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European Romantic Review

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“Unhallowed arts”: Frankenstein and the Poetics of Suicide

Deanna P. Koretsky

To cite this article: Deanna P. Koretsky (2015) “Unhallowed arts”: Frankenstein and the Poetics

of Suicide, European Romantic Review, 26:2, 241-260, DOI: 10.1080/10509585.2015.1004544

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“Unhallowed arts”: Frankenstein and the Poetics of Suicide

Deanna P. Koretsky∗

Department of English, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

This essay interprets suicide as an essential trope in Mary Shelley’s critique of thefantasy of individualism in Frankenstein, and posits that suicide operates as ametaphor through which to interpret Romanticism’s interest in radical politics.

Frankenstein engages the subject of suicide by way of three kinds of extra-textual discourses – Mary Shelley’s attempt to come to terms with the role of

suicide in her biography, as well as in the larger cultural debate on legal and medical aspects of suicide at the turn of the nineteenth century; the novel’sengagement of Percy Shelley’s account of the relationship between reading,sympathy, and love as it concerns the possibility of subject production; and alarger Enlightenment debate about how subjects are formed and maintaincohesion. Through the intersection of these three discourses, the novel usessuicide to stage Romanticism’s interest in the political efficacy of the materialsthat the Shelleys saw as creating subjects – namely, texts.

Romantic literature can’t stop talking about suicide. From Keats’ claim that he has“been half in love with easeful Death” (“Ode to a Nightingale” l. 52) to Balzac’s sug-gestion that “chaque suicide est un poeme sublime de melancolie” (“each suicide is a

poem sublime in its melancholy,” Le Peau de Chagrin 64, translation mine), we areconstantly reminded that the Romantic period was one of repressed sensuality, ineluct-able destiny, and irremediable malaise, and that these strong emotions were oftenunderstood to have suicide as their final result. Suicide is also an explicit topic of many Romantic-era writings, most notably Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther

and recollections by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Percy Shelley of Thomas Chatterton,the young poet who killed himself after failing to achieve literary fame. It is curious,

then, that until ver y recently, few scholars had explored the subject of suicide inRomantic literature.1

Indeed, most criticism on suicide within the humanities tends toward historicalreadings of changing attitudes about suicide. The majority of this work posits David Hume’s essay “On Suicide” (published in 1756 and posthumously reissued in 1777)as the beginning of “modern” conceptions of suicide, thereby mapping t he moderniz-ation of suicide onto a larger shift in eighteenth-century moral thought.2 Historians of suicide rely on a narrative that situates modern suicide as emerging co-terminously withEnlightenment theories of the individual, and thus, the surge of literary interest insuicide around the turn of the nineteenth century is read as an extension of the

# 2015 Taylor & Francis

∗Email: [email protected]

European Romantic Review, 2015

Vol. 26, No. 2, 241– 260, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2015.1004544

mailto:[email protected]

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eighteenth century’s philosophical interests in individualism. Historians of suicide hailEnlightenment secularism as an intellectually liberating moment that opened suicide tocritical inquiry beyond religious condemnation. Michael MacDonald and TerenceR. Murphy offer one explanation of how the Enlightenment shaped the history of suicide:

Ancient philosophies that condoned and in some circumstances celebrated suicide gaveway in the Middle Ages to theological condemnations and folkloric abhorrence. TheReformation intensified religious hostility to self-murder in England and some other Euro- pean countries. Finally, in the eighteenth century, Enlightenment philosophy and the secu-larization of the world-view of European elites prompted writers to depict suicide as theconsequence of mental illness or of rational choice, and these concepts still dominate dis-cussions of self-destruction today. (2)

Thus, the narrative goes, loosening religious strictures gave way to more fluid thinking,and suicide entered, fully-fledged, into cultural discourse. But this narrative is incom-

plete, because it does not take into account challenges to Enlightenment theories of individualism that lie at the heart of Romantic discussions of suicide. In order tomore fully understand the history of suicide as a function of Enlightenment secularism,we need to account for the role played by suicide in counter-narratives to the Enlight-enment developed during, for example, the Romantic era.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein develops one such counter-narrative. Drawing fromdiscourses on sympathy, textuality and subjectivity, Frankenstein sets the concept of “the individual” against the secular rhetoric of suicide in order to interrogate thelegacy of Enlightenment individualism. In so doing, the novel offers a different mode through which to interpret Romanticism’s interest in suicide. Mary Shelley

understood the individual as constructed through social means and, as a result, her emphasis on suicide in Frankenstein differs from the commonplace Romantic precon-ception of suicide as a preemptive, solipsistic act of mourning for the inevitable failureof one’s own poetic vocation. Instead, suicide functions as an essential trope in MaryShelley’s critique of the fantasy of individualism, and thus becomes a powerful tropethrough which to interpret Romanticism’s interest in radical libratory politics.

