From Emile to Frankenstein: The Education of Monsters

Alan Richardson

European Romantic Review, 1:2 (1991), 147-62

If its more salient treatment of the problematic nature and expression of female desire links the "female Gothic" with the contemporary domestic novel while underscoring differences in their representational strategies, however, so does the Gothic's less obvious concern with the questions of women's education and moral development which were central both to the subject matter and the didactic aims of domestic fiction (Poovey, Proper Lady 3-47). In Anne Radcliffe's Romance of the Forest (1791), for example, the heroine finds herself in the midst of a Rousseauvian educational idyll, nursed through a mental and physical breakdown in Savoy by a benevolent pastor who applies the "philosophy of nature" to the "gradual unfolding of [his children's] infant minds" (245-46); the object lesson by which this Savoyard vicar teaches his daughter the value of moderation reads like an excerpt from Rousseau's Emile or from Thomas Day's Sandford and Merton (249-53). In her next novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Radcliffe carefully {148} describes the "unfolding" of the heroine's character under the tutelage of her father, St. Aubert (5). Emily's education, including a "general view of the sciences," "every part of elegant literature," and the inculcation of "modesty, simplicity, and correct manners," represents the most advanced eighteenth-century liberal thinking, anticipating the educational programs of Erasmus Darwin and of Richard and Maria Edgeworth, and standing out incongruously against the novel's sixteenth-century setting (6, 24).

Such unexpected appearances of the rational pedagogue in the haunted castle might seem merely to reflect the insistent presence of education -- both in its proper sense and in the wider sense of Bildung -- within Romantic-period culture (Plotz), an accidental rather than integral feature of the female Gothic. And yet, as Judith Wilt has pointed out, the implicitly tyrannical relation of (male) teacher and (female) student, the "exercise of power by the knowing over the ignorant," is "pure Gothic" and recognizable as a Gothic inheritance even in the domestic novels of Austen, haunting such "charming young man/naive young woman relationships" as those of Willoughby and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility and Henry and Catherine in Northanger Abbey (138-39). The power/knowledge dynamic underlying the relation of Emily St. Aubert and her father is all too analogous to that which facilitates Emily's exploitation by the villain Montoni, who cruelly plays on this very resemblance, taking on the voice of the father-instructor when she balks at his designs: "Before you undertake to regulate the morals of other persons, you should learn and practise the virtues, which are indispensable to a woman -- sincerity, uniformity of conduct and obedience" (220). The same inequality informs the pedagogical-romantic relations which characterize the domestic novel, marking not only doomed couplings like that of Clarence Hervey and Virginia St. Pierre in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda, but successful ones like that of Edmund and Fanny in Austen's Mansfield Park as well. And as Claudia Johnson, drawing on Wilt in her own reading of Northanger Abbey, remarks, this same structural disequilibrium also characterizes the "system of female education and manners" developed by writers from Rousseau to More and Jane West (39). The thematization of pedagogy in the Gothic novel helps bring out the element of social criticism implicit in its opposition of naive heroines and knowing villains, who often (like Montoni) assume a paternal position, suggesting that the line between pedagogy and tyranny is an uncomfortably fine and unstable one, particularly given the agenda for perpetuating male domination built into most of the period's programs for female education.

{149} Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) presents an especially complex and elaborate version of the critique of female education implicit in the female Gothic as instituted by Radcliffe and at once parodied and extended by Austen. Shelley describes herself (in her introduction to the revised 1831 version of the novel) as the "daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity," Wollstonecraft and Godwin, who were in addition perhaps the two most radical educational thinkers of their era (5). Shelley's concern with education -- which her father had described as inherently connected with "despotism" (Godwin 60) and which her mother, in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, had shown as central in establishing and maintaining male domination over women in European society -- emerges in the opening pages of the novel's epistolary frame, as Walton laments his "neglected" studies and the limitations of a "self-educated" intellect: "Now I am twenty-eight, and am in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen" (16, 19). Walton's reliance on a self-directed program of reading in place of a more regular and directed course of studies allies him with most women (and most women authors, including Shelley) of the period, who could hope at best for a few years in a finishing school which might, as Austen puts it in Emma, allow them to "scramble themselves into a little education" (52). His sense of inferiority to a schoolboy is also a reflection of female rather than male experience: Swift, in his widely read "Letter to a Young Lady," had insisted that even the most "learned Women" must feel themselves, "in Point of Leaming," below the "Perfection of a School-Boy" (92), and the unflattering comparison, reiterated by Lady Pennington (220) and Hannah More (1: 188), had become a commonplace of the discourse on female education of the period. Anne Mellor has shown how Shelley's critique of a "sexual education" troubles the "cult of domesticity" informing such later novels as Mathilda (1819), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837) -- all of which feature "father-guardians" who mold the heroines along lines set out in Rousseau's Emile -- but a similar critique can be traced in Frankenstein, which belongs equally to the traditions of Gothic and domestic fiction, as well (184, 212). If Frankenstein can be read as the articulation of a "birth myth" (Moers 72), it is pervasively concerned with the development and education of children as well, and particularly with the dilemma of self-education and the no less problematic "sexual education" which, for women in the Romantic period, is virtually the sole alternative to it.

