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2013-08-27 From Prometheus to Presumption: Frankenstein's Theatrical Doppelgänger

Reid, Brittany Lee Alexandra

Reid, B. L. (2013). From Prometheus to Presumption: Frankenstein's Theatrical Doppelgänger (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26236 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/894 master thesis

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From Prometheus to Presumption:

Frankenstein’s Theatrical Doppelgänger

Brittany Reid

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

AUGUST, 2013

Abstract

This thesis examines the Doppelgänger relationship between Victor Frankenstein and the

Creature, as it is characterized through both Frankenstein and its first theatrical adaptation. With a specific focus on Richard Brinsley Peake’s 1823 gothic melodrama, Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein I unpack how the novel’s cross-medium adaptation leads to a changed conception of the relationship of its central characters. In Frankenstein, Victor is the focal figure and acts as the Creature’s dominant counterpart. However, the characters’ cross-medium adaptation from page to stage inverts this Doppelgänger relationship from Shelley’s initial conception in the novel. Consequently, the Creature is privileged as the drama’s focal figure while Victor is rendered both secondary and subservient. By contextualizing both texts within their formal, generic, critical, and cultural milieus, this study explores the implications of this significant role reversal to the Frankenstein myth.

iii

Acknowledgements

1. My supervisor, Dr. Anne McWhir, and my committee members: Dr. Susan Bennett

and Dr. Barry Yzereef.

2. The Government of Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Council for providing me with generous grant support to complete this study.

3. My professors and fellow students in the Department of English and the Department

of Drama at the University of Calgary.

In loving dedication to my own fated doubles:

My family, my best love, my friends, my mentors, and my passions

Table of Contents

Abstract …………………………………………………………...……………………………p. ii

Acknowledgments ………………….…………………………………………………..…….. p. iii

Dedication ………………………….……………………………………………..……p. iv

Table of Contents …………………….……………………………………….……...... p. v

List of Illustrations …………….……………………………………………………………....p. vi

Introduction: Frankenstein, At the Double………………...…..…………………………………..1

Chapter 1: Frankenstein’s Doppelgänger: A Study in Fiction …………………………………..15

Fated Counterparts………………………………..….…………………………………...22

Twin Descents…………………………………………………………………………....38

Chapter 2: Presumption’s Doppelgänger: A Study in Theatre………………………………….. 57

Starring “The Creature” as “______” ……………………………………..……………62

Also Featuring Victor Frankenstein as “?”……………………………………………… 75

Playing the Part: Theatrical Case Study Analysis ……………………………………….91

A Final Curtain Call: Concluding Remarks………………………………..………………… 103

Works Cited and Consulted ………….…………………………………………………………106

List of Illustrations

1. Plate 6 from William Blake’s Jerusalem……………………………………...…...……..6

2. Frontispiece to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by Theodor von Holst ……………….10

3. A poster from Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein………………….…………..10

4. Frontispiece to the 1831 edition…………………..…………………….……………… 19

5. Detail of Constantin Hansen’s Prometheus Creating Man in Clay (1845) ...……...……25

6. Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818)……...………………43

7. Poster from Presumption’s 1826 remount…………………...………………...……...…67

8. Mr. T. P. Cooke……………………………………………….…………………………72

9. James William Wallack in Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823) ……..…87

10. Mr. James William Wallack …………………………………………………………….90

11. Cover of Dicks’ Standard Edition of Presumption (1865) …………………..………….93

12. Image from Beraud and Merle’s Le Monstre et le magicien (1826)…………………… 96

13. Another image from Beraud and Merle’s Le Monstre et le magicien (1826)…………...97

Introduction: Frankenstein, At the Double

In the nearly two hundred years since Frankenstein’s 1818 publication, the novel’s many doubles and dualities have become integral to its literary legacy. In addition to the character pairings, frame narratives, allegorical implications, and significant uses of intertextuality within the novel, these mirrorings, doublings, echoes, and multiple meanings go beyond the pages of

Mary Shelley’s classic text by reaching into its critical and cultural heritages. For example,

Frankenstein has been adapted innumerable times for stage, screen, or page, creating an artistic dual legacy for this Romantic text. As well, discussion continues as to whether the 1818 original version or 1831 revision should be considered the novel’s definitive edition, permitting the story two distinct yet interconnected literary identities. Continuing in recent years, Charles E.

Robinson’s illuminated edition of Frankenstein in 2008, entitled The Original Frankenstein, credits Percy Bysshe Shelley as the novel’s co-author and renews discussion about collaborative literary composition in the nineteenth century.

In “The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein,” George Levine describes the significance of these mirrorings and multiplicities in Frankenstein: “Such doublings and triplings, with reverberations in and out of the novel in Mary Shelley’s own life and in modern psychological theory, suggest again the instability and ambivalence of the book’s ‘meanings’” (15). Through the interplay between its many textual, critical, and cultural doubles, Frankenstein offers limitless new readings and allows for continued engagement with this canonical work.

This study participates in the continued re-imagination of Frankenstein’s infamous doubles. For this reason, my study not only addresses Shelley’s novel, but also engages with the broad and long-lived Frankenstein mythology. My research is grounded by a focused consideration of the story’s most significant character doubles: Victor Frankenstein and his 2

Creature.1 From this point of departure, I demonstrate how Victor and the Creature’s innate similarities and intrinsic connection cast them in a Doppelgänger relationship in Frankenstein.

With an inclusive interest in both the novel and its cultural legacy, I then observe how the relationship between Victor and the Creature is changed from its fictional representation in

Frankenstein to the novel’s first theatrical adaptation in 1823: Richard Brinsley Peake’s

Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein. Through these twinned depictions, Victor and the

Creature’s Doppelgänger relationship is again doubled through its fictional and theatrical representation. At once a distinct theatrical creation and a responsorial creative critique,

Presumption itself acts as an uncanny double for Frankenstein and, like the Creature to Victor, maintains a natal link to its source. In this way, the relationship between Victor and the Creature within the Frankenstein mythology is formally reflected in the story’s twinned legacies in fiction and theatre. Consequently, as a cross-medium adaptation of Shelley’s source text, Presumption is yet another of Frankenstein’s many doubles.

Before moving on, a cultural and critical context for the double and Doppelgänger is needed to understand both how these terms apply to Victor and the Creature’s relationship and why they have significant bearing on Frankenstein. The belief in figural doubles has ancient origins. Twins, couples, duplicates, and pairs make frequent appearances in Classical writing and often carry great symbolic significance. In Roman mythology Janus, the god of transitions and new beginnings, is depicted with two faces: one looking back to the past and another ahead to the future. In both Greek and Roman mythology, the eternal link between twin brothers, Castor and

Pollux, led to their immortalization as the Gemini, one of the zodiac constellations. Similarly,

1 For consistency and clarity, I will identify this character throughout my study as “the Creature.” I will also identify the Creature using “him” rather than “it” to better reflect the sense of sameness between him and Victor. 3 throughout the tradition of Judeo-Christianity, pairings such as Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, or

Jacob and Esau are described as mirrored opposites transfigured through familial love.2 Closer than kin, these biblical doubles exemplify the elevated risks and rewards of such innate interpersonal connections by extending beyond the expectations of a typical husband/wife or brother/brother relationship.

Although each depiction is unique, they all contribute to the rich collective mythology of the double. Whether appearing as dual personalities, kindred spirits, or character complements, these early doubles transcend the confines of prototypical human relationships to forge a complex bond with each other. At their most foundational level, these relationships can be attributed to a preternatural sense of “sameness” wherein the two individuals are distinct yet inseparable.

Although they are each autonomous and function individually, the pair is inextricably linked and their symbolic significance is manifested through the ties which bind them.

But although the double relationship often implies a sense of symbiosis and mutual benefit, this is not always the case. Even though Castor and Pollux are immortalized as the

Gemini, they are first separated through Castor’s death. Adam and Eve are thrown out of

Paradise, Cain kills Abel, and Jacob and Esau’s sibling rivalry brings their descendant nations into combat. Since its earliest conceptions, the double presented dangerous potential. In “The

Shadow Within: The Conscious and Unconscious Use of the Double,” Claire Rosenfield describes the double relationship’s dual potential as beneficial or parasitic:

2 For more information on these early doubles see, Ovid Fasti I 126-7, Pseudo-Hyginus Fabulae 224 , Genesis 2: 15-24, Genesis 4:8, Genesis 25:19-34, respectively.

To the sophisticated audiences of the Classical World, the Middle Ages, and the

Renaissance, Doubles were either facsimiles, bodily duplicates manipulated to divert us,

or allegorized opposites to instruct us. Perhaps not until after the development of the

novel have we been made aware of what primitives have always intuitively known: that

duality inspires both terror and awe whether that duality be manifested in a twin birth, or

man and his shadow, or in one’s reflection in water or in a mirror, or in the creation of an

artifact resembling the exterior self. (326)

Rosenfield’s characterization of doubles confounds a simplistic reading of these Classical examples. Her inclusion of a “twin birth, or man and his shadow, or in one’s reflection in water or in a mirror, or in the creation of an artifact resembling the exterior self” extends the initial paradigm and allows for a much broader definition for figural doubles.

Moreover, her assertion that the double has always inspired both “terror and awe” encourages further critical inquiry: Are all doubles true equals? Do both individuals mutually benefit from this shared connection? If so many Classical doubles end in death, tragedy, or dejection, what does this say about the operation of these relationships? And, philosophically speaking, must both individuals in a doubling exist on the same ontological level? What would it mean if they did not? Although these questions are timeless and carry with them the double’s universal appeal, no one has been more preoccupied with answering them than the Romantics, and their response came through the conception of the Doppelgänger.

In contemporary colloquial expression, the term “Doppelgänger” has come to mean a close physical likeness between individuals. However, this simplification does not account for the ideological context that gave birth to the Romantic Doppelgänger, nor does it capture its emblematic use in literature from the late-eighteenth through the nineteenth century. The term

Doppelgänger, directly translated as “double-goer,” was first introduced by Johann Paul Friedrich 5

Richter in his 1796 novel, Siebenkäs.3 Throughout the following century, the concept developed further and a new standard was set for reading and evaluating character foils, linked pairs, or mirroring opposites in literature.

Edward J. Rose observes how this interest in character dualities or twinned souls across realms and worlds is consistent with the central tenets of Romantic ideology: “The Romantics’ strong sense that there were two worlds—the real and the unreal, the unfallen and the fallen—and their equally strong desires not so much to fuse them as to have a single perspective on them both is reflected in their preoccupation with the theme of the double” (138). Building on the mythology of symbolic doubles, the Doppelgänger nuanced this established paradigm and initiated a cultural fascination with spectral shadows, look-alikes, or uncanny opposites.

In its Romantic conception, and my own application of the term, the Doppelgänger refers to only one half or member of a particular kind of double relationship. Operating on a different ontological level than his or her counterpart, the Doppelgänger is a secondary antitype of an individual. Unlike doubles in general, the Doppelgänger is literally or figuratively created by the dominant individual. Consequently, the existence of the Doppelgänger depends on an unequal privileging within the pairing. From the implicit hierarchy of this bond, the Doppelgänger is most frequently represented as a phantom double, evil twin, or abject opposite of its corresponding counterpart. Compared to the equal balance of power possible in a double/double union, in a

Doppelgänger relationship the Doppelgänger is necessarily subjugated by the more socially- privileged individual. For this reason, while “double” is a blanket term for any pairing or partner offering completion through an innate connection, the

3 For Richter’s original conception of the Doppelgänger see Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; or, the Married Life, Death, and Wedding of Siebenkäs, Poor Man’s Lawyer, trans. Alexander Ewing (London: George Bell and Sons, 1897). 6

Illustration 1: Plate 6 from William Blake’s Jerusalem, 1821, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.

William Blake imagines the spectre as a shadow counterpart. Although an individual must strive to banish his or her spectre, these entities are intrinsic to the human psyche and cannot be destroyed. For more on the Blakean spectre and the fourfold nature of the human psyche see “My Spectre Around Me Night and Day.” 7 term “Doppelgänger” is applied to only one member of the relationship, specifically, the one considered secondary to the actions and behaviors of the other.

This disparity in the Doppelgänger relationship results from an understanding of the

Doppelgänger as the physical manifestation of an individual’s subconscious. As exemplified through William Blake’s spectre or James Hogg’s preternatural lookalike,4 the Doppelgänger was created from an individual and represented some darker impulse. The hierarchy implicit within the relationship therefore reflects the privileging of the conscious over the subconscious.

Considered in this way, the Doppelgänger is literally the repressed or latent urges of an individual brought to life. As such, these secondary entities are not fettered by the same social and moral codes as their corresponding dominant counterparts. While this allows the Doppelgänger greater freedom, it also means that he or she is not as socially normative as the individual and therefore marginalized as an aberration or marked as a preternatural being.

In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s lyrical drama, Prometheus Unbound, he develops this view of the Doppelgänger as a reflected image of life. Earth’s address to Prometheus in Act I offers one of Romanticism’s most clearly stated descriptions of the Doppelgänger:

Ere Babylon was dust,

The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,

Met his own image walking in the garden.

That apparition, sole of men, he saw.

For know there are two worlds of life and death:

One that which thou beholdest; but the other

Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit

4 See James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and the relationship between Robert and Gil-Martin (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010). 8

The shadows of all forms that think and live,

Till death unite them and they part no more

(191-200)

Earth’s warning that there are two realms of existence, what lives and the ghosts of living forms, carries with it the cautionary tale of the Doppelgänger relationship. Described in the drama as

“phantasms,” these shadows emulate life and mimic consciousness, but are attached to the actions and ideas of those they represent. As Andrew Webber notes in Doppelgänger: Double Visions in

German Literature, the hierarchy between the individual and the Doppelgänger is often challenged or questioned in Romantic fiction because “in the case of the Doppelgänger the ‘real’ is duplicated as phantasm in such a way as to defy distinction” (9). The resulting power struggle between an individual and his or her Doppelgänger is an essential aspect of this relationship and presents the primary source of conflict between them.

In “Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears,” Slavoj Žižek provides a contemporary response to this relational construct by delineating the root cause and function of the Doppelgänger:

He is the subject’s double who accompanies him like a shadow and gives body to a

certain surplus, to what is in the subject more than subject himself. This surplus represents

what the subject must renounce, sacrifice even—the part in himself that the subject must

murder in order to start to live as a ‘normal’ member of the community. (54)

Even though Žižek describes this paradigm from outside its initial Romantic context, the power dynamic remains the same and the conceit carries through into contemporary critical perspectives. As a “certain surplus of the individual” and “what is in the subject more than subject himself,” the Doppelgänger is both a distinct entity and direct effusion from an individual. While doubles in general can be two autonomous individuals strengthened by an 9 innate bond, the Doppelgänger is created by his or her corresponding individual. Representing what the individual must “renounce,” “sacrifice,” or “murder” to become a “normal member of society,” the Doppelgänger is forced into a combative relationship with his or her dominant counterpart. This sense of conflict and struggles reverberates through the Romantic conception of the Doppelgänger and brings us back to Victor and the Creature’s relationship in Frankenstein.

Returning to Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein and the Creature are perhaps the most famous example of an individual and his Doppelgänger in Romanticism. As a testament to the contemporary popularity of this critical reading, sample essays and beginner study guides now flood the internet with claims that the Creature can be read as Victor’s twin. The sheer pervasiveness of this reading has led some critics to consciously avoid the subject altogether. For example, in their introduction to The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s

Novel, editors George Lewis Levine and Ulrich C. Knoepflmacher remark that this view has become so widely held that “the writers of this volume assume rather than argue it” (14).

However, although this claim has become foundational to the reading of Shelley’s novel, the discussion does not end there. Beyond the observation and identification of an exceptional relationship between Victor and the Creature there still remains a vast field of opportunity for critical and creative engagement.

For this reason, rather than take this position for granted, I explore the implications of this reading to both the novel and its first theatrical adaptation, Presumption. Acknowledging that the

Frankenstein myth is comprised of a complex system of interconnected doubles, I unpack how this particular Doppelgänger relationship is initially constructed, collapsed, and reconstituted through cross-medium adaptation. Instead of shying away from this established critical viewpoint, my study directly engages with Frankenstein’s rich cultural heritage to establish new points of connection. 10

In Frankenstein’s Doppelgänger relationship, Victor’s privileging as the individual grants him exclusive agency over the Creature’s actions. However, through the characters’ adaptation from page to stage, their relationship is adjusted to suit a different performance mode and a new genre: the gothic melodrama for the illegitimate theatre.

(From Left to Right): Illustration 2: Theodor von Holst’s Frontispiece to Frankenstein, 1831, The New York Public Library: Pforzheimer Collection, New York. Illustration 3: An Engraving Depicting Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, 1826, Harvard Theatre Collection, Cambridge.

As a result of this transition, their Doppelgänger relationship is reconceptualised and inverted to better suit nineteenth-century theatrical conventions. Consequently, while Victor is privileged above the Creature in Frankenstein, in Presumption, the paradigm is reversed to allow the Creature to become the drama’s focal figure. In the following study, I explore this changed dynamic and its implications for the reading and reception of this central relationship.

In my first chapter, entitled “Frankenstein’s Doppelgänger: A Study in Fiction,” I consider Victor and the Creature’s relationship, as it is originally conceived in the novel. Using 11

Romantic love as a conceptual touchstone, I read Victor and the Creature’s Doppelgänger relationship alongside generic conventions. I begin this chapter with a brief background of the novel’s circumstances of composition and immediate critical reception. I follow that with a close textual reading to determine how Shelley’s narrative presents the Doppelgänger within the novel.

Through the characters’ poignant interactions and the traditionally hierarchical nature of the creator/progeny relationship, Shelley plays with expectations regarding similarity and contrast to suggest a relational reading of Victor and the Creature. This close reading is situated within

Frankenstein’s current critical conversation and supplemented by the novel’s initial critical response, context for composition, and ideological context.

In the first section of Chapter 1, “Fated Counterparts,” I trace Victor and the Creature’s shared fixation with each other back to its point of origin. Although their relationship is corrupted later on, their initial compulsion towards each other is in keeping with the paradigm of Romantic ideal love and consequent disillusionment. In the second section, “Twin Descents,” I affirm

Victor and the Creature’s continued connection through their shared language and parallel character arcs. Robbed of redemptive love and removed from the other character doubles, Victor and the Creature are left alone in their grief and brought back together through a desire for vengeance. After experiencing a sense of shared misery, creator and creation are fatefully and fatally joined again by a desire for mutual destruction. Unable to truly separate and compelled towards each other until death, Victor and the Creature confirm their roles as an individual and his Doppelgänger.

