What terrific posts this week!
It seems that everyone found fertile ground in applying Althusser to Frankenstein and I am no exception.
One of the terrifying reasons that the creature may have been rejected - when viewed under Althusser’s Marxist lens - is that it may not have been only because of his appearance, it may have also been because he was not like Victor, he was not a product of the capitalist system. In his society, the creature was a rare breed not influenced by the ISAs and RSAs surrounding him: he was free of those trappings. He was socially, ideologically and physically “off the grid.”
Why, then, does the creature still have the desire to tap into an ideology with a female creature? Did these ideas and concepts spring up from within himself as a sort of natural system of principles or was the creature influenced by his few run-ins with those around him enough to want to emulate the experience? Why should he want to “become linked to the chain of existence and events, from which I am now excluded” (Shelly 100)? It would appear that that chain of “existence and events” is exactly what is causing him grief.
Also, what responsibility do Victor’s teachers have in his creation? Though his later instruction was assisted by Krempe and Waldman, his first, and perhaps most lasting science lesson, was self-guided instruction through the works of Cornelius Agrippa: a mystical physician not suitable for instruction at the “educational ideological apparatus” level of Victor’s times (1346).
I take issue with the characterization of the monster as being disconnected and off the grid. While its true he has no history, he certainly does face institutions like the cottagers, an institution of family, and while he doesn't attend school, his close reading of Paradise Lost certainly touches on the institution of the church.
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