Fantasy, Trauma, and Gothic Daughters: Frankenstein as Therapy

Abstract

F rankenstein stands as the center and high point of Mary Shelley's literary career, although it was actually her first extended and completed work. She was only nineteen when she wrote it, and she never again surpassed it in terms of artistry or power of vision. Her conscious grasp of its full implications and revelations is a topic still hotly debated among its critics, but its power resides, I would argue, in its unconscious working out and through the author's own intense sense of victimization, and her increasingly desperate struggle for love and family. The novel functions as a form of therapy for a young woman trying to resolve the consequences of her traumatic birth, troubled childhood, and chaotic courtship. As an extended fantasy, the novel attempts to "act out" the author's own intense ambivalence about her parents, her siblings, and her lover/quasi-husband, Percy Shelley. The work's canonical status, only recently gained, attests to its survival as a precursor for both the SF genre and the gothic romance. As philosophy, metaphysics, proto-Marxian

Frankenstein, feminism, and literary theory

“…Cultural studies criticism has drawn on, and in turn responded to, Ellen Moers's politically charged notion of the "female gothic." Most recently, my ] essay, "Fantasy, Trauma, and Gothic Daughters: Frankenstein as Therapy," 29 places the novel within the framework of the female Gothic tradition, labeled "Gothic feminism." I differ from Moers in seeing the true woman in the text as "Victor," a Gothic feminist who manipulates others to do "his" bidding, all the way washing "his" hands of responsibility for the elimination of his family -rivals for the lost mother's love.…”