ask why this supposedly secret scene appears so explicitly in the text. Now while I ultimately contend that the monster's tale represents a transcript of a fantasmatic mourning-work, for now I would like to situate the monster's narrative in terms of what Derrida calls "permeation from within or from without, seeping through the crypt's partitions" (xv). Updating the uncanny, phantomatic seepage differs from the return of the repressed exactly because of the encrypted nature of the haunting: for example, Caroline cannot appear as she is - dead - but only as the living or encrypted dead: as a zombie-like infiltrator of dreams or as the dead-come-alive, a.k.a the monster. Caroline as dead thus become an absence that haunts the text, an absence catalogued most decidedly when Victor visits "the cemetery where William, Elizabeth, and my father reposed" (205) - without Caroline by their side. A "kind of theft to reappropriate the pleasure object," (Derrida xvii) incorporation reframes Caroline's empty grave as a cenotaph for a prohibited Oedipal desire that had folded her away into a psychic vault from which she returned a "mummy again endued with animation" (Shelley 59). |
| 13 | Crypts, though, preserve more than just the living dead: they also incorporate the forbidden desires of the phantom itself. Peggy Kamuf explains that sometimes during incorporation,
Dubbed a 'telepathic' transmission by cryptology, this transmission of "foreign bodies outside all recognizable contexts of communication" (Rickels 194) can pass both unspeakable secrets, and wishes for pre-Oedipal union or death. Searching for Caroline's secret, Berthin, recalling Victor's dream of Elizabeth "walking in the streets" (Shelley 59) - or streetwalking - alludes to the possibility of a hidden history of prostitution. From this, Berthin further hypothesizes that Victor's unnatural production of the monster stands as a refracted testament to Caroline's unconscious inasmuch as "the secret from the mother's grave is that of an illegitimate birth" (58). |
| 14 | Unfortunately backed by little textual evidence, the notion of Victor re-enacting Caroline's illegitimate pregnancy nevertheless speaks to the ventriloquism mentioned by Kamuf - one that has serious repercussions for questions of sovereignty. In Victor's case, we see him receiving orders from beyond the grave. For as Abraham and Torok write, "'in the middle of the night,' the phantom of the crypt comes to haunt the keeper of the graveyard, making strange and incomprehensible signs to him, forcing him to perform unwanted acts, arousing unexpected feelings in him" (8). These feelings, the result of a libidinal wound, ultimately yield a murderous aggression. For if we read Victor and the monster as one, then the murders must have been committed by the created, albeit with the hands of the creator. |
| 15 | An architecture of trauma, the crypt would not 'appear' in a text without an authorial blueprint to 'follow.' In this case, though, the lost love-object was one Mary Shelley never actually had: her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. Critics, noting Shelley's natal biography, have contended that her interest in 'hideous progeny' stems from guilt over Wollstonecraft's death from puerperal fever; Frankenstein, they maintain, accordingly enacts a search for or negotiation with the absent maternal. That said, I believe that Wollstonecraft haunts the text more than previously recognized. Inasmuch as phantoms can be "transmitted from one generation to the next, from parent to child or from community to individual without ever having been voiced" (Berthin 54), Mary Shelley could have silently incorporated her mother during her frequent visits to her grave, or more likely through a reading of her works, not to mention William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Women. These texts would have exposed Shelley to not only Wollstonecraft's political standpoint, but also to her intense libidinal attachments to Henri Fuseli, Fanny Blood and Gilbert Imlay - not to mention her suicidal tendencies. Burwick elaborates:
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| 16 | Yet no one commits suicide in Frankenstein. The only explicit allusion to self-destruction - the monster's immolation on an arctic pyre - never actually occurs since the text indefinitely defers it. That said, the text does possess a cryptic hieroglyph that demands interrogation: The Sorrows of Young Werther. Found in the portmanteau by the monster, Werther represents, along with Plutarch's Lives, Volney's Ruins of Empires, and Milton's Paradise Lost, the touchstones of the monster's 'formal' education. While the monster does not "enter into the merits" of Werther's case for suicide, he nevertheless feels "inclined toward the opinions of the hero, whose extinction I wept, without precisely understanding it" (Shelley 131 emphasis mine). As we shall see, the monster weeps because in Werther it glimpses its intended destination. Withholding for now my explanation, I would like first to turn to Wollstonecraft, whose sensitivities, passions and suicidal tendencies so resembled the German character that Godwin declared her a "female Werther" (Memoirs 73). Her first biographer, Godwin could not help but notice the resemblance between Werther's unrequited love for Charlotte and Wollstonecraft's failed attempts at love and 'romantic friendship' with Blood, Fuseli and Imlay. Understanding lovesickness as nothing more than melancholia in disguise - i.e. a refusal to accept the 'death' or impossibility of a relationship - we can subsequently interpret Werther's presence in Frankenstein as symptomatic of Wollstonecraft's own aberrations of mourning, aberrations phantomatically transmitted from mother to daughter, secrets that haunted the young writer, forcing her to perform unwanted and unhallowed textual acts, i.e. the production of the crypt of Frankenstein. |
