Delving into Frankenstein equipped with a Freudian panoply yields the exhumation of an impressive array of conflicting, though equally elucidating, critical artifacts. Considering Frankenstein when reading the excerpt from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and “The ‘Uncanny’”, I was struck with an (uncanny) sensation that Shelley’s text deliberately conflates what would be espoused by Freud’s writing nearly a century later.
The Monster’s narrative seems to provide fertile ground for Freud’s theories. To begin with, Frank’s Monster, in his state of obliviousness preceding his vicarious educational experiences, may be conceived as a breed of character vastly different from King Oedipus. Freud explains how Oedipus “shows us the fulfillment of our own childhood wishes”, but the Monster does not avail us (or Frankenstein) with like satisfaction of such vicarious fulfillment and punishment (816). The Monster laments that “No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses” (81). While Freud understands the character of Oedipus as a projection of inherent and universal psychosexual drives and through the opportunity his experience provides us to displace or “detach our sexual impulses”, the Monster’s early narrative emphasizes an anxiety inconceivable in its estrangement from the familiar psychosexual anxiety Freud understands as universal. The Monster lacks a genuine mother through which any incestuous actions can be consummated; he lacks a genuine father to supersede. As the ‘production’ of a creator that need not necessarily be affiliated with either gender, the Monster asks “What was I?”, but without the universal desires and anxieties to repress, to transfer or displace, or (unknowingly, as in the case of Oedipus) actualize, what type of answer can a Freudian reading provide?
The Monster pines away, qualifying in a statement his early condition as “a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing” (81). Further qualifying the impotence and indistinguishableness of his origin and resultant existence, the Monster complains that “all my past life was now a blot” (81). The convoluted tense of this description and the ambivalence of the word ‘blot’ can be understood in terms of the Monster’s unique position. ‘Blot’ as an indistinguishable mark can refer to the Monster’s unique state in one way, while ‘blot’ as an erasure may yield another understanding. Either way, the choice of the word should be understood as peculiar and particular as a decision made by bibliophile like Shelley. In this statement there could be detected the possibility of an inversion of the story of Oedipus and Freud’s notion of castration anxiety. In his discussion of the uncanny, Freud posits that “the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated” (831). Already blinded by his uncertain origins, and without the possible filial irony that plagues Oedipus, the Monster emerges in his inchoate consciousness as castrated; he has no reason to fear his nonexistent father or any desire for his nonexistent mother. The Monster, besides being created as already castrated – and only to be castrated subsequently (if that is possible) once he ‘transforms’ Frankenstein into his father - cannot affirm (unwittingly or no) what Freud sees as universal as it explains having never “seen a being resembling me, or who claimed any intercourse with me” (81).
Finally, the Monster’s statement that the question of his identity can “be answered only with groans” may be fruitful in the consideration of Freud’s ideas of the uncanny. Freud’s understands the uncanny in terms of infantile complexes being repressed and then revived and the surmounted primitive being confirmed (839). The answering “groan” to a question of identity resulting from the absence of psychosexual ‘universals’ in the Monster’s experience is significance to both of these distinctions and I think it can relate or help to substantiate what I see as a colonial discourse in Freud’s understanding and the Monster’s narrative.
No comments:
Post a Comment