In the second chapter, “Presumption’s Doppelgänger: A Study in Theatre,” I explore how nineteenth-century dramatists read, reacted to, and responded to Frankenstein. Chiefly guided by my interest in the novel’s representation of a Doppelgänger relationship, I trace Victor and the

Creature’s relocation from page to stage. Looking specifically at Peake’s Presumption; or, The 12

Fate of Frankenstein as the first theatrical re-telling, premiering less than five years after

Frankenstein’s completion, I explore how the Doppelgänger relationship in Frankenstein is changed, challenged or compromised by cross-medium and cross-generic adaptation. To this end, my analysis reflects the turn from fictional to theatrical, psychodrama to melodrama, mythical to moralistic, rarified to accessible, psychological to sensational, and imagined to incarnate as represented in Frankenstein’s theatrical makeover.

I begin this chapter by defining and contextualizing the genre chiefly used for

Frankenstein’s earliest adaptations: the gothic melodrama of the illegitimate theatrical tradition.

Looking at primary documents such as performance reviews, production images, and promptbooks, I locate Presumption within its theatrical age and analyze its conventions through nineteenth-century practices. To reflect this inter-modal shift, my focus on language and characterization in my reading of Frankenstein is replaced by visual representation and action for

Presumption’s assessment.

I look at two versions of Presumption, a composite manuscript and performance text, printed in Cox’s Seven Gothic Dramas 1789-1825, and the 1865 Dicks’ Standard Edition of the play, printed in Forry’s Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present. Through this comparative reading, I expand the scope of my criticism to include both a revision of the original play text (Cox) and the widely-distributed edition, based on the play in production (Forry). By cross-referencing Frankenstein as source text, Presumption as creative adaptation, and the drama’s performance history, Victor and the Creature can be viewed from three distinct yet interrelated vantage points, providing further insight into the link between

Frankenstein and his infamous creation.

Building on these cultural and textual foundations, I appraise the dramatization of Victor and the Creature’s uncanny relationship to understand how it was read, re-interpreted, and 13 ultimately, portrayed by nineteenth-century dramatists. Through key criticism, historical sources, and close reading, the continuation of Frankenstein’s Doppelgänger in these early adaptations is evidenced. However, although this paradigm is preserved, these first dramatizations subverted

Shelley’s original concept by recasting Victor as the Creature’s Doppelgänger.

With this shift in mind, my first section of Chapter 2, “Starring “The Creature” as

‘______’” looks at the continued complexity of the Creature in these early adaptations. The fictional Creature’s rich characterization is preserved through the coded iconography of the melodramatic tradition. Looking specifically at archetypal representation and pantomime performance, I return Presumption to its theatrical milieu to understand the intended effect of his representation. Conversely, while the Creature survives this inter-modal shift, in Presumption,

Peake notably divests Victor Frankenstein of Shelley’s nuanced characterization.

In the second section of Chapter 2, “Also Featuring Victor Frankenstein as ‘?’” I examine

Peake’s uneven theatrical treatment of the novel’s central figure. Through the Creature’s recasting as the Presumption’s central character, Victor is forced to take on the dual roles of presumptive protagonist and apathetic antagonist. Contrasted with the Creature’s evocative portrayal, Victor defies melodramatic convention in his theatrical debut by being neither heroic nor villainous.

For this reason, in Peake’s Presumption, the relationship between Victor and the Creature directly subverts the primary paradigm established in Shelley’s Frankenstein. Consequently, the

Creature ceases to be the embodied reflection and projection of Victor’s inner life by gaining autonomy through dramatization. But rather than gain equal footing with his creator and destroy the hierarchy implicit in the Doppelgänger relationship, through their intentionally unbalanced representation, the Creature subsumes Victor’s stage identity to become the drama’s focal figure.

In my third and final section of Chapter 2, “Playing the Part: Theatrical Case Study Analysis,” I 14 consider the implications of this changed dynamic and observe how this focal shift was practically enacted in the English minor playhouses

Throughout this study, I consider Victor and the Creature through the lens of the

Doppelgänger relational paradigm in Shelley’s Frankenstein and Peake’s Presumption. In

Frankenstein, Victor and the Creature’s individual characterization and innate connection mark them as an individual and his Doppelgänger, respectively. But in the transition from fictional to theatrical representation in Presumption, the relationship is reversed so that the Creature is the privileged individual while Victor’s characterization is simplified.

These major differences in Victor and the Creature’s relationship from Frankenstein to

Presumption initiate important lines of critical inquiry. To begin, what are the implications of this role reversal and how is Victor and the Creature’s relationship transformed as a result? What do these changes tell us about Victor and the Creature’s original relationship in Frankenstein and how it was initially perceived? How was Frankenstein reconceived for theatrical staging and how was Presumption received by nineteenth-century audiences? And finally, how have these alterations influenced Victor and the Creature’s textual, critical, and cultural legacies? With these questions in mind, I will demonstrate how Victor and the Creature’s Doppelgänger relationship is reflected through both form and content in Frankenstein and Presumption.

Chapter 1

Frankenstein’s Doppelgänger: A Study in Fiction

“We will each write a ghost story”

In June 1816, Mary Shelley participated in a now famous ghost story contest at Byron’s home in Geneva. Along with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, Mary set out to write a tale of terror. Prompted by Byron’s suggestion, the competition between friends provided the impetus for Shelley to compose her most famous literary work. Looking back on this event in her

1831 introduction to Frankenstein, Shelley recalls her initial hope of creating a story that would

“speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart” (8). Compelled by this desire and inspired by a dream in which “my imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie” (11), Shelley began writing what would eventually become one of

Romanticism’s landmark texts.

As “the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity” (2), writers and political activists Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and future wife to poet Percy

Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley was defined by her familial doubles before she ever put pen to paper. In “Rewriting the Family: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Elisabeth Bronfen senses this familial pressure within the Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley circle and asserts that “from the beginning, writing for Mary means affirming her parents as author-predecessors” (28). Carrying the burden of these impressive literary legacies, Shelley spent the following year creating her own work of fiction. But in the year it took her to compose and complete her “hideous progeny”

(15), she faced many trials and tribulations in her own life that greatly influenced her writing process. After returning to England from Geneva, Mary and Percy married and she became 16 pregnant with their daughter, Clara Everina. The suicides of Mary’s half-sister, Fanny Imlay, and

Percy’s estranged wife, Harriet Shelley, greatly affected the Shelleys and their unsuccessful attempt to gain custody of Harriet and Percy’s children was another crippling blow to the family.5

As George Levine notes in “The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein,” Mary’s personal struggles during the novel’s composition reflected the broader cultural ethos of the time and allowed Frankenstein to “emerge from the complex experiences that placed the young Mary

Shelley, both personally and intellectually, at a point of crisis in our modern culture” (4). For this reason, Shelley’s literary progeny was brought to term during a tumultuous period of personal and cultural upheaval.

When it was first published in January 1818, no author was credited with Frankenstein’s composition. Like the unnamed Creature in the novel, Frankenstein went forth into the world without any explicit attachment to its creator. However, because Percy Shelley had submitted the manuscript for consideration, popular opinion at the time was that he had authored the novel, again reinforcing his role as one of Mary’s literary doubles. Sir Walter Scott was among the critics who cited Percy as the probable author, causing Mary to write to him and clarify this assumption.

In her letter of June 14th 1818, Mary explains why she wrote Frankenstein anonymously and expresses continued humility about the quality of her work: “I am anxious to prevent your continuing in the mistake of supposing Mr. Shelley guilty of a juvenile attempt of mine; to which—from its being written at an early age, I abstained from putting my name—and from respect to those persons from whom I bear it” (71). Describing Frankenstein as a “juvenile attempt of mine” and not wishing her husband to be seen as “guilty” of its composition, Mary

5 For a timeline of the events surrounding Frankenstein’s composition, see Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson, The Mary Shelley Reader (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990). 17 continues to express insecurity about the novel’s quality. Her decision to abstain from putting her name “from respect to those persons from whom I bear it” reinforces the continued spectre of her parents’ literary legacies on her own creative contributions. However, her decision to dedicate the 1818 edition to her father underlines this paternal relationship, even while anonymous publication eludes it. The resulting interplay between saying/unsaying and assertion/evasion adds another layer of doubling and duplicity to Frankenstein’s literary origins.

From this initial confusion over authorship, immediate critical response to Frankenstein was greatly polarized and represented two distinct viewpoints. Supporters of the novel praised its originality, inventiveness, and high-minded approach. In his early review, Sir Walter Scott asserts that the novel “impresses us with a high idea of the author’s original genius and happy power of expression” and goes on to praise the author for having “enlarged the sphere of that fascinating enjoyment” (620). Conversely, once Percy Shelley was identified as the possible author, critics opposed to the text launched ad hominem attacks against both the Shelley and Godwin families, with Mary Shelley at the juncture between the two. In one response from The Quarterly Review, critic John Wilson Croker goes on the offensive against the novel and the literary families associated with it:

Our readers will guess from this summary, what a tissue of horrible and disgusting

absurdity this work presents. – It is piously dedicated to Mr. Godwin, and is written in the

spirit of his school. The dreams of insanity are embodied in the strong and striking

language of the insane, and the author, notwithstanding the rationality of his preface,

often leaves us in doubt whether he is not as mad as his hero. Mr. Godwin is the patriarch

of a literary family, whose chief skill is in delineating the wanderings of the intellect, and

which strangely delights in the most afflicting and humiliating of human miseries. (382) 18

After discrediting the novel as a “tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity,” his true target is revealed as Mary’s father and Percy’s father-in-law, William Godwin. Remarking that the family’s “chief skill is in delineating the wanderings of the intellect” and principle interest is “the most afflicting and humiliating of human miseries,” Croker makes his intention to attack the literary family clear. But although baseless, such criticism was not exceptional and Frankenstein continued to attract critical ire on the basis of familial associations.

Yet still, Mary and her novel were haunted by the spectre of her family’s accomplishments, renown, or notoriety and once she was revealed as Frankenstein’s true author, public scrutiny only intensified. But despite this initial critical division, the novel has since achieved nearly universal acclaim and helped Mary Shelley secure her own reputation as one of the Romantic period’s most respected writers. From these early compositional and influential doubles, I return to the text itself to begin my study of another of Shelley’s literary doubles:

Victor Frankenstein and the Creature.

In the first image of Victor and the Creature, the frontispiece for Frankenstein’s 1831 edition, Theodor von Holst visually underscores the pair’s innate connection. Bathed in a pool of moonlight and contrasted against the darkness of the scene, the tangled form of the Creature is emphasized in the image’s foreground. Recalling Christ’s pose in Michelangelo’s Pietà, the

Creature is positioned as if in the arms of an absent or unseen protector. But although his placement suggests a need for support, his unnatural strength is visually apparent. Set against the frail frame of a nearby skeleton, the Creature’s astonishing physique and powerful musculature belie his piecemeal composition.

However, in this pivotal moment, the Creature’s unusual appearance is not what stands out most. As Victor steals away into the night, he looks back on his abandoned progeny one last 19

Illustration 4: Theodor von Holst’s Frontispiece to Frankenstein, 1831, The New York Public Library: Pforzheimer Collection, New York.

20 time with an expression of fearful disbelief and recognition. Despite the many superficial differences between the flailing Creature and his fleeing creator, their innate connection undercuts these distinctions. Through their gaze, the uncanny likeness between Victor’s own countenance and that of his discarded creation comes to light, allowing their intrinsic link to show through.

In this image, Holst captures an essential aspect of Victor and the Creature’s troubled relationship: the undeniable sense of sameness which binds them. Using this haunting image as a point of departure, this section examines the complex nature of Victor and the Creature’s relationship. With the Doppelgänger as my guiding theoretical conceit, I demonstrate how their bond can be read as a distorted depiction of the ideal love paradigm.

A central feature of Romantic and Gothic literature, the concept of ideal love relies on an emotional extension towards another individual with the ultimate hope of personal redemption.

Carrying the promise of completion through another, this perfect partner acted as an individual’s

“epipsyche,” another soul towards which he or she is continually drawn.6 In Percy Bysshe

Shelley’s treatise on the subject, “On Love,” he identifies this yearning as an innate human compulsion: “We are born into the world and there is something within us which from the instance that we live and move thirsts after its likeness” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 473). This

Romantic love goes beyond symbolic mirroring to present two individuals who are both complementary in character and emotionally intertwined through a shared connection. But at its most foundational level, this ideal love is best understood as the recognition of the self in the other. As Holst visually captures in his haunting image, this process of idealization, recognition

6 In Carlos Baker’s book Shelley’s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision, he provides a critical account of the Shelleyan epipsyche (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1948). For more on this topic, see William A. Ulmer’s identification of “erotic supplement” in Shelleyan Eros: The Rhetoric of Romantic Love (New Jersey, Princeton UP, 1990). 21 and realization carries particular significance for Victor and the Creature’s relationship in

Frankenstein.

In the novel, Victor has many possible character doubles and shares in several close personal relationships. However, these bonds are eclipsed and ultimately destroyed by the

Creature, indicating the primacy of his tie with Victor as his Doppelgänger. While each of these doubles represents more generically conventional examples of filial or romantic bonding, Victor and the Creature’s innate connection and pervasive sense of sameness both corrupts and consumes the novel’s other relationships. Although these figures show potential as ideal loves for

Frankenstein, each is replaced by Victor’s bond with the Creature. Whether his shared camaraderie with Clerval, domestic romance with Elizabeth, or mutual bond with Walton, every alternative path Victor pursues is blocked in turn by the dominating influence of the Creature.

Although the initial promise of love between creator and progeny is perverted into mutual hatred, their shared fixation, elimination of competing interests, and paralleling descents into misery mark Victor and the Creature as both diametrically opposed and intrinsically linked. For this reason, in Frankenstein the redemptive love of the other is displaced by a narcissistic self- love which is expressed in the physical manifestation of the Doppelgänger figure. Acting as each other’s epipsyches, Victor and the Creature are fatefully and fatally drawn together. But because

Victor and the Creature’s connection also complies with the creator/progeny and parent/child relational paradigms, their bond is rendered even more complex. These many facets lend further symbolic significance to Victor and the Creature’s relationship and complicate the characters’ interactions and expectations.

To understand this contentious relationship better, it is necessary to explore both why and how this link was initially forged. To begin, I look at Victor’s scientific approach to demonstrate how it relies on a synthesis between critical and creative faculties. His perspective on ancient and 22 modern sciences not only foregrounds his desire to create life, but also provides a useful context for his attitudes towards the Creature.

Fated Counterparts

Although Victor’s escape act suggests ambivalence towards his Creature, his initial reaction must be read in context. As Holst’s depiction accurately conveys, Victor’s horror is mingled with a sense of pained recognition. In the following section, I unpack Victor’s actions and ideas leading up to the animation of the Creature.

Before his fateful flight and the abandonment of his newly-formed Creature, Victor

Frankenstein was a passionate student and a champion of the old scientific methods. Afforded a distinctly Romantic education during his childhood, in which “our studies were never forced; and by some means we always had an end placed in view, which excited us to ardour in the prosecution of them” (66), Victor was drawn towards the limitless scientific and creative potential found in natural philosophy. Encouraged by his parents to think laterally and pursue ideas which excited “ardour in the prosecution of them” (66), Victor took greater interest in practitioners of the past than current scientific theorists. However, in his transition from the more open studies of his youth to his formal university education in Ingolstadt, Victor’s pre-existing beliefs and ideals collide with established institutional practices and the current intellectual climate.

In his initial disenchantment with the state of modern science, Victor laments the limited scope and scale of the new schools of thought: “When the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed and I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth” (75).

Seeking to build from the work of then-discredited scientific philosophers such as Cornelius 23

Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, Victor considers modern applications of these principles, eventually leading to a fascination with galvanism and artificial animation.

Encouraged by the shared views of his professor, M. Waldman, Victor sets out to validate

Classical scientific ideas through modern advancements, with his chief curiosity being the creation of life. Victor’s interest in the source of life is a departure from the more rational endeavours of eighteenth-century practitioners and a return to the aims of an earlier age. Viewing knowledge, imagination, metaphysics, and spirituality as intrinsically linked, Victor’s own beliefs reflect the ideals of his formative predecessors, rather than the Enlightenment tenets of his own time.

Through these philosopher-scientists of old, Victor finds a school of thought to which he could ascribe and a creative paragon to aspire to. Notably, in his identification of these figures as

“the lords of my imagination” (70), Victor explicitly expresses his confluence between imaginative and critical engagement. By venerating the “chimeras of boundless grandeur” of early thinkers over the “realities of little worth” he perceived in modern science, Victor emphasizes a more holistic approach and consciously subjective engagement with his experiment.

Considered through this lens, Victor’s scientific ambitions and initial desire to create life takes on even greater personal implications. Railing against the perceived restrictions of modern science, his efforts to challenge the most unassailable limitation, the distinction between life and death, can be read as an act both of creation and of rebellion. In either case, the success or failure of the Creature carries deeply personal implications for the young student. For this reason, from the experiment’s earliest stages, the unfinished Creature offers the hope of intellectual and personal redemption for Victor Frankenstein. 24

With a greater understanding of the stakes associated with his experiment, Victor’s initial obsession with the Creature can be understood. While the first sight of his completed creation horrifies him, the intensity of his immediate hatred must be read alongside his initial hopes for his progeny. In his narrative address to Walton, Victor expounds on his unrelenting pursuit of success and the complex motives which guided his scientific foray into galvanism:

No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in

the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I

should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species

would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe

their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I

should deserve their’s [sic]. (81-82)

In this passage, Victor reveals the emotional tumult he experienced while contemplating the import of his task; his ambition to “pour a torrent of light into our dark world” directly evokes

Promethean associations. The mythical Prometheus is integral to a symbolic reading of

Frankenstein and is alluded to in the novel’s subtitle “The Modern Prometheus.” In addition to his theft of fire from the gods to bring to humanity, Prometheus is also credited with forming humankind out of clay.7 By integrating both of these feats into this singular act of creation, Victor brings mythical scope and scale to his task.

In Constantin Hansen’s 1845 painting, Prometheus Creating Man in Clay, Prometheus is shown fashioning man in his own image. Completed after Frankenstein’s 1818 publication, this painting notably depicts Prometheus as larger than his model man and with his hand in firm

7 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses I: 363-65, Prometheus is characterized as both fire bearer and creator of humankind: “O for my father’s magic to restore mankind again and in the moulded clay breathe life and so repopulate the world!” trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008).

Illustration 5: Constantin Hansen’s Prometheus Creating Man in Clay (detail), 1845, The Hirschprung Collection, Copenhagen.

26 control of his creation. Unlike this creation of a successful simulacrum, Victor’s own Promethean endeavours result in an enormous distortion of the human form. Despite the later consequences of his defiance, Prometheus’ creation of life is imbued with a sense of nobility and measured control. But for Victor, this direct invocation of the myth of Prometheus forecasts the inevitable result of his overreaching experiment and alludes to possible delusions of grandeur.

