The Malignant Intimacy: Doubles, Atheists, and Orphans in Frankenstein Unbound by Stuart Clarry III A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida August 1997 © Copyright by Stuart Clarry III 1997 ll The Malignant Intimacy: Doubles, Atheists, and Orphans in Frankenstein Unbound by Stuart Clarry III This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. Robert A. Collins, Department of English, and has been approved by the members of his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. SUPERVISORY COMMITIEE: ~=·=·=--...:,:---- J> '"'-;k? R- ll~ Gu,«c_)LG ~k ~~ Chairperson, Department of English ~ean, TheA Schmidt~ College of Arts and Humanities ~ -J 3- 97 D Date 1ll Acknowledgments Although my name is on the cover of this thesis, it would have been virtually impossible to complete without the encouragement and support of several people. I would like to extend my appreciation to Stacy Acker, Jennifer Brachfeld, and the rest of the lunch crowd for allowing me to bounce ideas around and helping me create some kind of organizational plan. Many thanks to Dr. Howard Pearce for helping me organize these ideas and plans into something coherent. Thanks also to Traci Klass for always being that breath of fresh air in the doorway. Finally, heartfelt thanks go out to my Thesis Committee: Dr. Robert Collins, Dr. Carol McGuirk, and Dr. David Anderson, who patiently and faithfully guided me through this proJect. Special thanks are due for three individuals, without whom this project would never have come to fruition. Monica Lewman has been a constant source of vital energy and encouragement; she made me believe that this could be done. Dr. Robert Collins provided critical guidance and support, from the genesis of my ideas through the completed manuscript. He also has the patience of Job! And finally, none of this would have been possible without my Mother's love and encouragement, and her unfaltering belief in my abilities (even when I wasn't sure). Thank you all! IV ABSTRACT Author: Stuart Clarry Title: The Malignant Intimacy: Doubles, Atheists, and Orphans in Frankenstein Unbound Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Robert A. Collins Degree: Master of Arts Year: 1997 Brian Aldiss's Frankenstein Unbound is both a tribute to and exegesis of Mary Shelley's novel. The central figure, Joseph Bodenland, the 'everyman' of modern technological society, emerges as a composite of Victor Frankenstein and the Creature; he is the pivotal character through whom Aldiss revises and reinterprets Shelley's themes. Bodenland's role as a double reveals how Aldiss has updated Shelley's biographically inspired atheism and psychological orphanhood. As an atheist, Bodenland symbolizes technology and modern society's increasing separation from faith and God. Bodenland's sense of orphanhood suggests humanity's separation from the natural world, and by extension, the loss of individual identity in a technological, scientific world. Bodenland's status as the last man on Earth symbolizes Aldiss's concern that modern society has not been responsible for its acnons. v To My Mother, and in Memory of My Grandparents TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction . 1 Chapter One: Dualism and Doubles I. Doubling and the Gothic Tradition .......................... ll II. Victor, the Creature, and the Dualistic Nature of Frankenstein ... ... 15 III. The Double in Frankenstein Unbound ... ....... .... ..... ... 18 Chapter Two: Frankenstein, God of Technology I. Shelley's New Man ............... ................... ... 31 II. Atheism and the God ofTechnology ....................... .. 34 Chapter Three: The Orphaned Culture I. From the Orphaned Child to the Orphaned Nation ........... .. 37 II. Joe Bodenland: Aldiss's "Last Man" ......................... 41 Conclusion . 45 Notes . ... .... ............ .. ....................... .. ..... 50 Works Cited ............ .. ..................................... 52 Vl LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS H . Fuseli- The Nightmare . ..... ....... ...... ... ... ... .. 15 Poster Art for Roger Connan)s Frankenstein Unbound . .... ... .. .. ... .... 