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Session 9a: Created Monsters
Chair: Dianne Bunch

Frankenstein and Dis-Membered Identity: Mary Shelley And the Monstrous
Eleanor Salotto
Sweet Briar College, Virginia, United States of America

Frankenstein elucidates a story about representation and its non-correspondence, and Shelley's Introduction to the 1831 edition of the text, images Mary Shelley looking into the mirror and asking the same questions that the creature does: "Who was I, What was I" and veering off the "traditional" signification of the feminine subject. Shelley calls into question the notion of categories by arguing for the shifting ground of the notion of category. Her gendered subjectivity does not fully inhabit the gender that it approximates; it is never quite carried out according to expectation. Like the creature in the text proper, Shelley misses the mark of gendered sexuality (we remember that the creature is made up of disparate pieces of bodies), in that she breaks the connection between the represented and the representer.
In this introduction to the 1831 edition, then, Shelley sews onto her body or produces onto her body the category of the feminine. She creates a Shelley, a fictional character, just as through the representations of Walton, Victor, and the creature she manufactures fictional subjects who cannot present themselves directly. Too many critics have taken her at her word, equating the author of the introduction with the "real" and definitive Mary Shelley. Kaja Silverman points out the limitations of this view when she writes: "The biographical strategy...fails to distinguish...between the author 'inside' the text and the author 'outside' the text--between authorial subjectivity and the historical author" (374). The problem with biographical interpretations of Frankenstein (such as those advanced by Johnson and Moers) is that they fail to account for the text's suggestion that identity is taken up by the subject only to be discarded. Additionally, Shelley intimates that the representation of identity will always be mediated by a screen identity. The biographical method also assumes that female writers will always write texts that express their "true" gender. Mary Jacobus makes this point with particular force when she writes about the biographical interpretations of Frankenstein: "Feminist interpretations such as these have no option but to posit the woman author as origin and her life as the primary locus of meaning" (138). The supplemental quality of Frankenstein signals, however, that there will always be a multiplicity of persons behind the "I," and no one original "I."
What does the presentation of Shelley's life, along with the creature's, Walton's, and Frankenstein's disclose about origins? To suggest that Shelley in the main text writes a covert autobiography of a woman's life, as Barbara Johnson has pointed out, in that she must write behind the cover of a mask, is an influential point for feminism. But Johnson's idea does not portray the entire story. In the introduction Shelley repeats the origins of a woman's life to displace that origin. She sets up identity and calls it into question, displacing and disrupting her "definitive" place in culture. And in subverting the story of man that makes up Western culture in the main narrative, she sets the stage for redeploying the origins of a woman's life. The introduction, then, can serve as a way to critique the lived life of a "story." Shelley challenges the idea of a monolithic identity; in its place, she substitutes the identity of woman that does not stay in place.
Furthermore, Shelley writes in disguise in the introduction, showing that the first person in narrative is assumed--she "dresses up" as a woman and writes in drag. Judith Butler poses the question: "Does being female constitute a 'natural fact' or a cultural performance?" (Gender Trouble x). The introduction portrays Shelley performing the role of a woman. As the narrative proper deals with the made personage of the creature, the introduction forecasts the construction of the feminine body as it takes up its place in writing the feminine voice.
The introduction sounds the death knell of the possibility of definitive representation of the subject to itself, which the remainder of the text illustrates. As Frankenstein's quest for origins leads him to the discovery of a creature that does not correspond to his intentions, the fictional subject that Shelley creates in the introduction cannot reflect a composite representation of herself. But this is a representation with a difference: for here Shelley challenges the notion of one fixed inscribed woman. Her creation of the feminine subject paradoxically leads to the dismemberment of that subject as she has traditionally been conceived. Any attempt to create composite origins leads to a decay in that telling. Corrupting the ideal of woman by offering a multidimensional feminine voice in the introduction, Shelley tampers with static notions of woman. Veering from the originary meaning of woman, she subverts the myth of the origin of woman. Given the representationality of discourse, the subject looks into the mirror of herself and sees a fiction, which is embedded in other stories. Shelley looks into the mirror of life stories by women and then writes an introduction that turns out to be parody in its excess of "womanliness."

Gods and Monsters
Nina Ohligschläger
University of Tübingen, Germany

Frankenstein's creature as devised by Mary Shelley is a tragic hero. Although of appalling outward appearance, this nameless outcome of a grotesque medical experiment proves to have a soul: The monster is a sensitive character, longing for a friend or companion.
In the twentieth century, movies seem to be the most fruitful art form in taking up the novel for further explorations. Among the numerous adaptations of the novel, Bill Condon's film Gods and Monsters (1999) stands out. He adapts a novel of Christopher Bram, a fictional reconstruction of director James Whale's last days. Moreover, Condon succeeds to combine topics raised in the original novel integrating the strong images created by Whale's movies Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). In Shelley's novel, the monster takes on the role of Victor Frankenstein's 'doppelganger' and it clearly is an outsider posing a threat to society. As the common mistake of calling the creature by the name of its creator 'Frankenstein' reveals, both are intricately connected, the question being who the real monster is.
This holds true for Condon's movie as well. In the beginning, the allocation of roles seems to be unmistakable. Whale, the creator of the most iconic image of Frankenstein's creature embodied by Boris Karloff, appears as modern Prometheus trying to push his gardener Clay Boone into the character of the monster. Boone bears similarities to the creature: Firstly in resembling Karloff's monster and secondly on a personal level having apparently no personal ties. Eventually the former director's conception has to give way. During the crucial thunderstorm scene, Boone rejects his role refusing to act according to Whale's plan. On the other hand, Whale calls himself an aberration in various respects: having survived the horrors of World War I, originating from the working-class and despite of that showing creative powers and, talking of the 1950s, his living openly gay. However, the link between these characters is their loneliness.
Hence the question of what it means to be a monster is posed once again and still exerts fascination, regardless whether in 1818, 1931 or today.

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