Victor & Father & Freud

The book opens up Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams" with the Oedipus Complex. They start with,

In my experience, which is already extensive, the chief part in the mental lives of all children who later become psychoneurotics is played by their parents. Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed at that time and which is of such importance in determining the symptoms of the later neurosis.

Moments of love and hatred are always magnified to the child's mind (814). This theory makes sense, considering Victor's relationship with his father (or what he deems worthy enough to repeat to Walton). The fact that the first information Victor reveals about his father is the man's "honour and reputation...respected by all who knew him for his integrity and indefatigable attention to public business" (18). The first information we hear from Victor about Victor's relationship with his father, the first time the two communicate is when his father "looked carelessly" at Victor's book. The first thing the man says in the novel is, My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash" (21). Readers even get Victor's reaction... or his perception of his reaction, as we need to remember that he is recalling and retelling this to Walton. Victor doesn't take pains to hide his resentment towards his father: If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me... under such circumstances, I should have thrown Agrippa asside... It is even possible, that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin. But the cursory glance my father had taken of my volume by no means assured me that he was acquainted with its contents" (21-22). Victor believes that his father's glance didn't "assure" him that his father was knowledgable of the contents, but his resentment earlier in the paragraph resounds louder.

Applying Freud to the theory makes sense: early in Victor's experience of the scientific world, his father's reaction and facial expression is enough to make a lasting impression on Victor- so much so that he includes it in his retelling of his story. This was a feeling on a "magnified scale," most likely of hatred (as opposed to love), in response to his father.

The fact that this moment is included in Victor's account- that Shelley includes it, even- is remarkable.

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?