Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity Author(S): Bette London Source: PMLA, Vol

Home , Henry Weekes, On Frankenstein

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity Author(s): Bette London Source: PMLA, Vol. 108, No. 2 (Mar., 1993), pp. 253-267 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462596 Accessed: 24-02-2018 15:52 UTC

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This content downloaded from 158.135.1.176 on Sat, 24 Feb 2018 15:52:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Bette London

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity

BETTE LONDON, associate IN A STRIKING MEMORIAL to the Shelleys-commis- professor of English at the sioned by their only surviving child, Sir Percy, and his wife, Lady Shelley-the couple is impressed in the image of Michelan- University of Rochester, is the gelo's Pietd (fig. 1). Mary Shelley kneels, breast exposed, in the author of The Appropriated traditional posture of a Madonna humilitatis, supporting the lifeless Voice: Narrative Authority in body of her drowned god and idol. Superimposing a Christian Conrad, Forster, and Woolf narrative onto a notorious Romantic "text"-a scandalous life story ( U of Michigan P, 1990). Her composed of atheism, incest, and illicit sexuality-the monument most recent articles on fixes the contradictions that constitute and surround the Shelleyan

women's fiction and feminist legacy, mobilizing its own conventionalized impressions of the staple figures: the martyred, revolutionary poet and his beautiful, dis- criticism and theory have ap- traught widow. The Christianized life of Shelley, however, remains peared in ELH (1991) and only one of the monument's scandals. For to a modern audience, at Diacritics (1991). She is com- least, fed on a revitalization of Frankenstein and a new canonization pleting a manuscript on nine- of the novel's "feminist" author as the creator of monstrous birth teenth- and twentieth-century fantasies, the marginalization of Mary in the figure of maternal women writers and the practice adoration reads with equally disturbing incongruity.1 As a document in the reconstruction of the Shelleys' lived of dual authorship. relationship and in the construction of posthumous meaning, the monument, executed by Henry Weekes, contributes to the narrative production and circulation of hierarchically ordered, gendered literary history. It performs the same ideological work, for example, as another piece of "memorial" iconography, Louis-Edouard Fournier's Funeral of Shelley (fig. 2)-a representation of Shelley's cremation that focuses on the ritual viewing of the poet's smoldering body. Mary Shelley (who did not actually attend the funeral) appears as a kneeling figure, literally at the edge of the canvas and barely distinguishable from a shadowy mass of nameless observers, while the standing figures of the privileged mourners (the poet's friends and literary compatriots Byron, Hunt, and Trelawny) command visual attention. The narrative that the painting details thus binds Shelley's preeminence (public and private) to the lasting rites of masculinity.

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But though such works ensure the place of masculine privilege, their enshrinement of the poet as martyr figure contains its own subversive potential. For these testimonials to masculine genius barely cover their display of male exhibitionism, rendering the male body dispropor- tionately visible. Thus, while Fournier may refine the viewers' sense of the corpse's presence, the inclusion of Mary in this otherwise all- male ritual invokes the scurrilous stories of that body's remnants. These stories, circulating widely in biographical sketches, raise the inde- cent specter of Mary Shelley's wranglings with Hunt for Percy Shelley's relics-for possession of the prized part of the poet, the remnant of his heart. Edited out of the official account Fournier represents, this unseemly exhibition glosses the painting's inscription of the spectacle of masculinity, of male spectators surveying the prostrate male body. Fig. 1. Monument to Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Weekes's sculpture, with its self-conscious Wollstonecraft Shelley, by Henry Weekes. Christ- borrowings from Christian iconography, calls church Priory, Dorset. (Photograph from the Bett- attention even more insistently to the display of mann Archive.)

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Fig. 2. The Funeral of Shelley, by Louis-Edouard Fournier. 1889. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. (Photograph courtesy of the trustees of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside.)

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masculinity. As Leo Steinberg has demon- scenes-the animation of the monster, the mur- strated, European Renaissance art repeatedly der of Elizabeth, the death of Frankenstein. points to Christ's sexed body, and the Shelley And in doing so, they uncover the novel's memorial, true to its type, draws the eye to the crucially masculine scaffolding. For these key markers of sexuality, in particular to the veiled textual moments, each represented in the nar- phallus that centers the scene. For the arrange- rative as a kind of framed frieze, share both ment of figures, the viewing trajectory initiated the structural configuration of Weekes's statu- by Mary's gaze (as it invites the eye to travel ary and the monument's erotic fixation on the downward, first to Percy's upturned face and lifeless male body.4 Thus Frankenstein's de- then along the incline of his slumped body), the scription of the unanimated creature-"the life- torsional patterns of the drapery, the pointing less thing that lay at my feet"-captures, of Percy's right hand (with its insinuation of an precisely at the moment preceding the entry of unnaturally elongated finger)-all focus on the monstrosity, the classical beauty of the sculpted site of masculinity and the ensuing drama of the Percy Shelley: "His limbs were in proportion, lifeless male body. and I had selected his features as beautiful" Mary's iconic representation, then, quite lit- (52). Shelley's posture, moreover-head flung erally supports a scene of male self-display. Like back, neck exposed, bloodless arm extended the acts of extravagant feminine self-abasement echoes that of the "lifeless and inanimate" body and masculine idolatry that embarrass her char- of Elizabeth, flung upon her bridal bier in the acter in the "post-Shelley" phase of her biogra- novel's most climactic moment. Mary Shelley, phy, her conventionalized position here both in such a reading, figures the position of disguises and reveals-enacts and exposes-the Frankenstein supporting the remains of the spectacle it upholds. In what it includes as much lover's body-a position also assumed by the as in what it excludes, this portrait of a languish- monster in the novel's last exchange of bodies, ing Mary relentlessly points to the exposure of in the creature's "strange and wonderful" ap- a monstrously extended Percy. In this respect, pearance hanging over the "lifeless form" of his then, Weekes's representation can be seen to creator. restage the "origins" of Mary Shelley's most If the logic of the novel demands as its famous creation, Frankenstein-a text fre- consummation the laying out of Frankenstein's quently read as a critical portrait of Percy.2 body, as I have been arguing, the symmetrical Moreover, in reworking the figures of Mary inversion of its creation scene is achieved Shelley's waking dream, the monument repro- through a detour onto the woman's body and duces the novel's iconographic centerpiece: "I through the circulation of the position of mon- saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling strosity. This pattern has far-reaching, and as beside the thing he had put together. I saw the yet largely unexamined, implications for an un- hideous phantasm of a man stretched out ..." derstanding both of the novel and of the wider (228). workings of gender-implications that exceed Mary Shelley's authorship, then, which would the narrow determinants of a strictly biographi- seem to have been effectively erased, returns to cal rendering. For the shifting configurations these testimonial productions as a species of that mark the novel's reinventions of its central intertextual glossing performed through the scene destabilize the sexual hierarchies that un- agency of Frankenstein.3 But if Frankenstein derwrite the novel's meaning, making the male recalls what is monstrous, what lurks beneath body the site of an ineradicable materiality. Yet the surface, in this memorial imagery-the the discomposing presence of that body remains displayed male body, "the hideous phantasm of the thing most resistant to critical insight; like a man stretched out"-the memorials reactivate the sexuality of Christ in Steinberg's thesis, it is Frankenstein's own iconography, opening the preeminently visible but persistently unseen, novel to new interpretive possibilities. For they consigned to modern oblivion. point to the emblematic identity of its central Among Frankenstein's audiences, however,