In what follows, I link the issue of suicide in Frankenstein to three kinds of extra-textual discourses – firstly, to Mary Shelley’s attempt to grapple with the role of suicidein her biography, as well as in the larger cultural debate on legal and medical aspects of suicide at the turn of the nineteenth century; secondly, to the novel’s engagement of Percy Shelley’s account of the relationship between reading, sympathy, and love asit concerns the possibility of subject production; and thirdly, to a larger Enlightenment debate about how subjects are formed and maintain cohesion. Through the intersectionof these three discourses, I posit that the novel uses suicide to stage Romanticism’sinterest in the political efficacy not of subjects, but of the materials that create subjects

– texts. Frankenstein reveals how Romanticism, emerging out of the “age of suicide,”as the eighteenth century is sometimes dubbed, came to consider t he social and politicaldimensions of suicide by engaging it, first, as a literary problem.3

Mary Shelley and the Culture of Suicide

That suicide was a topic of interest to Mary Shelley in the years leading up to her writing Frankenstein is evident from her journal. Her first mention of suicideappears on 25 August 1814, when she and Percy “hear of Patricksons [sic] killing

242 D.P. Koretsky



himself . . . another of those cold blooded murders that like Maria Schooning we may put down to the world” (40). Patrickson was a protege of Godwin’s who committed suicide on 10 August 1814. As Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert explain,“Maria Schooning” refers to Maria Eleonora Schoning, the protagonist of a “harrowingstory of female misfortune,” written and published by Coleridge in The Friend in18104:

Maria is first raped as she sits weeping over her father’s grave, and then befriended by a poor woman, Harlin. Maria persuades Harlin to join with her in a false confession of infanticide, so that she and Harlin can be executed, thus avoiding the sin of suicide,and Harlin’s children can then be cared for by charity and not die of starvation. Overcome by remorse, Maria confesses the truth before her execution, but the magistrates do not believe her; Harlin is executed and Maria expires on the scaffold. (40, n. 134)

Mary Shelley’s recollection of this fictional narrative in her entry on Patrickson’ssuicide suggests that she affirms the opinion of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft,

that suicide may represent a political act. As Michelle Faubert explains, Wollstonecraft employed the theme of suicide in her fiction “to express a feminist sentiment about theworthlessness of the unfulfilled female life, and to protest women’s lack of control over their own destinies [suggesting] that, for women of her day, life is a cruel prison fromwhich death (not feminism, alas) will release them” (116). In referencing Maria Schon-ing, a heroine not unlike the suicidal women of Wollstonecraft’s Jacobin fiction, MaryShelley validates Patrickson’s decision to end his life.

The specific way in which Mary Shelley references Maria Schoning also highlightsher interest in the socioeconomic dimension of suicide. When Maria convinces Harlinto be executed instead of committing suicide, she does so in order that her children

remain cared for by the state. In the early nineteenth century, if a coroner deemed asuicide felo-de-se (literally “felon to himself”), his property would be forfeited to theCrown. This policy of forfeiture was notoriously corrupt; Georges Minois has shownthat for almost as long as the forfeiture laws existed, the wealthy swayed coronersagainst issuing felo-de-se verdicts to preserve family names and fortunes (210–48).

