There is much about this week’s readings that interests me, but the major problem I have with all of them is the heavily male-biased and patriarchal mindset of all these theorists. The need to fit women into the work of Freud and Lacan particularly, strikes me as something of an afterthought. Even children seem to possess more psychoanalytic validity than women. However, ironically, given that we’re also talking about Frankenstein, a male-centered novel written by a woman, maybe all this maleness actually works to our benefit.
To begin with Freud, I do find the discussion of the dream-work interesting in its discussion of the inequality between the dream thoughts and the dream content and the inability to draw 1:1 comparisons between the two. This idea that the conjunctions are missing: the if, and, because, although, either, that has to be filled in between ideas in the interpretive sequence is fascinating if only because it is something we do for ourselves, naturally, as we try to figure out meaning. It also works so nicely with Frankenstein because she claims the genesis of the story came from a dream. Not that she wrote exactly what she saw in the dream, but she interpreted it and filled in the gaps, trying to replicate not simply what the dream contained, but the feeling that the dream left her impressed upon her. This terrible sensation of fear. Of “what arouses dread and horror” (825) the birth of a man without a womb.
The very definition of unheimlich.
A man birthing a man, by hovering over a mishmash assemblage of parts. No wonder she was terrified.
So what would Freud make of this dream? What can you make of a castrated woman creating an anxiety-stricken man who runs from his bizarre creation? Is the anxiety simply an extreme case of unheimlich feelings stemming from an “intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not?” (833)
Additionally, when Frankenstein sees his own image and is horrified, how would Lacan interpret his reaction? How do we interpret this aesthetic recognition of self, and what influences our reaction to it, especially if it is one of revulsion?
The Deleuze and Guattari excerpt on “minor literature” is another excerpt that is interesting with respect to Frankenstein. They write: “The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation.” (1453) In Frankenstein, I think we see all of these at play in some respect, given that the monster is an outsider separated from society. He learns language, but can’t speak to anyone, so in effect, language becomes a frustration to him as it does not prove to be a viable means of communication. There is a political immediacy to him, given that he lives as a fugitive on both the social and legal levels, and he is outside any collective, having no one like him and being unable to form a social connection with anyone other than Victor, who he has a strange hunter to hunted/pursuer to pursued (working in both directions) relationship. So this creates the story of someone outside society, trying to connect and tell his story, while the author represents the same construct as well, being a woman living in the society of men. Shelley writes in her Introduction (1938), “Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener.” Thus she presents herself as being outside the circle of men, writing her own story of femininity and childbirth from within the context of a male-dominated environment, and she does so using the methodology that they have given each other, which is not of her own construction: the ghost story.
I love this idea, I suppose, because I like to revise the strictly feminist reading of this text as one of repression and explanation into something more assertive, perhaps more egalitarian and less explanatory, as in what if Mary Shelley is not so much trying to compete with men on their terms, but drag men into hers, which, unfortunately is one of birth and death all rolled into one.
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