Experiment on a Dissected Reading: Maternal Absence in Frankenstein’s Gothic Gravidity

Abstract

To read Frankenstein as an experimental text is an experiment in and of itself. First published in 1818, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s ground-breaking novel was conceived long before literary critics noted the twentieth-century emergence of the experimental in literature. Experiments, typically, proceed in a ‘rational’ method and establish set patterns which are empirical, controlled, and systematic. This is far from the fevered midnight labours of Victor Frankenstein or the literary experimentation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Literary experiments, however, innovate in order to break such established patterns, and, arguably, in women’s writing, this is inextricably linked with resisting prescribed, male-dominated, discourses.

The term ‘experimental’, in relation to writing—and especially writing by women—is contested. This chapter draws on what Friedman and Fuchs identify as the creation of ‘an alternative fictional space in experimental writing—a space in which what is feminine and marginalised in fiction and patriarchal culture can be expressed through ‘exploding traditional forms’ (Friedman and Fuchs, Contexts and Continuities: An Introduction to Women’s Experimental Fiction in English. In Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, 3–51. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, 4).

In an experimental reading using eighteenth-century ‘maternal atlases’ as well as editorial extractions from different Prefaces to, and editions of, Frankenstein, Blewitt and Bell dissect the text’s symbolic representations of childbirth and pregnancy to argue that Frankenstein traverses an increasingly patriarchal medicalised discourse of pregnancy, gestation, childbirth, parenting, and death. This chapter shows us that literary creation is a highly visceral process, replaying the tensions between creation and dismemberment and the corporeal and the spectral, and this is apparent in medical representations of female bodies and in the novel itself. Frankenstein resists straightforward reading and calls for experimentation because it disrupts established narratives of authorship and exposes the processes of gestation that a text undergoes in order to be ‘birthed’.