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such oversight would almost seem the product By making the male body my starting point, of a representational conspiracy. For if in imi- I insist on its tangibility in both the repre- tation of the Incarnation, Frankenstein creates sentational economy of Frankenstein and the a being "complete in all the parts of a man," the cultural production of Mary Shelley's literary absence of the markers of sexuality leaves the authority; and by reading Frankenstein against creature incomplete, facilitating its installation some specific literary and nonliterary construc- in the feminine economy-the traditional locus tions of Mary and Percy Shelley, I suggest the for "the monstrous" and "the body." Moreover, ways conventionalized operations of gender Frankenstein's account of creating monstrosity have foreclosed access to Frankenstein's explo- sustains the visible paradox that supports mas- rations of masculinity-so much so that an culine identity; for it is only when Frankenstein approach to the subject now requires the dis- speculates on female monstrosity ("she might mantling of elaborate critical edifices. As the become ten thousand times more malignant than Shelley monuments suggest, the documents that her mate") that he considers the threatening would secure or obscure Frankenstein's place in presence of the monster's male sexuality ("a race literary history typically stage male anxieties of devils would be propagated upon the earth" across the body of the female subject. And in [163]). It is thus the spectacle of woman's un- Mary Shelley scholarship, the relentless concern controllable materiality (the figure of what can- with questions of authority and bodily limits not be seen) that gives distinctive shape to the would seem to have taken its cue from the novel. already constructed male body. In a pattern, then, for which James Rieger's Overlooking this suppression of male sexual- edition of the 1818 text of Frankenstein may be ity, many commentaries on the novel-includ- only the most explicit instance, these works ing some of the most influential feminist characteristically invest in versions of female readings-continue to pursue Frankenstein's monstrosity-practiced on the figure of Mary critical project, upholding the illusion of male Shelley. But a critical rereading of these forma- gender-neutrality, of the invisibleness of mascu- tive texts might initiate discussion of what they linity.5 Indeed, feminist criticism has taken the repress: stories of the fractured foundation of lead in promoting speculation on the monster's masculine privilege. female identity-a hypothesis extended, at least "Mary Shelley's Life and the Composition of in part, in the interest of claiming feminine Frankenstein," for example, the introduction to visibility. Erasing all markers of masculine pres- Rieger's critically indispensable text, contrives a ence, Gilbert and Gubar perfect this reading, biographical portrait of Mary Shelley that re- naming creature and creator as "Eve and Eve produces-in her own person-the figure of all along" (246); but in exposing all the novel's monstrosity that haunts her tale, a figure characters as "female in disguise" (237), they marked, like the novel's male creation, by uncover over Frankenstein's investments in male natural bodily extension. Framed by her scan- exhibitionism, thus supporting, however inad- dalous mother (kept alive, posthumously, by the vertently, dominant ideological imperatives. defamatory reports of the reactionary press) and Perhaps for this reason, their "eccentric" reading by the contamination of her own "final adven- has been readily accepted. For, habituated to the ture" (an amorous liaison ending in bribery and contemporary construction of the scopic regime, blackmail), Mary Shelley enters this account which allows little flexibility in gendered posi- circumscribed by the scandal of the female body tions, readers continue to ignore the self-evident: -a body even death cannot obliterate. And she Frankenstein's insistent specularization of mas- remains, in Rieger's reconstruction, the emblem culinity, its story of the male creator making a of a too substantial existence: "the stiff, humor- spectacle of himself.6 It is this specularization, less and self-dramatizing woman she had always and some of the conditions of its suppression, been" (xxiii). Like the novel's celebrated inven- that this essay investigates. tion, this "composite figure" troublesomely com-

