Grooming in Frankenstein
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, multiple characters are forced to undergo experiences of physical or psychological molding to fulfill the desires of others. Although the Frankenstein being is the only individual physically designed by another to fulfill the designer’s needs, Elizabeth and Caroline, Victor’s mother, endure a form of psychological structuring that is fundamentally similar.1 I argue that Elizabeth, Caroline, and the Frankenstein being parallel each other through shared experiences of dispossession, which provide self-serving individuals the opportunity to mold the displaced individual to their will. I first assert that Caroline and Elizabeth’s experiences mirror each other and then assert that the Frankenstein being’s experience provides a literalized enumeration of them. By stripping the Frankenstein being of the traits that allow Caroline and Elizabeth to seemingly “accept” their grooming—such as imposed norms of femininity and beauty, Shelley defamiliarizes Elizabeth and Caroline’s conditions and suggests that cultivating an individual to serve marital, reproductive, or intellectual desires of another is a predatory and monstrous act. Shelley also suggests that it is one that victims sometimes replicate.
1. I refer to the being created by Victor Frankenstein as “the Frankenstein being” in this essay to avoid the judgmental connotations associated with words like “creature” and “monster.”
For both Caroline and Elizabeth, the death of their biological parents is followed by the emergence of a figure who harnesses this trauma to achieve their marital or reproductive desires. Through her recurring usage of the language of imprisonment, Shelley illustrates that the “protection” that Caroline and Elizabeth are offered requires them to permanently forfeit any remaining autonomy and confine themselves to their protector. Detailing the events which lead to the meeting of his parents, Victor declares that at the very moment Caroline kneeled over the coffin of Beaufort, her father, Victor’s own “father,” Alphonse, “entered the chamber” (Shelley ch. 1). Without means or living parents, Caroline, who was considerably younger than Alphonse, “committed herself to” the care of Victor’s father “who placed her under the protection of a relation” for two years (ch. 1). Shelley suggests that Caroline plays an active role in deciding to leave with Alphonse through the usage of “herself”; yet the author’s usage of “committed” complicates the truth of Caroline’s autonomy. While “committing” is a word used to communicate that one has entrusted herself to the care of another, it is also used to communicate imprisonment: one is “committed” to a ward or “committed” to death. The uneasiness surrounding Caroline’s autonomy is heightened by her financial dependency on Alphonse and his relative. To prevent her displacement, Caroline must act as an adequate and appealing guest for an extended period during which Alphonse could discard her.
Like Caroline, Elizabeth is “rescued” from conditions of poverty in the wake of the death of her parents and cultivated into an ideal romantic and reproductive partner by her supposed protectors. After discovering Elizabeth orphaned in an impoverished Italian household, Caroline and Alphonse adopt her and she becomes “the inmate” of their household, a “pretty present” for their son Victor (ch. 1). Underlying tension regarding the autonomy of the saved female figure emerges once again through the idiom of confinement. While “inmate” refers to one who stays in the house of another, it can also mean one who does not “properly belong to the place where he or she dwells” or to a prisoner (“inmate,” Oxford English Dictionary). For both Caroline and Elizabeth, familial death provides their “protectors” (groomers) the circumstance to shape an individual who can fulfill their romantic and reproductive goals. While the narration does not offer an explicit criticism of how Caroline and Elizabeth came to join the Frankenstein family, Shelley undermines the notion that the women are truly saved through ambiguous language that gestures at sequestration.
Victor Frankenstein’s creation of the Frankenstein being provides a literalized model of the psychological shaping that Caroline and Elizabeth experience: like Elizabeth and Caroline, Frankenstein emerges from conditions of death that are used to fulfill the desires, in this case the intellectual and egotistical desires, of the opportunistic designer. Describing the process of configuring the Frankenstein being, Victor relays that he “dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave” to collect body parts (ch. 4). Viewed as biological contributors, the dead bodies exhumed by Victor serve as the genetic parents of the Frankenstein being. Just as parental death is a necessary condition for the psychological molding of Caroline and Elizabeth, the death of the Frankenstein being’s “parents” is a necessary condition for his physical molding. Shelley makes this parallel legible on a stylistic level by again evoking the language of imprisonment. Shelley describes the Frankenstein being’s site of creation as a “solitary chamber, or rather cell,” rendering it both a room and a site of confinement (ch. 4). Although the Frankenstein being has greater mobility than Elizabeth and Caroline, as he is not ultimately attached to a domestic site, he is, like them, brought to a place that makes his existence private and obscured. By drawing parallels between Caroline, Elizabeth, and the Frankenstein being on contextual and stylistic levels, Shelley connects the obvious absurdity and abusiveness of the Frankenstein being’s creation to the more subtly portrayed absurdity and abusiveness of Caroline and Elizabeth’s molding.