By challenging the confines of mortality, Victor endeavours to be the first human to bring life out of death and creation from destruction. Through statements like “many happy and excellent natures would owe their beings to me,” his desire to produce life beyond this initial experiment is made clearly apparent, as is his intention for his new species to be both perfected and contented in his care. Through this massive undertaking, Victor aims to surpass the role of parent and adopt the mantle of a superior god, asserting that: “No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.” Importantly, by seeking gratitude for his benevolent generosity, Victor reveals his desire for a mutual connection with his new species. In this way, his task takes on another powerful emotional dimension, far exceeding the thrill of objective scientific inquiry. Looking to this future species as the consummation of his intellectual and personal toils, Victor’s emotional investment in the unfinished Creature is exponentially heightened. Initially considering his creation as the Adam to future generations, Victor conceives of the Creature as living proof of his success. In this way, his expectations for the Creature approximate the hope of redemption through another.

However, the latent egoism of Victor’s pursuit is alluded to even prior to the Creature’s completion and precludes a pure reading of Victor’s intentions. In “Mary Shelley’s Monster:

Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein,” Lee Sterrenburg asserts that “Victor foresees a utopia that reflects his own subjective desires” (149). Chris Baldick similarly observes that “Frankenstein’s creation of his monster is a very private enterprise, conducted in the shadow of guilt and 27 concealment, undertaken in narcissistic abstraction from social ties” (51). Victor’s act of creation is too narcissistic and ego-driven to accommodate love and leads to a corruption of the ideal

Romantic paradigm. With a desire for gratitude and grandeur as Victor’s chief motivation, his horror at the Creature’s loathsome appearance can be attributed to his wish for a perfect form worthy of his efforts and adoration. Bearing Victor’s initial hopes in mind, the pain and disappointment underlying his description of the Creature is palpable:

His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—

Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath;

his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these

luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost

of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled

complexion, and straight black lips. (85)

Victor’s devastation at the Creature’s appearance permeates the language of his account. In his remark “Beautiful!—Great God!” he emphasizes the harsh disparity between his intended vision and the horror of the Creature’s living reality. In “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Narcissus,”

Jeffrey Berman identifies this sense of horror and disgust as Victor’s “paralyzed over- identification with the Creature and subsequent revulsion and dread” (18). Believing himself to be future god and savior to an advanced species, Victor refuses to acknowledge that a being created by his own hand could be such an aberration. Consequently, his swift renunciation of the

Creature, the casting aside of his would-be Adam, is an attempt at self-preservation and a pre- emptive deferral of corrupted love. In his statement, “I had selected his features as beautiful,”

Victor demonstrates an unwillingness to be held accountable for the Creature’s ghastly appearance and a refusal to identify himself with the corrupted outcome of his toils. 28

In his later remarks, Victor’s disappointment encompasses the pains of cruel heartbreak and sudden disillusionment with a flawed ideal: “Mingled with this horror, I felt the bitterness of disappointment: dreams that had been my food and pleasant rest for so long a space, were now become a hell to me; and the change was so rapid, the overthrow so complete!” (86). Having set out to create a thing of beauty, Victor renounces all claims to the Creature for forming such a

“horrid contrast” with his initial ideal. Rather than witness the immolation of child, dream, creation, and self in one decisive moment, Victor flees and abandons the long anticipated product of his love and labors. As the primary individual in the Doppelgänger relationship, Victor has the luxury of decisive action and can freely abandon the Creature for the time being. However, despite his best efforts, Victor’s bond with the Creature cannot be broken.

As in the case of his creator, the Creature’s fixation begins with an ideal rather than an individual. While Victor’s desire for discovery leads to an emotional attachment to his developing progeny, in lieu of a present parent, the Creature projects his need for acceptance onto an unknowing surrogate family. But while the Creator’s interest in the DeLacey family seems to temporarily offset his governing fixation with Victor, it instead revitalizes this natal link.

Although he is unaware of the circumstances of his creation, the Creature’s later interactions with humans, such as the DeLaceys, are haunted by the disillusionment brought on by Victor’s abandonment. Whether in the villagers’ vicious rejections, the DeLaceys’ heartbreaking rebuff, or in his creator’s journal, Victor’s initial act of rejection echoes through each of the Creature’s failed interpersonal experiences. Even without his creator present, the Creature’s interactions, ideas, and behaviors are formed by Victor’s pervasive influence. For this reason, although the

Creature has no memory of him, Victor is established early on as his dominant counterpart and fated epipsyche. 29

For the retelling of Victor and the Creature’s first encounter, Victor is privileged as the account’s narrator. As the novel’s central character and the primary figure in the Doppelgänger relationship, Victor’s perspective helps inform reader response to both characters:

I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of

the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and

he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have

spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I

escaped, and rushed down stairs. (85-86)

By using terms such as “wretch” and “miserable monster” to describe the Creature, Victor ascribes savagery to the being. But beyond these judgments, lines such as “his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me,” “his jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks,” and “one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me” also convey a clear narrative. Despite Victor’s interpretation of the incident, his account suggests that the Creature simply looked at his creator, tried to speak, smiled, and reached out to him, causing

Victor to flee in terror. This heightened emphasis on interpretation from this early point in the narrative foreshadows the Creature’s failure to communicate and connect with others.

Consequently, this series of events proves significant later in the Creature’s tale, as this same sequence is re-cast, re-situated, and replayed several times with similar results.

Although the Creature does not consciously recall this encounter, his subsequent interactions with humans all take on a similar structure, highlighting the importance of this first meeting. As the pattern progresses and these encounters render increasingly traumatic results, the

Creature’s connection to Victor correspondingly strengthens, causing him to seek out the source of his initial torment. Consequently, the Creature’s inability to escape the set design of this first encounter leads him back to Victor and affirms his unbreakable link to his creator. 30

After Victor flees the scene and leaves his newly-formed Creature to fend for himself, neither Victor nor the reader knows the character’s fate. Only after their meeting in the mountains does the Creature finally get to tell his tale and fill in some of the gaps left by Victor’s first- person narration. Abandoned without the necessary tools for survival, the Creature seeks protection in a nearby village. Although his early encounters with humans are comparatively minor incidents in the novel, they bear significance for a comparative reading with his initial meeting with Victor and set a precedent for later events. Upon first arriving in the village, the

Creature enters a cottage and surprises its inhabitant:

“Finding the door open, I entered. An old man sat in it, near a fire, over which he was

preparing his breakfast. He turned on hearing a noise; and, perceiving me, shrieked

loudly, and quitting the hut, ran across the fields with a speed of which his debilitated

form hardly appeared capable.” (131-32)

Taking place early in his intellectual and social development, this episode lacks the emotional stakes of his later dealings with humans. But even in this early transaction, the sequence of events directly recalls his first encounter with Victor and the Creature’s appearance alone triggers a fearful response and immediate desertion. In the Creature’s recollection of the event, the details of the cottage are more impressive than the confusing behavior of the strange man whose appearance was “different from any I had ever before seen” (132). The Creature’s shock is telling, as he is not yet aware that this incident is part of a progressing pattern of rejection.

Consequently, rather than take issue with the old man’s flight, the Creature is confused by his bizarre reaction. However, as the frequency and severity of these rejections increases, he begins to intuit his own abject status.

Shortly after this first episode, the Creature enters another cottage and finds a family inside: “I hardly placed my foot within the door, before the children shrieked, and one of the 31 women fainted. The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me, until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons, I escaped to the open country” (132).

Although the pattern of revelation, as initiated by the first two incidents, is here maintained, the threat level is raised considerably. The violence and vehemence of this encounter marks an escalation from Victor and the old man’s frightened departures. The heightened risk of physical threat anticipates later instances of violent recourse in his tale, such as the Creature’s spurned efforts to save a child from drowning. While he is confused at first by the old man’s hurried departure, the Creature learns from the villagers’ collective confrontation that he is something to be feared and abhorred. Although the Creature maintains hope that more benevolent humans can look past his apparent deficiencies, these initial rejections contribute to his eventual rejection of humanity.

Even in Victor’s absence, the aftershocks of his abandonment of the Creature course through these first encounters. While the Creature’s appearance elicits the villagers’ negative responses, responsibility for his deformity and outcast status ultimately falls to Victor. By having to revisit and relive his creator’s own dismissal through the horror of strangers, the Creature is pulled back to the initial act of abandonment which leads to his marginalization. In this way,

Victor’s pervasive influence on the Creature’s life can be sensed in these mirroring reactions and their set pattern of revelation and rejection. Like seeing the face of lost love at every turn, the

Creature is fatally compelled towards the image and actions of his deserted creator, thus confirming Victor’s role as the Creature’s epipsyche.

As Victor’s Doppelgänger, the Creature is directly tied up in his creator’s actions and, as such, his own behavior responds to that of Victor. For this reason, though far away, Victor’s initial and decisive rejection of the Creature came to define his subsequent encounters with 32 humans. But although this pattern is established through these first interactions, the Creature still maintains hope for redemption through another group of outcasts.

Deprived of his creator and spurned in his first interactions with humans, the Creature finds a temporary balm for his loneliness in the DeLacey family. Displaced from their homeland and taking refuge together, the family is likewise removed from others like them. This marginalized status, coupled with their apparent benevolence, presents the promise of a new beginning for the exiled Creature. Having wandered through the lonely woods and taken refuge in a nearby hovel, the Creature observes the family from afar and imagines himself as one of them. His immediate affinity for the cottagers leads him to believe that they are different from the villagers:

Nothing could exceed in beauty the contrast between these two excellent creatures. One

was old, with silver hairs and a countenance beaming with benevolence and love: the

younger was slight and graceful in his figure, and his features were moulded with the

finest symmetry. (135)

Enchanted with their bucolic charm and beauty, the Creature sees the family as his new hope for kinship and transcendence through another. Immediately following his negative experiences with the villagers, the Creature’s chance encounter with the DeLaceys shows the potential to break the pattern of rejection, as initiated by Victor’s departure.

Beyond his initial fascination, the Creature’s interest quickly grows into a desire to be one among them and share in their familial affection. Once watching the DeLaceys from afar is no longer enough to satisfy his need for inclusion, he soon thinks of ways to approach them and appeal for their approval. By secretly helping them in their labors and studying their behaviors, the Creature hopes to approach them and enjoy the love they shared for each other. Desperately 33 craving their acceptance, he dedicates himself to personal betterment and the acquisition of language in the hope that he could be considered worthy of their perfect love:

I looked upon them as superior beings, who would be the arbiters of my future destiny. I

formed in my imagination a thousand pictures of presenting myself to them, and their

reception of me. I imagined that they would be disgusted, until, by my gentle demeanour

and conciliating words, I should first win their favour, and afterwards their love. These

thoughts exhilarated me, and led me to apply with fresh ardour to the acquiring the art of

language. (141)

By becoming well-versed in “the art of language,” the Creature hopes to be found deserving of the benevolent mercy of these “superior beings.” But while his emotional stakes and level of engagement are raised considerably from his unsuccessful encounters with the villagers, this episode with the DeLaceys is an extended repetition of his first failed meeting with Victor. In the absence of his creator, the Creature temporarily projects his longing onto the DeLaceys and re- casts them as his unknowing surrogate family. Staging an extended remount of his first denial of redemptive love, the Creature is doomed to suffer the same disastrous consequences as before with Victor and the villagers in the leading role.

Again repeating the pattern initiated by his encounter with Victor, the Creature’s self- education and acquisition of language are analogous to his earlier attempt to articulate and physically reach out to his creator. Although the means and methods are more complex, the sentiment behind them remains the same. Even though he had no conscious memory of his abandonment, he unknowingly substitutes in the DeLaceys as a stand-in for Victor.

Consequently, the Creature’s deferred love of the absent Victor is projected onto the present

DeLaceys and results in the same devastation and disillusionment. 34

While the DeLaceys represent the possibility of happiness for the Creature, this hope is quickly dashed at first sight. After years of second-hand education and socialization outside their cottage, the Creature finally gathers the courage to enter their home and introduce himself to his beloved family. Despite these efforts and the persistent hope that the DeLaceys would deviate from the pattern set by Victor and perpetuated by the villagers, their reaction to him nearly replicates those rejections from years before:

Who can describe their horror and consternation on beholding me? Agatha fainted; and

Safie, unable to attend to her friend, rushed out of the cottage. Felix darted forward, and

with supernatural force tore me from his father, to whose knees I clung: in a transport of

fury, he dashed me to the ground and struck me violently with a stick. (160)

Even though the Creature spends years improving himself, learning about the family, and secretly assisting them in their labors, his efforts are immediately and violently dismissed by the

DeLaceys. Despite the blind father’s open acceptance of the well-intentioned Creature, his family’s reaction directly recalls the villagers’ myriad responses to the hideous being, including fainting, fleeing, and fighting. This outright refusal to accept the Creature as one of them, despite his warm gestures, mimics Victor’s initial rejection and reinforces his continued control over the fate of his progeny.

Although Victor is not directly responsible for the DeLaceys’ actions, his refusal to be held accountable for the fate of his Creature locks him into a systemic cycle of rejection and alienation. Unable to overcome this first show of neglect and locked into an unbreakable bond with Victor as his creation and Doppelgänger, the Creature’s subsequent interactions with humans are all colored by this initial hurt. But beyond this symbolic show of Victor’s continued influence, in another instance in the Creature’s tale, he directly intercedes in his progeny’s life. 35

Even before the Creature was spurned by his beloved DeLaceys, his desire to find others like him persists. During the course of his education outside the cottage, he learns about human nature through the works of writers such as Milton, Volney, Plutarch, and Goethe. Their texts greatly inform the Creature’s self-actualization and influence his perceptions of others. Hearing of no other like himself in any of these works and dogged by a crisis of identity, the Creature constantly seeks answers to his questions, yet receives none: “But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing” (147).

Through his persistent anxieties and assertion that “no father had watched my infant days,” the Creature alludes to Frankenstein’s thematic connection with Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Beyond its significance as one of the texts the Creature first encounters, Milton’s retelling of

Adam and Eve’s removal from Paradise and the fall of Satan is suggested earlier through Victor’s desire to create a species in his own image. After the failure of this idealistic experiment, Victor abandons the Creature and, in keeping with this Miltonic construct, throws him out of Paradise by leaving him to fend for himself.

In “Teaching the Monster to Read: Mary Shelley, Education and Frankenstein,” Anne

McWhir observes the influence of Paradise Lost on the Creature’s self-understanding:

There is more than one reading of Milton even in Frankenstein itself, as the creature

identifies himself now with Adam, now with “the fallen angel, whom [Frankenstein

drives] from joy for no misdeed” (95), and as he regards his “creator” now as divine, now

as demonic. The monster cannot at the same time be both innocent, virtuous, vegetarian,

natural man and be a demonic outcast. Yet he considers himself to be both, and is

destroyed by the same perplexities that confuse the reader. (81) 36

By casting himself as a fallen angel forcibly ejected from the company of his intended brethren, the Creature consciously aligns his own outcast status not only with that of Adam but also with that of Milton’s Satan. This sentiment is clearly expressed during his meeting with Victor through the Creature’s bold assertion that: “I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed” (126). Through this allegorical association, the Creature’s initial abandonment takes on mythical implications as his connection with Victor is directly compared with Satan’s combative relationship with God.

Believing himself deserving of Victor’s paternal care and finding himself fatally compelled towards him, the Creature acknowledges that his absent creator continues to define him. For this reason, although the DeLaceys initially carry the hope of consolation, the Creature’s inability to directly identify with them creates a persistent longing for what is forever lost.

Despite these lingering sentiments and remembered injuries, his affection for the

DeLaceys is unquestionable and his hope for their love is genuine. But like his earlier hopes for companionship and consolation, this dream is similarly shattered. Upon finding himself alone in his creator’s lab years before, the Creature steals away into the night, cloaked in Victor’s robes.

In the pocket of the robes, the Creature finds Victor’s journal documenting the process leading up to his animation and the aftermath of the failed endeavor. Now empowered through knowledge and able to discern meaning from the text, he learns of his infernal origins and Victor’s disappointment with him as the unintended result of his experiment:

I sickened as I read. ‘Hateful day when I received life!’ I exclaimed in agony. ‘Cursed

creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?

God in pity made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy

type of yours, more horrid for its very resemblance.’ (155) 37

While his failed interactions with humans are all reminiscent of his creator’s refutation, the journal directly connects the events back to Victor, bringing him into the Creature’s field of vision. The remark, “‘Hateful day when I received life,’” accurately identifies the source of his pain and torment in that first moment of simultaneous creation and rejection. Now aware that his dream of finding others like himself is impossible and his intended parent refuses to acknowledge him as his own, the Creature understands the root cause and sheer enormity of his isolation.

Through the journal, Victor’s perceivable influence over the Creature’s fate is physically manifested through his written denunciation of his progeny. Although the aftermath of this act of abandonment reverberates through the Creature’s subsequent encounters with humans, the journal provides a fixed locus and point of origin for the Creature’s misery. In linking his hardships back to his absent creator, the Creature finally understands Victor’s defining influence in his life and feels fatally compelled towards him. But rather than pursue him out of love, the

Creature’s initial desire for redemption through another is eclipsed by the need for retribution.

Now able to appeal to his creator, the Creature demands a bride in restitution for his injuries:

From you only did I hope for succor, although towards you I felt no sentiment but that of

hatred. Unfeeling, heartless creator! you had endowed me with perceptions and passions,

and then cast me abroad as an object for the scorn and horror of mankind. But on you

only had I any claim for pity and redress, and from you I determined to seek that justice

which I vainly attempted to gain from any other being that wore the human form. (164)

Acknowledging Victor’s role in casting him “abroad as an object for the scorn and horror of mankind,” the Creature seeks immediate restitution for his creator’s reckless actions. By conceding that Victor is the only human who owes him “pity and redress,” the Creature admits the vanity of his earlier attempts to seek succor from “any other being that wore the human 38 form.” With his sights now turned on Victor, the Creature seeks vengeance for his ill-treatment and hopes to benefit from their fated connection.

While Victor’s absence should have weakened this central relationship in the novel, the

Creature’s tale reveals his creator’s continued influence during their separation. In this way,

Victor continues to exert dominance over the Creature and, through his initial denial, unknowingly fosters the link between them. Whether through the progressive pattern of rejection established by Victor’s abandonment or his direct intercession through the journal, Victor’s persistence in the Creature’s life is demonstrated through the documented events of these lost years. Although Victor is able to escape his Creature during this time, the Creature’s role as his

Doppelgänger means that his actions and behaviors are defined by the initial precedent set by his creator. Consequently, he is always caught following the shadow of Victor’s image and living in the wake of his devastating desertion, until he decides to benefit from this intrinsic link and seeks retribution. Even though Victor is able to temporarily assuage his guilt over the creation of his progeny, their fated connection means that his reprieve cannot last for long.