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bines a mechanical body (stiff and humorless) some of Percy Shelley's "additions," interpolat- with self-proliferating energy. ing "autograph variants" from the 1823 Thomas But as Rieger tells the story of Frankenstein's copy of the text, and appending (as a sup- entry into literary history, Mary Shelley's pres- plement) the collation of the 1818 and 1831 ence begins to diminish. Always "Mary" to editions, Rieger manufactures a radically discon- Percy's "Shelley," always modeled on or em- tinuous text that displays the seams and sutures bodying a husband's or father's literary interests, of its composition, decomposition, and recom- Rieger's "Mary" fulfills the condition of position. Rieger overreaches Frankenstein, how- "proper" secondariness. This truncated figure, ever, insisting on the feminine signature of the however, remains riddled by contradiction. For (textual) body he brings into existence. Excusing it is Frankenstein's claims to preeminent origi- his own violation of professional propriety ("I nality that support Rieger's effort at literary have violated another editorial convention, resuscitation-the reproduction of the very text, which prescribes either a clear or a diplomatic unavailable for over a century, reconstructed in text")8 on the grounds that "this mode of pre- his contribution to the Library of Literature. sentation shows the author's mind at work," he This effort, moreover, serves to bolster the locates the source of his editorial difficulties in authority of the woman artist. Indeed, Mary Mary Shelley's "feminine" incapacity-incapac- Shelley's authorship can be reconciled to Rie- ity marked in the "fussiness of her second ger's textual history only by the hypothesis of thoughts" and her amateurish "tinker[ing] with female monstrosity-a hypothesis supported, as a completed imaginative act" (xliv). In what in the movies, by the invention of the creator's seems an urbane, unobtrusive, and even criti- accomplice: the physician's assistant.7 Perhaps cally sanctioned misogyny, Rieger's "produc- not surprisingly, then, Rieger's narrative uncov- tion" thus participates in and reproduces ers another scandal of the body, a scandal of conventional gendered readings, upholding the textual impurity that turns on the discovery of feminine as the locus of spectacle. Percy Shelley's pervasive "assistance at every This cultural production-surely one of point in the book's manufacture," assistance so Frankenstein's most enduring legacies-does not extensive that "one hardly knows whether to confine itself to the masculine academy; it sur- regard him as editor or minor collaborator" faces conspicuously in Mary Shelley's preface to (xviii). her own recomposing effort, her introduction to In Rieger's representation, then, "the life" and the third edition (1831). Asked to account for "the composition" enact the same scene: the the "origin of the story," Mary Shelley frames exhibition of the female body with its paradoxi- her response in the terms of a question often put cal display of excess and lack; its insistently to her: "How I, then a young girl, came to think visible demonstration of the horror of having of, and dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?" nothing to see. Moreover, in reconstituting the (222). The question positions her as "a young "original" text of Frankenstein (the 1818 edition) girl" in the place of spectacle; and, as Mary with the aid of modern technologies, Rieger Poovey has ably illustrated, the ensuing expla- replicates this overdetermined configuration, ex- nation, with its elaborate rhetoric of modesty, posing as feminine the text's monstrous lack of reproduces the paradoxical alignment of mon- unity. For despite his somewhat jocular admis- strous exhibitionism and demure self-effacement sion that "there [were] moments in the prepa- that conditions the nineteenth-century construc- ration of this edition when [he] felt like tion of gender-a construction Rieger's intro- Frankenstein himself" (v), Rieger shies away duction reinvents. from the implications of this analogy. Nonethe- Moreover, as much feminist criticism has less, the identificatory structure of male autobio- demonstrated, this spectacle of the woman writ- graphical creation resonates in his undertaking. ing, strikingly evoked by Mary Shelley, can be Glossing quotations and allusions as well as appropriated for feminism in a new deployment

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of (auto)biography. But the recovery of the ety. But the deployment of this body in Rieger's female author behind the male-dominated text reading covers other bodies and a different crime frequently involves a voyeuristic mechanism that against patriarchy: the exposure of Percy in leaves criticism fixed on the self-display of the Mary's posthumous editing and publication of woman, on what Barbara Johnson calls the "my his manuscripts. The paternal prohibition-Sir monster/my self" syndrome. Consequently, as Timothy Shelley's refusal to have his son's name Mary Jacobus insists, such biographical invest- and works bandied about in print-echoes in ments inevitably reduce the text to "a monstrous Rieger's critical admonitions about Mary's con- symptom" (138). And insofar as this is true, tribution to the Victorian impaling of Percy as feminism might do well to alter its perspective, a "shrill and seraphic figure" (xxi). Hence the reexamining the structure of spectacle and the crime that, one might say, is inscribed on Mary positions spectacle engenders.9 Shelley's body-the crime for which the author Such an examination might suggest that the pays with her sex-turns out to be, in these place of spectacle is not unique to women, and narratives at least, the unsexing of Percy, whom from this perspective, the "impropriety" of Mary she places in the specular position of woman. Shelley's authorship need not be read as scan- Yet the presentation of Percy in Mary's pref- dalous; the scandal, at least, does not necessarily ace to the first collected edition of his poems inhere in a single body. If one turns Rieger's baffles alike a conventional construction of gen- allegations back on themselves, Percy's presence der and any simple model of gender transposi- in every stage of "the book's manufacture" tions. Fulfilling an "important" obligation (xlix), implicates the masculine in the production of even a "sacred duty" (liii)-providing the public monstrosity. And the scandal of Mary Shelley's with a "perfect edition" of her husband's poems, fractured text may discredit the female author the living proof of his "sublime genius" (xlix) less than it does her masculine authorities, who Mary would seem to occupy the available spec- have their own uneasy relations to textual origi- trum of culturally sanctioned feminine posi- nality. For like her excessively deferential accep- tions.10 But in producing Percy Shelley for the tance of her husband's editing, Mary Shelley's public as well as bringing forth his productions, unorthodox citational strategies-her insistent she recasts and conflates the roles of wife and literary allusions and indiscriminate textual bor- mother; activating the iconographic machinery rowings-may expose not so much her lack of that renders her, as in the Weekes statue, the originality as the material conditions that con- mother of her husband, she simultaneously dis- stitute textuality as a form of grafting. Writing turbs and enforces gender proprieties. More- in a hand not distinctly her own, Mary Shelley over, in "detailing the history of those opens to question the copied status of the text productions, as they sprang, living and warm, she copies into her own. Bearing the word, as from his heart and brain," she inserts Percy in Margaret Homans suggests, Frankenstein (crea- Frankenstein's sexually ambiguous place-the ture, creator, text) bares the underpinnings of site where maternal and paternal forces of pro- the male romantic economy, "[literalizing] the creation vie for mastery. As in Frankenstein, the literalization of male literature" (117). The joins suppressed story of female production, doubly in Frankenstein's textual anatomy thus demon- marked here as well as there in the absent organ strate that composition, even in male hands, is of generation, infects and scandalizes the body always of the body. Accordingly, the spectacle of the man. For Mary Shelley's refusal to "re- of the text-of the text's irregular body- mark on the occurrences of [Percy's] private life, prompts with new urgency the question of gen- except inasmuch as the passions which they der at the novel's source: whose body does the engendered inspired his poetry" recalls, even as text display? it covers over, the other products of that passion Rieger's parable would seem to admit only and Percy's responsibility for their fate: the one response: the female body, sexually stigma- bodies that sprang "living and warm" from tized, that advertises Mary Shelley's impropri- Mary's womb and now lie dead before their

