Jacques Lacan and Mary Shelley: Repressed Abandonment in Frankenstein

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.