Twin Descents

Through their paralleling character arcs, common language, and shift in the pursuer/pursued paradigm, Victor and the Creature’s similarities become increasingly pronounced as the narrative progresses. In their regressions from hopeful love, to misery, to revenge, Victor and the Creature inevitably follow each other into twin descents. While they spend years physically removed from each other, their shared fixation and fatal compulsion towards each other lead their paths to converge. For this reason, although Victor and the Creature follow divergent paths after their early separation, by Frankenstein’s final pages they are brought back together. More than that, as they near one another, their individual characterization becomes 39 intertwined and their former distinctions are rendered intentionally unclear. By using fictional ambiguity and character mirroring, Shelley completes the relational paradigm established early in the novel and affirms the primacy of Victor and the Creature’s relationship as that of an individual and his Doppelgänger.

Even though Victor’s immediate horror at the Creature’s appearance causes him to run, their mutual fixation with each other ultimately brings them together and underscores the inherent sense of sameness they share. After Victor first abandons the Creature, a stanza from Coleridge’s

“Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is quoted at length. Although Victor’s departure should mean freedom from his Creature, this stanza foreshadows their inevitable reunion later on:

Like one who, on a lonely road,

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And, having once turn’d round, walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread. (87)

This stanza not only reflects the dynamic of the Doppelgänger relationship, but its inclusion immediately after the abandonment of the Creature anticipates the story’s later events. Even though he has left the Creature behind, Victor still feels the presence of his “frightful fiend”

“close behind him.” This early sense of impending danger persists throughout the novel. Now plagued by the Creature and inadvertently sanctioning him as his Doppelgänger, Victor and his progeny are inextricably linked from the moment of creation.

Unable to share his secret with others while traveling down this dark and “lonely road,”

Victor is plagued with a sense of “fear and dread.” Overcome with the knowledge that his spectre follows closely in his wake, Victor “walks on and turns no more his head,” attempting to resist 40 the persistent pull of the Creature for as long as possible. Despite Victor’s best efforts to ignore his impending arrival, he “knows” rather than “thinks” that the Creature follows closely behind him. But unfortunately, as Victor’s father tells him later in the novel, “a fatality seems to pursue you” (204), and Victor confirms these suspicions by conceding that, from this point on, “I was cursed by some devil, and carried about with me my eternal hell” (225). From this first encounter, the die was cast and Victor and the Creature were fatefully and fatally joined. Bound together at this initial point of convergence, the two characters spend the remainder of the novel mirroring and moving towards each other.

As I established in my first section, Victor and the Creature both share the initial hope of finding perfect love. While Victor’s Promethean ambitions led him to create a being in his own image, the Creature’s desire for companionship causes him to subconsciously project Victor’s image onto every human he meets. However, Victor and the Creature suffer a sense of shared disillusionment as their potential love is instead warped into a Doppelgänger relationship.

Through this change of state, the happiness, redemption, and completion associated with ideal love are exchanged for despair, revenge, and mutual destruction.

After spending years separated, Victor and the Creature are fatefully reunited in the Swiss

Alps. Following his repeated rejection and his discovery of Victor’s journal, the Creature seeks out his creator for retribution. But although this confrontation can be summarized simply as a meeting between Victor and the Creature during which the Creature tells his story and requests a bride, Shelley’s thoughtful development lends mythical implications to this significant encounter.

Leading up to the Creature’s arrival, Victor observes the mountain scenery around him as he journeys towards his fate. But rather than simple exposition, this thorough account lends a sense of gravitas and thematic import to Victor’s travels. I quote the following section at length to emphasize the detail of Shelley’s description and her attention to natural imagery in this scene: 41

I arrived at the top of the ascent. For some time I sat upon the rock that overlooks the sea

of ice. A mist covered both that and the surrounding mountains. Presently, a breeze

dissipated the cloud, and I descended upon the glacier. The surface is very uneven, rising

like the waves of a troubled sea, descending low, and interspersed by rifts that sink deep.

The field of ice is almost a league in width, but I spent nearly two hours crossing it. The

opposite mountain is a bare perpendicular rock, gazing on this wonderful and stupendous

scene. The scene, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains,

whose aerial summits hung over its recesses. Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the

sunlight over the clouds. My heart, which was before sorrowful, swelled with something

like joy. (124)

While isolated in the wilderness, Victor is made acutely aware of his surroundings. Despite his

Creature’s impending arrival, Victor is drawn into this sublime vision of nature. Alone on the mountain top and facing “the sea of ice,” Victor’s heart “which was before sorrowful, swelled with something like joy.” Transformed through this encounter with nature, Victor is afforded a temporary reprieve before meeting with his Creature.

Beyond contributing to the novel’s overall atmosphere, these descriptive sections expand

Frankenstein’s scale beyond basic prose to the level of psychodrama. By setting this fateful confrontation in such a magnificent locale, Shelley lends a sense of immensity and vastness to the scene. At once operatic in scope and elemental in composition, the Swiss Alps, and Mont Blanc in particular, lend both visual grandeur and ideological associations to this important meeting. In turn, Victor and the Creature’s relationship shares in this expansion and is imbued with greater symbolic significance.

Shelley’s description of Victor in the mountains is visually mirrored in Caspar David

Friedrich’s “The Wanderer above The Sea of Fog” (1818). In this iconic Romantic painting, 42

Friedrich captures a similar image of a man encountering the sublime through nature and provides a visual double for Shelley’s fictional description. This vivid account in the novel also recalls Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the individual’s solo encounter with the vastness of nature. Shelley’s explicit references to Coleridge’s poem throughout the novel encourage a thematic connection between the texts and allow the mariner’s lamentations of

“Alone, alone, all alone/ Alone on a wide, wide sea” (233-34) to color Victor’s experience of natural solitude.

Humankind’s relationship with nature also plays an important role in Romantic ideology and Victor’s contemplative response to the wonders of the Alps consciously recalls this tradition.

In particular, Mont Blanc figures prominently in Romantic literature and is visited by William

Wordsworth in The Prelude, Lord Byron in Manfred, and Percy Shelley in “Mont Blanc.”

Notably, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s description of the Alps in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour as

“aerial summits” (151) is directly lifted for Victor’s description of the dependent mountains

“whose aerial summits hung over its recesses.” Shelley’s decision to borrow her husband’s phrase and stage the action in a place they had recently visited and written about carries thematic significance. Through her integration of autobiography and allegory, memory and myth, or experienced and imagined, Shelley conjures up a literary vision that is at once simple and sublime. Consequently, the mythical is rendered personal and the personal is rendered mythical.

Adding to this personalized experience of nature, Shelley sets the scene in a popular Romantic location and, in doing so, consciously engages with the symbolic import and majesty of this iconic environment. Consequently, her vivid description of Victor confronting the sublime in nature before rejoining his Creature locates Frankenstein within the Romantic tradition and lends 43

Illustration 6: Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer above The Sea of Fog, 1818, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

44 both greater humanity and mythical implications to Victor and the Creature’s Doppelgänger relationship.

Following this fateful encounter, Victor and the Creature each go their own way, but never truly separate again. Now charged with the infernal task of creating a bride for his progeny,

Victor enters into a downward spiral with his Doppelgänger by his side. In both Victor and the

Creature’s stories, a discernible shift in language and tone occurs as their sense of initial hope gives way to misery. Through the loss of love and a growing feeling of isolation, the characters both experience a period of complete disillusionment. Although the sense of isolation brought on by these feelings causes them to retreat within themselves, their shared emotions and experiences render their language almost indistinguishable and reinforce their sense of sameness.

As the Creature’s tale begins, the beauty of the natural world gives him new confidence that he has a fresh start and a brighter future ahead: “My spirits were elevated by the enchanting appearance of nature; the past was blotted from my memory, the present was tranquil, and the future gilded by bright rays of hope, and anticipations of joy” (141). Envisioning a future “gilded by bright rays of hope, and anticipations of joy,” the Creature moved on from his earlier pains, which were now “blotted from memory.” But as he is forced to endure new and unforeseen hardships, his faith is shaken and his initial hope gives way to deep despair. In recounting his decline to Victor, the Creature reflects on the realizations which led to his misery. Initially hopeful that he would be accepted and even loved by others, he came to learn that “there was none among the myriads of men that existed who would pity or assist me” (161). Overwhelmed by his difficult circumstances, the Creature’s confusion and growing frustration can be perceived though his constant questioning. Trying in vain to appeal to an absent creator, his invocations become more desperate as his circumstances worsen. 45

While learning about history, literature, and philosophy from outside the cottage, the

Creature failed to identify with the human condition, leading him to question his own place in the world and with others. Thinking back on his earlier encounters, the Creature expresses anxiety that he is an aberration unfit to keep company with humankind: “Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?” (146). Identifying himself as a “blot upon the earth” “whom all men disowned,” his still-persistent hope for love is tempered by suspicions of his own abject status. As his fears grow, his isolation is underscored by the inability to have his questions answered: “‘What was I?’ The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans” (147). Although the Creature asks for help, his forced solitude means that he is given no consolation for his suffering. Only able to venture guesses about his identity, the Creature and his pitiable condition become increasingly hopeless. Without the assistance of others, his misery becomes overwhelming and his invocations reflect his growing despair: “What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them” (153). From his initial hopefulness as the story begins, the Creature’s search for identity, eventual rejection, and outcast state bring him to a place of complete despair. Disillusioned by the broken promise of ideal love and forcibly marginalized, the Creature expresses his sorrow through the language of dejection and constant questioning.

Although his transformation takes place much later in the novel, Victor ultimately succumbs to this same feeling of misery. During his first formal meeting with the Creature,

Victor is charged with the duty of creating him a mate. Overwhelmed by the gravity of his task,

Victor makes his first appeal for help: “Oh! stars, and clouds, and winds, ye are all about to mock me: if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart, depart and leave me in the darkness” (173). In asking for either death or desolation to free 46 him from his curse, Victor shows a sense of dread from early on. Once his loved ones are murdered and the hope of all future happiness fades, Victor completely adopts the Creature’s tone and language of despair.

After learning of Clerval’s death, Victor describes his feelings of incompleteness in terms reminiscent of the individual/Doppelgänger’s dual existence: “I walked about the isle like a restless spectre, separated from all it loved, and miserable in the separation” (194). With his dear friend now gone, Victor feels like a shadow of his former self and distanced from all he once loved and cherished. With the death of Elizabeth, this feeling of desolation is renewed through his latest loss: “A fiend had snatched from me every hope of future happiness: no creature had ever been so miserable as I was; so frightful an event is single in the history of man” (220).

Asserting that “no creature had ever been so miserable as I was,” Victor descends further into the throes of despair. By claiming that a “fiend had snatched from me every hope of future happiness,” Victor directly implicates the Creature and emphasizes the unjust and unexpected nature of this transgression. His belief that “so frightful an event is single in the history of man” highlights the intensity of his feelings and his sense of utter hopelessness in the wake of such profound personal tragedy.

Again using the term “miserable” to describe his state, his language recalls the Creature’s earlier lamentations. This shared language reaffirms Victor and the Creature’s innate connection and calls attention to other examples of linguistic parallels. Beyond the borrowed use of the

Creature’s rhetoric, Victor similarly poses questions to some higher power during this difficult time. Immediately after Clerval’s death, Victor wonders how and why he was allowed to go on living:

Why did I not die? More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink into

forgetfulness and rest? Death snatches away many blooming children, the only hopes of 47

their doting parents: how many brides and youthful lovers have been one day in the

bloom of health and hope, and the next a prey for worms and the decay of the tomb! Of

what materials was I made, that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the turning

of the wheel, continually renewed the torture. (201)

By contrasting his own state with that of “blooming children” or “brides and youthful lovers,”

Victor further emphasizes his lack of vitality and readiness for death. Equating his endless trials and tribulations with “so many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture” Victor wonders “of what material” he was made that he could endure such hardship while others are permitted to die and become “prey for worms and the decay of the tomb.”

In addition to the vivid imagery his language conjures, the notion of a “turning wheel” that “continually renewed the torture” also evokes Promethean associations. After Prometheus created humankind from clay and brought fire to the world, he was punished for his transgression by being chained to a rock where an eagle would come each day to eat his liver. The next day, his liver would grow back and the process would repeat itself for all eternity.8 Given the Promethean overtones of Victor’s initial act of creation, the continued punishment for his crime lends mythological scope and scale to his suffering and provides an answer to his later question, “Alas!

Why did they preserve so miserable and detested a life?” (205). In addition to supporting a mythological reading of the character and emphasizing his struggles during this trying time, these questions also directly connect Victor with his Creature on a foundational level.

In his initial interrogations, “Why did I not die? More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink into forgetfulness and rest?” Victor’s sense of loneliness and isolation

8 For the story of Prometheus’ punishment, see Hesiod’s Theogony, trans. Richard S. Caldwell (Newburyport: Focus Information Group, 1987).

48 in the universe are emphasized. Furthermore, these same supplications were made earlier by the

Creature as he wondered why he had to endure his own agonies. Through examples such as,

“Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live? Why, in that instance, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed?” (160), their mirrored emotional states and common language are made apparent. Through this constant questioning and shared sense of despair, the characters’ commonalities are emphasized. This mutual experience of misery and period of anguish is another point of connection in Victor and the Creature’s parallel character arcs.

From a place of shared misery, Victor and the Creature both emerge with revenge in their hearts. Although their despair leads to a sense of complete isolation, their ensuing anger brings them outside of themselves and, once again, compelled towards each other. While Victor and the

Creature were initially drawn together through love, the corruption of this ideal and the misery they consequently experience leads them to pursue one other with vicious hatred. In this way, the period of despair they both endure is a time of transition during which their ideal love paradigm is reconfigured into their final Doppelgänger relationship. Now that any kind of love is forever out of reach, their efforts are instead put towards seeking revenge for their cursed conditions.

Turning back towards each other, their despair gives way to anger and a mutual desire to destroy their fated counterpart as the apparent source of their torment.

Although they had mutual desire early on, Victor and the Creature now find themselves fatally drawn together through mutual hatred. Locked into a death spiral from which neither can emerge, both creator and creation blame each other for their pains and seek retribution. Looking at Victor’s language for his description of the Creature, his earlier hopes and ensuing misery are both replaced by the desire for vengeance: 49

My abhorrence of this fiend cannot be conceived. When I thought of him, I gnashed my

teeth, my eyes became inflamed, and I ardently wished to extinguish the life which I had

so thoughtlessly bestowed. When I reflected on his crimes and malice, my hatred and

revenge burst all bounds of moderation. (119)

The intensity of Victor’s “abhorrence of this fiend” is directly proportional to his earlier hopes for his future progeny as the first of a new species created in his image. Now focused on the

Creature’s demise, Victor’s “hatred and revenge burst all bounds of moderation” and through his ardent wish to “extinguish the life which I had so thoughtlessly bestowed,” he himself becomes monstrous. In his new attitude towards the Creature, Victor takes on a more vicious countenance and hateful form than previously seen: “When I thought of him, I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed.” This vivid description of Victor’s physical response captures the visceral hatred he feels for his once-desired creation.

Furthermore, this account also anticipates the Creature’s later reaction when he realizes that he is irreconcilably abject: “The feelings of kindness and gentleness, which I had entertained but a few moments before, gave place to hellish rage and gnashing of teeth. Inflamed by pain, I vowed eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind” (166). The similarities in these descriptions suggest a direct continuity between the two characters in their mutual hatred. The Creature’s

“hellish rage and gnashing of teeth” directly recall Victor’s own physical response: “When I thought of him, I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed.” In both accounts, “hatred” is explicitly mentioned and Victor’s emphasis on “revenge” is mirrored through the Creature’s desire for “vengeance.” These linguistic parallels conflate the two characters, joining them together though their shared anger and underscoring their innate connection. Even though the

Creature’s malice is here directed towards “all mankind,” his desire for vengeance eventually causes him to focus in on his creator as the source and continued spring of his torment. In this 50 way, through their shared hatred and need for revenge, Victor and the Creature knowingly re- engage with each other and willingly pursue their own eventual ends.

As the story progresses, Victor and the Creature’s rhetoric of revenge becomes even more prevalent. With every loss he endures and every crippling blow he is dealt, Victor becomes correspondingly more obsessed with the Creature’s destruction until it becomes his sole motivation for carrying on. Having identified the Creature as the cause of his misfortunes, Victor

“desired and ardently prayed” that he might have the chance to “wreak a great and signal revenge on his cursed head” (221). Compelled by this singular aim and focused on his task, “all voluntary thought was swallowed up and lost” (223). In a direct parody of Victor’s obsessive interest in bringing the Creature to life, destroying the Creature becomes Victor’s sole fixation and only balm for the death of his loved ones. Now “hurried away by fury,” Victor confesses that “revenge kept me alive; I dared not die, and leave my adversary in being” (223).

As revenge becomes Victor’s guiding fixation, the quest for vengeance also comes to define the Creature. Blaming Victor for the pains and torments he endured, the Creature vows to destroy his creator and rob him of all future happiness:

I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards

you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have a care:

I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart, so that you curse the

hour of your birth. (169)

The Creature’s hatred of his creator is palpable in these assurances of vengeance and retribution.

Identifying Victor as his “arch-enemy” to whom he swears “inextinguishable hatred,” the

Creature’s preoccupation with Victor is clearly evident and his commitment to vengeance matches that of his creator. But while the Creature promises Victor that he will “desolate your heart, so that you curse the hour of your birth,” this obsessive interest in his creator affirms rather 51 than disrupts their continued connection. While both Victor and the Creature commit themselves to each other’s destruction, their shared fixation still binds them together. Instead of feeling truly ambivalent towards each other, their inextricable link dictates that, whether in hatred or love, they cannot live without each other. Consequently, their mutual desire for vengeance and shared rhetoric of revenge only further solidifies their bond.

In his book, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century

Writing, Chris Baldick accurately conveys Victor and the Creature’s shared identity crisis as the characters’ circumstances worsen:

All identities in the novel are unstable and shifting: the roles of master and slave, pursuer

and pursued alternating or merging. As in the Revolution debates, the accuser of

monstrous offspring is himself accused of being a monstrously negligent parent. When

Victor and his monster refer themselves back to Paradise Lost—a guiding text with

apparently fixed moral roles—they can no longer be sure whether they correspond to

Adam, to God, or to Satan, or to some or all of these figures. Like the iceberg on which

Frankenstein makes his first appearance in the novel, their bearings are all adrift. (44)

As Victor and the Creature face greater challenges, their earlier character distinctions are questioned and the lines distinguishing them are blurred. Like many of the characters in Milton’s foundational text, Victor and the Creature are forced to play multiple parts as they develop a greater understanding of themselves and their fated purposes. Although Victor maintains dominance as the primary individual in their Doppelgänger relationship, power shifts, role reversals, and interchanges occur between the characters as new points of conversion emerge later in the novel.

