| dc.description.abstract | Mary Shelley's early life was fraught with developmental problems. Like
Victor Frankenstein's Creation, she lacked a genuine chance to experience what
Jacques Lacan calls the Real with her mother. While some readings of
Frankenstein point to Mary's early development as being successful and properly
supported by William Godwin's love, thus making her upbringing parallel to
Victor's, Mary nonetheless experienced many of the same deprivations the
Creation in Frankenstein did.
In this paper, the author maintains that, based on a Lacanian analysis of
Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein's emotional detachment from his Creation and
others reflects Mary Shelley's psychological sense that she had been abandoned
and betrayed by the principal people in her life, including William Godwin, Mary
Jane Godwin, Percy Shelley, and her dead mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.
The feeling of being an outcast that the Creation expresses so eloquently in
his Lacanian Symbolic phase coincides, in Mary's life, with the repressed
abandonment issues that were coming to the forefront of her consciousness at the
time she wrote her famous novel. Mary's chain of signifiers, indicating her
repressed feelings, came out during her "session on the couch" in Lake Geneva
and became metaphorically embodied in her seminal novel. In a Lacanian sense,
the Creation was Mary's alter ego. Mary used the written word to express her feelings and was destined for such a creative expression of her inner life by being
born into a literary family. Mary Shelley used Frankenstein as a vehicle to deal
with the pain and the injustices she experienced during the first two decades of her
life. | en_US |
