Adolfo Plazola
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein introduces a complex and evil archetype via the character of Victor Frankenstein and transforms that evil into the Creature, who is victimized as a demonic entity. However, it is through Victor Frankenstein that the reader gets a glimpse into the darkness of man’s most deep and unconscious mind. Shelley’s stylistic way of writing reveals the dark spectra that all humans possess but are also frightened to ever build the courage to face the darkness that lurks from within. Victor has a dark and unconscious temptation for evil, and he only comes to an understanding of it when he crucially has to face what he has created: the Creature. Through the complex relationship between Victor Frankenstein and the Creature, Mary Shelley explores how Victor’s denial of his repression leads him to detach himself from accepting the dark inner workings of his unconscious—the shadow.
Because of how obsessed Victor is with death and creating life after the loss of his mother, he is unable to realize the duality of his repression and the way that it both affects and is affected by this obsession. In the wake of accomplishing his goal of giving life to the Creature, Victor deals with the manifestations of his repression through a dream that he has about Elizabeth and his dead mother. He says, “I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms” (Shelley 84). By having a dream in which Elizabeth ends up turning into his mother, Victor is now dealing with the repression of the death of his mother that he never fully came to terms with. Because Victor was so close to his mother, him not accepting her death resulted in Elizabeth’s role in filling the void of an important maternal figure. After her loss, Victor became obsessed with death and the renewal of life as a way to avenge his mother’s death. Victor admits that “If [he] could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, [he] might in process of time renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption” (Shelley 81). In trying to create life, Victor assumed he could conquer death, thereby theoretically resurrecting the idea of the person who gave him life. This dream not only highlights Victor’s obsession with death but also his inherent repression in dealing with the loss of his mother. Will A. Adams discusses repression through a Freudian lens by explaining the ways in which repression can manifest. He explains, “When we become divided against ourselves, aspects of our wholeness can be dissociated and transmuted into external daemons. Such daemons can torment us in dreams, fantasies, delusions, illusions, and hallucinations” (Adams 61). This is where Victor’s repression is apparent within his dream as well as the way he handles his awareness of the dream because to him, it is only a dream that he brushes off. He doesn’t accept it as a sign of torment from an external demon of his past. Victor brushes off his dream and its possible meaning so quickly due to the fact that he does not understand his repression because his obsession with death overpowers his ability to realize his repressed past, creating a cycle where his obsession and repression are a dual cause and effect. Therefore, what drives Victor is the fact that he wants to give meaning and life to inanimate objects, but he does not understand that the way that he operates in giving life to lifeless objects derives from that which controls him—his repression.
The idea of the unconscious meeting the conscious when the Creature comes to life leads Victor Frankenstein to live in denial and once again enters a state of repression via what Freud calls “the return of the repressed.” When the Creature presents itself to Victor, it instills a sense of fear over what he had done, for the ugliness of it revealed the manifestation of Victor’s internal repression. After the Creature stands before him, Victor says, “I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes...were fixed on me. I took refuge in the court-yard...where I remained during the rest of the night... fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life” (Shelley 84). After giving life to the Creature, Victor treated the incident in a childish manner by going to bed and falling asleep as a way to “forget” what happened. This act of forgetting parallels a state of repression wherein rather than confronting the parts of the self that he fears or are intolerable, he hides from them in hopes that repression will overpower what he saw, treating it like a nightmare that will eventually vanish come dawn. While trying to sleep, the Creature stands before him, and when they lock eyes, the ugliness of the Creature brings horror to Victor’s heart, forcing him to escape the manifestation of Victor’s internal darkness, which stems from his repression. Denise Gigante argues that Victor’s repression is what allows the ugliness of the Creature to come to life, but this return of his repression goes beyond his past. She states, “The Creature’s ugliness, on the other hand, constitutes a return of the repressed not linked to any particular childhood fixation. Instead the Creature appears as a return of what is universally repressed...the horrors at the core of all existence” (Gigante 567). According to Gigante, the Creature’s ugliness demonstrates a return of repression for Victor because his ability to give life to such an ugly entity forces him to deal with that which has been dissociated from his consciousness into the unconscious. This is where Victor realizes that his own existence is being challenged because what defines him is essentially being presented through the Creature, highlighting what Gigante mentions as beyond a mere childhood fixation but is instead a long timeline of repression that has continued throughout his life. Therefore, the Creature manifests in the form of forcing Victor to look into a metaphorical mirror of ugliness that translates into the “return of the repressed,” where the Creature acts as a reemergence of everything that Victor has buried deep within.
