The Autonomous Creature:
Embodiment and Alienation in the process of Becoming
“I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the nature you bedeviled me with is a lie. Do not trust to protect to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine ” – Susan Stryker “My Words To Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix” pg247
Mary Shelley’s rage at the excruciating incommunicability of alienation bleeds through the seams of Frankenstein’s creature; dribbling faster out of the agitated suture holes as the creature discovers the terrible obsession that thrives in the painful hyper awareness of conscious embodiment, or becoming. According to Susan Stryker in her monumental rant “My Words to Victor Frankenstein” the process of becoming an autonomous creature, a purposeful self, involves “some culturally and historically specific mode of grasping [one’s] physicality” in order to “transform the flesh into a useful artifact” (Stryker 253). This process of rendering one’s own flesh meaningful seems to rely on a knowledge of the history of that flesh, a knowledge of the forces that brought this assemblage of gooey material into sentient animation, a contextualization of this body’s particular genesis, and maybe even some insight into its subsequent proliferation. According to this logic of descent, being aware that one’s history is unclear; that its “naturalness” has been constructed or interfered with, may become a point of intense alienation. Heteronormative society associates a body’s lack of medically confirmed “natural” origin to dangerous, monstrous otherness.
Frankentein’s creature’s knowledge of their body’s “unnatural” origin, or its lack of clear descent, sends them folding their flesh into the material of the other, kneading with judgemental hands: “ I was dependent on none, and related to none." The creature muses in self-reflection, "what did this mean? who was i? what was i? whence did I come? what was my destination? these questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them” (Shelley 89). This inability to identify a personal history catalyzes the creature's spiraling descent into a painfully disorienting state of forced disidentification. Mary Shelley positions us as readers in a spectacular experience of communicative deconstruction and linguistic abstraction in volume II chapter IV as the creature is introduced to the “godlike science” of communication. The creature observed that in communicating one’s “experience and feelings to one another” with “articulate sounds,” one may produce “pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearer” (Shelley, 77). This discovery of communication’s ability to relieve the misery of isolation through shared experience further fueled the creature’s obsessive desire for a sense of connection.
Aching for the opportunity to suspend their misery in a fleeting moment of consenting interaction, the creature compares their own othered embodiment to that of Saphie, their beloved cottagers, and the characters in the books they found in the woods (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Sorrows of Werter, a volume of Plutarch's Lives, and John Milton's Paradise Lost). In listening to Saphie’s introduction to the intricacies of “the strange system of human society” from their hovel, the creature comes to desire an understanding of their own position in this strange system. The creature yearns for a context and a purpose, “the words induced me to turn toward myself” to decipher its own social value as an autonomous body. “And what was i? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant… I was besides endowed with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man,” and here the creature deduces they will be perceived as monstrous in their singular otherness (Shelley 83).
The corporeal limitations that have been at the center of the creature’s alienation since their first attempt to feel connection assumed their wretchedness only through the social and historical processes of medicalization and pathologization at the hands of medically institutionalized codes of normativity. Upon realizing that the flesh of their body is doomed to be perceived as unnatural; the monstrous, abandoned creation of Victor Frankenstein’s manic scientific bender, the creature reaches a crucial moment in their becoming in experiencing the incommunicable rage at being sentenced to conscious existence without the ability to consent. The creature exclaims “hateful day when I received life!” in disgust of the relentless terminal uniqueness that brought them into being (Shelley 91). The rage that was reawakened in themselves with this discovery seemed to be coded as a historical, almost hereditary rage; a performance of the medical pathologization of their assembled flesh and its means of embodiment.
Mary Shelly chooses to let us ponder, with the creature, what might be most valued by fellow social beings, which they could aim their flesh toward achieving now that it has been imbued with life and desires acknowledgement. Shelley allows us to experience this painful process of optimization; of territorialization and self-judgement. We panic, with the creature, with Victor, with Walton, with Mary Shelley, with her peers, with Susan, with our peers, that we will fail in the process of transforming our own flesh into a useful artifact. Festering in the isolated experience of panic, the creature becomes more and more desperate to banish their own misery, as well as that of the cottagers, through the transcendence of communicative connection. The creature’s awareness of their visually perceived monstrosity is expressed in complex inner dialogue: “when I looked around I saw and heard on none like me. Was I then a monster?” (Stryker 83) We follow the creature as they experience irreversible materialization of knowledge into pain “I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling; but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death-----a state which I feared yet did not understand” (Shelley 84). But the creature does not wish to give up their existence for the certainty of death, rather they wish to express their rage and direct it “against the conditions in which I [we] must struggle to exist” . Stryker traces her own history back to the icon of othered embodiment that Mary Shelley’s creature immortalizes; “like the monster I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment” manifesting a ritual literary activity of communicating and connecting through isolated shared experiences (Stryker 245).