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time. Laying "the first stone of a monument due to Shelley's genius, his sufferings, and his vir- tues," Mary Shelley's publication thus antici- pates the contradictory inscriptions staged in the works of Henry Weekes and other Victorian monument builders (liii). Rieger's representation of Mary's wifely editorial productions echoes, in fact, the response of another Shelley biographer to another Vic- torian edifice: Onslow Ford's monument to Shelley at University College, Oxford (fig. 3). Writing in 1940, Newman Ivey White protests that Ford's work "still bears its part in preserv- ing the misconception of Shelley as a beautiful, ineffectual angel" (2: 384). Like the Weekes memorial, Ford's monument exhibits a full- length figure of the drowned Shelley executed in white marble-an ornate display (including a Fig. 3. Monument to Percy Bysshe Shelley, by Onslow weeping bronze sea nymph supporting the effigy) Ford. University College, Oxford. erected, White points out, at the instigation of a woman, Mary's daughter-in-law, Jane Shelley. As White's insistent specification of the figure's him, by his co-adjutor," his sister Elizabeth "recumbent" position suggests, it is the laying (305-06). Similarly, Rieger's insistent produc- out of the male body that excites his disgust. For tion of Mary Shelley's textual impurity in his in his rendering of the sculpture, such self-con- presentation of a "perfect edition" of her mas- scious display inevitably proves feminizing, re- terwork might alert us to his authorial anxieties ducing the elevated image of the poet to -his concern lest his editorial procedures "mar sentimentalized matter, making it, in effect, a the book's appearance" (xliv) and betray his piece of Shelleyana.ll implication, as it were, at "every point in the This recurring pattern, familiar in the recon- book's manufacture." structions of the Shelley monuments and biog- A telling footnote to Rieger's representation raphies, inserts the spectacle of woman at the of Mary Shelley's work and life, these stories locus of male exhibition; and the female specta- point to one of Frankenstein's most unsettling cle, simultaneously covering and exposing male features: its demonstration that positions of self-display, invites a differently inflected reading specularity are not gender-specific. And from of literary history. For one thing, it casts Mary's this perspective, Rieger's exhibition of Mary literary "borrowings" in a new light, calling Shelley's artistic deficiencies needs to be not so attention to the skeletons buried at the site where much discredited-as Anne Mellor forcefully a young author's purported improprieties are argues that it should be-as subjected to re- paraded. If, for example, as Rieger alleges, the newed scrutiny. For if one questions the myth 1831 text of Frankenstein "virtually plagiarizes of masculine self-possession that bolsters Rie- the diction, ideas, and symbolism of Shelley's ger's allegations, one might further question 'Mont Blanc"' (xxiii), Mary's exposure can illu- recovery efforts like Mellor's--efforts built on minate Percy's own illicit dabblings, earlier in the desire to claim this plenitude for women. In his life, in Matthew Lewis's "Tales of Terror": fact, in insisting on the need to "distinguish the plagiarism discovered in Original Poetry. Mary Shelley's language from her husband's" Cameron, who discusses this plagiarism in ex- and meticulously quantifying and categorizing tended notes, points out that Percy immediately Percy's revisions, Mellor aligns her project with attributed it to "the imposition, practiced upon Rieger's; for although she reverses Rieger's lit-

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erary judgments, she shares his fundamental reactivates the novel's uneasy grapplings with assumptions about "unique genius" and the figuration. author's stabilizing and authenticating signa- Read in the light of the novel's represen- ture.12 Committed to a view of writing as uni- tational extravaganza, the artistic "flaws" of the tary, coherent, and self-sufficient (writing as novel become even more revealing. The stilted, "single-handed" production [38]), Mellor's ornate prose style, for example, which Mellor work, as much as Rieger's, sustains authorship attributes primarily to Percy Shelley's med- as an exclusive institution-one whose configu- dling,14 can be seen to point up the novel's rations best serve male members. "mannered" literalizations: its manipulation of This vision of authorship as self-contained its subject. As Nancy Vickers points out, in and self-continuous-as a coherent extension of mannerist art "it is the mark of the hand of the the self into an extracorporeal existence-turns artist rather than the mimetic representation of out to be Frankenstein's informing fiction. But the model that is structured to command atten- as the novel dramatically illustrates, such a tion." But in Frankenstein that "hand" is neither vision cannot be sustained without considerable single nor self-identical; moreover, read as a contradiction. This contradiction, predicated on work of mannerist virtuosity, the novel both the simultaneous avowal and disavowal of differ- exposes and upsets the "very vocabulary of ence-between the literal and figurative, the heterosexual hierarchies" on which mannerism unique and reproducible, and the bodily and depends. According to Vickers, the "sexual/aes- textual-marks the productions of masculinity thetic pleasure" that "unites male artist, male as fetishistic. And it is precisely this fetishistic patron, and male viewer" in mannerist produc- structure that Frankenstein both illuminates and tion requires "the discomfort of its female sub- experiments with, in its intertextual networks as ject" ("Mistress" 37, 36).15 In Frankenstein, well as in its intratextual thematics.13 In this however, where the female subject drops out of context, the question of how much Percy Shelley sight, the discomfort accrues to the masculine actually wrote remains beside the point. For the collective: the male artist, spectator, and spec- desire to "fix" his contributions to Mary tacle. And as the notorious slipperiness of Shelley's text (whether Rieger's attempt to "con- Frankenstein's signature suggests, the composi- solidate" them or Mellor's to "correct" them) tion of masculinity, at least in the novel, cannot simply installs the critic in the novel's problem- be fixed. atic. Like Frankenstein, the desiring subject must mobilize an elaborate machinery (the tech- Although the novel admittedly "presents not nologies of graphology and advanced stylistics) one but three autobiographies of men," feminist to perpetuate the myth of self-identity-a myth criticism has made a compelling case for reading the novel treats as male fantasy. Frankenstein, against all odds, as "the autobiog- Frankenstein's textual uncertainties can be raphy of a woman" (Johnson 3). Strong feminist seen, then, to restage the problems of its central interpretations have virtually reconstructed the drama: the fantasy of masculine creation outside text to put its gender beyond question, teaching the body. But in the workings of the novel, this readers to privilege the novel's inscription of its fantasy breaks down over the issue of embodi- absent women and to see in the very repression ment-in the vexed relation between the crea- of the feminine the powerful marks of Mary tor's hand and the creature's body, between the Shelley's presence.16 But now, as I have been "work of [Frankenstein's] own hands" and arguing, a feminist critique might best fulfill its Frankenstein's "own hand-writing" (72, 59). projectAs by reversing this direction, reading the the recalcitrance of Frankenstein's hand sug- presence of the novel's self-consciously male gests, the body's parts cannot be buried-even texts to illuminate the absences they cover, to in the institutional enclaves of masculinity. Put- expose the self-contradictions they repress. Ex- ting the hand back into writing, the excavation ceeding the text's self-proclaimed limits, such a of the text, as performed by modern critics, thus reading might even name Frankenstein's dread-