As the novel draws to a close and Victor and the Creature’s contentious relationship finally reaches its inevitable conclusion, their shared quest for revenge leads them to a chase 52 through the Arctic. Victor now acting as pursuer and the Creature as pursued, the creator follows his creation through the ice and snow. But instead of letting Victor die in the cold, the Creature leaves him sustenance and encourages him to continue on. Instructing him to “wrap yourself in furs, and provide food, for we shall soon enter upon a journey where your sufferings will satisfy my everlasting hatred” (227) the Creature feeds into their connection and prolongs this pursuit. In one of the inscriptions left for Victor “on the barks of trees or cut in stone” (226), the Creature made explicit his desire to drag out their suffering:

My reign is not over yet, you live, and my power is complete. Follow me; I seek the

everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost, to which I

am impassive. You will find near this place, if you follow me too tardily, a dead hare; eat,

and be refreshed. Come on, my enemy; we have yet to wrestle for our lives; but many

hard and miserable hours must endure, until that period shall arrive. (227)

Empowered by his superior tolerance of the Arctic conditions, the Creature asserts his dominance by remarking “my reign is not over yet, you live, and my power is complete.” Although his role as Victor’s Doppelgänger forcibly marginalizes the Creature throughout the novel, his impassivity to the elements allows him to string his creator along during the final leg of their journey and allows him to believe that he is in control of both their fates. Envisioning their ultimate confrontation as a moment when they will “wrestle for their lives,” the Creature chooses to prolong their hardship through “many hard and miserable hours” instead of ending their misery immediately.

This deferral of their final confrontation speaks to the Creature’s motivations and continued subjugation as Victor’s Doppelgänger. His reticence to sever all ties with his creator demonstrates his inability to live without Victor and although revenge is his prime motivation for much of the novel, the Creature implicitly understands that the murder of Victor will bring a kind 53 of self-annihilation. Defined by his creator for his entire loathsome life, the Creature would lose all sense of meaning and purpose without the guiding influence of Victor, as the primary individual in their relationship. This acquiescence to Victor’s dominance can be observed through the Creature’s later decision to end his own life once Victor finally passes away: “I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been” (243).

Seeking death once Victor is gone, the Creature affirms the innate connection they share and brings their relationship to its final and fitting close.

Having initially idealized each other as their hope for redemptive love, Victor and the

Creature are inextricably linked throughout Frankenstein. The pervasive influence of this bond not only informs their characterization, but also aligns Victor and the Creature throughout the novel as fated counterparts. From their initial fixation with each other, their resulting despair and desire for revenge marks the continuation of their parallel character arcs. Through this shared language and mirroring descents, Shelley reinforces Victor and the Creature’s unbreakable bond.

The resulting union is an inescapable and all-consuming bond which influences every other relationship, interaction, and event in Frankenstein.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor and the Creature are joined together through an intrinsic link and an innate sense of sameness. As an individual and his Doppelgänger, Victor and the Creature are initially bound by a shared fixation, and ultimately, brought together for their final twin descents. Although their relationship is born out of the hope of ideal love and redemption through another, this paradigm is shifted and their fatal compulsion towards each other eventually ends in shared tragedy. 54

Although I have been emphasizing the two figures within this Doppelgänger relationship, it is important to note how this connection is maintained through direct association with the novel’s other characters. Despite the primacy of Victor’s relationship with the Creature, his other conventional character doubles also play a formative role in this connection. In his introduction to

Making Monstrous: Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory, Fred Botting complicates Victor and the

Creature’s Doppelgänger relationship through a more complex configuration that accounts for these other figures:

These dualities are not, strictly speaking, doubles, because they involve a third term to

hold them in place. The third term makes up a triad, a holy trinity perhaps, of which the

apex is an external gaze that structures the double within and as a frame and finds,

binding them in their difference, an absent pivot, an authorial voice. Thus, as duality, the

double is encased, framed by the unifying force of a positively human order and author

that establishes the limits, the constitutive poles of its own human identity. (24)

For Botting, this “third term” or “unifying force” can be found in the external presence of the author through the act of composition. By identifying Mary Shelley as an organizing influence on

Frankenstein’s narrative, Botting acknowledges the need for another active participant, thus opening up the restrictive Doppelgänger pairing. However, while he identifies the Victor,

Creature, Mary Shelley triad as his “holy trinity,” this allowance for a “third term” progresses the paradigm and permits multiple configurations within the narrative itself.

Whether through his friendship with Henry Clerval or his later camaraderie with Robert

Walton, Victor is closely aligned with many characters throughout the novel. But perhaps his most significant double, besides the Creature, is Elizabeth Lavenza. Described in the 1831 edition as “my more than sister” (43), Elizabeth’s dual roles as family member and future wife cast her as Victor’s erotic double. Identified as love object and emphasized through the element of desire, 55

Elizabeth symbolizes heteronormative fulfillment for Victor. Elizabeth’s privileged position as

Victor’s primary female counterpart also anticipates Carl Jung’s conception of the anima: shadow archetypes within the male unconscious, represented as feminine inner personalities.9 In keeping with the Miltonic framework alluded to earlier on, Victor and Elizabeth’s relationship is reminiscent of Adam and Eve and, specifically, the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib. Viewed in this context, Victor’s innate bond with Elizabeth parallels his creator/progeny relationship with the Creature and contributes to a revision of the novel’s Doppelgänger relationship as a triangulation of terms. Further complicating this dynamic configuration, the Creature’s wish for his own bride mimics Victor and Elizabeth’s erotic connection and creates another figural double for Elizabeth. Through his unfulfilled desire for Elizabeth, or a corresponding female figure, the

Creature is again deprived of companionship while Victor secures his dominance through

Elizabeth as erotic double. Consequently, although Victor and the Creature’s relationship undoubtedly maintains primacy throughout the novel, Victor’s other character doubles, such as

Elizabeth, extend the paradigm and allow for several reconfigurations.

In this way, although the Doppelgänger relationship is strictly comprised of two figures, it relies on a third term to fix it in place and affirm its continued existence. Through the addition of a “third term,” the complexity of Victor and the Creature’s fatal compulsion is mediated through the novel’s secondary characters. However, because the individual and Doppelgänger are not true equals, the Doppelgänger is not permitted his own external character doubles. As such, Victor is offered romantic love and filial affection while the Creature is denied the love of his creator, the

9 For more on Jung’s conception of the anima, see Anthony Stevens’ On Jung (Princeton: Princeton UP,1990).

DeLaceys, and his unfinished bride. Consequently, Victor’s dominance over the Creature is constantly reaffirmed through his close connection with each of his character doubles.

However, in the story’s transition from fictional to theatrical representation, Elizabeth ceases to be important. In fact, all of Victor’s character doubles are demoted to background players or secondary figures in the drama. In Presumption, these necessary changes mean that

Walton is cut entirely, Clerval is reduced to a straight man, and Elizabeth is recast in the more conventional role of Victor’s sister. With these characters now sidelined, Victor and the Creature are the only remaining character doubles in the play.

As for Botting’s “third term,” the position once filled by Mary Shelley as writer or

Elizabeth, Walton, and Clerval as character double is recast in the drama. Along with the reduction of these character doubles and the story’s displacement from its fictional origins, a new

“third term” is needed to fix this relationship in place. In Presumption, responsibility for constructing and maintaining the Doppelgänger relationship instead falls on the audience. The importance of audience response to the illegitimate theatrical tradition meant that dramatists had to cater to the public’s sensibilities. Consequently, audience seduction played an integral role in the gothic melodrama and informed the dramatic composition of such texts as Presumption.

For this reason, Peake’s decision to make the Creature more appealing to audiences leads to an inversion of Frankenstein’s Doppelgänger relationship in Presumption. While Victor’s character doubles reinforce his significance in the novel, the drama’s reliance on audience reception privileges the Creature as the focal figure. In the next chapter, I return Presumption to its theatrical milieu to examine both how and why these changes were made and what they mean for Victor and the Creature’s relationship.

Chapter 2

Presumption’s Doppelgänger: A Study in Theatre

Closely following Mary Shelley’s completion of Frankenstein in 1818, an impressive tradition commenced of dramatizing the novel. Beginning in 1823 with Richard Brinsley Peake’s

Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, the Frankenstein myth became an imaginative preoccupation of nineteenth-century theatrical practitioners. According to Forry, within three years of Presumption’s premiere, fourteen other dramatizations of the novel were staged, spanning a wide variety of genres and styles (Hideous Progenies 3). In the same year that he opened Presumption, Peake lampooned his own play with the parodic burlesque, Another Piece of Presumption.

After Peake blazed the trail, dramatist Henry M. Milner adapted Frankenstein for the stage with two very distinct productions. Milner’s 1823 effort, The Demon of Switzerland, was a colossal failure with no surviving play text and scant critical response. However, his wildly successful follow-up, Frankenstein; or, The Man and the Monster, provided Peake’s

Presumption with its first real competition. Premiering at the Royal Coburg in 1826, Milner’s play relocated the novel’s action to Italy and staged the story’s climactic finale on the edge of the crater of Mount Etna (204).

Meanwhile, interest in the Frankenstein myth had spread across the continent, causing other nations to adapt the tale for their stages. Merle and Beraud’s French retelling, Le Monstre et le magicien, opened in 1826, and its popular English translation by John Atkinson Kerr debuted the same year. The play borrowed from the tradition of nautical melodrama by casting Victor and the Creature out to sea for their final confrontation. When Presumption was remounted in 1826, 58 the play’s ending was changed to match this version’s exciting conclusion, thus indicating the popularity and pervasiveness of this international adaptation (Forry 13).10

Sparked by Presumption’s initial popularity, the story of Victor Frankenstein and his

Creature exploded onto the nineteenth-century stage and remained there throughout the following century. Garnering critical and popular attention, these first productions contributed to the resurgent interest, and subsequent revision, of the novel in 1831. But while Shelley’s text was a favorite source for dramatists in the Romantic and Pre-Victorian periods, its shift from fictional to theatrical presentation has divided audiences, reviewers, and contemporary critics for nearly two centuries. Although these first productions gained widespread popularity in the minor playhouses, readers have often found the connection to be problematic between these adaptations and Frankenstein.

Taking the form of melodrama, parody, or burlesque, these first attempts at staging the novel provoke many questions regarding cross-medium adaptation. For example, how can a novel be appropriated for a performance mode? What method or standard applies to the evaluation of these plays, both theoretically and in practice? And finally, which elements of the original narrative are retained and which are discarded? My own line of inquiry picks up from these questions as I compare and contrast Frankenstein with its theatrical progenies.

Although each of the novel’s contemporary adaptations contributes to Frankenstein’s cultural legacy, my study specifically focuses on Presumption as the first and most formative example. After the play’s initial run of thirty-seven performances in the summer of 1823, it retained its popularity and continued in the repertoire until at least 1850 (Cox 385). And while

Presumption directly responded to Shelley’s source text, subsequent adaptations were influenced

10 The playbill for the remount advertises “an entirely new scene, conforming to the original story, representing a schooner in a violent storm in which Frankenstein and the monster are destroyed” (Cox 386). 59 or informed by Peake’s interpretation of the novel. For this reason, Presumption is a creative critique of the novel itself and, as such, offers useful insight into Frankenstein’s initial reception and immediate critical response. Furthermore, as both the only production seen by Shelley and the cause of Frankenstein’s renewed popularity, Presumption remains one of the most significant cross-medium adaptations in the novel’s illustrious history.

The adaptation of Frankenstein for the theatre requires different modes of communication and new methods of mythmaking. The change in medium required a contraction of Shelley’s narrative to suit both theatrical constraints and generic conventions. Unlike closet dramas intended for private contemplation, Presumption must necessarily be read alongside its performance history and within the context of the nineteenth-century minor theatres in London.

Until 1843, the London theatre scene was distinctly divided. Because of the continuing dominance of the Patent playhouses, a hierarchy persisted between the “legitimate” dramatic tradition and that of the popular but peripheral minor theatres. Maintained through government protection, Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket held exclusive rights to produce

“serious drama,” including comedic and tragic works. Forced to contend with these prohibitions, the unsanctioned minor houses needed to develop alternative practices and conventions to remain commercially viable outside Patent rule. From this place of creative restriction, the popular tradition of “illegitimate” theatre emerged.

Gaining momentum throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, illegitimate theatre marked a departure from the Classical forms and standards identified with the Patent productions. Unable to make use of traditional conventions and forbidden from staging “spoken drama,” practitioners in the illegitimate tradition were forced to find new styles and modes to remain creatively competitive and commercially solvent. In the face of these strict limitations, the 60 minor theatres defied Aristotelian dramatic principles of plot, character, thought, and diction, choosing instead to privilege music and spectacle. This decision allowed illegitimate theatre to stay within formal and content restrictions and, in the process, helped characterize it as vibrant entertainment for the general populace. From burlesques to pantomimes, comedic sketches to musical acts, the minor playhouses became home to a broad range of alternative performance modes.

But while each genre played to success on the illegitimate stage, one of the most popular began as an import from the Patent tradition: the gothic melodrama. Boasting a piecemeal aesthetic and cannibalistic in nature, the gothic melodrama borrowed heavily from other mediums, styles, and stories to become a dominant dramatic form in the nineteenth century.

While it had previously thrived in the Patent playhouses, its formal hybridity and broad appeal made it an iconic fixture of the illegitimate theatrical tradition. Due to an increased emphasis on aesthetic appeal and audience accessibility, these melodramatic performances relied on impressive stage pictures, loaded gestures, and coded iconography to express meaning.

Facilitated by landmark advancements in technical theatre, this increased reliance on stage craft helped to enable visual storytelling.

In Romantic Drama: Acting and Reacting, Frederick Burwick explains how these melodramatic conventions and coded images were implicitly understood by minor playhouse audiences, thus enabling simplified narrative strategies: “With an audience of frequent theatre- goers who were alert to familiar tropes and situations, playwrights could easily engage in a conspiracy of allusions, knowing that many would perceive the cross-referencing and layering of sources” (57). Without the need for lengthy exposition or detailed characterization, this

“conspiracy of allusions” permitted playwrights to distill language into key images and to swap out rhetoric and monologues for action sequences and stunning visuals. 61

In the popular subgenre of gothic melodrama, part of this “conspiracy of allusions” included direct reference to the gothic literary tradition. Sparked by the work of writers such as

Horace Walpole, Monk Lewis, and Ann Radcliffe, the resurgence of the gothic novel ignited theatrical interest in the literary genre’s iconic tropes. In Michael R. Booth’s English Melodrama, he describes the cross-medium adaptation of the gothic novel onto the nineteenth-century stage:

What the melodramatists did with the Gothic novel was to simplify and intensify:

wherever possible sensations were elaborated and the supernatural emphasized.

Improvements in stage mechanics facilitated a full display of ghosts, and where the

novelist tended to suggest horrors the playwright made a satisfying physical show of

them. (69)

Building on the gothic novel’s reliance on atmospheric terror, dramatists capitalized on advancements in technical theatre to bring these tales of terror to the stage. By simplifying plots or characters and intensifying sensational or supernatural aspects, illegitimate theatrical practitioners successfully integrated the traditions of gothic literature and melodramatic performance. Building from melodrama’s widespread popularity, the gothic melodrama also played to great success in the Patent playhouses; but its generic hybridity and visual spectacle made it an ideal fit for the minor theatres.

In the nineteenth century, the gothic melodrama became a fixture in minor playhouses, such as the Royal Coburg and English Opera House. In keeping with continued restrictions on content, character archetypes, generic conventions, narrative simplicity, gothic tropes, and a declamatory style of acting became the favorite modes of communication in the genre. In a direct departure from the Patent productions’ reliance on rhetoric and complex characterization, illegitimate gothic melodramas were designed to shock, thrill, and delight enraptured audiences.

Capturing the imagination of the general populace through music, dance, and spectacle, the 62 gothic melodrama went on to become a key dramatic form in the Romantic era, and it is out of this tradition that Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein emerged.

How did a genre based on simplicity and visual appeal re-appropriate the novel’s complex characters for the minor theatre? And furthermore, how is Frankenstein’s Doppelgänger relationship changed to fit this distinctive genre?

Starring “The Creature” as “______”

“How delineate the wretch whom, with such infinite pains and care, I had endeavored to form?”

Initially posed by Victor after first seeing his Creature brought to life, this same question is at the heart of a nearly two-hundred-year-old desire to conceive and communicate

Frankenstein’s Creature. In looking to the novel for clues, the Creature’s nuanced characterization reveals an immense, unrelenting, otherworldly, and yet achingly human portrait of Victor’s abandoned progeny. As the story progresses, any definitive conception of the Creature is further complicated and contradicted. More questions linger for the eager reader until finally,

Victor’s hunt for the elusive Creature becomes our own.

In the Romantic and early Victorian periods, this same pursuit guided many dramatists in their attempts to bring the Creature to life. Closely following the novel’s 1818 publication, the

Creature’s dramatic potential attracted the attention of illegitimate theatrical practitioners.

Beginning with Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein in 1823, the

Creature captured the imagination of the English theatre-going public and quickly became a touchstone in popular culture. Despite Victor Frankenstein’s central role in the novel, it was the

Creature who stole the spotlight in the early dramas. The effect of this focal shift not only influenced the portrayal and reception of the Creature, but radically reconfigured the relationship 63 between creator and creation in these early adaptations, specifically Peake’s Presumption. The following section will explore the Creature’s movement from fictional to theatrical representation during the nineteenth century is explored. Referred to in the play bill as “______,” the Creature was neither immediately defined nor limited by titles or terms. Furthermore, this “nameless mode of naming the unnameable”11 alluded to the Creature’s search for identity in the novel and gave the fictional character a new beginning as a theatrical figure.

By reading the play’s performance text and manuscript edition alongside Frankenstein, a foundational continuity in the Creature’s characterization is established, despite a change in genre. Consequently, critical claims that Peake’s depiction robs the character of his initial complexity will be refuted. Drawing from gothic melodramatic conventions, my reading of

Presumption’s Creature focuses on performance practices and archetypal representation in the illegitimate theatrical tradition. To that end, my study engages two interrelated aspects of Peake’s

Creature: appearance and performance. While Peake’s use of archetypal coding and pantomime marks an apparent departure from the novel, a more nuanced reading of these tropes within the context of the nineteenth-century minor playhouses is required. In considering the play text alongside these generic conventions, Frankenstein as source text, performance reviews, and cultural influences, Shelley’s Creature endures, despite his changed appearance in Presumption.

While the Creature is described primarily by others in the novel, intentional evasiveness is one of Frankenstein’s greatest strengths, permitting the reader to conjure up his or her own image of unutterable monstrosity. For this reason, any dramatization of the Creature must contend with individual conceptions of the character, as we see from textual analysis. Through the Creature’s

11 Mary Shelley’s phrase to describe the Creature’s unusual crediting in the playbill (“To Leigh Hunt, September 9th, 1823.”) Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995, 135-39).

64 dramatization, he ceases to be purely imagined and takes on a tangible physical presence. With the need to show the character to the audience in some manner rather than simply tell of his appearance and exploits, the Creature must be adapted to fit different formal and generic conventions. Fictional ambiguity gives way to theatrical illusion as the Creature’s immensity must somehow be contained and expressed onstage.