Rousseau has been invoked in several recent discussions of Frankenstein as a central presence in the novel. The monster is often compared to the "natural man" of Rousseau's Second Discourse (Cantor 120-22; Mellor 47; O'Rourke {150} 549), although such comparisons elide a crucial distinction between the two: Man in Rousseau's imagined state of nature is essentially solitary and barely recognizes other individuals as such (Discourses 95, 137), whereas Shelley's creature is instinctively social, and "long[s] to join" the De Lacey family on the first day he observes them (110). More plausible (and more far-reaching in their implications) are the associations made between Victor Frankenstein and the autobiographical Rousseau of The Confessions and the Reveries who similarly abandons his children (a failing made much of by Shelley in her biographical essay on Rousseau for the Cabinet Cyclopedia); between the creature and Rousseau as self-styled victims who lament their persecution by an unjust society; and between the often remarked relation of Victor and his creature as two halves of a divided self and the literal self-division of Rousseau in the Dialogues or Rousseau Juge de Jean-Jacques (Marshall 178-227; O'Rourke). What has gone unnoticed, however, is that the narrative at the heart of Frankenstein -- the creature's long speech describing his first sensations, his developing ideas of the natural and social world around him, and the "progress of [his] intellect" (127) -- seems to have been suggested by a passage in Emile, which Shelley had read in 1815 (a year before she began writing Frankenstein):

Let us suppose that a child had at his birth the stature and the strength of a grown man, that he emerged, so to speak, fully armed from his mother's womb as did Pallas from the brain of Jupiter. . . . Not only would he perceive no object outside of himself, he would not even relate any object to the sense organ which made him perceive it . . . all his sensations would come together in a single point . . . he would have only a single idea, that is, of the I to which he would relate all his sensations; and this idea or, rather, this sentiment would be the only thing which he would have beyond what an ordinary baby has. (61)

Describing the education of a monster, Shelley critically addresses, through parodically distorting, the tradition of writing on female education and conduct associated especially (after Wollstonecraft's second Vindication) with Emile, in which women are at once sentimentalized and viewed, anxiously, as deformed or monstrous in comparison with an explicitly male norm. For Rousseau, woman's subordinate position in society, and thus the unequal education that facilitates her subordination, is rooted in her physical difference from man -- her weakness, her capacity to bear children -- and in certain moral differences which characterize her as well: her tendency to "unlimited desires" and to be "extreme in everything," which together make her life a "perpetual combat against herself" that can only be won with the aid of modesty and "habitual constraint" (359, 369-70). The notion that women are morally, as well as physically, deformed in comparison to men surfaces throughout English writing on female conduct and education as well, despite the growing emphasis on women's beneficial moral influence on their children, husbands, and the larger society around them informing these same works. For John Gregory, women's "natural vivacity" and "unbridled imagination" will lead to dissipation if not carefully confined (12, 38); for Hester Chapone, woman's volatile temper, if indulged, can lead to extreme fits of "passion" or anger -- "an enraged woman is one of the most disgusting sights in nature" (92); the Edgeworths similarly brand a woman's passion as "disgusting" in Practical Education, and note that "peculiar caution is necessary to manage female sensibility" (1: 212, 380). This tendency becomes much more marked in the reactionary writers who, like Thomas Gisborne, trace women's particular "failings and temptations" to the "native structure and dispositions" of the "female mind" (33). For More in Strictures, vanity is rooted in the "conformation of the human and especially the female heart" (1: 65), which is uniquely susceptible as well to "irregular fancy," "ungoverned passion," and "uncontrolled inclinations" (1: 177, 2: 105). For Jane West -- developing the Biblical "weaker vessel" metaphor which even James Fordyce had rejected as too degrading in his Sermons to Young Women (164) -- woman "carries within her a rebellious crew of passions and affections, which are extremely apt to mutiny"; replete with "irregular desires" or "unlawful cravings," woman is (stretching the metaphor further) a "slight felucca" which must be "taken in tow by some stouter vessel" if it is not to sink with the weight of its own iniquity (16-17, 49). If within this tradition woman is ideally a domestic angel like Elizabeth {152} Lavenza -- Victor Frankenstein's "more than sister" -- she continually threatens to become a passionate, rebellious creature impelled by unlawful desires, like Frankenstein's monster, his more than child. The monster, as Poovey writes, is "doubly like" woman as construed by patriarchal ideology: formed as a subordinate vehicle for "someone else's desire," and yet exiled as the "deadly essence of passion itself" (Proper Lady 128).

