Abstract
Just a year after Shelley’s ‘Alastor’ (1816), the young Mary Godwin subjected her lover’s vision of limitless spiritual ascendancy, of a double born out of sheer desire, to a fierce and implacable scrutiny. Obsessed by the quest for ‘immortality and power’, Victor Frankenstein turns to the charnel house, fitting together bits and pieces of dead bodies, struggling to create new life. Through his assiduous labour he uncovers the ‘cause of generation’, then moves forward to forge a new species of man (F.46,52) Yet this double of flesh and blood imbues him with disgust, its grotesque, ill-proportioned body mocking his endeavour. Instead of feeling compassion for the being he has created, he flees it in terror.
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Notes
Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1977) p. 142.
Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972) p. 164.
William Veeder in Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, The Fate of Androgyny (University of Chicago Press, 1986) makes an intricate study of Mary Shelley’s sometimes tormented bond with the ideal of androgyny: as she discovered it in Percy’s work and as it emerged in her own life and art.
Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur, Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper and Row, 1976) p. 155.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
Anne Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (London: Methuen, 1988) pp. 172,176.
Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Literature and Art, transl. Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963) p. 185.
Mary Shelley, Collected Tales and Stories (ed.) Charles E. Robinson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) p. 128. Hereafter cited as CT.
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© 1989 Meena Alexander
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Alexander, M. (1989). Unnatural Creation. In: Women in Romanticism. Women Writers. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20257-7_7
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