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ful secret: the repression of masculine contra- self illustrates the point: the novel relentlessly diction at the heart of dominant cultural highlights the body of this exemplary man even productions. 17 where other bodies seem to be in question. Thus This attention to the production of masculin- while the novel's most sensational moments- ity has important implications for feminist the in-animation of the monster, the destruction of quiry, especially for studies of Frankenstein, the monster's a "bride," the discovery of Eliza- novel structured around this central allegory beth's (the death-point to specular objects other making of a man). Such critical rethinking de- than Frankenstein, the narrative witnesses these mands, among other things, a renewed attention dramatic passages on Frankenstein's body and to the historical specificity of the construction of replays them in his broken utterances. In the masculinity and a recognition that masculinity, account of the monster's composition, for exam- as much as femininity, is created by cultural ple, Frankenstein decomposes himself; anticipat- negotiations and contestations. It insists that ing his inventory of the creature's parts, he brokenness has no necessary or exclusive con- deanimates and divides-and thus opens to nection to the feminine-witness Frankenstein's view-his own body, now seen as an object self-exhibition as "a miserable spectacle of made up of component parts: "my eyeballs were wrecked humanity." And it brings to light the starting from their sockets" (50); "my voice constitution and distribution of the male body became broken, my trembling hands almost in the making of cultural identity. Recontextu- refused to accomplish their task; I became as alizing the cultural production of femininity, it timid as a love-sick girl" (51, autograph vari- suggests the way versions of the feminine reflect ant).19 Frankenstein's transgression thus associ- and illuminate a fractured masculinity.18 ates him with the "feminine" scandal of But the Frankenstein that emerges from such discontinuous, bodily materiality, a gendered a redirected scrutiny is an entirely different position imprinted in the parodic catalog of the creature from that produced by traditional monster's "beauties": scholarship and new feminist autobiography. For insofar as Frankenstein's male bodies have Beautiful! -Great God! His yellow skin scarcely claimed critical attention, criticism has resorted covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; to one of two strategies, reading the bodily his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his markings as the secret code for covert female teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances presence or marginalizing them as signs of only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery effeminacy. Either way, the male body drops out eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the of sight, consigned to a condition of aberrancy. dun white sockets in which they were set, his But the approach I have been proposing would shrivelled complexion, . . straight black lips. make it possible to read Frankenstein's self-dis- (52) play in and as the writing of his body-a project foreclosed by a criticism that aligns the body Normative readings of this scene, focusing on its exclusively with women. And it would permit horrific aspects, disguise its participation in the the novel's critical operation to be seen as Petrarchan convention of (female) dismember- something more than the solitary production ment:of in the representation of the loved one as an aberrant masculinity. For if Frankenstein's a composite of details, a collection of parts. But insistent articulation of the male body would Mary Shelley's deployment of this technique at seem to challenge the pieties of masculinity, it this climactic narrative intersection suggests its may be the common understanding of mascu- "natural" function in the construction of an linity that requires reconsideration and not idealized masculine image-a position rein- Frankenstein's position in it. forced by her later citations of Petrarch's sonnets Indeed, the text of Frankenstein that criticism (with gender pronouns reversed) in her bio- has sublimated reveals that male spectacle is an graphical tributes to her husband ("Preface" integral part of masculinity. Frankenstein him- xlix-lvii). Inverting the traditional blazon

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(whose gender specificity has been powerfully body-participates in a culturally specific re- articulated by Nancy Vickers and, more re- configuration of the problems of masculine ide- cently, by Patricia Parker, esp. 126-54), alization. In the chain of idealized male figures Frankenstein's creation scene thus doubly per- that inhabit the novel, the monster represents forms its male anatomy, on the body of the only the most evident distortion. creature and on the body of the creator. From this perspective, it is easier to under- If, then, the question of how to "compose a stand why, in the novel's monstrous logic of female" (147) becomes the one on which both reciprocity, the termination of Frankenstein's Frankenstein and the novel stall, the novel effort to conceive and execute a female creature insists nonetheless on the discomposure of mas- produces as its first embodiment not the much culinity, on the troubled and troubling repre- noted and symmetrically satisfying exchange of sentation of the male body. Thus even when the corpses-a bride for a bride-but the discon- monster is not corporeally present, the memory certing self-image of male disfigurement: the of its animation disturbs Frankenstein's equilib- shattered corpse of Clerval. For the novel turns rium. Possessed by an "excess of sensitiveness" on male mirrors, and the male body remains the and activated by Clerval's gaze, Frankenstein's privileged site of inscription. Whereas the mur- body becomes a notable site of hysterical self- der of Elizabeth prompts Frankenstein to pur- display. For in Clerval's presence, Frankenstein poseful, if frenzied, action, the sight of the finds that he cannot "contain" himself-that he prostrate man ("I saw the lifeless form of Henry cannot be stilled: "I was unable to remain for a Clerval stretched before me" [173]) stops single instant in the same place; I jumped over Frankenstein completely: "The human frame the chairs, clapped my hands, and laughed could no longer support the agonizing suffering aloud" (56). A kind of divertissement-a danse that I endured, and I was carried out of the room macabre that induces a dead faint-this morti- in strong convulsions" (174). Even recalling the fying performance earns Frankenstein the mon- "anguish of the recognition" (173) subjects his ster's specular place, turning Clerval's gaze from body to disintegration, and he recovers himself the signs of the absent creature to the creator's -in the narrated events and in the narration now "lifeless" body. After restoring Franken- only to reenact this male spectacle, to find stein to life and nursing him back to health, himself figuratively as well as literally "stretched Clerval asks only that he "not discompose [him- on a wretched bed, surrounded by . . . all the self]" (58). miserable apparatus of a dungeon" (174). Even here, however, Frankenstein's aberrant Frankenstein thus lives to prove on his body his behavior exists within the normative construc- "unnatural" elasticity, to exhibit in his pro- tion of masculinity. For the dispersal of the male longed self-reckoning "the hideous phantasm of body that this scene strikingly demonstrates a man stretched out."21 conforms to a construction of the body famil- In the scenes of horror cataloged in the iarly produced in eighteenth-century medical narrative, Frankenstein thus remains the prime discourse: hypochondria, or male hysteria. Em- representational stage-experiencing in himself bodying a condition so prevalent as to be dubbed all the wrackings of the body and the tortures "The English Malady," Frankenstein betrays all of the unsolicited gaze, displaying an imagina- the textbook signs of susceptibility: refinement tion acutely sensitized to the martyr's fate, of intellect, extraordinary "understanding" or claiming, at the last, preeminence in suffering: "imagination," solitary study, single-minded "no creature had ever been so miserable as I was; fixation, cloistered nocturnal reflection.20 In fact, so frightful an event is single in the history of distributed across the male body, hysteria was man" (195). Even Elizabeth's death (the horror frequently read, in the years before Frankenstein most insistently gender-marked) is anticipated appeared, as a sign of privilege and superiority. on Frankenstein's frame, first in his premonitory Thus, Frankenstein's engagement in male spec- imaginings and then in his act of narration. For tacle-in the production of a grotesque male in Frankenstein's distorted view of history, man