Although Victor is unable to confront his shadow and accept the ugliness that was lurking within his own self, he ultimately comes to a form of acknowledgment that if he had looked inward, then the Creature’s malicious actions could have been prevented. Initially, after the Creature murders his brother William, Victor goes into a rage over the Creature’s actions and regrets bringing it to life. He says, “When I thought of him I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed, and I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I had so thoughtlessly bestowed” (Shelley 112). By Victor admitting that he “thoughtlessly bestowed” life, he reveals that there was a part of him that was unconsciously working when he created the Creature. However, the ultimate result of the presence of his unconscious mind ended up being something that he loathed and that enraged him so much that he wanted to “extinguish.” The Creature wasn’t just his unconscious creation, but it was a manifestation of his own dark and grotesque self that was living within his unconscious mind. The dark internal self of Victor that made up his “shadow” was exhibited through the Creature’s external self, which is why the Creature turned out so hideous and grotesque-looking. The way that Victor is looking at his own shadow, the dark and repressed self, is by looking at the Creature because Victor’s inward darkness has morphed into the Creature. Therefore, while Victor thinks that it is the Creature’s ugliness that he is enraged by, it is actually the ugliness that is lurking within his own self. Le Guin summarizes Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow by stating that “The shadow is the other side of our psyche, the dark brother of the conscious mind...The shadow stands on the threshold between conscious and unconscious mind, and we meet it in our dreams, as sister, brother, friend, beast, monster, enemy, guide” (143). In relation to Victor, Jung’s concept of the shadow shows that the Creature, whom he views as nothing but a monster, was created in the unconscious state and is a result of Victor’s repressed denial of his own inner darkness, the shadow. Just like Le Guin mentions, the more it is denied, the blacker and denser it becomes. Therefore, because Victor is so repressed and did not take time to look inside, the more his soul was being threatened by the weight of his inner ugliness. On the other hand, Victor slowly begins to realize that the Creature is not the problem, for Victor is the problem since the Creature was only responding to Victor’s denial of his creation. After the death of his little brother William, he says, “I, not in deed, but in effect, was the true murderer” (Shelley 113). This is where Victor starts to realize that if he had been aware of his dark unconscious actions when creating the Creature and acknowledged his own ugliness within, then perhaps he would have accepted the Creature for the way he took shape. Victor recognizes that the death of William is not the Creature’s fault entirely because it was Victor who failed to nurture the Creature just like that of someone trying to make peace with his own shadow. In fact, Jung argues that “To become conscious of [the shadow] involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real” (Jung 8). Because Victor failed to do this from the beginning, the Creature’s actions were mere reflections of Victor’s repressed and unconscious dark self. Therefore, when Victor acknowledges that he indeed is the true murderer is when Victor starts to hold himself accountable that he never came to terms or looked to make peace with his inward self.
Through her novel, Shelley shows how the repressed qualities of Victor ultimately led him to have these internal conflicts and battles within his unconscious mind that he never truly embraced or accepted. Living a life of denial, Victor reveals that of a repressed psyche which forms his complex relationship with the Creature. Because Victor failed to acknowledge and accept his dark inner self, those repressed qualities returned through the manifestation of the Creature, thus forcing Victor to look into a metaphorical mirror of ugliness that derives from within his own self. By reading Shelley’s text from a Freudian and Jungian perspective, Victor’s character reveals an ultimate lack of embracing the shadow due to his overtly repressed self. Therefore, this shines a light on how the novel is not only a tale about a man-made monster but how man himself is essentially the true monster.
Works Referenced
Adams, Will W. “Making Daemons of Death and Love: Frankenstein, Existentialism,
Psychoanalysis.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 41, no. 4, Oct. 2001, pp. 57–89,
doi:10.1177/0022167801414004.
Gigante, Denise. “Facing the Ugly: The Case of ‘Frankenstein.’” ELH, vol. 67, no. 2, 2000, pp.
565–587. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30031925.
Jung, C.G. “The Shadow.” Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self. Translated by
Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull, Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. 8-10.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Child and the Shadow.” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of
Congress, vol. 32, no. 2, April 1975, pp. 139-148. Jstor, https://www.jstor.org/stable/
29781619.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. 3rd edition. Edited by D.L. Maddonald and Kathleen Sheff. Broadview editions, 2012.
Biography
As a recent transfer student from Mt. San Antonio College, Adolfo is an English major at Cal State Fullerton working towards their Bachelor's degree. Adolfo is currently in their second semester at CSUF and will be graduating in Spring of 2022. After graduating, Adolfo hopes to begin the M.A. program in English at CSUF. Adolfo's goal is to teach English at the community college level.