Usurping the Female: Frankenstein and ‘Male’ Pregnancy
by Alison Milbank, ABC Religion & Ethics:
This year sees the two hundredth anniversary of Mary Shelley’s great Gothic novel, Frankenstein – the product of a ghost-story writing project among the Romantic poets gathered at Byron’s villa on Lake Geneva.
Among them, Mary Shelley was the only female participant, and one who had recently suffered the death of a child soon after birth.
Contemporary feminist literary criticism lauds Frankenstein for its critique of male attempts to deny the claims of family and social good to “pursue nature to her hiding places” and penetrate her secrets.
In particular, Victor Frankenstein is held to usurp both the divine act of creation and also the maternal role in giving birth to make a Creature out of the body parts of corpses. His closest relationship with the explorer Walton, Frankenstein cleaves to a homosocial world that has no room for the feminine. This rejection is sharpened in the 1831 revisions, when the child Victor openly views his future wife Elizabeth as his property.
After the birth of his Creature, Frankenstein flees in horror at the monstrous sight of a being he had considered beautiful in the act of making, but now finds grotesque. His guilt at this maternal usurpation and failure of care manifests itself immediately in a nightmare vision:
“I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel.”
Ironically, Mary Shelley’s nightmare vision has come to pass in our own day, in which women who have changed gender to present as male are now subsuming pregnancy to their new identity, and quite without Frankenstein’s guilt. An interviewer of such men reported that, to the contrary, some found it a masculinising experience and felt empowered by taking on a feminine role.
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