| 17 | In addition to Werther, Frankenstein possesses one other mise-en-abime of mourning: the letters of Safie, Felix's Turkish love, which codify a lament for a lost and idealized mother, one that bears a startling resemblance, critics have noted, to Mary Wollstonecraft - or at least her political avatar. Joyce Zonana, for example, argues that the letters serve as the touchstone to a conscious feminist philosophy since the "letters pointedly express a specific, fundamental feminist message identical to a key premise in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women: that women have rational souls" (171). Yet the contents of these letters remain invisible, summarized but never elaborated; from this, Zonana argues that the letters, located in the physical, textual center of Frankenstein, "constitute the novel's inaccessible center," (171) the space beyond which "voyeuristic, culturally masculine appropriation" (181) cannot proceed. Agreeing with Zonana that the text actively engages with feminist politics, I do not feel however that the opacity of the letters suggests a feminist poetics of silence - but rather the muteness of a psychic wound. Marking the textual presence of Wollstonecraft's ideas, but not Wollstonecraft herself, the letters do not coincidentally enact the topography of the crypt, which Derrida describes as existing both inside and outside the Self, just as the letters exist within Frankenstein even as the contents do not. Cryptic, the letters are phantomatic transmissions, secrets encrypted onto blank pages, secrets that "will prove the truth of my tale" (Shelley 126) exactly because their absence is not empty, but rather haunted, haunted by the phantom of the crypt, the true 'monster,' Mary Wollstonecraft. |
| 18 | Yet the monster does not resemble Mary Wollstonecraft any more than it does Caroline Beaufort. On the contrary, it gains its outline from the common Romantic figure of the golem, a creature of animated clay associated with alchemy and such figures as Paracelsus, who claimed, in his 1572 De Natura Rerum, to have created a homunculus, or 'little man.' While footnoting for future study the absolute absence of the signifier 'golem' in Shelley's text, we should recognize that this figure can account for the creature's physical monstrosity, its status as an "ugly wretch" (Shelley 144). That said, how do we account for Peter Brook's definition of the monstrous as that which "exceeds the very basis of classification, language itself" (100)? Plugging into the idea of the monster as a chimera or transgressive hybridization, a defiler of boundaries, this definition merges with a common criticism summated in Paul Sherwin's question: "how is one to comprehend a representation that transcends representation?" (886). |
| 19 | Abraham and Torok provide an answer. They contend that introjection, fundamentally grounded in the relationship between the baby's mouth and its mother's breast, motivates language itself, which figuratively cries out and re-calls all 'breast-objects.' As we have seen, though, when introjection encounters obstacles (i.e. prohibited desires), incorporation saves the day by 'literally' introjecting the object, albeit in a fantasmatic manner, for example the 'funerary feast' of Victor's "days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses" (Shelley 53). A refusal of introjection, incorporation consequently assaults its concomitants - figuration, language, and representation - thus providing a new frame for the monster's boundary-defying namelessness. Furthermore, taking introjection 'literally,' incorporation in turn fecalizes its object, transforming it into "true excrement" (Abraham and Torok 10). Attentive to the frequency of Victor's 'gnashing teeth,' a buccal symptom pointing to thoughts of the monster, we can thus reframe the monster as a body of shit, a filthy mass that defies all Symbolic economies of use and representation. |
| 20 | Considered by many a critique of the Promethean drive, Frankenstein frequently circulates in discourses concerned with the dangers of science. In "The Question Concerning Technology," Martin Heidegger addresses similar concerns, in particular the radical ontological and epistemological consequences technology has had for humankind. For Heidegger, modern technology is a way of revealing the Being that presences itself in the openness of man; 'calling-up' the world, technology operates, though, in the register of an instrumentality that dangerously objectifies that world. Heidegger thus calls the essence of technology the Enframing, a word that evokes connotations of ordering, arranging, and putting into place. Organizing objects at an epistemological and ontological level into the form of standing-reserve, the Enframing ensures that "everything everywhere is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering" (Heidegger 17). A dissemination of standing-reserve, the Enframing produces an economy of objects, one that structures, I argue, social and libidinal economies: reinforcing the paternal metonymic injunction, the Enframing ensures, after every 'loss,' that there is always-already another object waiting. |
| 21 | In Frankenstein, Reality attempts to introduce two such losses; Victor, giving unconscious lip-service, refuses to accept either. Recalling Caroline's last request for Elizabeth to 'supply her place,' we find that Victor's dreams reveal his inability to substitute, his feelings toward Elizabeth growing increasingly ambivalent as he distances himself from her geographically and emotionally. If we understand Elizabeth as standing-reserve, as a "possession of my own" (Shelley 37), we can in turn reframe Victor's hesitation to marry her, not to mention her murder at the hands of the 'monster,' in terms of an unconscious disavowal of the Symbolic ordering motivated by the Enframing. |