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is single in his capacity for feeling and suffering. the story's horror is dramatized in the experi- Frankenstein's maddening inability to compre- ences of men, in the exchange of sensations hend, for example, the obvious meaning of the between male bodies. Thus when Walton testi- monster's claim "I shall be with you on your fies, in his appeal to his sister, to his own somatic wedding-night" suggests an imagination exclu- sensations of horror ("do you not feel your sively bound to male theatricals, an imagination blood congealed with horror, like that which in which the man always occupies center stage. even now curdles mine?" [206-07]), his repre- Imagining his own death at the monster's hands, sentational practices bear the imprint of Frankenstein enjoys both positions of the specu- Frankenstein's body. While the absence of sig- lar exchange: spectator and spectacle. Elizabeth nature leaves the reception of Walton's "tale functions merely to facilitate this self-display; as of horrors" uncertain, his testimonial seals the ostensible object of Frankenstein's interest, Frankenstein's narrative exchange. The blood- she preserves the place of his gaze, permitting curdling secret withheld from Elizabeth-"I the thought of his own absent body to excite his have one secret, Elizabeth, a dreadful one; when sympathy: "when I thought of my beloved Eliza- revealed to you, it will chill your frame with beth, of her tears and endless sorrow, when horror" (187)-finds its destination in Walton's she should find her lover so barbarously frame; the "tale of misery and terror" Franken- snatched from her,-tears, the first I had shed stein promises to confide to Elizabeth "the day for many months, streamed from my eyes ..." after [their] marriage shall take place" passes (166). Similarly, when Frankenstein records the instead to Walton's pen in an act that stands as actual murder scene, he registers Elizabeth's the thrilling consummation of confidential vows death throes first on his own body: "my arms between men. dropped, the motion of every muscle and fibre Excluded from the sensations of horror, Eliza- was suspended; I could feel the blood trickling beth is simultaneously excluded from the field of in my veins, and tingling in the extremities of pleasure the novel fantasizes. And Walton's my limbs."22 Moreover, the scream that signals narrative, for all its assertions of fraternal devo- the monster's offstage consummation of his deed tion, promises to reinscribe this exclusionary proceeds ambiguously from either Elizabeth's or logic. Relinquishing the reciprocity of letter Frankenstein's mouth: "the scream was re- writing for the journal's narcissistic investments, peated, and I rushed into the room" (193). Walton readily accommodates his sister to a Expressly arranged for Frankenstein's scopic functional position-the pretext for his plea- regime, the haunting sight of Elizabeth's "lifeless sure. The question of woman's pleasure, in fact, and inanimate" body ("Every where I turn I enters Walton's text at precisely the moment it see the same figure-her bloodless arms and is precluded by the union of male bodies, the relaxed form flung by the murderer on its bridal moment when Walton becomes Frankenstein's bier" [193]) consequently appears doubly as an amanuensis: afterimage. Frankenstein's text thus displays the drama of I have resolved every night, when I am not engaged, what D. A. Miller calls the "sensationalized to record, as nearly as possible in his own words, body"-a body culturally coded as feminine, what he has related during the day. . . . This particularly in the later nineteenth century, but manuscript will doubtless afford you the greatest subject to discursive appropriation in the mas- pleasure: but to me, who know him, and who hear culine domain. Such a body renders visible the it from his own lips, with what interest and sympa- culture's sexual codes and mechanisms of iden- thy shall I read it in some future day! (25) tification-mechanisms that would seem to pro- vide little space for women. For even if, as For Walton-who lacks the signature of self- Walton's framing suggests, the ultimate recipient identity, who signs himself differently in each of "this strange and terrific story" is female (the recorded instance-the text becomes the un- reader embodied in Walton's sister, Margaret), natural extension of Frankenstein's hand writ-

