SYMPATHETIC MONSTER—the modern monster we identify with as well as fear; the monster inside us; we are the monster; the Jungian shadow; the pitiable, terrible outcast; sympathy with abjection; educating monsters.
Frankenstein is a novel of firsts: the first sf novel, and the first appearance of the mad scientist, and yet Mary Shelley’s modern monster with which we identify with instead of simply trying to kill might be her signature creation and legacy. The abject Creature has been a powerful cultural force, not just as the iconic, destructive “Frankenstein Monster”, but as a “Sympathetic Monster” with both sides of that contradictory phrase in play. Readers, as teaching the text makes clear, identify with the Creature instead of Victor Frankenstein (whose name is on the cover); but the Creature is murderous in its violence. Shelley wrote what many of us, as readers, take to be our own autobiography as monsters: we recognize in the creature’s outcast nature and thwarted desires, a portrait of our own psyche. When stories powerfully give us monsters who remain monsters yet move us to sympathy, we have a monster indebted to Shelley’s reinvention of the monster tale—the first of a peculiar but now widely recycled subset of the “monster” category proper. Also known as the outcast, the alien, the other—the Sympathetic Monster calls up our empathy but is always dangerous and frequently prone to outrageous violence.
The relationship of the Creature to Creator in Shelley’s novel can be, and has been, generally understood in a simplistic way as a monster who takes revenge on its maker, the mad scientist (See MAD SCIENTISTS/MONSTERS). But more powerful readings emerge from an engagement with the sympathetic monster’s relation to the more complex, contradictory Byronic hero that is its “father,” Victor Frankenstein; their intense and intimate destructive relationship rewards close attention. (See QUEER FRANKENSTEIN for a consideration of the sexual tensions here.) The term “the Shadow,” drawn from Jungian psychology, has been used to describe the close interchange between such “bound together” figures; “the Shadow” is an archetype, suggesting that one way to read the two characters is as two aspects of one being, one personality.
As Ursula Le Guin writes in “The Child and The Shadow” (1975) of the archetype as it appears in many kinds of fantastic literature:
“The shadow is on the other side of our psyche, the dark brother of the conscious mind. It is Cain, Caliban, Frankenstein’s monster, Mr. Hyde. It is Vergil, who guided Dante through hell, Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu, Frodo’s enemy Gollum. It is the Doppelganger. It is Mowgli’s Grey Brother; the werewolf; the wolf, the bear, the tiger of a thousand folktales; it is the serpent Lucifer. The shadow stands on the threshold between the conscious and the unconscious mind, and we meet it in our dreams, as sister, brother, friend, beast, monster, enemy, guide. It is all we don’t want to, can’t, admit into our conscious self, all the qualities and tendencies within us which have been repressed, denied, or not used.”
The particularly Frankenstein spin on the Shadow puts emphasis on the relationship of self to monster—the secret, even shameful, nature of the connection—and the Gothic sense that both parties are doomed because they cannot escape one another. This kind of figure or relationship has also been called the Double, the Doppelganger, the Evil Twin, even versions of the Clone. Its presence is “uncanny” in Freud’s sense of the word, tying it to a repressed recognition of the self. Here is how the Encyclopedia of Fantasy defines the Double:
“The sinister double, originally as the Doppelganger, was one of the central motifs of Gothic fiction (> Gothic Fantasy) and remained an important theme in weird fiction throughout the 19th century. The notion is connected to various superstitions regarding Shadows, Mirror images and Twins, but derives much of its psychological power from the fact that we all construct civilized ‘social selves’.”
A powerful trope in the 19th-century, the figure of the Double has hardly fallen out of fashion in the 20th century or beyond, and Frankenstein offers a particularly influential version of our conversation with the monsters inside us.
References:
SEE QUEER FRANKENSTEIN and MAD SCIENTISTS/MONSTERS.
See the full entry on the “Double” in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy: