FRANKENSTEIN, DICKENS, AND PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY
2018 saw the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, so a little belatedly this prompted a re reading in my children’s fiction reading group. I was interested in examining the thesis that the book’s meaning/main theme could be ‘parental responsibility’ rather than the Promethian dangers of science.
Researching this, I came across an illuminating essay Frankenstein or Rousseau’s Monster, by David Marshall, which examines the links between Rousseau and Mary Shelley. I was intrigued to discover that Rousseau, who I knew from cursory readings during university days, was a credible influence on the genesis of the story. In the year Mary Shelley had her dream about a ‘hideous phantasm’ and wrote the book, we know from her journal that she read Rousseau’s Emile and his last great work Reveries of a Solitary Walker, as well as her mother’s book, Vindication of the Rights of Women in which Mary Wollstencraft states ‘a great proportion of the misery that wanders, in hideous forms, around the world, is allowed to rise from the negligence of parents.’
Rousseau famously abandoned his five children, born to him and his partner Therese Levasseur, putting them in the Enfants-Trouves orphanage, claiming that if he had kept them, her family ‘would have made monsters of them’. Mary Shelley, writing some twenty years after the publication of Frankenstein, condemns Rousseau in her biographical essay Eminent Literary and Scientific Men for abandoning his children and states that he ‘failed in the plainest dictates of nature and conscience’, ‘neglected the first duty of a man by abandoning his children.’ In Mary Shelley’s imagination Rousseau’s children are ‘brutified by their situation, or depressed by a burden, that they have not inherited the commonest right of humanity, a parent’s care.’
The parallels she draws between Rousseau’s treatment of his children and Victor Frankenstein’s attitude to his creation are plain - the monster says ‘you my creator detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us…do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind.’
This callous abandonment of his children preoccupied Mary hugely, but interestingly, she would also have identified strongly with Rousseau –– both of their mothers died in childbirth, effectively abandoning them. In addition, her mother Mary Wollstencraft’s personal and public interest in Rousseau (she frequently mentioned him in her writings and called him ‘the true Prometheus of sentiment’) gave Mary compelling psychological reasons to identify her mother with Rousseau. These parallels and connections with her own life go some way to explaining the psychological depth in the novel - the monster’s nemesis Dr Frankenstein is also his creator (and vice versa).
It is hard to avoid thinking that Dickens addresses the same theme of parental responsibility in his book Great Expectations, a theme that would have connected to his life, his harsh upbringing at the hands of his father who sent him out to work at the age of twelve to pay the family debts.
When he hides his benefactor Magwitch from the authorities in his rooms, Pip directly references Frankenstein, ‘I doubt if a ghost could have been more terrible to me… The imaginary student, pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me.’
There are many monsters in Great Expectations - Pip’s sister, Pumblechook, Jaggers, Estella’s mother, Orlick, the Pockets - the whole book looks at this creator/monster idea in depth. Miss Havisham rears and creates the cold and emotionally removed Estella, only to realise too late that as a consequence Estella can never love her and is content to marry a man she does not love simply because he is rich, ‘what have I done…what have I done’. Magwitch, by his anonymous patronage, turns Pip into a kind of moral monster who desires only to be a gentleman and becomes ashamed of his humble upbringing.
What has this got to do with today?
These problems are all too current - discussions on the causes of knife crime, gangs as replacement families, absent fathers, bullying, society’s responsibility to look after its children, children as young as 12 handed knife prevention Crime Orders - in short the politics of child rearing. How is it that we are allowing them to turn into monsters? We may know the answers, but like the best Greek tragedies we seem destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over, to inflict harm on the very creatures we beget. No surprise that whether in myth, folklore or fairy tale traditions, these are universal ideas which underpin all our story telling.
In my current story (work in progress), like Frankenstein’s monster my character is abandoned by her father, exiled into wilderness, has to learn to use words (name things) and language to understand the world and survive , has to make a choice between good and evil, receives education/guidance from a ‘good parent’ mentor (grandma), and has to confront her mother’s boyfriend, the ‘bad, misguided parent’, whose hubris will be his downfall.
Here is a link to a newspaper article on knife crime
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/knife-crime-prevention-orders-children-violence-home-secretary-sajid-javid-new-law-a8755031.html
…and one on bullying
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/05/first-lady-invited-kid-sotu-whos-bullied-because-his-last-name-is-trump-she-ignored-thousands-bullied-because-presidents-language/
Notes
There are many parallels between Rousseau’s work (in particular his Reveries) and Frankenstein, suggesting Mary Shelley had these in mind - making the connection between the two authors wholly credible.
Mary Shelly’s story was conceived and part written in Switzerland, the literary landscape of Rousseau’s life (the Mer de Glace which features heavily in Frankenstein is near Chamonix). The many nature descriptions in Frankenstein echo moments in Rousseau’s work where the author finds solace in nature, closely resembling Victor Frankenstein’s pleasure in nature, where he is able to escape his experiments. One description of Victor’s outing in a boat on a lake is closely matched in Rousseau’s Reveries.
Many details of Rousseau’s descriptions of monsters, and how primitive man first lived in nature (the Enlightenment noble savage) in his Discours sur L’inegalite des Hommes and Essai sur L’origine des lunges find echoes in mary Shelley’s novel, eg the Monster’s discovery of language.
In Emile, Rousseau presents his views on child rearing and education (and to a lesser extent Religion, declaring in the Vicar of Savoyard that all religions should be treated with equal worth/respect – how revolutionary was that!! This caused a huge uproar and was the main reason Rousseau was exiled, fled for his life to live in safety)
In Reveries, Rousseau entwines his observations on nature and the nature of man with his personal history, looking back and reflecting on the reasons for his exile – Rousseau became a moral monster, hounded for his beliefs.