In the case of Peake’s Presumption, the leap from the fictional to theatrical character is further extended by the exaggerated aesthetic of the gothic melodrama. In a genre where realism and nuance typically succumb to archetypes and tropes, a literary figure such as the Creature will look unfamiliar under stage lights. But while his portrayal is altered by this cross-medium and cross-generic transition, the Creature’s appearance is not disconnected from his fictional conception, despite modern interpretation. Instead, by adapting the character to suit the gothic melodrama’s distinct modes of communication, Peake devises a theatrical counterpart to

Shelley’s fictional Creature.

Because of melodrama’s reliance on aesthetic appeal, visual elements such as costume, gesture, pose, and stage picture all help tell the story. Unable to rely on language to the same extent as the Patent productions, illegitimate dramatists employed visual cues to aid characterization and help delineate the hero from the villain or the rustic from the nobleman. To assist audiences, dramatists frequently capitalized on physiognomy, the once-accepted scientific practice of assessing personality traits on the basis of physical features,12 to allow for the immediate identification of character features or moral leanings.

12 For more on the theoretical conception and practical application of physiognomy in the nineteenth century, see James D. Redfield’s Comparative Physiognomy or Resemblances Between Men and Animals (New York: Clinton Hall, 1852).

For minor theatre audiences accustomed to this use of coded iconography and archetypal representation, the physical appearance of the ghost, ghoul, or goblin at the centre of a gothic melodrama was of chief interest. As a way of first bringing the monsters onto the stage, a dramatic reveal was staged to emphasize the supernatural being and its horrifying form. Often eliciting audible audience reaction, these unveilings were intended to cause ladies to faint and children to weep with fear.

Maintaining this convention, before the Creature’s first onstage appearance in

Presumption, Victor’s vivid account of the character’s ghastly form helps build suspense. In words lifted almost directly from the novel, Victor’s speech prepares the audience for the

Creature’s highly-anticipated arrival:

I saw the dull yellow eye of the Creature open, it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion

agitated its limbs. What a wretch have I formed, his legs are in proportion and I had

selected his features as beautiful—beautiful! Ah, horror! His cadaverous skin scarcely

covers the work of muscles and arteries beneath, his hair lustrous, black, and flowing—

his teeth of pearly whiteness—but these luxuriances only form more horrible contrasts

with the deformities of the monster. (143)

Peake’s decision to leave Shelley’s description of the Creature almost completely intact is telling.

By keeping Victor’s account from Frankenstein as a point of connection, Peake maintains a natal link to the Creature’s fictional origins. Rather than dismiss this description entirely, Peake attempts to preserve the novel’s initial conception of the Creature, despite the change in medium and genre. However, despite textual borrowing from Frankenstein, the realization of the Creature onstage is discernibly different and the character’s appearance is altered significantly to be more in keeping with melodramatic conventions. The stage directions for the Dicks’ Standard Edition 66 of the play suggest the following for the Creature, on the basis of T.P. Cooke’s costuming in the role:

Dark black flowing hair—à la Octavian—his face hands, arms, and legs all bare, being

one colour, the same as his body, which is a light blue or French gray cotton dress,

fitting quite close, as if it were flesh, with a slate colour scarf round his middle, passing

over one shoulder. (136)

Although Peake took pains to retain Victor’s description of the Creature from the novel, his practical execution of the character did not maintain the same standard. According to Forry, the phrase “à la Octavian,” to describe the Creature’s hair is believed to reference “the wild dress of the Spaniard Octavian in Colman’s The Mountaineers” (Hideous Progenies 15) and is a notable addition to the character’s initial description. Based on Don Quixote, The Mountaineers was an exotic adventure-drama from the Patent playhouses. Premiering in 1793 at the Haymarket, the production played to great acclaim and its roguish hero, Octavian, quickly became a beloved dramatic figure (Sutcliffe 60). Peake’s explicit goal of having Creature’s appearance emulate that of the handsome Octavian is telling.

Rather than present the character as visually grotesque, as both the novel and play text would seem to suggest, Peake’s reference to Octavian is the first of many changes intended to enrich the Creature’s physical representation and undercut his apparent monstrosity. Choosing not to replicate the Creature’s proportions, yellow eyes, or musculature, Peake’s stage notes instead call for “a slate colour scarf round his middle, passing over one shoulder.” This description of the Creature’s clothing clearly evokes a robe or toga. Along with these stage directions, original production images similarly depict the Creature in Greco-Roman attire.

In this image from the play in production, the Creature’s dominating stance, heavy brow, dignified expression, powerful frame, and ancient apparel conjure heroic associations. While 67

Illustration 7: An Engraving Depicting Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, 1826, Harvard Theatre Collection, Cambridge.

Shelley dubs Victor “The Modern Prometheus” in Frankenstein’s subtitle, in Presumption, Peake visually associates the Creature with antique tradition. However, this costuming takes on greater symbolic significance when read alongside the Creature’s Classical education in the novel. In addition to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Goethe’s Sorrows of Werter, Plutarch’s Lives has a formative influence on the fictional Creature’s intellectual, moral, and social development in

Frankenstein. Crediting Plutarch for teaching him “high thoughts” and elevating him “above the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to admire and love the heroes of past ages” (153), the

Creature consequently feels an “ardour for virtue” and “abhorrence of vice” (154). By clothing the Creature in Classical apparel, Peake implicitly acknowledges this important narrative and thematic thread in Frankenstein. Although the Greco-Roman influence on the character’s costume is original to Presumption, the tie between the Creature and Classical tradition has precedent in the novel.

Having considered Cooke’s costuming in Presumption, an apparent disparity persists between Victor’s description of the Creature in the novel and play and the character’s onstage appearance. Although they share some commonalities, Peake’s additions of wild hair, blue skin, and ancient apparel appear to run counter to the Creature’s described appearance. How then does

Peake negotiate Shelley’s initial description of the character in the novel with his practical styling of Cooke as the Creature?

By returning Presumption to the theatrical medium and gothic melodramatic genre, these stage directions and Cooke’s costuming are shown to reflect melodrama’s suggestive staging practices and the importance of audience engagement. Having heard an explicit description of the

Creature before his arrival, the audience would have projected this stated vision of the character onto the actor playing the role. Although technical theatre saw landmark advancements in the 69 nineteenth century, there were still limitations as to what could be convincingly staged in the gothic genre.

Through Peake’s use of archetypal associations conventional to the gothic melodrama, the actor’s physical presence and the Creature’s stated features could be reconciled by the knowing audience. Mirroring the reader’s active role in imagining the Creature in Frankenstein, the audience would likewise connect the stated vision of the Creature and his physical manifestation onstage. Because of Peake’s borrowed use of Frankenstein’s original description and suggestion of the Creature’s intended effect, the audience would become complicit in his vision for the character.

Having considered the Creature’s appearance in Presumption, I now look at the effect of performance style on the character’s continued complexity. Following Presumption’s 1823 premiere, critics, audiences, and even Shelley herself were enraptured by the Creature’s dramatic representation. However, despite the Creature’s landmark success in the illegitimate theatrical tradition, his silencing has led many modern critics to chide Peake for limiting the character to a mute monster. Notably, Baldick rejects Presumption’s speechless Creature as a perversion of

Shelley’s initial conception: “From a sensitive critic of social institutions, the monster has been transformed into a rampaging embodiment of Victor’s unleashed ‘impiety,’ who is never given a hearing” (59). But although the Creature no longer appears as “a sensitive critic of social institutions,” his silence should not be misread as inanity, nor should his changed relationship to his creator be misconstrued as continued subjugation. And although the novel’s Doppelgänger relationship is reinforced through Victor and the Creature’s verbal expression, the Creature’s muteness allows for a different mode of communication.

Highlighted through contrast and melodrama’s visual emphasis, it is the mute Creature who comes to prominence in Presumption. Consequently, the silencing of the Creature allows for 70 a regeneration rather than reduction of the character’s fictional characterization. While the decision to render the Creature mute has been regarded as a misinterpretation of Shelley’s thematic intentions, the Creature’s silent expression in Presumption transcends these apparent limitations. Without the ability to articulate his anxieties and ambitions, the dramatized

Creature’s internal struggles are evocatively expressed through pantomime performance.

Characterized by broad gestures and musical underscoring, pantomime was a well- established performance mode in the nineteenth century and its borrowed use in melodrama was a common occurrence. A perfect complement to the melodrama’s visual emphasis, broad appeal, and musical interludes, the pantomime imbued movement and gesture with greater significance.

In keeping with the restrictions on “serious drama” in the minor playhouses, the pantomime’s reliance on physicality and corporeal language helped evade textual limitations. But in addition to its practicality, Peake’s employment of the pantomime tradition for the dramatization of the

Creature is symbolically and thematically significant. Robbed of speech, the Creature’s feelings and intentions are physically expressed rather than verbalized, as they are in the novel. However, rather than become a supporting character as a result of the change, the Creature comes to the drama’s forefront through innovative modes of communication.

Without the use of speech, the actor must physically express the misery, longing, and alienation lamented by the Creature in the novel. Uneducated and pre-verbal, the Creature’s bodily expression and innate musicality allow him to operate on a different theatrical plane than the other characters. While he is not able to speak or sing, the Creature’s lyrical movements and fascination with song mark his characterization as distinctly melodramatic. By incorporating the communicative abilities and artistic appeal of dance, music, and gesture, the Creature’s agency is maintained in Presumption. 71

To understand how pantomime performance helped the Creature transcend his mute presentation, it is necessary to return Presumption to its performance history. Celebrated for his athletic prowess and physicality on stage, Thomas Potter Cooke was a noted performer before appearing in Presumption for the unnamed Creature’s theatrical debut. First appearing in

Presumption’s initial run at the English Opera House in 1823, Cooke was then cast in Merle and

Beraud’s French adaptation Le Monstre et le magicien in 1826. Following his return to the

English Opera House in 1826 for Presumption’s successful remount, The Illustrated London

News (15 October 1853) estimated that by the half century, Cooke had played the role of the

Creature at least three hundred and sixty-five times. Cooke was a key component in the initial success and endurance of Frankenstein’s dramatic legacy, receiving enthusiastic response to his pantomimic performance.

Following Presumption’s 1823 premiere, critics were quick to commend Cooke’s masterful performance and mute communication of the Creature’s nascent development. In a review from The Theatrical Observer, Cooke’s performance was lauded as the play’s greatest triumph: “Nothing could be more excellent than the acting of Mr. T.P. Cooke, as the nameless monster, in marking the first effects of some of the most striking objects of art and nature upon his new-created faculties” (29 July 1823). A later review from the same publication noted that

Cooke “represents in dumb show with infinite accuracy, the varied feelings supposed to arise from the extraordinary condition of his nameless character” (13 August 1823). Even Mary

Shelley herself applauded Cooke’s successful turn as the Creature. In a well-known letter to

Leigh Hunt, she was quick to observe the subtlety and clarity of his silent performance: “Cooke played the part extremely well—his trying to grasp at the sounds he heard—all indeed he does was well imagined and executed” (1: 378).

Illustration 8: T. P. Cooke. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: Muller Collection, New York.

To understand how the Creature’s silent expression could be effectively conveyed with emotional quality, one need only to look at Peake’s elaborate stage directions in Presumption.

Confronted by Victor and the DeLaceys in an adapted scene, the Creature is attacked by his intended protectors and responds with violent force. In the original manuscript edition, the scene plays out with minimal suggested directions: “Music.—Felix discharges his gun and wounds the

Demon, who writhes under the wound.—In desperation pulls a burning brand from the fire— rushes at them” (413).

However, in the Dicks’ Standard Edition based on the play in performance, the stage directions are significantly elaborated to reflect Cooke’s silent subtext. These detailed additions include moments such as the Creature wanting to attack Felix but “deterred by repetition of the wound,” a sympathetic appeal where “The Monster rushes up to Frankenstein, and casts himself at his feet, imploring protection,” and a complex bit of pantomime in which “Frankenstein endeavors to stab him with his dagger, which the Monster strikes from his hand—and expresses that his kindly feelings towards the human race, have been met by abhorrence and violence; that they are all now converted into hate and vengeance” (153). Although unable to speak, the

Creature still communicates with his creator through meaningful movements and gestures. These extended stage directions in the performance edition are indicative of Cooke’s expressive abilities and also attest to Peake’s sophisticated understanding of the source text. In addition to placing the

Creature within the gothic melodramatic tradition, the use of pantomime performance served as a physical referent to events and ideas from Frankenstein. Put into practice, this meant that significant moments or concepts from the novel could still be retained despite cross-medium and cross-generic adaptation. Through the distillation of Shelley’s rhetoric to meaningful gestures underscored by suggestive musical leitmotifs, Frankenstein’s Creature lived on in Presumption.

This effective adaptation can be observed by comparing exemplary moments in the novel and 74 play, such as the Creature’s discovery of fire. I quote the following section at length to emphasize

Shelley’s thorough description of this episode in the novel:

One day, when I was oppressed by cold, I found a fire which had been left by some

wandering beggars, and was overcome with delight at the warmth I experienced from it.

In my joy I thrust my hand into the live embers, but quickly drew it out again with a cry

of pain. How strange, I thought, that the same cause should produce such opposite effects!

I examined the materials of the fire, and to my joy found it to be composed of wood. I

quickly collected some branches; but they were wet, and would not burn. I was pained at

this, and sat still watching the operation of the fire. The wet wood which I had placed near

the heat dried, and itself became inflamed. I reflected on this; and, by touching the various

branches, I discovered the cause, and busied myself in collecting a great quantity of wood,

that I might dry it, and have a plentiful supply of fire. (130)

The Creature’s first-person account of encountering fire is thorough and highly contemplative.

His intellectual process and emotional response is chronicled through this lengthy description and his conscientious attention to detail indicates the significance of this formative discovery. In

Peake’s treatment of this same event in Presumption, the shift in medium requires new modes of expression:

Hammerpan and the Gipsies shriek and run off. The Demon descends, portrays by action

his sensitiveness of light and air, perceives the gipsies fire, which excites his admiration—

thrusts his hand into the flame, withdraws it hastily in pain. Takes out a lighted piece of

stick, compares it with another faggot which has not been ignited. Takes the food

expressive of surprise and pleasure. (403)

Although this pantomimic sequence distills the description in the source text, Peake retains the action, intellectual engagement, and emotional response covered by Frankenstein’s detailed 75 depiction. Even though Shelley’s rhetoric is silenced, it is successfully transfigured into loaded gesture and enlivened action. Viewed through the lens of gothic melodrama and the illegitimate theatrical tradition, this piece of stage business would have had the same meaning and intended effect as the lengthy account found in the novel. Through the distillation of image and action, the symbolic import of this sequence would have been clearly communicated to audiences in the minor theatres.

Considered through Presumption’s performance history, Peake’s decision to render the

Creature mute approximates the Creature’s complex characterization in Frankenstein. Through the added implications of silencing, othering, and marginalization, Peake’s creative choice further alludes to the novel’s thematic undertones. Taking into account the long history of pantomime, the gothic melodrama’s emphasis on action and gesture, and Cooke’s highly-praised performance, the Creature’s muteness is the result of cross-medium adaptation and not an act of senseless character reduction. By retaining the Creature’s complexity and keeping his portrayal consistent with gothic melodramatic conventions, Peake privileges the character as

Presumption’s focal figure. This decision marks a decisive focal shift from the novel’s emphasis on Victor Frankenstein and anticipates a subversion of Frankenstein’s Doppelgänger relationship.

Also Featuring Victor Frankenstein as “?”

By the time Frankenstein returned to the silver screen for Universal Pictures’ classic film version in 1931, Shelley’s novel had already undergone over a century of cross-medium adaptations. This iconic filmic adaptation of the novel is most famously remembered for Boris 76

Karloff’s portrayal of the mute Creature.13 Like T.P. Cooke before him, Karloff brought a sensitivity to the role that complicated the Creature’s apparent monstrosity. But although the

Creature’s representation received the most critical acclaim and is still celebrated today, what about Victor?

In the film, Victor’s nuanced characterization in the novel is reduced to a parodic representation of the mad scientist archetype. Now renamed Heinrich Frankenstein, his bizarre obsession with reanimating corpses becomes his definitive character trait. After succeeding in his fiendish labors, the maniacal Dr. Frankenstein celebrates his apparent triumph with his strange assistant, Igor. Contributing to this image of Frankenstein as an evil genius, his crazed exclamations of “It’s Alive!” have echoed throughout the character’s legacy.

But where did this conception of the character come from? How did Victor get so far away from Frankenstein?

From Victor Frankenstein’s theatrical debut in 1823’s Presumption, the stage was already set for his total character overhaul. Displaced from his fictional conception, the character was free to be reimagined and reinterpreted on the illegitimate stage. But although he is the novel’s eponymous and central character, this first cross-medium adaptation of Shelley’s tale sidelines the creator in favor of his creation and initiated a pattern that could carry on for years.

While Peake’s use of coded iconography and pantomime performance enlivened the

Creature, close reading and critical response indicate Victor’s archetypal refitting as not successfully realized. Consequently, although modern critics often take issue with the Creature’s reductive representation, it is in fact Victor who is lost in translation. As a result of this focal shift, the relationship between Victor and the Creature, as re-imagined in Presumption, is the

13 In Albert J. Valley’s “The Stage and Film Children of Frankenstein,” his survey of adaptations includes both Presumption and this film version from 1931 (The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel [Berkeley: U of California P], 1979). 77 mirrored image of Frankenstein’s initial configuration. In this way, while the novel positions

Victor as the primary individual and the Creature as his Doppelgänger, Peake’s privileging of the

Creature leads to Victor’s narrative subjugation and subsequent re-casting as the secondary antitype to his Creature.

From this observation, my study of the novel’s protagonist and his displacement in

Frankenstein’s theatrical tradition begins with one important question: is Victor Frankenstein strictly limited to fictional representation and, if so, how did mid-nineteenth-century dramatists, such as Peake, treat him differently from his Creature? To answer this question, I evaluate how

Victor’s dramatization reflects or rejects gothic melodramatic conventions. As a formal framework, I appraise Victor’s appearance, actions, and performance in relation to two central melodramatic archetypes: the hero and the villain.

By reading Presumption’s portrayal of Victor alongside conventional descriptions of the archetypal hero and villain in melodrama, I observe how his inconsistent characterization makes him ill-suited for the gothic melodrama and its character expectations. Even though Victor’s nuanced motivations and actions in the novel are neither purely villainous nor purely heroic, his lack of clear dramatic identity impedes his melodramatic transformation. Rather than commit to either archetype for Victor’s representation, Peake’s curious decision to flip-flop between the two is revealing. While the Creature is transfigured to reflect the shift from fictional to theatrical representation, Victor’s characterization is neither retained from the novel, nor altered to adhere to Presumption’s generic conventions. Based on this observation, this chapter demonstrates how

Victor’s theatrical afterlife is a kind of spectral shadow to his presentation in the novel, adding yet another double to the many duplications of Frankenstein.