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ing. Writing to and from Frankenstein's body, bodies, one might question the conventionality Walton declares his work the paradigmatic auto- of Mary Shelley's position behind the scenes- biography: a vehicle for anticipating and repli- a position from which the female spectator, cating male self-bonding. It is perhaps not unobserved, can illuminate and mobilize the surprising, then, that in the copy of the text skeletal structure of masculinity. In such a presented to Mrs. Thomas, Mary Shelley under- model, then, the representation of women is not lines the word pleasure and adds a marginal without its interest, but that interest may lie less note, "impossible," for here especially pleasure in the construction of woman as a self-empow- is proscribed by sexual difference. ering agency than in the understanding of the If, however, such a reading seems to repeat woman's position in the arrangement of male the novel's marginalization of the feminine, exhibitions, in the staging of male spectacle. For leaving women readers no unappropriated space the woman silenced at the margins of the male for gender-specific identification, it does not for imagination can do more than demonstrate mas- that reason foreclose the possibility of other sites culine preeminence. Like the figure of Mary of pleasure--the pleasure, for example, reserved Shelley produced in the reconstruction of her for the spectator of such male spectacles. For in story's origins (the 1831 introduction) or the its turn on the fetishistic mechanism, Franken- sacrificial figures cast up in her novel, the woman stein records the pleasure of seeing what is at the extremities can point to the fractures in prohibited in relation to the broken male body. the unified male image: the excesses and deficien- While within the novel's theater of repre- cies that disturb the surface of masculinity. sentation the spectator continues to inhabit the From such a position she can carve out a space male body, his spectatorial pleasure is construed for reading differently, opening to view the as a form of mortification. But this repre- inevitable gap between image and ideal that sentation leaves open to investigation the way structures male self-presentations, that renders the performance of masculinity solicits and en- male literature-and literary criticism-auto- gages a reader outside the frame-a reader biographical confession. whose response is not preenacted. For the If the novel's performance of gender, then, woman reader, for example, seeking a site for can solicit readers differently, I would like, by feminist intervention, the novel's male theatri- way of conclusion, to pursue one of the text's un- cals register differently on the body. For what acted configurations. When Walton introduces they reveal is not the exhibition of masculine Frankenstein into his narrative, it is as someone difference-the plenitude of phallic power and who "make[s] a figure in a letter" (16); at the possession-but the emptying out of the mas- same time, Walton retreats from the space of culine center. The novel can thus be read as masochism opened up by his investment in this putting into question the singular authority (male) of spectacle, from the figural possibilities masculinity and, with it, the fixity of sexual invoked by an object that excites in him the most positions and the determinateness of gender "painful interest." "Will you laugh," he entreats privileges. his sister, "at the enthusiasm I express concern- In its fixation on masculine spectacle, then, ing this divine wanderer? If you do, you must Frankenstein unsettles the positions of the specu- have certainly lost that simplicity which was lar relationship, but the corollary to this gender once your characteristic charm" (24). A perfor- transposition is the space opened up to the mative utterance, this speech would preempt the possibilities of female spectatorship. And this response Walton fears by raising the specter of perspective invites a reconsideration of the way female monstrosity-the loss of the charac- Mary Shelley represents herself in the scene of teristic charm of femininity. For the uncharming original creation: the "devout but nearly silent woman, simultaneously produced by and pro- listener" to male literary and scientific specula- ducing masculine instability, spells the end of tions (Frankenstein 227). For in view of Franken- representational transparency. She suggests the stein's exposure of masculine discourses and precarious grounds on which the male escapes

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the position of spectacle. The male body, it 5Margaret Homans observes that the monster's "very would seem, can be protected from disarming bodiliness, its identification with matter, associates it with traditional concepts of femaleness." But in analyzing this scrutiny only if, as in Weekes's memorial to view of the romantic imagination, she exposes its misogynis- Shelley, it is propped by the image of feminine tic and narcissistic underpinnings: its desire "to do away, not propriety: the figure of woman that, confirming only with the mother, but also with all females so as to live the text's iconographic meaning, allows us to see finally in a world of mirrors that reflect a comforting illusion and not to see the component parts of mascu- of the male self's independent wholeness" (106). My argu- ment interrogates such illusions of masculine wholeness from linity. But if, as Walton intimates, we refuse the the opposite direction-through the implications of bodili- position allocated for woman, the laugh of the ness and materiality as male attributes. Medusa will echo in our reading. In Franken- 6For a discussion of Frankenstein's male spectacle (focused stein, this laughter might produce a new mythol- on the inscription of Rousseau in Mary Shelley's writings), ogy, focusing not on the spectacle of female see David Marshall. Marshall's discussion of the theatricali- monstrosity but on the extravagant fantasies of zation of suffering within eighteenth-century fiction and aesthetics demonstrates the extent to which men dominate a deficient masculinity. Reading Frankenstein's both positions of the specular exchange. spectacle of masculinity, we might turn the 7From the first, this figure-variously named Ygor, Fritz, Medusa story on its head; for in the version I and Dr. Praetorius-has been a staple of stage and screen am constructing, the laugh of the Medusa would adaptations of the novel. See Lavallay. animate the novel's lifeless male bodies to reveal 8Rieger here refers to his practice of interpolating the autograph variants from the Thomas copy into the text the conditions of their articulation. rather than relegating them to footnotes or an appendix. 9Jacobus's essay-which forcefully interrogates the text's modus operandi, its participation in a structure that inevitably sacrifices the woman-opens the way for such a discussion, shifting the potential direction for feminist inquiry to the problematic representation of masculine "theory." Notes 10Sunstein notes a similar conventional pose in Mary Shelley's anxieties about a proper biography of Percy: "She

1Moers's now classic discussion of Frankenstein, first was frightened that a biography would drag her, a lone woman who wished only to be obscure and 'insignificant,' published in 1976, inaugurated a tradition of feminist readings of Mary Shelley. For other significant contributions, see before the public. 'This is weakness-but I cannot help it- Gilbert and Gubar, Ellis, Knoepflmacher, and Poovey. to be in print-the subject of men's observations . . . 2Indeed, as has been frequently noted, Mary gives attacked and defended!"' (297). For further discussion of the Frankenstein Percy's pseudonym, Victor. Scott, Small, and contradictions built into such gendering of spectacle, see Carson. Veeder each discuss this biographical connection. Veeder is especially interesting, for while he invokes "old charges lWhite even indexes Ford's monument this way: "Ford, against Percy" in order "to direct the reader to what Mary Onslow, his recumbent statue of Shelley at University Col- is pointing at" (6,7), he continues to invest in the woman as lege" (2: xxviii). Jane Shelley, as the prime collector of spectacle: "Ultimately what I hope to give is a sense of the Shelleyana, some of which was donated to Oxford along with drama of Mary Shelley, the special splendor of a woman who the Ford statue, stands as a perpetrator of both the poet's could, without exaggeration, call her life 'romantic beyond feminization and his sentimentalization. romance' . . . and could write one of the influential novels 12Although Mellor shares Rieger's faith in textual purity, in our language" (3). her "pure" text would eliminate the traces of Percy Shelley: 3In this context, The Funeral can also be seen to gloss "Perhaps the someday an editor will give us the manuscript Mary novel, representing its (unrepresented) final sequence: Shelleythe actually wrote, cleansed of such elaborations ..." monster's self-immolation. (62). For her extended treatment of Frankenstein's textual 4This configuration also illuminates the novel's memorial controversy, see especially 52-69. imagery, where the portrait of Frankenstein's mother ("an 13For other discussions of Frankenstein's representation of historical subject, painted at my father's desire," representing textuality, see in particular Cottom, Favret, Hodges, and "Caroline Beaufort in an agony of despair, kneeling by theMclnerney. coffin of her dead father" [73]), placed above a miniature 14"Heof typically changed her simple, Anglo-Saxon diction William (whose death is forcibly linked to a miniature of and straightforward or colloquial sentence structures into Caroline), is the first object to meet the eye of the newly their more refined, complex, and Latinate equivalents. He is bereaved Frankenstein. By means of a contorted female thus in large part responsible for the stilted, ornate, puta- subject, these images thus link male desire to the repre- tively Ciceronian prose style about which many readers have sentation of the lifeless male body. complained" (Mellor 59-60).