Shelley defamiliarizes the grooming of Caroline and Elizabeth by merging Caroline and Elizabeth’s images in Victor’s dream with the Frankenstein being’s image in reality; this visual blending suggests that, despite their aesthetic disparities, the three characters are united by their experiences of pain and their artificially constructed states. Victor’s contrasting reactions to Elizabeth and Caroline’s faces and the Frankenstein being’s face illustrates that he cannot comprehend the Frankenstein being’s fundamental similarity to Elizabeth and Caroline because, in his mind, they exist in fixed, innocent, and feminine forms. After bringing the Frankenstein being to life, Victor depicts the being’s “shrivelled complexion and straight black lips” (ch. 5). He describes Elizabeth and Caroline as possessing the same lifeless qualities of the Frankenstein being in his dreams. After Victor kisses Elizabeth, her lips become “vivid with the hue of death,” and she transforms into his mother’s corpse (ch. 5). Immediately upon waking, Victor confronts the Frankenstein being’s face and body: “I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created” (ch. 5). Although Elizabeth and Caroline and the Frankenstein being aesthetically contrast in terms of attractiveness, they all inhabit moldable bodies rendered abject by Victor either in his subconscious (through the kiss) or in reality (through violent creation). The supposed normality and content of the women is undermined by their visual proximity to the Frankenstein being who is clearly an unnatural creation. That Victor feels sympathy and love for the women, who are imagined as passive and helpless, after rendering them abject, but disgust for the “demoniacal corpse” that he so violently constructed, suggests that his awareness of the constructed nature and abjection of the women is limited by his own conceptions of gender and aesthetics (ch. 5). To comprehend the unnaturalness of designing another being whose purpose is to satiate personal desire, Victor must encounter the victim in an active, masculine, and unaesthetic form.
Shelley does not only demonstrate that molding someone to fulfill the needs of another is a violent act, but she also demonstrates that it is a cyclical act sometimes perpetuated by those who have experienced it themselves. Despite having been molded to suit the purposes of others, Caroline and the Frankenstein being set out to design (or in the being’s case, compel the designing of) individuals that can serve their reproductive or romantic expectations. Caroline, upon her deathbed, reminds Elizabeth that her “firmest hopes of future happiness were placed on the prospect of” Victor and Elizabeth’s union and that Elizabeth “must supply [her] place to [her] younger children” (ch. 3). From Caroline’s perspective, Elizabeth has a clear role: to ensure the reproductive continuation of the Frankenstein family by marrying the eldest son and rearing the younger Frankenstein children. Caroline requires Elizabeth to fulfill the same role of dispossessed reproductive partner required of her by Alphonse, and she uses the same means as Alphonse to achieve them. She extracts Elizabeth from her home, cares for her during a period in which her intended role is insecure, and then requires her to play a romantic and reproductive role to receive continued support. The Frankenstein being provides a second enumeration of a case in which a person who has been molded to fulfill a certain role seeks to mold another person. He demands that Victor “create a female for [him] with whom [he] can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for [his] being” (ch. 17). The reader, aware of the misery and discrimination that the Frankenstein being has endured, may infer that the fulfillment of such a demand will only confer the same suffering upon the female Frankenstein being. The Frankenstein being’s declaration of the role of the female being makes clear that she is to be created to suit his own romantic, emotional, and sexual needs. Acknowledging the obvious cruelty and unnaturalness of the Frankenstein being’s desire to control and use the female Frankenstein being to serve his emotional, sexual, and romantic needs, the similarity between the Frankenstein being and Caroline’s behaviors suggests that Caroline’s demands of Elizabeth are also cruel and unnatural.
Shelley’s contextual, stylistic, and visual parallels between Elizabeth, Caroline, and the Frankenstein being make strange the idea that one individual can contently exist to fulfill the needs of another. While Elizabeth and Caroline are poised to accept their roles by the gender expectations of their time, the Frankenstein being has no such close contact with civilization or family that allows him to normalize his experience. Freed from the constraints of civilization, the Frankenstein being is permitted by Shelley to freely express his anger: “Come on, my enemy; we have yet to wrestle for our lives, but many hard and miserable hours must you endure until that period shall arrive” (ch. 24). He might thus be viewed as the mouthpiece to Elizabeth and Caroline’s suppressed and ontologically inexpressible pain. The cyclical nature of Caroline and the Frankenstein being’s actions suggests that pain, when it is sublimated or cannot be redressed, begets only more pain. Additionally, the fact that the Frankenstein being fulfills his purpose—which is simply to come to life—and is still discarded due to his unappealing physical appearance suggests that Elizabeth and Caroline’s acceptance and fulfillment of their assigned roles is conditioned upon aesthetic compliance. The Frankenstein being’s existence is at once precarious and extraordinary in many respects, yet entirely normal (particularly to women) in others, making his horrific condition tangible and historically poignant.
Works Cited
“inmate.” Oxford English Dictionary. Accessed March 4, 2024. https://www.oed.com/ dictionary/inmate_n?tab=factsheet#486873.
Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. London:
Colburn and Bentley, 1831. Project Gutenberg.
I use chapter numbers rather than page numbers in this essay because the online version that I accessed did not include page numbers. Professor Dauber said that this method of citation was permissible.
Authors Bio
Gwendolyn Davison (she/her) is a senior in Columbia College. She majors in history and concentrates in English. She has published creative pieces in Quarto and looks forward to taking the Columbia Publishing Course over the summer.