Based on his first appearance in Presumption, Victor Frankenstein shows every sign of being a true stage villain. From the start of the play, frequent allusions are made to Victor’s 78 villainous potential in the drama. While Victor’s authority as the primary narrator in

Frankenstein allows him to influence reader reception, the shift from fictional to theatrical representation changes the way the character is both presented and perceived. Initially described by his servant, Fritz, in no uncertain terms as one whom “holds converse with somebody below with a long tail, horns, and hooves, who shall be nameless” (137), Victor is under constant attack for his presumptuous behavior.

As I discussed in my first chapter, the name of the novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern

Prometheus, privileges Victor as the eponymous character and establishes thematic parallels between him the mythological Prometheus. However, the novel’s re-imagination as a gothic melodrama for the illegitimate stage requires a new title more in keeping with a changed approach to the central character: Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein. Although Victor is still referenced in the drama’s subtitle, the leap from Frankenstein to Presumption reflects both a focal and tonal shift. Emphasizing the crime and not the character, Victor’s grand aspirations are persecuted rather than ennobled. With Shelley’s mythical allusion abandoned for a moralistic commentary, Victor’s vice of presumption is highlighted as his most definitive character trait.

From this initial identification of Victor’s sinful behavior, a case can be built for his casting as the drama’s villain. In addition to this titular reference to Victor’s presumption, the character’s appearance also arouses audience suspicion about his morality. In the stage directions for the Dicks’ performance edition of Presumption, Victor’s costuming is highly suggestive:

“Black velvet vest and trunk breeches—gray tunic, open, the sleeves open in front, slashed with black—black silk pantaloons and black velvet shoes—black velvet hat.” On the basis of his outfit alone, Victor’s moral leanings and social status would be clearly forecasted to the audience.

In keeping with melodrama’s reliance on visual storytelling, color associations assisted in characterization and clarified meaning for the audience. Bearing in mind this implicit 79 identification, Peake’s decision to clothe Victor in nearly all black is telling. Contrasted with the earth tones used for the gypsies, rustics, and servants or the Creature’s varying shades of gray,

Victor’s dark attire visually distinguishes him as a villainous figure. Recalling that the world of melodrama is “a world of absolutes where virtue and vice coexist in pure whiteness and pure blackness” (Booth 14), Victor’s black costume clearly marks him as a “bad guy” and limits his potential for change or growth within the drama. Choosing to forgo traditional heroic white for villainous black, Peake intentionally bars a favorable reading of the character, instead guiding audience sympathy elsewhere.

In addition to colour symbolism, Victor’s costume also places him firmly within the upper class. Outfitted in a velvet vest, shoes, and hat with silk pantaloons, Victor’s luxurious clothing would be intentionally alienating to some members of minor theatre audiences. Attracting a wider range of patrons than the Patent productions, illegitimate dramas played across social spheres and economic classes. The broader demographic of the minor theatres helped lower-class characters gain audience favor, a tendency encouraged by melodramatic conventions. In a genre where the lovable working class was often at odds with the wicked aristocracy, Victor’s opulent clothing would have immediately piqued audience suspicion. Coupled with Peake’s choice of dark color palette and the play’s telling title, Victor’s duplicitous or immoral potential is strongly alluded to from the beginning. In viewing the character’s appearance through the lens of gothic melodrama,

Victor’s costuming is conventionally consistent with the archetypal villain. This aesthetic choice sets early precedent for a changed approach to the character’s treatment throughout Presumption.

But although Victor’s costuming and the play’s title would suggest that he is re-cast as a conventional stage villain in Presumption, the character is not treated consistently throughout.

While the play’s title and Victor’s costuming suit the conventional trappings of a nineteenth- century scoundrel, Peake does not cast Victor as a true melodramatic villain. Although 80

Frankenstein’s Victor is neither purely villainous nor purely heroic, melodramatic characters had to adhere to a strict moral binary or conventional code of behaviors. While Peake is able to evade this limitation with the Creature through the nuanced use of pantomime performance, his portrayal of Victor does not key into any one practice, archetype, or approach conventional to illegitimate gothic melodrama. Consequently, Victor is unevenly characterized and wavers between heroic potential and villainous action throughout the drama. The resulting theatrical character is both disconnected from his fictional origins in Frankenstein and rendered inert on the illegitimate stage.

In looking at Victor’s language in Presumption, his character inconsistencies become increasingly apparent. Although melodrama’s emphasis on showing rather than telling eliminates the need for Frankenstein’s frame narrative, Victor’s reliance on language is maintained in the story’s staging. But while detailed description and rhetorical phrasing are integral to fictional characterization, long-windedness and a facility with language are unattractive features for a melodramatic character. While Aristotle suggests that diction is among the most important elements of a play (Poetics 56), the gothic melodrama’s emphasis on music and spectacle subverts this traditional paradigm. As a result, this privileging altered the purpose of language from poetic artistry to utilitarian functionality. Consequently, characters defined through rhetoric and oratory, such as Presumption’s Victor, are stifled within the melodramatic context. Although

Victor’s thoughtful discourse in the novel is in keeping with the medium, it marks a departure from generic conventions in Presumption.

Rather than elicit audience sympathy, both the form and content of these lengthy tracts further distance spectators and raise audience suspicions about the character. As Michael R.

Booth notes in his seminal work, English Melodrama, “villains are unable to keep quiet and are much given to self-revelation through gloating soliloquies and confidential asides” (22). 81

Observed in practice, Victor’s soliloquies take on a different tone through their changed context.

In a soliloquy from scene one, Victor boldly asserts his intention to create life. In words almost directly borrowed from the novel, he shares his grand plan with the audience. But while these confessions read as deeply contemplative in Frankenstein, in Presumption, these early declarations signal Victor’s brash insolence:

I have seen how the fine form of man has been wasted and degraded—have beheld the

corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life! I have seen how the worm

inherits the wonders of the eye and brain—I paused—analysing all the minutiae of

causation as exemplified in the change of life from death—until from the midst of this

darkness the sudden light broke in upon me! A light so brilliant and dazzling, some

miracle must have produced the flash! The vital principle! The cause of life!—Like

Prometheus of old, have I daringly attempted the formation—the animation of a Being!

To my task—away with reflection—to my task—to my task! (139)

By borrowing choice selections from the novel, Peake freely integrates adapted and original writing for Victor’s speeches. The resulting effect is more cannibalistic than constructive as these re-appropriated sections work in stark contrast with the usual fixtures and fittings of the gothic melodrama. For example, Victor’s reference to Prometheus in this soliloquy is a relic from the character’s fictional conception. As I demonstrated in my first chapter, Prometheus is integral to

Frankenstein and contributes to a thematic reading of the novel. Peake’s brief allusion to the mythical figure therefore pays homage to Victor’s fictional identity as “the modern Prometheus.”

However, because the drama is notably devoid of the novel’s Promethean allegory, this reference does not carry the same symbolic significance as it does in Frankenstein. Consequently, because

Victor’s soliloquies are lifted from Frankenstein without formal revision, the character is ostensibly caught between fictional and theatrical representation. By having the character speak 82 summarized and decontextualized passages from the novel as dramatic soliloquies, Peake produces a strange theatrical effigy of the novel’s focal figure.

In the scene leading up to this speech, the audience is given additional clues for interpreting the character’s language. Having interrupted Clerval’s musical interlude, Victor’s self-aggrandizing statements continue to arouse suspicion from both his friend and the audience.

Declarations such as, “Ha! I see by your eagerness that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted. That cannot be,” and “none but those who have experienced can conceive the enticements of science” (139), suggest delusions of grandeur and a sense of intellectual entitlement, characteristic of a conventional villain. In reaction to his friend’s superior airs, Clerval appeals directly to the audience and acknowledges his friend’s strange behavior.

Lines such as “How wild and mysterious his abstractions—he heeds me not,” “Again in reverie!

This becomes alarming—surely his head is affected,” and “He heeds me not—tis in vain to claim his notice” (139) work in comic contrast against Victor’s arcane responses and confirm the audience’s initial distrust of this aristocratic figure in black.

In addition to undercutting the serious tone of Victor’s contemplation, Clerval’s asides to the audience work the double duty of self-reflexively questioning the authority of descriptive language in the melodrama. By granting the audience early liberty to question and criticize the legitimacy of Victor’s rhetoric, Clerval plants the seed for the continued scrutiny of the character throughout the drama. Encouraged to mistrust the beguiling power of language onstage, minor theatre audiences would have been deterred by Victor’s reliance on rhetoric. In having Clerval break the fourth wall and share in the audience’s confusion, Peake acknowledges Victor’s inappropriate placement in the melodrama. Rather than reimagining the character to better suit the form and genre, Peake juxtaposes Victor with more conventionally appealing characters to 83 emphasize the stark contrast between them. Because Victor’s authoritative, literary language is generically inconsistent, he is rendered intentionally inaccessible to minor theatre audiences.

However, as the play progresses, Victor’s harsh tone and superior attitude quickly and completely change. After the pivotal creation scene, Victor’s language changes from villainous rhetoric to heroic declarations. Following act one’s climactic finale, Peake relies far less on

Shelley’s adapted text for Victor’s speeches, instead opting for his own original dialogue. In choosing to diverge from Frankenstein’s narrative, Peake needed to compose original lines to suit these changed circumstances. As a dramatist known for his farces, burlesques, and melodramas, he was well-versed in the standard dialogue of illegitimate gothic melodrama. Consequently,

Victor’s lines in acts two and three are more conventionally consistent with the gothic melodrama and take on an overtly moralistic tone.

Now speaking in the traditional language of melodrama, Victor cries out for his beloved and laments his certain fate: “Agatha! Dearest Agatha! Her name recalls my sinking spirits— where—where is she to be found? Oh, would that I ne’er had been robbed of her! ‘Twas her loss that drove me to deep and fatal experiments!” (401). While the character’s earlier speeches deal with life’s greatest mysteries, his new-found obsession with his beloved Agatha is more characteristic of melodrama’s archetypal stage hero. Through his claims of loneliness and heartache, Victor’s grand aspirations are abruptly and completely dismissed for a new guiding fixation: love. To this end, his moral transgressions are explained away as a symptom of love lost rather than as the consequence of his Promethean ambitions.

Consequently, as the language of Frankenstein is phased out in favor of Peake’s original writing with a more heroic bend, the link between Victor’s fictional and theatrical depictions becomes increasingly tenuous. After the Creature is brought to life, Victor’s mournful tone and repentant attitude can be sensed through his highly bombastic soliloquies. Histrionic expressions, 84 such as “the fangs of remorse tear my bosom” (422), capture the discernible shift in Victor’s language from Frankenstein to Presumption and mark a signal change for his theatrical makeover. But while this linguistic turn should make Victor a more dramatically viable character, this sudden turn does little to salvage his melodramatic representation. Having been vilified from the play’s beginning, Victor’s hurried recasting as a contrite sinner muddies rather than nuances his characterization. Never advancing beyond penance for his “sinful” act of creation, Victor`s language is limited to confessions of guilt and promises of repentance. Referring to himself as a

“miserable and impious being” (399) and “the author of unalterable evils” (423), Victor decries his own “impious labor” (144), wishing to “extinguish the spark which I so presumptuously bestowed” (144). Victor’s last-minute recasting does little to remedy his poor placement in the genre.

Even though his language is made more in keeping with melodrama’s accepted style of discourse, early indications of his potential villainy preclude a heroic reading of the part.

Furthermore, while his language progresses from devious declarations to apologetic admissions, his actions become increasingly nefarious throughout the play. While melodramatic audiences might have been willing to accept a repentant sinner as their drama’s hero, Victor’s increasingly villainous behavior precludes a favorable reading of the character.

Although Victor’s language early on in the play alludes to his villainous potential, his behavior immediately following the creation scene carries the continued hope of his heroic redemption. Determined to rid the world of his hideous progeny, Victor endeavors to destroy his creation and protect his loved ones. His quest to save his beloved and vanquish the monster through courage and strength of character follows a highly conventional melodramatic plotline influenced by the tradition of chivalric romance. In keeping with generic protocol, Victor doggedly pursues the Creature for the remainder of the play, attempts to free his child brother 85 from captivity, and saves Agatha from the burning cottage by bearing her “in his arms over the couch, in the midst of which parts of the building fall” (153). But while all these brave actions, paired with his conventionalized rhetoric, would point to Victor’s innate heroism, several telling events undercut this positive character reading and archetypal association.

Following the 1823 premiere of Presumption, critics opposed to Victor’s immoral actions focused their complaints on his impious animation of the Creature. Variously described in one leaflet as “improper,” “pregnant with mischief,” and “the promulgation of such dangerous doctrines” (Hideous Progenies 5), the creation scene attracted most critical ire. However, although this scene is considered the source and summit of Victor’s sinful action, his animation of the Creature is neither his last nor his most severe crime in Presumption.

As Victor’s failed attempts to kill his creation become increasingly brutal, his remorseful tone correspondingly intensifies. The effect is a discord between action and language that prevents a clear reading of the character. Constantly punishing himself for his sins while still viciously pursuing the Creature to no avail, Victor is paralyzed by his angst. The result is a dramatic figure both ill-suited for the melodramatic stage and greatly distanced from his initial characterization in Frankenstein.

After first bringing his creation to life “Frankenstein endeavors to stab him with his dagger, which the Monster strikes from his hand” (152). This first act of violence towards the then innocent Creature forecasts Victor’s destructive impulses in the play. While in Frankenstein

Victor’s dual role as creator/destroyer is effectively counter-balanced through the dynamic interplay of the individual/Doppelgänger relationship, his vicious tendencies are heavily emphasized in the drama. Consequently, as Victor’s language becomes more conventionally heroic, his villainous behavior correspondingly worsens. 86

After his first attack at the end of act one is easily rebuffed by the Creature, Victor returns in act two with a new attitude and a new weapon. Although Victor previously delighted at the prospect of creating life, he now chastises himself for his overreaching and his language reflects this self-admonishment. But although Victor bemoans his “impious labour” and affects innocence through his claims that he cannot kill the Creature because that would be “murder—murder in its worst and most horrid form” (144), in his next appearances, he arrives carrying a pistol (157).

After yet another failed attack on his progeny, Victor appears in the next scene with “two loaded pistols and a musket unloaded” (159). As the threat of physical violence intensifies and Victor becomes increasingly desperate, the heroism of his quest is greatly diminished. Unable to beat the

Creature through more honorable methods, Victor relies on weapons alone to defeat a being with only “the mind of an infant” (144). Having seen the Creature’s “gestures of conciliation” (144) towards Victor in their first meeting, the audience would be aware that he meant his creator no harm. For this reason, Victor’s unprovoked assaults on the Creature would be viewed as strictly villainous, despite their conventionally heroic framework.

Having considered Victor’s appearance, language, and action in Presumption, I now look at the play in performance to determine how his dramatic portrayal lent itself to archetypal melodramatic associations. Following Presumption’s 1823 premiere, reviewers primarily focused on T.P. Cooke’s portrayal of the unnamed Creature. But while critics were quick to commend

Cooke’s Creature, James William Wallack’s performance as Victor Frankenstein was given only a cursory nod and few explicit mentions. Having unsuccessfully taken on heroic roles in

American productions of Hamlet, Macbeth, or Richard III, Wallack returned home to England where he found relative success playing refined comedy parts in Patent productions. Following these failed attempts at playing the hero and a stagecoach accident in 1822 which fractured his

Illustration 9: James William Wallack in Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, Ed. Stephen C. Behrendt. Romantic Circles. 88 leg and ended his acting career shortly thereafter, Wallack’s 1823 turn in Presumption was not expected to impress.

Considered through the context of Wallack’s performance history and physical limitations, his casting in the role of Victor speaks to Peake’s approach to the character. Rather than cast one of the many actors known for playing heroes or villains on the illegitimate stage,

Peake’s decision to bring in an injured and understated performer from the Patent playhouses is a telling moment in Victor’s dramatic afterlife. In casting an actor from outside the tradition of illegitimate gothic melodrama, Peake consciously chose to forgo a more conventionally consistent version of the character.

In addition to Wallack’s theatrical reputation, visual representations of the character in performance suggest an atypical treatment of the drama’s would-be leading man. Having already argued that Peake’s approach to the character inconsistently tottered between archetypal heroism and villainy, these renderings confirm Victor’s liminal characterization. In looking at images of

Victor in Presumption, his pose and posture consistently evoke the passion of “fear.”

Passions were the prevailing aspects or attitudes of dramatic characters, physically expressed through identifiable postures, stances, or movements. Whether courage or cowardice, joy or sorrow, each emotion or attribute could be physically enacted and seen onstage. Although the passions were foundational to nineteenth-century acting in general, their emphasis on clear expression of character types made them an ideal fit for the gothic melodrama. In a 1759 dramatic treatise entitled A General View of the Stage, Thomas Wilkes and Samuel Derrick describe the innate connection between the physical manifestation of the passions and the emotions or intentions conveyed by each: “every passion and sentiment has a proper air and appearance, both of countenance and action, stamped upon it by Nature, whereby it is easily known and distinguished” (109). The condition that they be “easily known and distinguished” 89 was important because the passions were not subject to individual interpretation. Instead, a universally understood code of physical signs broadcasted character types and traits to attuned audiences. Rather than infer intended characterization, nineteenth-century actors and audience members could consistently recreate and interpret these fixed poses.

Considered in the context of this formulaic approach, Wallack’s defined pose in the above image, and the many others like it, offers important information about how the character was portrayed and received. Published in 1810, The Thespian Preceptor was one of many popular handbooks offering prescriptive directions for the performance of the passions. In it, the description for playing “fear” matches the included image of Wallack as Victor:

FEAR, violent and sudden, opens the eyes and mouth very wide, draws down the eye-

brows, gives the countenance an air of wildness, draws back the elbow parallel with the

sides, lifts up the open hand (the fingers together) to the height of the breast, so that the

palms face the dreadful object, as shields opposed against it. One foot is drawn back

behind the other; so that the body seems shrinking from danger, and putting itself in a

posture for fight. The heart beats violently; the breath is fetched quick and short, and the

whole body is thrown into a general tremor. (34)

The popular decision to depict Victor in a state of fear is telling for his theatrical characterization.

A direct visual link with fear not only reinforces Victor’s apparent cowardice in the play text, but also precludes a purely heroic or villainous reading of the character. In the description of how a hero should act, The Thespian Preceptor dictates that one “cannot have a cringing and contracted deportment: for that denotes both mental and bodily debility, and the consciousness of superior power is never absent from the hero” (26-27). Similarly, as Booth observes, this behavior is also inconsistent with the archetypal villain who instead “thinks, chooses, initiates action, alters his plans makes new ones” (18) without reservation or fear of recourse. The common depiction of 90

Illustration 10: James William Wallack in Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt. Romantic Circles. 91

Victor in a state of “fear” for Presumption’s production images suggests how nineteenth-century minor theatre audiences perceived the character and confirms his inability to be read as a true stage hero or stage villain.