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l5Vickers's study of Cellini's Nymph of Fontainebleau condition: "Specifically, hypochondria is seen to be visited concludes, "The very vocabulary of heterosexual hierarchies upon those for whom refinement, study, or 'imagination' that unites male artist, male patron, and male viewer, then, involves solitude or retreat, the meditation which excludes in sexual/aesthetic pleasure articulates, as its corollary, the all but the subjects of its fixation, the 'lucubration' which discomfort of its female subject" ("Mistress" 36). Franken- implies cloistered nocturnal reflection and the writing which stein offers an interesting turn on this pattern by putting the comes out of it" (210-11). male body on display-laid out with its limbs extended, 21See, for example, Frankenstein's complaint on his sur- contorted, dispersed, opened to view. vival of Clerval's murder: "Of what materials was I made, 16This view of the novel's gender is generally shared even that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the by feminist critics who do not explicitly engage a theory of turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture" (174). female autobiography. Veeder, somewhat reductively, ques- Freed from literal imprisonment, Frankenstein re-creates the tions this tendency: "Feminist readings can, however, go too dungeon in his own psyche, in a world circumscribed by the far.... Mother can achieve such prominence that father is inextinguishable figures of interchangeable men: "and al- cast into shadow" (125). though the sun shone upon me, as upon the happy and gay 17This interpretation of Frankenstein's secret is an inver- of heart, I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful sion of Johnson's paradigm: "It is thus indeed perhaps the darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes very hiddenness of the question of femininity in Frankenstein that glared upon me. Sometimes they were the expressive that somehow proclaims the painful message not of female eyes of Henry, languishing in death . . . sometimes it was monstrousness but of female contradictions. For it is the fact the watery clouded eyes of the monster, as I first saw them of self-contradiction that is so vigorously repressed in in my chamber at Ingolstadt" (179-80). In most stage and women" (9). Sedgwick sees Frankenstein's "tableau of two film versions of the novel, Frankenstein is called not Victor men chasing one another across a landscape" as emblematic but Henry (Clerval's given name), a substitution that may of what she calls "The Age of Frankenstein." Sedgwick suggest another novelistically motivated slippage in mascu- argues that it is "importantly undecidable in this tableau, as line identity. in many others like it in Gothic novels, whether the two men 22Veeder, the critic perhaps most concerned with Franken- represent two consciousnesses or only one; and it is impor- stein's explorations of masculinity, reads these signs as tantly undecidable whether this bond . . . is murderous or emblematic of Victor's impotence and effeminacy (122); such amorous." For her, texts like Frankenstein crystallize "this a reading, however, relegates these signs to psychological paranoid, i.e. specifically homophobic, tableau": "What I abnormality, foreclosing what might be a more complex have argued most distinctively and rhetorically marks The exploration of the contradictions that structure the articula- Age of Frankenstein is the absolute omnipresence of this tion of "normal" masculinity. homophobic, paranoid tableau, in the absence of a widely- available sense of a possible homosexual role or culture, and in the absence of any felt specificity of male homosexual desire in the culture at large" (ix-x). This analysis of homophobia, Works Cited however, has not received sustained attention in the Franken- stein scholarship. A reading that emphasizes masculine Cameron, Kenneth Neill. The Young Shelley. Genesis of a contradiction in the novel might link the hysteria- and Radical. New York: Macmillan, 1950. paranoia-oriented perspectives Sedgwick distinguishes as Carson, James P. "Bringing the Author Forward: Franken- "feminocentric" and "masculocentric." stein through Mary Shelley's Letters." Criticism 30 18In my thinking on male subjectivity, I have benefited (1988): 431-53. from the ongoing theoretical work of Kaja Silverman (in Cottom, Daniel. "Frankenstein and the Monster of Repre- particular, "Fassbinder and Lacan"). Until recently, discus- sentation." Substance 28 (1980): 60-71. sions of masculinity and spectacle have been most vigorously Ellis, Kate. "Monsters in the Garden: Mary Shelley and the pursued in film studies; see, for example, Neale. Bourgeois Family." Levine and Knoepflmacher 123-42. 19Devon Hodges makes an analogous point: "On viewing Favret, Mary A. "The Letters of Frankenstein." Genre 20 the animated creature, Frankenstein becomes 'discomposed' (1987): 3-24. and his disrupted state appears in the language of the Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. "Horror's Twin: passages following his act of creation: 'I started from my Mary Shelley's Monstrous Eve." The Madwoman in the sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth Attic. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. 213-47. chattered, and every limb became convulsed . . ."' (159). Hodges, Devon. "Frankenstein and the Feminine Subversion Hodges reads Frankenstein's thematic and stylistic refusal of of the Novel." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 2 coherence as emblematic of "the feminine subversion of the (1983): 155-64. novel." Homans, Margaret. Bearing the Word: Language and Female 20John Mullan offers a valuable discussion of male hysteria Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing. in his chapter "Hypochondria and Hysteria: Sensibility and Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. the Physicians" (201-40). Frankenstein would seem to meet Jacobus, Mary. "Is There a Woman in This Text?" New all the conditions Mullan summarizes as activating the Literary History 14 (1982): 117-1. Rpt. in Reading

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