Other readers of Frankenstein who see the monster as, at least in part, a distorted version of nineteenth-century constructions of the female tend to emphasize one or the other of these polarities: either the creature's "initially . . . feminine qualities," such as tractability, sympathy, and domesticity, which ally it to such female characters in the novel as Elizabeth and Agatha (Knoepflmacher 106), or its monstrousness, its "very bodiliness" (Homans 106) its deformed status as "a 'filthy' or obscene version of the human form divine" (Gilbert and Gubar 240). But a good measure of Shelley's critique of the construction of femininity within the Rousseauvian tradition lies in her portrayal of how easily -- perhaps how inevitably -- the monster slides from one pole to the other, from a "creature of fine sensations" to a vessel of "evil passions" (146): what remains constant is its difference. A similar phenomenon can be seen in the case of Justine, a lower-class woman adopted by the Frankensteins and thus herself doubly other, who initially appears to those around her as docile and domestic but who, on being accused of William's murder, is immediately condemned as a "monster" (87) of criminal desires. This instability inheres in woman's status as "a creature of the second sex" defined in terms of her divergence from a masculine norm (Gilbert and Gubar 235), and who thus remains dangerously "other" -- implicitly inhuman -- even when viewed as a domestic angel. Such an analysis is suggested in the novel by the parallel descriptions of the monster as representing a "new species" (54) and of Elizabeth, the pattern domestic heroine, appearing "as of a different species" in her very "celestial" bearing (34). Here especially Shelley seems indebted to her mother's critique of the male conduct book tradition, stemming from Rousseau, which considers "females rather as women than as human creatures" (7). Moreover, by stressing as she does the role of education throughout the novel, Shelley evokes as well Wollstonecraft's view that "sexual" differences in character are aggravated, if not wholly produced, by male-instituted socializing practices which turn women into "artificial beings" (9), a cultural enterprise which finds its extreme expression in Frankenstein's creation of a monstrous version of the angelic/demonic female from raw materials.

{153} In developing the creature's account of his mental progress Shelley seems at first to follow Rousseau rather uncritically, both in portraying the creature's initial sensory confusion and in having him develop "ideas" before he has acquired language, drawing them from his gradually "distinct" sensations instead (104); as Rousseau had recommended in Emile (112), the creature's first ideas are based on "objects" rather than "words." But in depicting the creature's education proper, which he receives indirectly in tandem with the "Arabian" Safie -- whose very name evokes Rousseau's Sophie -- Shelley's relation to Emile begins to take on a critical edge.² Safie, to begin with, is educated by her lover, Felix De Lacey, much as Sophie is educated by Emile (or Fanny by Edmund in Mansfield Park). This seems a happy enough arrangement, but -- particularly with Wilt's insight into the power of the knowing over the ignorant in the Gothic tradition in mind -- we can see how the male domination inherent in the form of Safie's instruction (independent of its specific content) keeps her in a subordinate situation, helping to explain why a potential feminist (fleeing Turkish "bondage" for "higher powers of intellect, and an independence of spirit, forbidden to the female followers of Mahomet" [124]), is nevertheless self-limited to a "strictly domestic motivation and role" (Mellor 118, 209). Moreover, Safie's status as an "Oriental" who refuses to be "immured within the walls of a haram" (124) itself suggests an implicit critique of the conduct book tradition which treats women, as Wollstonecraft had written in the second Vindication, "in the true style of Mahometanism . . . as a kind of subordinate beings, and not as part of the human species" (8) -- a remark which anticipates Shelley's equation of the non-human creature and Safie through their shared education. As both Wollstonecraft (Vindication 86) and Catherine Macaulay before her (213) had acidly noted, Rousseau himself describes his approach to female education in terms of perpetuating a harem mentality: "I would want a young Englishwoman to cultivate pleasing talents that will entertain her future husband with as much care as a young Albanian cultivates them for the harem of Ispahan" (Emile 374). Turning from this once infamous passage to the scene in which Safie "sat at the feet of the old man," playing "entrancingly beautiful" airs as her "voice flowed in a rich cadence," one must wonder how far the harem has been left behind after all (118).