| 22 | This disavowal, furthermore, occurs alchemically: building off Berthin's observation that "incorporation in the hidden crypt reactivates in the subject primitive beliefs in restorative magic," (56) we discover that alchemy and its elixirs of life act as a melancholic (en)balm that successfully encrypts Caroline's imago. At the same time, alchemy as an epistemological state contrary to the Enframing suffuses the fantasy world of the crypt: in opposition to Victor, who post-lightning strike embraces the modern technology of natural philosophy, the monster remains open to the multiplicity of presencing. Keeping in mind that alchemy, itself a techne, does not concern itself with the classification of the world, so much as with its metamorphosis, we return to the notion of the monster as the embodiment of an encrypted and forbidden epistemology, an alchemical one 'prohibited' (and thus psychically introjected) by the Enframing. |
| 23 | Focusing in on this electrifying moment of schism, we find a re-enactment of the oedipal scenography, the 'blasted tree' linking the narratively adjacent deaths of mother and alchemy through the trope of lightning as castration (indeed, it is significant that in the 1818 text Alphonse introduces Victor to electricity). Victor, inspecting the ruined phallus of the tree, discovers (through deferred action) having "never beheld anything so utterly destroyed" (Shelley 42). If we understand Freud's fort/da as a technology designed to placate anxieties over absence, we can follow Ronell's logic in conceptualizing the monster as itself a fort/da, a "technology of mourning" intended to mask the irresolvable conflict of presence and absence metaphorically laid bare by the lightning. A technology 'developed' to mask and conquer the absence wrought by death, the monster is a symptom of an alchemical and incorporative deadlock. At the same time, however, the monster as a technology of mourning also speaks to Derrida's observation that "the process of incorporation always carries within it, inscribed in its very possibility, the 'nostalgic vocation'"(xxi), i.e. introjection. As Ronell writes, "the monster knows that it was created to sing the lament of mourning, to teach the necessity of hanging up" (195). The only question remaining is whether it reaches its destination. |
| 24 | Phantoms and their crypts hide behind and between words. Producing volumes of dissimulating text, they have a performative power that "shapes the internal logic of the text and moulds, transforms and redefines its recipients, crypt-carriers and readers alike" (Berthin 59). Phantomatic transmissions can transform their readers into writers, their listeners into speakers - as we see with Walton, Victor's analyst who in turn becomes the crypt-keeper and propagator of the monster to his sister Margaret Saville, and with Mary Shelley, who declared her intentions to write early in life. |
| 25 | In Victor's case, the transmission of the phantoms of Caroline and Agrippa yielded a fantasy world readable only through the encrypted transcript of the monster's tale, a transcript itself lodged within the larger diversionary context of Victor's narrative to Walton. As I mentioned above, incorporation, however, always carries within it introjection: no crypt remains perfectly, hermetically sealed. The transcript of a psychoanalytic session, Frankenstein accordingly details a fantasmatic mourning-work. A technology of mourning, the monster brings about a scene of transference that breaks the tableau of mourning dictated by Caroline Beaufort's painting: for as Abraham and Torok write, the melancholic ultimately wants nothing more than for the analyst to recognize not the hate, but rather the love that the lost object feels for the subject. In Frankenstein, Walton, curious and compassionate, engages the monster after Victor's 'death'; the monster, in response, declares that Victor represented "the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration amongst men" (224). Keeping in mind that "it is as the mother that the monster mourns her dead son" (Rickels 200), we realize that Victor, unable to engage with his mother's image because that would necessitate truly accepting her loss, alchemically encrypted her imago into the form of the monster, which he then sent out into the world to bring about the mourning he could not accomplish himself - a mourning that finally allows Caroline to enter the grave. |
| 26 | The monster brings more than Caroline to the transferential scene, however: it also brings Mary Wollstonecraft. Building off her observation that Margaret Saville, as the ultimate recipient of the text, has the same initials as Mary Shelley, Anne Mellor argues that "in a sense the novel is written by the author to an audience of one, herself" (54). Like the cameo of Caroline Beaufort, which works like a miniaturized but highly mobile maternal imago, both Safie's letters and the monster follow the circuitous route of a psychic postal system full of detours and roadblocks - a postal system that sheds new light on the monster's self-inquiry: "Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?" (131) |
| 27 | Overlaying Wollstonecraft and Shelley onto the climactic transferential tableau, we find that the monster facilitates the introjection of Wollstonecraft as well. By deferring its own suicide beyond the edge of the text, the monster effects a symbolic internalization of her suicidal drives thus freeing both of them to return to the grave. As such, when Godwin, in response to his daughter's emotional sensitivities, declares that "I am afraid you are a Wollstonecraft" (Brown 366), we nevertheless discover that Shelley does not plummet, even after her husband's death, into the same depths of suicidal melancholia as her mother - for thanks to Frankenstein, the transcript of a successful mourning-work, Shelley had alchemically transformed her leaden phantoms into golden text. |
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eSharp issue: autumn 2004. © James Landau 2004. All rights reserved. ISSN 1742-4542.