Mary Shelley was soon to become entangled in an example of this inequity when, inDecember 1816, the body of Harriet Shelley, Percy’s first wife, washed up in theThames. Henry George Davis, a mid-nineteenth century local historian, recalls that the verdict returned on Harriet’s body “bears the marks of outside influence” (112).When the coroner’s inquest was held – itself a “hushed up procedure” – “a verdict

[was] returned, which saved her the revolting burial then awarded to the suicide”(113). The official verdict states only that Harriet was “found dead in the SerpentineRiver” (Rivers, “Burial” 480). Percy Shelley’s note to Mary five days after theinquest confirms that Harriet’s death was in fact the result of suicide: “It seems that this poor woman . . . was driven from her father’s house, & descended the steps of pros-titution until she lived with a groom of the name of Smith, who deserting her, she killed herself.”5 Nor was anyone fooled by the cover-up; as late as 1859, Davis still deridesthe actions of the Westbrook and Shelley families, invoking a poem on the suicide of a

prostitute, Thomas Hood’s “The Bridge of Sighs,” to suggest that English societyremained unconvinced by attempts to conceal Harriet’s suicide.6

The immediate fate of Harriet’s body brought Mary Shelley back to the topic of suicide in still another way. The body was taken to the Fox and Bull Inn, then a receiv-ing house of the Royal Humane Society. Founded in 1774, the Society worked to

prevent people from drowning by disseminating information about resuscitative

European Romantic Review 243



methods. While hardly unique in its interests in resuscitation and resurrection, theRoyal Humane Society is uniquely pertinent to Mary Shelley’s novel. The scienceemployed by Victor Frankenstein is similar to that used by the Royal HumaneSociety, which engaged contemporary interests in the animating potential of electricityas elucidated in, for example, the works of Luigi Galvani, John Hunter, and Ben Frank-lin, whose kite experiment Frankenstein cites as an inspiration for his interest inscience. But more importantly, by the turn of the nineteenth century, the RoyalHumane Society was not only resuscitating victims of accidental drowning, but activelyseeking out suicides who had died by drowning in order to restore them to life. In 1805,the physician Samuel Jackson Pratt reported, “more than five hundred suicides have

been providentially restored by the medical assistants of the Humane Society” (552).Mary Wollstonecraft was one among this number.

Wollstonecraft was famously displeased with what she perceived to be the Society’sinterference with her right to die, a fact that haunted Mary Shelley all her life. CarolynWilliams has noted Wollstonecraft’s despondency with the intrusion of the Royal

Humane Society, which “condemned” her to a life she no longer wanted:

When she set out to commit suicide, she expressed fears lest attempts be made to restoreher to life. In October 1795, she wrote to Gilbert Imlay, “I go to find comfort, and my onlyfear is, that my poor body will be insulted by an endeavour to recall my hated existence.But I shall plunge into the Thames where there is the least chance of my being snatched from the death I seek” [Letter LXIX]. She jumped into the Thames off Putney Bridge, and lost consciousness before she was pulled out of the water. Her next letter expresses acoolly defiant refusal to endorse conventional responses to her situation: “I have onlyto lament, that, when the bitterness of death was past, I was inhumanly brought back tolife and misery . . . If I am condemned to live longer, it is a living death” [Letter LXX].(Williams 222–23)

Indeed, the longing for death figures prominently even in unexpected places in Woll-stonecraft’s writing, such as her Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden,

Norway and Denmark (1796). In Letter XV, for example, she describes how “death,under every form, appears to me like something getting free to expand in I know not what element . . . I asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery” (89). More-over, as Cora Kaplan reminds us, Godwin’s descriptions of Wollstonecraft’s suicidaltendencies were among the principle reasons that his 1798 Memoirs “undid her influ-ence and reputation for almost a century” (262). Thus, the specter of Wollstonecraft’ssuicidality everywhere surrounded Mary Shelley. Williams suggests that Mary

Shelley may have seen herself as a kind of Frankensteinian wretch, produced from – or in spite of – her mother’s desire to die. Though, as Williams grants, “theimpact on Frankenstein of Mary Shelley’s lifelong distress at the role she played in bringing about her mother’s death in childbirth has been thoroughly canvassed

by other critics,” it is also possible to read the text as one in which Mary Shelleyunderstands herself as “a child of the dead . . . conceived after her mother’s second suicide attempt” (213).7

In addition to these multiple ways in which Mary Shelley was confronted by suicide between 1814 and 1816, she also held in her purview the death of her half-sister, FannyImlay, who, like Harriet Shelley, committed suicide in the fall of 1816, when Mary was

writing Frankenstein. Fanny Imlay died of a laudanum overdose on 9 October 1816,and her suicide note, from which the signature was torn off, was printed in theWelsh newspaper The Cambrian three days later:

244 D.P. Koretsky



I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavoring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that sucha creature ever existed as (qtd. in Todd, Maidens 3)

Critics have long speculated about the torn-off signature,8 but few have noted howclosely Fanny’s description of herself as a being of “unfortunate” birth whose life

brings “a series of pain” is echoed throughout Frankenstein. Indeed, given Mary Shel-ley’s familiarity with the topic, it is curious that critics have been all but silent on thetheme of suicide in the novel.9

That suicide is central to the novel is evident from its final lines, wherein the crea-ture declares his suicidal intentions:

“But soon,” he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I shall die, and what I now feel beno longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile

triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagrationwill fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.” (156)

In a text written from within a culture centrally concerned with the development of thehuman subject, one wonders why the novel’s final act should be one of self-murder, thedeliberate undoing of that development. The creature’s death is frequently read as achallenge to Enlightenment ideologies of subject formation. For Gayatri ChakravortySpivak, the “darkness and distance” into which the creature hurls himself signals an“existential temporality that is coherent with neither the territorializing individualimagination . . . nor the authoritative scenario of Christian autobiography” (259), two

principles that underwrite the logic of British imperialism. Spivak’s reading hasspawned a staggering amount of scholarly work positioning F rankenstein as challen-ging Euro-central, patriarchal dynamics of subject production.10 Within the logics of such criticism – regardless of whether the creature’s development is understood interms of Rousseau’s pedagogical theories, nascent discourses of liberal feminismdrawn through Wollstonecraft, or Kant’s tripartite theory of the subject – critics gen-erally agree that the novel all but necessitates the creature’s expulsion from thesocial order because he does not fit the criteria, however they are conceived, of Enlight-enment subjectivity. For the purposes of this discussion, the particular kind of subjec-tivity with which the novel grapples is irrelevant; rather, it is significant that for critics

who understand the text to be about the limits of any Enlightenment fantasy of a unified and coherent self, because the creature can find no place within the social order, he must die.

Even as it is important to note that the creature’s expulsion from the social order isachieved not merely through death, but through suicide, the role of suicide in the novelis complicated by the fact that he is not its only suicidal character. Frankenstein, too,repeatedly declares his desire to end his life, baiting the creature and effectivelysetting up his own death: “I often endeavored to put an end to the existence Iloathed and it required unceasing attendance and vigilance to restrain me from commit-ting some dreadful act of violence” (126–27). While Frankenstein does not finally die

by his own hand, he is only too eager to catch the creature so that they may kill eachother. Their pursuit of one another, and Frankenstein’s desire for death, becomes, infact, Frankenstein’s very reason for staying alive:




I had formed in my own heart a resolution to pursue my destroyer to death; and this purpose quieted my agony, and provisionally reconciled me to life . . . I confess that isit the devouring and only passion of my soul . . . I devote myself, either in my life or death, to his destruction . . . How I have lived I hardly know; many times have I stretched my failing limbs upon the sandy plain, and prayed for death. But revenge kept me alive; Idared not die. (138–40)

Even on the brink of death, Frankenstein wills himself to live. Likewise, the creature,fearing that “if [Frankenstein] lost all trace [he] should despair and die, often left somemark” (141) for Frankenstein to find him, allowing the creature, too, to carry to fruitionhis suicidal wish.

That both the creature and Frankenstein seek to kill themselves offers reasonenough to attend to the role of suicide in this novel. But the novel’s engagement with suicide is further complicated in that the creature’s and Frankenstein’s suicidalimpulses are not presented as separate impulses, but as fundamentally linked. Thus,

beyond merely registering cultural interests in suicide, Frankenstein uses suicide to

comment on social phenomena of relationality that, for Mary Shelley, underpin the pro-duction of Enlightenment subjectivity. Specifically, as part of her critique of exclusion-ary narratives of subject production, Mary Shelley engages Percy Shelley’s writings onlove from his 1815–1816 period, which are, themselves, engagements with eighteenth-century philosophies of sympathy.

