Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Oedipus, Victor, and the creature

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes that Oedipus' "destiny moves us only because it might have been ours -- because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father" (816). He further analyzes Hamlet in these terms, saying that Hamlet hesitates to take revenge "on the man who did away with his father and took that father's place with his mother" because that man "shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized" (817-8). If this unconscious desire is universal, I wonder, then, how this Oedipus Complex applies to Frankenstein. Victor loves his mother -- it could be said that he idolizes her -- and he could even be said to want to marry her, as Elizabeth set up as the best substitute for his mother after she dies. Also, while Victor respects his father, he expresses anger towards him for dismissing his fascination with Agrippa and slowly brings about his father's death through the deaths of his loved ones. Thus, the Oedipus Complex plays out with regard to Victor (without intention, too! as Freud's theory comes 85 years after Shelley's novel). The creature, however, is a different case than Victor's. He expresses hatred for his father (Victor) and wants to kill him, as the novel clearly shows, although this desire is conscious. The Oedipus Complex is further complicated as Victor is simultaneously the creature's father and mother. Where, then, does the creature's sexual impulses lie? Is it problematic that he has a father and no mother, or that his "mother" is a man? What might Freud have said about the creature's unconscious? What are the creature's true desires? Can they be categorized in the way that the Oedipus Complex suggests they should be?

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