Dream Analysis and Victor's Morbid Nightmare

Frankenstein’s horrifying dream in chapter IV of Mary Shelley’s novel struck me for its curious similarity to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s quotation of the Bhagavad Gita following the successful test of the atomic bomb: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer’s remark signifies that he fully realized, and foreshadowed, the destructive force of his creation after seeing it function—Frankenstein’s dream operates in the same way; after catching a glimpse of the monster, Victor, through the act of dreaming, sees himself as the “destroyer” of his loved ones. I mentioned this Frankenstein/Oppenheimer metaphor in SciFi class, but did not have the benefit of Freud’s analysis to fully unpack the dream.

Victor’s dream consists of three elements: First, the appearance of Elizabeth, who was “in the bloom of health walking in the streets of Inglostadt.” This is followed by an embrace and kiss, and this kiss leads directly to the third portion: Elizabeth transforms into the “grave-worm” infested corpse of Victor’s mother (34).

Freud tells us that “[t]he alternative ‘either—or’ cannot be expressed in dreams in any way whatever” (823). Let’s leave aside the oedipal aspects of both the dream and the nature of Victor’s relationship to Elizabeth, and focus strictly on how the dream-work handles the dream-thoughts. Frankenstein’s pursuit of “infusing life into an inanimate body” (34) was partially grounded in an earlier wish to bring the dead back to life. He abandons the latter, but the former seems almost like a precursor: as if one must—in biblical and Miltonic order—first master creation before attempting resurrection. So his rooted desires could, potentially, be twofold: he wants to attain Elizabeth’s affection and bring his mother back from the dead.

After witnessing the monstrosity that is his own creation, Frankenstein’s mind is full of questions: I have created life or I have created a monster? The monster is horrible or I am horrible for creating the monster? My failure has jeopardized Elizabeth’s safety and destroyed my chances for resurrecting my mother?

A seemingly limitless number of questions can be invented, but the point is that the dream, like Freud says, “show[s] a particular preference for combining contraries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same thing” (824). So that in the dream Frankenstein is both a monster, but not horrible: his kiss turns Elizabeth to death (monstrous), but his intentions are affectionate.

Dreams also merge “whole material into a single situation or event” (822). The question of Elizabeth’s welfare and inducing resurrection warps into the kiss that turns Elizabeth into Victor’s dead mother. We’ve reached a jumping off point for another discussion; but I will stop here and just leave the rest in question form.

Freud says that “whenever [dreams] show us two elements close together, this guarantees that there is some specially intimate connection between what correspond to them among the dream-thoughts” (822). What kind of conclusions can we draw about the way Victor connects his mother and Elizabeth in the dream? Do they have to be predictably Oedipal?