On “Love”: Percy Shelley and the Social Function of Sympathy

Through moments of textual and conceptual similarity, Percy Shelley’s works offer a

backdrop against which to read Mary Shelley’s novel, as well as a point of contact between the novel and Enlightenment philosophies of sympathy. In the background of Frankenstein are at least three texts by Percy Shelley – the poem “Alastor”(1816) and two unpublished essays, “Speculations on Morals” (ca. 1815) and “OnLove” (1815). Mary utilizes Percy’s ideas in tandem with her own interest insuicide, recasting suicide from a mode of escape from a problematic world, to amotif that signals the need to rebuild it. Frankenstein invokes Percy Shelley’s theoriesof love to signal the ideological necessity of a kind of social suicide in order to lay thegroundwork for a better collective future.

Most of the action of Frankenstein is motivated by a thwarted desire for “love,” a

term the Shelleys use in a very particular sense in 1815–1816. At this early stage of Percy Shelley’s career, “love” is not yet the philosophical doctrine of eternal humangoodness that it would later become.11 In 1815–1816, Percy Shelley uses “love” torethink theories of “sympathy” posited by the moral philosophers of the Enlightenment,especially David Hume and Adam Smith.12 For Hume, sympathy constitutes a mode of moral attunement, but the dilemma of such moral attunement is that “the sentiment of others can never affect us, but by becoming, in some measure, our own” (Treatise 441).Hence, sympathy can only teach one to act morally by making the other present in theself through sympathy. Likewise, for Smith, sympathy operates through the imagin-ation – which is to say, not necessarily the fact – of how someone else experiencesthe world, for “our senses will never inform us of what [the other] suffers. Theynever did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imaginationonly that we can form any conception of what are his sensations” (9). Smith, like Hume,emphasizes that the impetus toward sympathy derives from an inherently benevolent

246 D.P. Koretsky



predisposition in man to know his fellow human beings. However, as Smith statesabove, that endeavor is finally, and necessarily, centered on one’s “own person”; inthis sense, sympathy in principle only instructs oneself about one’s own subjectivity,and not that of the person with whom one sympathizes.

What will become important for Percy Shelley’s theory of love is precisely thislimitation of one’s capability to know another, as Percy will turn Hume’s and Smith’s theories of interpersonal relationality into a theory of subject productionthrough an individual’s relationship to texts. David Marshall has interpreted thelimits of sympathy as part of the aesthetic character of Smith’s theory, observing that “selves” are precisely constituted through “a theatrical relation between a spectator and a spectacle” such that “the self as Smith represents it has a dramatic character ( Figure 190). Marshall also notes that the process by which people experience sympa-thy may, itself, be turned into a fiction, wherein people may find themselves

deceived by hypocrites . . . [who] know how to imitate the exterior signs and symptoms of

feelings and thus trick beholders into taking their presentations of self at face values . . .

Inreading or beholding the characters of others, one risks not only being misled but also being placed in the position of distance, difference, and isolation that sympathy is supposed to deny. (Surprising 181– 82)

Marshall posits that Frankenstein engages the aesthetics of sympathy to consider thesevery limits. Marshall draws Mary Shelley’s engagement with sympathy through thenovel’s interest in Rousseau, establishing Rousseau as a central influence on Mary’s

parents and thus, also, for Mary. But a more immediate, and hence, more likely,source is Percy.

Percy Shelley engages the tension between one’s desire to step outside one’s sub-

jective experience of the world, and the recognition that it may not be possible, todevelop “love” as an alternative to Enlightenment theories of sympathy. Like Humeand Smith, Shelley also takes sympathy as proof of humanity’s fundamental goodness.However, in “Speculations on Morals” Shelley explores the tension between themediated process by which a person becomes attenuated to the experience of sympathy,and those aspects of goodness that he considers inborn:

The inhabitant of a highly civilized community will more acutely sympathize with the suf-ferings and enjoyments of others, than the inhabitant of a society of a less degree of civi-lization. He who shall have cultivated his intellectual powers by familiarity with thehighest specimens of poetry and philosophy, will usually sympathize more than one

engaged in the less refined functions of manual labour. (308)