As the first theatrical adaptation of Frankenstein, Presumption set the standard for how

Victor Frankenstein was performed on stage and screen for years afterwards. The lasting influence of this first production can be sensed through the character’s unsympathetic treatment or uneven characterization in many subsequent adaptations of the novel, including the famous

1931 film version. In returning Presumption to its theatrical milieu, Victor’s inconsistent treatment marks him early on as a dramatic anomaly. In the context of illegitimate gothic melodrama, his indeterminate status was not seen as an asset, but instead, an irreconcilable character flaw. Consequently, Peake’s Victor is neither an effective melodramatic figure, nor in keeping with Shelley’s initial conception of the character.

Playing the Part: Theatrical Case Study Analysis

Earlier in this chapter, I individually appraised Victor and the Creature’s cross-medium adaptation for Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein. Through the comparative close reading of Frankenstein and Presumption, Victor and the Creature’s dramatic representations were considered in relation to their fictional characterizations. Returning now to my guiding interest in the Doppelgänger and its applications in the Frankenstein myth, I bring

Victor and the Creature back together to determine how their relationship in the drama (d)evolves from Shelley’s initial paradigm. Although their Doppelgänger relationship is maintained in

Presumption, Victor and the Creature switch roles and the Creature becomes the story’s most privileged and governing character. Using the Creature’s animation, the cottage scene, and

Presumption’s climactic finale as my three case studies, I conclude this chapter by demonstrating 92 how Victor and the Creature’s theatrical transformations in Presumption directly subvert

Frankenstein’s Doppelgänger relationship.

The cover for Dicks’ Standard Plays’ edition of Presumption captures the changed dynamic between Victor and the Creature and visually recreates this first fateful encounter.

Artfully positioned with one leg extended and the other on the table, the Creature easily leans back and appraises his alert creator. Decked out in Classical Roman garb, the Creature’s scanty attire, sinewy muscles, coy smile, and open pose undeniably express a sense of latent sexuality.

In this picture, the Creature ceases to be abject and his former monstrosity is replaced with flirtatious charm and physical beauty. For Victor’s part, his dwarfed frame, unsure posture, and turned back generalize him to the point of comparative obscurity. Furthermore, in keeping with melodrama’s visual codification, the decisions to clothe Victor in black and the Creature in white projects a clear good/evil binary onto the characters and is consistent with Peake’s production notes. Beside his attractive Adonis, Victor is minimized, thus underscoring his ambiguous representation in Presumption.

In moving from fictional to theatrical presentation, the Creature’s remarkable origins become increasingly important to the Frankenstein myth. In the novel, this scene fatefully unites

Victor and the Creature and initiates their fatal compulsion towards one another. But while

Shelley emphasizes the emotional implications of this act rather than the experiment itself, the staging possibilities for such an unusual event enticed many illegitimate theatrical practitioners in the nineteenth century. Allowing dramatists the opportunity to bring thunder, lighting, electricity, machinery, and corpses to the minor house stages, the creation scene became integral to nineteenth-century adaptations of the play. But in addition to the scene’s spectacular prospects, it still marks the first encounter between Victor and the Creature and offers early insight into the nature of their relationship. 93

Illustration 11: Cover of Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein by Richard Brinsley Peake, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 94

Immediately preceding the Creature’s entrance in Presumption, the following action occurs: Sudden combustion heard, and smoke issues, the door of the laboratory breaks to pieces with a loud crash – red fire within (144). Providing a formative template for later theatrical and filmic adaptations, this stage picture is loaded with many of the tropes now associated with this climactic arrival: the loud explosion, rising smoke, shattered door, and ominous fire all contributing to a sense of dread and impending doom. Emerging from this disastrous scene, the

Creature is immediately associated with his infernal origins. For a minor theatre audience acquainted with coded imagery and melodrama’s simplified approach to morality, his birth from chaos and christening by fire would forecast his later turn towards destruction and apparent evil.

From the Creature’s bold entry onto the stage, Peake returns to Shelley’s description of this first meeting with a moment of attempted intimacy: “Music. – The Demon looks at

Frankenstein most intently, approaches him with gestures of conciliation. Frankenstein retreats, the Demon pursuing him” (144). In the novel, Victor can only guess at the Creature’s intentions as “one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me” (86). Although Victor conjectures that the Creature meant to detain him, in Presumption, the stage directions clear up this ambiguity by stating that the Creature approaches with “gestures of conciliation.” Through Cooke’s skillful pantomime, the Creature’s attempt to appease Victor would be clearly perceived by the audience, causing them to question their initial perceptions of the mysterious being.

However, while this scene foreshadows the Creature’s innate humanity despite his menacing appearance, it also anticipates Victor’s reckless behavior and use of force to solve problems throughout the play. While in the novel Victor flees instead of engaging with his

Creature, Peake’s adaptation robs Victor of his character arc by immediately setting him towards violent recourse, declaring “Its unearthly ugliness renders it too horrible for human eyes! (The

Demon approaches him.) Fiend! do not dare approach me – avaunt, or dread the fierce vengeance 95 of my arm wrecked on your miserable head” (144). As the action intensifies, the music swells, and the first act comes to its climactic finale, Victor’s malicious intentions towards his hated

Creature are physically expressed:

Music. – Frankenstein takes the sword from the nail, points with it at the Demon, who

snatches the sword, snaps it in two and throws it on stage. The Demon then seizes

Frankenstein – loud thunder heard – throws him violently on the floor, ascends the

staircase, opens the large window, and disappears through the casement. Frankenstein

remains motionless on the ground. – Thunder and lightning until the drop falls.

In a distinct departure from Victor’s abandonment of the Creature in Frankenstein, Peake’s scene has Victor rebuff his Creature’s advances and try to stab him. While the Creature’s tentative approach in the novel recalls a parent/child relationship, gothic melodrama’s emphasis on visual appeal lends itself to a more overt display of rejection. Through Victor’s attempts to inflict pain on his progeny, the emotional damage caused through Victor’s departure is visually expressed.

As I demonstrated through my analysis of the novel, one of Shelley’s greatest achievements in Frankenstein is the narrative paralleling of Victor and the Creature and their mirroring descents into misery. Peake’s choice to make Victor hell-bent on the Creature’s destruction from the start locks him into a limiting and antagonistic role with no potential for growth. Conversely, the dynamic interplay between the Creature’s appearance and potential for both good and evil creates tension, intrigue, and interest in the dramatic figure. In Frankenstein,

Victor denies the Creature, leaves him to fend for himself, and unknowingly establishes a pattern of behavior which eventually leads them back together. Presumption’s creation scene instead brings the action to a head by forcing a confrontation between creator and creation. In response to

Victor’s physical threats, the Creature dismissively throws him to the ground, escaping his

Illustration 12: Le Monstre, 1826, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

These images from Le Monstre et le magicien (1826) feature Frankenstein’s infamous creation scene. It is significant that their composition is consistent with Presumption’s performance images and that the characters’ costuming and poses are retained. This continuity speaks to Frankenstein’s immediate popularity as a nineteenth-century theatrical source text and Presumption’s pervasive influence on these subsequent adaptations.

Illustration 13: Le monstre et le magicien, 1826, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

98 aggressive advances. In doing so, the Creature subverts the hierarchy implicit in Shelley’s creation scene by instead abandoning Victor.

As the act closes, the Creature’s agency is maintained while “Frankenstein remains motionless on the ground.” Unlike in the novel, the Creature of the drama does not pursue his creator, but instead “ascends the staircase, opens the large window, and disappears through the casement” (144), leaving Victor behind. This power shift defines Victor’s dramatic identity in relation to a Creature dominant from the outset. These early changes in characterization not only influence the representations of Victor and the Creature, but also subvert Frankenstein’s depiction of the individual/Doppelgänger relationship. For this reason, from their first meeting onward, Victor takes on a secondary and responsorial role to the Creature.

As the play continues, this central conflict between Victor and the Creature persists. In the novel, the Creature’s role as Victor’s Doppelgänger accounts for their fated connection and paralleling character arcs. Fatally pulled towards his dominant creator, the Creature of

Frankenstein is forced to follow Victor like his spectral shadow. However, in the drama, it is

Victor who dogs his Creature, pursuing him at every turn and preventing his hopes for happiness.

At the end of act two, Peake stages another confrontation between the two characters. Building on the spectacle of the first act’s finale, this second showdown takes place at the DeLacey cottage and ends with disastrous consequences.

In Frankenstein, after the Creature leaves the DeLacey cottage he encounters a child drowning in a rivulet and saves her, only to be rejected again because of his fearsome appearance. In Peake’s adaptation, this meaningful scene is retained. But in order to condense the original narrative for melodramatic presentation, Agatha DeLacey, Victor’s new love interest in

Presumption, takes the place of the child in the woods. Surprised by the sight of the Creature,

Agatha falls into the river, personifying the archetypal “damsel in distress” of melodrama. 99

Peake’s sequence of stage directions reveal the Creature’s heroic intentions as he leaps in to save the drowning Agatha: “The Demon leaps from the bridge and rescues her,” “The Demon places Agatha, insensible, on a bench near DeLacey,” and “The Demon tenderly guides the hand of DeLacey and places it on Agatha.” After a beat, “Agatha recovers. – The Demon hangs over them, with fondness.” Key phrases in these stage directions such as “tenderly guides” and “hangs over them, with fondness” suggest the Creature’s innate humanity and love for the family as his own. As in the novel, the DeLaceys renew the Creature’s hopes for redemptive love. In

Presumption, the Creature’s benevolent gestures towards the family are punctuated with this final act of heroic salvation. However, this moment of brief peace is immediately shattered as, “Felix and Frankenstein suddenly enter.”

Although the transition from novel to play necessitates a simplified plot, the significance of bringing Victor into the DeLacey storyline cannot be overstated. By integrating the Creature’s primary “parent” into his surrogate family, Peake shatters the Creature’s illusions of autonomy and self-assertion. In the novel, Victor’s enduring influence on the Creature is observed through the Creature’s compulsive repetition of his initial abandonment and his discovery of Victor’s journal. In Presumption, Victor’s persistent role in the Creature’s life is literalized through his physical presence in the DeLaceys’ cottage and his romantic relationship with Agatha DeLacey.

While the Creature’s tale in Frankenstein is his recollection of past experiences,

Presumption’s linear timeline allows Victor to freely intercede and pluck the Creature from his utopian safe haven while taking Agatha for his own. Victor’s violent re-entry into the Creature’s life is punctuated by another attempt to destroy him: “Music. – Felix discharges his gun and wounds the Demon, who writhes under the wound. – In desperation pulls a burning branch from the fire – rushes at them – beholds Frankenstein – in agony of feeling dashes through the portico.” In response to this attack, the Creature likewise responds with physical force, as he did 100 at the close of act one, and sets “light to the thatch and Rafters, with malignant joy – as parts of the building fall.” This quick sequence of tit-for-tat retaliation shows the physical abuses suffered by the well-meaning Creature.

Acting more like a raging fury than a sovereign individual, Victor is prematurely defined by his as yet unjustified fixation with the Creature. Peake limits Victor’s characterization by forcing him to play the story’s ending from the beginning. Consequently, a directionless Victor determinedly seeks retribution for a crime not yet committed and an injustice still to be enacted by the blameless Creature. As a result, when the Creature finally rebels at this late stage in the play, the flailing Victor has no room to grow, proving himself to be a faded remnant of Shelley’s original conception of the character. This reduction of Victor from a Promethean scientist in the novel to a wailing harpy in the drama re-focuses the story and shifts audience sympathy onto the

Creature. This shift in characterization contributes to the Creature’s privileging in Presumption and allows him to take the center stage as the play’s central figure, despite generic expectation and Shelley’s original conception.

Victor and the Creature’s escalating conflicts throughout the drama ultimately lead to their final confrontation. In Frankenstein’s cross-medium adaptation, the story’s space and scale had to be altered to adhere to theatrical expectations and minor theatre regulations. Consequently, the vast geographical distances covered in the novel were radically reduced to fit within the physical confines of the stage. In the process, the action in Presumption is primarily confined to the domestic sphere. But although Frankenstein’s Swiss Alps, English countryside, and Arctic tundra are necessarily lost in translation, this final showdown between Victor and the Creature in the mountains pays tribute to the text’s Romantic origins.

Even though he initiated the battle, in Presumption’s final act, Victor declares that “this recontre shall terminate his detested life or mine” (159). This statement is a reminder of Victor’s 101 ineffectual efforts to defeat his Creature up to this point. Having doggedly pursued him into the mountains, Victor meets the Creature in one last stand-off:

Music. – Frankenstein discharges his musket. – The Demon and Frankenstein meet at the

very extremity of the stage. – Frankenstein fires – the avalanche falls and annihilates the

Demon and Frankenstein. – A heavy fall of snow succeeds. – Loud thunder heard, and all

the characters form a picture as the curtain falls.

Although the stage directions for this sequence are brief, the impressive technical capacity of nineteenth-century theatres would have made this conclusion spectacular. For this reason, illegitimate theatrical conventions must be kept in mind while reading these directions. This third and final confrontation between Victor and the Creature maintains the progressive pattern of enhanced spectacle and heightened kinetic energy, as initiated by the concluding scenes from the first and second acts. From the flash and fear of the creation scene in act one to the terror and danger of the fiery cottage in act two, the grand finale’s power would have rocked the English

Opera House and, as critics have confirmed, left audiences cheering for more.

However, beyond the spectacular quality of this colossal conclusion, it is necessary to unpack if or how this ending serves as a fitting consummation of Victor and the Creature’s

Doppelgänger relationship, as re-imagined by Peake. As I mentioned before, this climactic confrontation comes from Victor’s desire to end their conflict. Once again, it is Victor who brings the crisis to a head, forcing the Creature to engage in violent combat. Now armed with a musket, significantly raising the threat-level from the sword and dagger of their earlier altercations, Victor is determined to kill his creation at any cost.

In Frankenstein, Victor and the Creature’s shared pursuit of one another locks them into a death spiral until each is finally devoured by this fatal obsession. In the novel’s closing moments, the Creature willingly seeks his own end since Victor’s death leaves him without his twinned 102 soul and dominant counterpart. This conclusion marks an appropriate end for Shelley’s narrative by implicitly confirming Victor’s continued influence over the Creature.

In Presumption’s final moments, Victor’s repeated attempts to master the Creature similarly lead to a common fate. The discharged musket and the avalanche it triggers provide an appropriate ending for Peake’s drama and reflect the changed nature of Victor and the Creature’s relationship. For this reason, the final stage picture with creator and creation destroyed by

Victor’s continued insolence places the blame squarely on his shoulders and serves as an appropriate ending to this tale of presumption.

103

A Final Curtain Call: Concluding Remarks

In her introduction to Frankenstein’s 1831 edition, Mary Shelley recounts the vision of

Victor Frankenstein and the Creature that first inspired her to write the novel: “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion” (9). The feeling of first seeing these characters in the theatre of her mind inspired Shelley to compose her tale, thus marking the beginning of

Victor and the Creature’s Doppelgänger relationship. But although she could not have guessed it at the time, Shelley experienced this same sensation of seeing Victor and the Creature only a few years later when she watched her characters come to life onstage. In 1823, only five years after the novel’s initial publication, Shelley attended a performance of Richard Brinsley Peake’s theatrical adaptation of Frankenstein, Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein at the English

Opera House. That night, she saw her infamous character doubles reimagined and her first act of literary creation replayed before her eyes.

In this study, I returned to Shelley’s novel and Peake’s act of creative reinterpretation to consider how each presented Victor Frankenstein and the Creature’s Doppelgänger relationship.

By comparing Frankenstein’s text with Presumption’s script and performance history, I explored how this central relationship was changed through cross-medium adaptation in the nineteenth century.

Beginning with my close reading of Frankenstein, I observed Victor and the Creature’s fatal compulsion towards each other. Looking at their initial fixation, shared disillusionment, and twin descents, I read their relationship as a perversion of the ideal love paradigm. With this conceit in mind, I demonstrated how Victor’s hierarchical privileging in the Doppelgänger relationship derails both characters’ hopes of happiness and irrevocably joins them together. 104

Turning my attention towards the novel’s adaptation and afterlife, I established a connection between Victor and the Creature’s fictional and theatrical representations. Using the novel’s first adaptation for the stage, Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of

Frankenstein, I explored points of connection and contrast between these two representations of

Victor, the Creature, and the ties which bind them. Returning Presumption to its theatrical context, I considered both how and why different conventions were used to adapt these characters for the illegitimate gothic melodrama. Through an emphasis on historical context, performance history, critical accounts, and stage directions, I showed that Victor’s melodramatic adaptation was not as successful as his Creature’s. Consequently, their Doppelgänger relationship in

Frankenstein is subverted and the Creature is privileged as the drama’s focal figure.

But having observed these changes, what significance do they ultimately bring to the continued reading and interpretation of both Frankenstein and Presumption? Although

Presumption has not been staged in over a century, its lasting influence still lives on in

Frankenstein’s stage, film, and cultural afterlives. In popular conceptions of the Frankenstein myth, the Creature is often silent, brightly colored, and given his creator’s surname:

Frankenstein. On the other hand, Victor as Dr. Frankenstein is alternatively cast as a madcap scientist, maddeningly devoted to his work, or just simply mad. The persistent association of these melodramatic tropes with Victor and the Creature speaks to Presumption’s pervasive influence on the general understanding of the characters.

In addition to its privileged role as Frankenstein’s first creative adaptation, Presumption also serves an important critical function as a contemporary commentary on the novel.

Furthermore, its broad appeal, landmark success, and immediate imitators confirm the drama’s formative influence on the public reception of Shelley’s novel in its own age. As a result,

Presumption’s ubiquity in the nineteenth century rekindled interest in the novel and contributed 105 to the Victorian renaissance of Mary Shelley and her writing. On the heels of Presumption’s immediate fame, Shelley was approached by publishers to prepare another edition of

Frankenstein, a clear indication of the novel’s resurgent popularity. The fact that Shelley saw

Presumption in performance forges an even more immediate connection between the drama and the novel, making it possible to read her liberal edits for this 1831 edition alongside the drama’s significant alterations to its source text. Victor’s revised description of his Creature as “the living monument of presumption and rash ignorance” (65) affirms this viewpoint and suggests a more nuanced creative continuity between the drama and the novel. In this way, both Frankenstein and

Presumption act as each other’s source text and maintain a reciprocal relationship directly mirrored by the changed dynamic of Victor and the Creature through cross-medium adaptation.

For this reason, although Frankenstein and Presumption offer seemingly contrary depictions of Victor and the Creature’s Doppelgänger relationship, they both contribute to a mutual understanding of each other and should be read as two equally valuable perspectives on one remarkable story. While Presumption’s continued success as a play does not compare with

Frankenstein’s legacy in literature, its formative influence on the novel’s history forges an intrinsic link between the two. Like Victor and the Creature, Frankenstein and Presumption are joined together as yet another example of Frankenstein’s many doubles.

106

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