46 Vll Introduction Like figures in a dream, all the people in Frankenstein have different bodies, and somehow, horribly, the same face, or worse--the same two faces. (Gilbert) A the time of its publication in 1973, Brian Aldiss's Billion Year Spree represented the most complete history of science fiction. Aldiss argues that the genre of science fiction began with Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. Although Aldiss's contention that Shelley wrote the first science fiction novel (and possibly the second in The Last Man) was controversial, he reaffirmed this position in Trillion Year Spree (1986), a revised edition. Since the publication of Billion Year Spree, Frankenstein has received increasing critical attention. Aldiss must be given credit for recognizing a novel that has since become central in the feminist and mainstream canons. Aldiss was so taken with Mary Shelley and her dark novel that upon completing Billion Year Spree he wrote Frankenstein Unbound, a contemporary retelling of the original novel. Of his novel, Aldiss writes that it was "designed to draw attention to its great original" (Trillion 18) and was "an act of homage to and exegesis of a novel that I regard as one of the very few rare masterworks of science fiction" (Griffin and Wingrove 162). 1 Frankenstein Unbound explores two central 1 themes in Shelley's novel: "man's confrontation with himself, . .. [and] the disintegration of society which follows man's arrogation of power'' (Billion 2 7) . Yet Frankenstein Unbound is much more than a mere extension of Frankenstein. David Wingrove argues that Frankenstein Unbound "imposes a Modernist framework upon the original gothic foundations to create something distinct from and yet immediately related to the original" (Griffm and Wingrove 163). Citing Ezra Pound's five forms of criticism, 2 Wingrove declares that Frankenstein Unbound is an example of"criticism by new composition"; Aldiss "was not attempting simply to rewrite the original without its flaws, but to reinterpret it from our modern perspective" (163). Aldiss updates Frankenstein) showing its relevance to contemporary culture. He abandons Shelley's gothic and religious trappings in favor of addressing issues such as the world wars, the cold war, and racial extermination. Richard Mathews also notes modernist features in Aldiss's novel, recognizing, for example, Aldiss's fascination with temporal breakdowns: In Probability A, we learned that artists of the nineteenth century felt trapped in time; the twentieth century artist feels time slipping beneath him. Bounded by future shock and historical awareness of an unprecedented order, the literary artist [i.e., Brian Aldiss], particularly one influenced by T.S. Eliot's belief in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," finds that present-tense work is constantly subject to slips into the past and future .... In this novel, Bodenland experiences a shock of recognition which seems similar to what Aldiss must have felt when he recognized Mary Shelley's influence in his own work: "I felt myself in the presence of myth, and by association, accepted myself as mythical!" (51) 2 Relying on Eliot's modernist ideology, Mathews concludes that myths achieve an existence beyond time. Hence the novel's protagonist, Joe Bodenland, and the creature have the same mythic reality as the Shelleys. In the novel, Bodenland supports this idea of mythic transcendence when he reflects that "One thing you see I had already accepted. I had accepted the equal reality of Mary Shelley and her creation, Victor Frankenstein, just as I had accepted the equal reality of Victor and his monster. In my position, there was no difficulty in so doing, for they accepted my reality, and I was as much a mythical creature in their world as they would have been in mine" (Frankenstein Unbound 89). For Joe Bodenland, reality is fleeting; with each successive timeslip, his physical and mental grounding becomes more tenuous. Aldiss invokes Derrida's philosophy that everything is a text, from Victor's fictive existence, to Shelley's mythic existence, to Bodenland's quickly fading eXIstence. Frankenstein Unbound runs the risk of deconstructing itself out of eXIstence. Additionally, reality's breakdown and the merging of fact and fiction in Aldiss's novel forces the reader to address a disturbing question: is Joseph Bodenland merely a fictional character in a story or has his fictive existence granted him a timeless "mythic reality'' as real as Mary Shelley's historical identity? Extending this question, does Bodenland's mythic reality threaten our own reality-are we alive or merely fictional characters in yet another layered text? This thesis will attempt to assess Bodenland's role as a mythic figure and determine his 3 purpose in the novel. Other critics have considered Frankenstein Unbound's central protagonist, Joseph Bodenland. Much of the discussion on the novel revolves around the presence of this "new" character. Wingrove, approaching the novel from a modernist viewpoint, attempts to illustrate how Aldiss's post-Freudian characters are representative of the superego (Victor), the ego (Bodenland),