Evaluate Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is study of Repression and Hysteria

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Name: Joshi Tejasvi A

Course: M.A. Sem: 02

Roll no. 21

Paper: 05 (Romantic age)

Batch: 2015-17

Topic: Evaluate Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is study of Repression and Hysteria

Submitted to: Department of English.

M.K.B.U. University Bhavnagar.

Introduction

Marry Shelly written Frankenstein in1818. ‘Frankenstein’ the title of this novel is based on the central character of the novel. The main themes of this novel are love, loneliness, hunger for the Knowledge, science and nature and ‘Repression’ and Hysteria’ there are some main themes of the novel. Let’s discuss in detail about   Repression and Hysteria.

Repression

Oxford Dictionary defines that the meaning of Repression is ‘Tending to keep your feelings or desires hidden.’

  An eighteenth-century doctor increasing Shelley’s fictional portrayal of grief in Frankenstein not only prefigures Godwin's response to an emotional crisis, but it replicates the sensibility of Reason and emotional restraint. Shelley creates the same terrible struggle for moderation between a learned father who shares Godwin's "philosophy" of logic and a passionate son struggling for self-control. In her representation, Alphonse lectures Victor on "the folly of giving way to immoderate grief" as the guilt-ridden protagonist mourns the deaths of William and Justine. Shelley's character can avoid further censure only by adopting a strategy to avoid his father "until I had recovered myself so far as to be enabled to conceal those feelings that overpowered me. She illustrates that the son has learned the father's lesson by having him uncritically repeat Alphonse's homily that "a human being in perfection ought always to preserve a cam and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity"

Given the coincidence between the scathing condolence Shelley received from her father and her fictional representations of grief, it is understandable that Anne Mellor would find Victor Frankenstein's statement of emotional control to be an "authorial credo and moral touchstone”. However, critics who credit the thoroughness of the character's emotional repression overlook the problems raised by Shelley's model of artificial tranquillity. Shelley's novel complicates the question of emotional control by revealing its problematic implication with gender. According to Godwin's model, as we have seen, expression of grief characterizes only the common "mob" of women; therefore, the Promethean protagonist of Frankenstein resists "unmanly" emotions. While the monster illustrates the expression of Victor's unspeakable masculine desires, Shelley uses Victor's body to show the dangers of unspeakable feminine ones. She observes that because a social and psychological system categorizes strong emotion as feminine and common, the men who experience such emotion risk chaos: a redefinition of gender and class status. In examining Shelley's depiction of Victor's repression of the feminine, we must take into account the social and political consequences w Shelley's attention to repression in Victor's code of masculinity is significant because his version of the "manly" is maintained only by constant vigilance. Like William Godwin, Victor accepts an ideology of masculine control, feminine nurturing, and the sanctity of home at the expense of communication with family members. Yet after the creation of the monster and the crisis it precipitates, Victor no longer can meet these rigid demands. Victor has proven his feminine capacity for procreation and then denied that aspect of him by abandoning his monster/child. The rejection of his disappointing, but powerful offspring unleashes a truth about the denial of human feeling that sheer masculine repression can no longer control. Shelley makes its inadequacy clear in Victor's aborted attempt to share his emotional problems with Alphonse. Tortured by the guilt of irresponsibly engendering a life that has destroyed his family, Victor claims, as he has before, to have murdered William, Justine, and Henry. Although he would have "given the whole world to have confided the fatal secret," Victor always had refused to explain his self-accusations for fear of being labelled insane. His father, who previously had ignored these outbursts, now responds in the manner Victor has predicted: "are you mad? My dear son, I entreat you never to make such an assertion again." Victor recalls that his statements convinced my father that my ideas were deranged, and he instantly changed the subject of our conversation, and to alter the course of my thoughts. He wished as much as possible to obliterate the memory of the scenes that had taken place in Ireland, and never alluded to them, or suffered me to speak of my misfortunes  hitch occur when control gives way to an emotional transgression.

Hysteria

Oxford Dictionary defines the meaning of Hysteria is ‘extreme’ or ‘uncontrollable emotion’.

Eighteenth-century doctors increasingly defined hysteria as a "nervous disorder" associated with insanity; therefore, an examination of this social phenomenon must consider the terms in which hysteria and the "English Malady" are discussed during the reign of George III -- Percy Shelley's "old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king."

Hysteria's etymological and historical associations with the feminine are well known, and its manifestations in Victorian women have been the object of much study. Hysteria in late eighteenth-century England has not received as much critical attention, but the ailment was so prevalent in 1784 that Thomas Sydenham routinely suspected it when diagnoses of female patients proved difficult.

Shelley illustrates this redefinition most clearly in several episodes of hysteria that she associates with Victor -- a character who may be less the phallic aggressor that some have described than a prototype for Freud's Dora. By attributing hysteria to a male character, Shelley invites us to look for problems in the cultural orthodoxy of masculinity, especially as represented in Victor's project. The representation of a male hysteric in Shelley's text illustrates her belief that, despite a culture's artificial division of emotions by gender, the male body can, if need be, speak in a "feminine" voice.

