ESC: English Studies in Canada

THE MONSTROSITY OF REPRESENTATION: FRANKENSTEIN AND ROUSSEAU C H R I S T I A N B Ö K York University “Pardon this intrusion. ... I am a traveller in want of a little rest; you would greatly oblige me if you would allow me to remain a few minutes before the fire.” (Frankenstein 178: the first words spoken by the Monster) F rankenstein, by Mary Shelley, dramatizes a crisis not only of biological reproduction, but also of tropological reproduction, in that the text redu­ plicates versions of eighteenth-century epistemology in order to narrate an allegory about the dangers inherent in reduplication: such epistemology ac­ tually provides crucial intertextual support for the lengthy anecdote in which the Monster recounts his own sociolinguistic development, an anecdote posi­ tioned centrally within the structure of the text, yet largely marginalized whenever the text is translated from print to either stage or screen. David Marshall, in “Frankenstein, or Rousseau’s Monster,” explicates this anecdote in terms of two texts by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Essay on the Origin of Language and the Discourses. Marshall argues not only that both the Essay and the Discourses have greater bearing upon the text than has been traditionally thought (184), but also that Rousseau overshadows all other philosophical influences upon Shelley, except perhaps for the influence of her parents (233). Marshall in effect provides a virtually exhaustive argu­ ment that Frankenstein offers a literary praxis for the philosophical theorem expounded by Rousseau about the origins of sociolinguistic initiation. Marshall indicates, for example, that Shelley is known to have read the Confessions, Emile, and La Nouvelle Héloïse before, if not during, the com­ position of her own text (228); moreover, Shelley is known to have been exposed to the ideas of Rousseau through references to him in the works of her parents, both the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice by William Godwin and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (230). Marshall goes on to account for the possible influence of the Essay and the Discourses upon Shelley by plotting conceptual similarities between Frankenstein and these two texts by Rousseau. Marshall amasses circum­ stantial evidence that does not by any means prove influence unequivocally, but does nevertheless increase the probability that Shelley might have en­ countered the sociolinguistic theories of Rousseau either directly through E n g l i s h S t u d i e s i n C a n a d a , x v i i i , 4, December 1992 an unrecorded dialogue with the two texts or indirectly through an un­ recorded dialogue with their readers. Marshall, like both Rousseau and Shelley, attempts in effect to recount the narrative of an unstable genealogy, of a missing origin, but in doing so Marshall does not adequately take into ac­ count the ways in which both Rousseau and Shelley inadvertently undermine the very idea of a genealogy with an origin and thus call into question the very kind of project that Marshall undertakes: both Rousseau and Shelley problematize the remembering of an origin even as they explore the dangers inherent in the forgetting of an origin. Marshall in a sense fails to address the ways in which Shelley’s narrative about the evolution of the Monster is in fact fraught with the same kinds of aporias that plague Rousseau’s nar­ rative about the evolution of language, nor does Marshall see that Shelley’s representation of the Monster may in fact represent Rousseau’s anxieties about representation. Frankenstein in fact appears to provide an uncritical account of Rousseau’s theory of linguistic development in order to narrate a critical account of Rousseau’s theory of familial responsibility. Frankenstein appears, in other words, to use Rousseau’s philology to recount a critique of Rousseau’s soci­ ology— a critique made more explicit by Shelley two decades later in Lives of Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France, a critical biography of Rousseau, in which Shelley not only chastises the philosopher for abandoning his five children to the care of a state orphanage (2:131), but also reproaches him for believing that primitive man recognizes no familial obligation (2: 135). Rousseau writes in his Discourses...