QUEER FRANKENSTEIN—gender questions and the monstrous; queer desire and the pitiable outcast figure, especially in representations between men/male monsters; men giving birth; empathy with abjection.

Mary Shelley obsessively read and reread the writings of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, whose proto-feminist writings remain radical. Yet Frankenstein is a novel about contentious relations between men, in which women figure as pawns merely. What can it mean? For a discussion of the prominent feminist aspects of this matter, see WOMEN WRITING MONSTERS. Another angle of approach is to read the story as Shelley’s penetrating comments on men and power, and on the meaning of intimacy between men; the meanings Shelley explores are often, of course, a “toxic masculinity,” in which death and selfishness are paramount. Still, Shelley’s critique of male power and intimacy rewards attention to its perception of how men are negatively shaped by patriarchy; and it is worth remembering that even Victor, who is generally excoriated by modern readers sympathetic to the Creature’s plight, is based on men she knew and loved: Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, her husband, who’s childhood nickname was “Victor.” That both men were surely aware of the “portrait” of themselves she offered, is also something worth considering. It’s hard not to imagine them teasing her about her portraying them as monsters, and yet allowing a certain justice to her terrible insights into male interactions and their violence.

Further, while both Byron and Percy Shelley offered models of a Romantic type—a daring, male figure of the poet or philosopher of far-darting intellect—both offer critiques of standard norms of masculinity of well. Percy Shelley embraced notions of the feminine and androgynous in his life and writing; and Byron, as the Byronic Hero bar none, performed a kind of hyper-masculinity that went over the top beyond masculinity, like a kind of reverse “drag” performance. A dandy or “Beau Brummel” in his taste in fashion, his predatory sexuality appears pansexual in its appetites, more performative itself than an indication of real intimacy. Each poet is, in short, both a model of masculinity and a critique that opens doors to reading Shelley’s novel as exploring potentially toxic or narcissistic maleness but also powerful queer masculinities. The story of the Creator making a male Creature becomes, as parodied in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), the making or controlling of an ideal partner as an image of the maker’s desire alone. Victor and the Creature “killing” each other’s female mates, with Elizabeth strangled in her wedding bed, are events loaded with a homosocial/homosexual intensity that cuts across normative gender expectations. In the end, neither cares about anyone but the other, developing a kind of intense, destructive attention that must be called love—perhaps a kind of love that cannot speak its name.

Queer Frankenstein locates the Creature as a nexus point for a crosscurrent of powerful emotions that have queer implications: a figure who is considered a monster who is denied humanity and neglected by Victor, moving us to empathy and identification. This links strongly to the Sympathetic Monster theme, using it, in this case, to promote the insight that society has made monsters of those who are not so by failing to recognize queer humanities as human. The anger of the Creature can be remade to stand for the anger of those unfairly stigmatized by sexual orientation. The redemptive power of the figure, in both the righteousness of its violence and in its powerful voicing of the position of the outcast, remains undiminished.

An important and mythic subtheme associated to this theme is “Men Giving Birth.” Mythic originals include Athena memorably breaking out of Zeus’s head. The iconic modern take on the theme is Mary Shelley’s novel. The making of an “android,” the stitching together of a new being, though that certainly can be seen as a kind of “birthing,” belongs to ANDROIDS. Here, we mean something more immediate, the actualization of the phrase “men giving birth”: a live birth out of a man’s body, from Adam’s rib to modern science fictional “births” like those enacted with aliens in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, for example.

References:

See SYMPATHETIC MONSTERS and ANDROIDS.