Victor can voice the unspeakable, and then his body speaks volumes on his wedding night. Here, Shelley brings to a climax the issues of hysteria and sexuality, just as the monster has promised all along. She has shown us Victor's perception that a union with his "more than sister" will prove problematic. Gilbert and Gubar see the relationship as one of "barely disguised incest," and even Shelley's Alphonse wonders if Victor "regards her as your sister, without any wish that she might become your wife". The narrative associates Victor's future bride with unnatural monstrosity in two forms. In an early dream after creating the monster, Victor's kiss transforms Elizabeth into Victor's dead mother. He awakens from this vision of Elizabeth/Caroline to view the monster standing over his bed. This nightmare scene, George Levine notes, "conflates remarkably with the actual wedding night murder; in both, the Monster appears in the moonlight, looking in the first instance upon Victor's body, then upon Elizabeth's." In addition to the doubling Levine observes, Shelley connects Elizabeth to the monster in another instance. On their honeymoon trip to Evian, the same trip where Victor stumbles over the term "lover," his vision becomes blurred while "gazing on the beloved face of Elizabeth". Just as a "mist" obscured Victor's view of the monster and the dead Clerval, so now "a sudden gush of tears blinded my sight and. . . I turned away to hide the involuntary emotion." Victor is concealing "unmanly" emotion, but he also is concealing the face of the woman whom he has married -- the woman he associates with his uncontrollable creation and with an incestuous relation. Victor's last words to Elizabeth, then, are doubly loaded. When she asks "what is it you fear," his reply that "this night is dreadful, very dreadful," addresses both his stated apprehension about the monster and his unstated fear of consummating their marriage.

Shelley's exploration of her character's fears of sex and loss of control culminate in the scene of Elizabeth's murder. His reaction to Elizabeth's murder seems passive, or simply cowardly, only if insulated from questions about his ambivalence toward marriage, or more specifically, heterosexual passion. Victor's body shows, in effect, his fear that desire will kill the woman he has considered only in terms of her purity and innocence. When Victor hears his wife scream, "the whole truth rushed into my mind, my arms dropped, the motion of every muscle and fibre was suspended. . . this state lasted but for an instant; the scream was repeated, and I rushed into the room". Here, the character faints, just as he did when viewing Clerval's body. However, Shelley explicitly contrasts his former paralysis with the active role he takes after Elizabeth's death: "I rushed toward her, and embraced her with ardour" (emphasis mine). Significantly, Shelley crafts the novel's only erotic embrace to include a lifeless body, one that cannot arouse uncontrollable sexual passion and that will preserve the brother-sister relationship threatened by nuptial union. Her language suggests that Victor's paralysis in a situation demanding action is due to both the fear of defiling his bride's virginity and the fear of the unleashed powers of sexuality. Immediately after Victor hears screams, Shelley interrupts the narrative to have Victor recall Elizabeth as "the best hope, and the purest creature of the earth."

Victor's hysteria results from his emotional constraints, in addition to the ethical questions raised by his creation of the monster. Not only must he restrain his grief for lost family members, but he also must cope with his feelings of guilt and responsibility for their deaths. Perhaps most difficult, though, is the repression of the self-doubt he feels about the moral questions the monster raises. His final speech, in which he reports that "I have not been occupied in examining my past conduct; nor do I find it blameable," protests his innocence rather too much to indicate a guilt-free conscience. Victor has brought a creature into the world and abandoned it; a review of his actions, for all his rationalizing, seems to find him culpable.  

Shelley shows that Victor's failure is not so much that he made a monster, but that he failed to tell anyone about it. Because his scientific discoveries are covert and his personal fears are hidden, Victor faces his deepest fears in rational, manly privacy. Shelley indicates that the division of gender roles is dangerous not just because of its instability, but because it produces this isolation. To Freud's question "What do women want?" the hysteric would answer "everything": including, but not limited to, unconditional love, sexual gratification, and the support and empathy of family members. Like Freud, even William Godwin seems to divine that his daughter's despair articulates an unfulfilled desire.

 In her last moments, even Elizabeth seems to hear the hollowness in her instructions to "be calm, my dear Victor; I would sacrifice my life to your peace. We surely shall be happy: quiet in our native country, and not mingling in the world." Victor reports that Elizabeth weeps at her statement, "distrusting the very solace that she gave; but at the same time she smiled, that she might chase away the fiend that lurked in my heart". The fiend lurks in Elizabeth's heart as she altruistically attends to male discomfort, sacrificing her own desires in order to shore up men's emotional stability. It lurks in Victor's as he dutifully refuses to attend to the passionate, immoderate, "feminine" side of his nature. Mary Shelley's novel illustrates the manner in which a rational society has relegated even emotions to a Godwinian "proper sphere" in arbitrarily dividing them by gender; in the process, it has taken away the words of both men and women. The policy of reasoned control can be breached through the language of the body, but only imperfectly: this mute message carries force and integrity, but it ultimately depends on the sensitivity and skills of the interpreter, and, as we have seen, none of Shelley's characters can read Victor's somatic cries of distress. Shelley's characters must articulate their most essential needs with only the vocabulary of their bodies. In the silence that results, many monsters will be formed.

Conclusion

Throughout the study of this whole novel we can say that “repression” and “hysteria” played vital role in this novel “Frankenstein”. 
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