It might be the result, as feminists conventionally argue, of Frankenstein’s rage for creative autonomy. Or it might be, alternatively, symptomatic of a repression of the mother by Shelley herself. 24 Could it be that Shelley’s autonomy as a creator, as much as Victor Frankenstein’s, depends upon the elision of motherhood from the creative enterprise? Feminist critics implicitly exonerate Shelley from such psychological tensions by reading her narrative as a cool intellectual critique of patriarchy, which at one level it emphatically is. But on another level it betrays an intense discomfort with the lot of the mother as origin of life given to death. 25 Shelley represses this biological fate and substitutes for it the labors of artistic creation. Her full service escort “hideous progeny” [Introduction 12], a work of art, is not subject to death, as were her children. 26 Frankenstein lives today beyond all mortal touch. Repressing the mother allows Shelley to control the creative enterprise rather than be controlled by it. This evasion of biological fate is the condition of creative freedom, for as we have already seen, the monster turns destructive precisely because he cannot maintain such an evasion. Shelley published her novel anonymously in part to reinforce this repression; where once was a mother is now a nameless creator.
The existence of such as for instance a great repression would-be an emotional claim in order to endure had been they not too the caretaker reappears during the Frankenstein inside the uncommon and you may sublimated ways. Adopting the death of Caroline Beaufort, that the fresh new 1818 release happens with exceptional swiftness, the new mom’s life is wholly figural; she becomes just image of a disappeared presence. Shelley some reduces so it ghostliness inside the up-date, in the earliest published variety of brand new narrative Caroline Beaufort stays generally an excellent figment of one’s creativity, a good figuration of your own maternal. This lady earliest good-sized looks are a disappearance, the new short and you will deadly results of vivid red fever. She output, yet not, given that a fact you to definitely haunts Frankenstein’s ambitions and you may presides more than his dad’s home. Whenever Frankenstein returns so you can Geneva immediately following a lack of half dozen decades, having been recalled of the development away from their sis William’s passing, the first thing he sees up on entering their dad’s residence is a painting off his missing mom:
For several minutes I gazed that have pleasure on her black vision, fringed of the deep lashes, along with her pleasant mouth” (139)
The conventional feminist implications of this existence are clear enough: the fact that this picture was painted at the urging of a “father’s desire” suggests that a woman’s body has been appropriated to become an object for masculine idealizing. But Caroline Beaufort’s is a macabre kind of beauty. This painting emphasizes, on a sublime scale, the proximity of the mother to death. If we approach it in psychological terms, as the figural effect of repression, then it suggests a resistance on Shelley’s part to the tragic implications of motherhood. She cannot approach or present it directly because the mother is a fatal creator and her labors are tied to time. So she sublimates the mother, recreating her on a heroic and ideal scale. The miniature of the dead William that hangs beneath his mother’s sublime image only reinforces Shelley’s point: motherhood creates a lineage of death that art recreates by idealizing. The apparent autonomy of the artist — particularly the female artist — comes for Shelley at the cost of repressing the mother, whose fatal influence is purged through an idealizing art.
Once murdering nothing William, the brand new monster observes a miniature around the children’s shoulder: “It absolutely was a great portrait from a many pleasant lady
Shelley for this reason controls mom because of the reproducing the girl in the idealized, aesthetic terminology, cleaning the lady image regarding defilement she starts. No place is this idealizing aim of artwork sharper than in the fresh new monster’s come upon with other picture of Caroline Beaufort. Notwithstanding my personal malignity, they softened and you may lured me. The ideal attractiveness of the fresh mother’s visualize both charms and you will enrages the latest monster, whom sensory faculties a continuous breakup from it. That it aesthetic idealization depends at some point on repressing more deadly facets of mommy, which arise indirectly regarding used to that the beast leaves the fresh miniature. Towards the picture of Caroline Beaufort becomes the evidence you to definitely seals this new destiny of your simple Justine. The new figural mom production to help you the girl foster-child, and also the fatal causality you to backlinks her or him reveals this new stifled curse away from impurity you to artistic manufacturing operates to idealize.