Mary Shelley implores us to experience the maddening discordant isolation of residing in a body that makes “passing” in our heteronormative ableist society impossible; asking how one may simulate connection within one’s own historical assemblage of isolated and othered creatures. What ensues for the creature once they acknowledge the betrayal of their soul by their own wretched flesh is a performance of obsessive, addictive, cathartic rage aimed at the soul’s unquenched craving for connection. Though the creature “longed to discover” themself to the cottagers, they remain hidden from sight until they have mastered the art of communication through language in hopes of surpassing the panicked response others express when confronted with the intimate material reality of this othered body. I would argue that the creature’s ‘[potentially feminist resistance to definition by a phallicized scopophelia] by mastering language in order to claim a position as a speaking subject and enact verbally the very subjectivity denied it in the specular realm” reflects Mary’s own attempt to identify through meaningful connections among her obsessively romantic, addicted, and terminally unique peers (Stryker 247). She expresses, through her creature, the inescapable madness of attempting to become in a state of alienation, of being forced to find autonomy in the acceptance of that ever-present potential for betrayal by one’s own flesh. Mary uses layers of narrators who fetishize their isolation to express, in multitute, the relentless disgust in our obsessive pursuit of the illusory “original” or “natural,” purely self-reflexive identification. These “passing” narrators (Walton and Victor) imbue their loneliness with a romantic intellectual superiority that pales in comparison to the creature’s raging proclamation of a conscious beings’ fundamental right to, and dependence on, sympathetic connection.
It is from alienation and terminal othering that addictive obsession begins to flourish in the place of a being’s need for purposeful connection. The addict/creature hopes that through their obsessive mastery of some mode of affective communication they may inspire a momentary suspension of judgement in the minds of their subjects. This suspension of judgement facilitates a collapse of harmful binaries [self/other, human/creature, internal/external, public/private, moral/immoral, natural/constructed] and an unbiased experience of shared sensation. The goal of any alienated being’s addictive behavior is to achieve a moment of unfettered mutual expression of the frustration of bridging the gap between physical and ontological existence. As social creatures, we crave to have recognized aloud this incommunicable collective self-centered panic, and we find relief in the confirmation of the “normalcy” of loneliness. In this collective alienation, we find comfort from our solitary suffering and intrinsic self-doubt.
I would argue that the creature, in a fundamental reflection of Victor, Walton, Mary and her literary peers, and now Stryker and innumerable alienated others, falls victim to a relentless, addictive cycle of excessive self-centered desire and subsequent volatile self-disgust. This cyclical extremism lurches the creature’s [addict] alienated body into action, bounding forward numbly, with nerve endings dangling, violence justified by victimhood. This addiction to whatever “creature comfort” simulates a sense of purpose can take on the transcendent integrity of rage; an experience Stryker claims “furnishes a means for disidentification with compulsorily assigned subject positions” (Stryker 253). Stryker’s argument for disidentification with compulsory identity roles reflects Mary Shelley’s own traumatic, complicated relationship with motherhood after having grown up knowing her mother died during her own birth, and then losing multiple children in infancy or miscarriage. This argument also calls back to the literary environment of dissent from traditional morals which Mary came from. It mimics the general air of disidentification that her peers; Percey Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori felt toward repressed social norms of the early 1800s. Percey is said to have carried a flask of laudanum with him at the time of his courtship of Mary, and the evening on which the novel was conceived supposedly involved substantial amounts of laudanum and wine. Mary’s proximity to addiction at the dawn of romantic literature is present in language of mutability and alienation being created by and about, terminally unique laudanum addicts like De Quincey and Coleridge, Percey Shelley, and Lord Byron.
Through the relationship between Victor and his creature, Mary may be exploring the uneasy sensation of her of personal history-making amongst the furious narcissistic production of her romantic literary peers. She portrays a creature searching furiously to feel connection through an extended exploration into the varying modes of embodiment, forced to submerge itself in the crushingly alienating weight of comparison and self doubt. She spits the incommunicable frustration of the soul with the body, and of the body with the soul through the mouth of her own literary creation. A body of text which has grown into an autonomous creature of its own through its ritual connection to others’ loneliness, and its ability to communicate such fundamental frustration by performing the consequences of the extreme means by which we may express our othered rage. Mary Shelley’s creature has become the point of historical decent for so many alienated masses of sentient flesh to begin constructing their own history, with relief from solitary suffering in our collective alienation.
[1] This is an interesting time to think about the inclusion of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” right before Victor sees Clereval