The creature's alienated relation to Felix and Safie's educational romance -- he learns by witnessing Safie's instruction through a fissure in the wall -- enables him to profit from some of the lessons which are seemingly lost on Safie. As Felix reads from Volney's Ruins, a work closely associated with the ideology of the French Revolution in its most radical phase, the {154} monster discovers the "strange system of human society": "the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; of rank, descent, and noble blood" (120). Other lessons are "impressed" upon him "even more deeply." "I heard of the difference of sexes; and the birth and growth of children; how the father doted on the smiles of the infant . . . how all the life and cares of the mother were wrapped up in the precious charge" (121). Apprised of a class system based on the unequal division of property facilitated by inherited rank and wealth, and schooled in the equally "strange system" of sexual difference, particularly the unequal responsibility of men and women for children (a lesson painfully relevant to his own case), the monster is in a position to make the sort of connections between class and gender hierarchies, aristocratic and male domination, which Wollstonecraft develops in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Guralnick). But he has not as yet learned how his own existential situation relates to these issues.

Having shared vicariously in Safie's "sexual education," the creature struggles to educate himself. Now able to read, he providentially discovers a package of books in the forest made up of Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and Goethe's Werther -- all works which Mary Shelley had read or reread in 1815 (along with Emile and the second Vindication) as part of her own ongoing program of self-education. The books at once puzzle and inspire him; he lacks the educational background which would make him a "competent" reader, and yet certain of his misreadings -- such as taking Milton's epic as the "true history" of "an omnipotent God warring with his creatures" (129) -- address his own situation more accurately than would a more conventional interpretation. His self-directed, arbitrary program of reading presents advantages and disadvantages similar to those of Wollstonecraft's Maria, whose lack of a formal education enables her uncommon independence of mind and yet leaves her subject to a dangerously "ideal picture of human life" (Maria 78).

More important, however, is the creature's discovery of Victor Frankenstein's laboratory journal, his sole inheritance from his "father" along with the unspecified garment -- presumably a sort of lab coat -- in which he finds it (130). The monster's reading of Victor's "papers," describing a man's creation of an artificial being, subtly evokes Wollstonecraft's reading, in the second Vindication, of Rousseau and his fellow male writers on female conduct and education: "Every thing is related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin; the whole detail of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it, is set in view" [2.7.4]. If this rather oblique parallel is, at least provisionally, entertained, several further cor- {155} respondences between Shelley's monster and Wollstonecraft's analysis of woman's deformation by patriarchal ideology come into view. Both the monster and woman within patriarchy crucially differ from man in point of strength, the monster's difference being produced wholly, woman's largely, by male intervention; ironically, the monster's greater strength entails (in Victor's view) his subordination no less than woman's relative weakness does for Rousseau, since the monster is potentially dangerous and must be contained. The monster's fate, as commentators often point out, is uniquely governed by his "physical appearance" (Mellor 128; Cantor 125); but perhaps not so uniquely. Throughout the conduct book tradition, as Wollstonecraft complains in the second Vindication, women are taught to be concerned principally with such external factors as "outward" demeanor (19), "corporeal accomplishment" (23), and "dress," for which they have a supposedly "natural" instinct (28). Moreover, Rousseau and the English writers on conduct who follow him enjoin upon women an appearance of virtue (particularly sexual virtue) which becomes still more important than moral behavior itself; David Marshall writes acutely of woman's consequent "theatricalized character" in Emile, her status as the object of the "regards and judgments of others"(140). By reading his creator's journal, the monster finds that his unequal and untenable position in human society is predicated on what a man has made of him. He responds with understandable anger at the man who would turn in disgust and contempt from the deformity he himself has engineered.

The creature demands from his creator the only means to social equality which he can imagine: Since his horrific appearance exiles him from human society, he will begin a monstrous society of his own with a "companion . . . of the same species" (and with the "same defects") which Victor is to create (144). The possibility of a female monster might seem to complicate any reading of the explicitly male creature as itself "feminine," and yet Victor's ultimate refusal to create a mate for him suggests a further link between the male monster and woman as constructed by domestic ideology: both (as Homans remarks) are "forbidden to have their own desires" (106). What Victor professes to fear in the female monster, in fact, are qualities which would magnify those which already differentiate his creature from "man" -- his emotionality, his physical difference, his unsublimated sexual desires -- and inspire anxieties similar to those attached to woman within contemporary educational discourse (Mellor 119-20). The monster's tendency to vent what the Edgeworths call "passion" might be aggravated in the female, rendering her "ten thousand times more malignant than her mate"; the monster's {156}"deformity" might inspire still "greater abhorrence" when appearing in "the female form"; his proclivity to sexual desire (evident in his very request for a mate) would be aggravated in the female creature, prompting her to either "turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man," or propagate with him a "race of devils" (165). A female monster constitutes, in this sense, a kind of pleonasm within the cultural code which Shelley critically addresses in Frankenstein. At the same time, Victor's destruction of his half-finished female creature brings out the "dread of woman" which characterizes his relation to Elizabeth (the prospect of their wedding night strikes him as "dreadful, very dreadful" [194]) and which, in part, underlies his horror of the monster as well.³

As when he is earlier banished from the idyllic domesticity of the De Lacey household, the creature's "only link" to society is snapped by Victor's ultimate refusal to create him a mate, and again he responds with a vow to "spread havoc and destruction" among mankind (136), now concentrating his revenge on Victor and his family. Frankenstein becomes from this point a kind of anti-domestic fantasy, with one after another of Victor's relations and friends murdered, until creature and creator, locked in an isolating, specular relation, consummate their hatred on a stretch of ice remote from all human habitations. Given the many connections suggested in the text between the monster and woman, what does one make of its uncontrollable rage? It is possible to see the monster's uninhibited anger as an "outlet" for the "hatred not permissable for the nineteenth-century daughter" (Knoepflmacher 95), or as the projection of male fears of an "independent female will" (Mellor 119), or both. One could even elicit a conservative reading from this aspect of the narrative: the monster's destructive rage, following the thwarting of his sexual desires, illustrates the dangers of an unregulated female mind (Poovey, Proper Lady 123). To read Frankenstein in this way, however, would be to underestimate the force of its Wollstonecraftian dimension, its exposure of the untenability of woman's position in a male-dominated society ultimately no more hospitable to Elizabeth than to the creature: the "angel woman" fares in the world of the novel no better than the "monster woman" (Gilbert and Gubar 244). Neither the domesticating process of a "sexual education" nor the independent rigors of self-education can, in the end, correct for woman's "otherness" in a male-defined society; the first leaves her too weak, a passive victim like Elizabeth or Justine, the second too independent, necessitating her exile and ultimately her destruction. Death, as U. C. Knoepflmacher writes, "remains the only reconciler in Frankenstein" (110).

This is not to suggest that Frankenstein is in any simple way a novel "about" education, any more that it is about, say, imperialism; or that the monster's difference can be reduced to a question of gender, any more than to a matter of social class.⁴ Perhaps what makes the monster so famously compelling is that its "difference" is finally irreducible, marking (as Peter Brooks suggests) an "unappeasable lack" (213). But reading Frankenstein against the grain of eighteenth and early nineteenth century educational writings elicits a range of meanings (to the necessary exclusion of other meanings which have been, and will be, elicited from it) which, in turn, bring out unnoticed links between several of the groups the creature has been compared to: women, colonized peoples, the nascent proletariat. All of these groups are, within the frankly hegemonic social discourses of Shelley's time, infantilized; all, like children in the period (and the monster represents, before all else, a child) had become increasingly subject to programs of schooling or "civilization" designed to discipline them for an increasingly regulated and normatized world. (Again, the figures of Safie -- trying to evade the "infantile amusements" of the harem [124], and Justine, domesticated daughter of the "lower orders" [65], can be taken as further indications of such links within the text.)⁵ All of these groups are seen as abnormal, or monstrous, within the dominant educational discourses of Shelley's age; Frankenstein suggests that, so long as these discourses are predicated on inequality, education will indeed remain, as Godwin had theorized and as Wollstonecraft had so powerfully demonstrated in relation to women, a form of tyranny.

Notes

2. The parallel between Safie and Sophie has been noted by both Pollin (101) and Scott (174).

3. See Karen Horney's essay on "The Dread of Woman," which explores male anxieties toward women in relation to men's ambivalence regarding the "mystery of motherhood," and is thus doubly relevant to a reading of Frankenstein.

4. See the influential readings of Frankenstein by Spivak and Moretti.

5. For the colonial subject as infantilized within British educational discourse see, e.g., Viswanathan (79, 84), and Richardson; Viswanathan notes as well the "comparability of the English working classes to the Indian colonial subject" within this same discourse (71). See also Mellor, who cites an intriguing allusion to Frankenstein made by George Canning in the course of an 1824 speech on the dangers of freeing the African slaves in the West Indies: "To turn [the Negro] loose in the manhood of his physical strength, in the maturity of his physical passions, but in the infancy of uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance; the hero of which constructs a human form, with all the corporeal capabilities of man . . .; but being unable to impart to the work of his hands a perception of right and wrong, he finds too late that he has only created a more than mortal power of doing mischief, and himself recoils from the monster he has made" (113).

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