A great deal of “Speculations” recapitulates Hume’s emphasis on sympathy asmediated through the imagination. For Hume, “imagination” refers to a broad facultyof mind that reproduces “faint, languid” copies of impressions (Treatise 8–9), and that also, in the experience of sympathy, makes possible “the sentiments of others[to seem] our own” (Treatise 593). For Shelley, too, “imagination or mind employed in prophetically imaging forth its objects, is that faculty of human nature on whichevery gradation of its progress . . . depends.” However, for Shelley, sympathy

belongs to a broader program of socialization that is cultivated by reading “the

highest specimens of poetry and philosophy” (“Speculations” 309). Thus, whereHume and Smith consider primarily face-to-face encounters, Shelley is interested intextually-mediated encounters, because the process by which one is constituted a




sympathetic, and therefore not only moral but highly civilized being, is tied directly toreading. And just as poetry and philosophy are constructed, in the sense that they arewritten by someone, so, too, Shelley finds virtue and morality to be humanconstructions:

The only distinction between the selfish man and the virtuous man is, that the imaginationof the former is confined within a narrow limit, whilst that of the latter embraces a com- prehensive circumference . . . Virtue is thus intirely [sic] a refinement of civilized life; acreation of the human mind or, rather, a combination which it has made, according toelementary rules contained within itself, of the feelings suggested by the relations estab-lished between man and man. (309)

Shelley maintains throughout “Speculations” that humanity is inherently oriented to begood, but as he notes above, goodness is also given particular form and context socially.Shelley’s emphasis on the relationship of texts to shape morality in individuals maythus be called a grammar of virtue, or further, a grammar by which we become “civi-

lized” subjects – a topic also of primary concern in Frankenstein.In “Speculations,” Shelley shifts the Enlightenment’s concern with how the subject

(the “reader”) is shaped through sympathy, to the emphatically Romantic interest in thewriter as the entity that governs that process: “We are impelled to seek the happiness of others. We experience a satisfaction in being the authors of that happiness” (311).“Speculations on Morals” concludes by considering the social nature not only of subject production through sympathy, which Shelley inherits from the Enlightenment,

but also what happens when sympathy is produced in others by an author. This con-cluding gesture raises more questions than “Speculations” can answer such as, for example, what is an author? What gives him the authority to affect the moral and

social development of men? And, most discomfiting for Shelley, what happens if heis misunderstood? These questions, in turn, drive both “Alastor” and, especially, “OnLove.”

In “On Love,” it is the writer, not the reader, who requires sympathy from others; but the writer’s attempt to find sympathy only indicates to him not only how little ordin-ary people understand each other but, worse still, how little the writer – the moral forceof the universe – is, himself, understood:

I know not the internal constitution of other men, nor even thine, whom I now address. Isee that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when, misled by that appear-ance, I have thought to appeal to something in common, and unburthen my inmost

soul to them, I have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distant and savage land. The more opportunities they have afforded me for experience, the wider has appeared the interval between us, and to a greater distance have the points of sympa-thy been withdrawn. With a spirit ill fitted to sustain such proof, trembling and feeblethrough its tenderness, I have everywhere sought sympathy, and have found onlyrepulse and disappointment. (503)

One can almost hear Frankenstein’s creature here. But it is not just the creature whowishes to have someone understand his “inmost soul.” Frankenstein is framed by awish for precisely such reciprocal relationality. Arguably, the main narrative would not have been written had Walton not been desperate for a friend. Indeed – and this

is what separates Shelley’s articulation of love from sympathy – “On Love” shiftsthe terms of Shelley’s discussion decidedly away from the overarching question of society at large, toward the “society” that is formed between readers and writers.

248 D.P. Koretsky



Thus, even while “On Love” laments the limits of sympathy, it is even more preciselyan articulation of the limits of those responsible for cultivating sympathy – authors.

Just as the speaker of “On Love” seeks and does not find sympathy from his reader,“Alastor” ruminates on the danger of seeking sympathy in the wrong places. That “Alastor” represents Shelley’s refusal of the Wor dsworthian poetic model of solitarygenius has been observed by a number of critics.13 While I do not have space hereto develop a reading of “Alastor,” I nevertheless want to propose that the poem estab-lishes a paradigm for Mary Shelley’s novel, for it connects a concern with how sym-

pathy might go wrong to the image of the charnel house: “I have made my bed / Incharnels and on coffins, where black death / Keeps record of the trophies won fromthee” (ll. 23–25), the frame-poet tells us, as he prepares to divulge the Poet’s tale.Mary Shelley famously employs the same imagery in her discussion of the “hiding

places” (28) Frankenstein combs for body parts. Frankenstein employs the topos of the charnel house to engage with Percy Shelley’s texts on love by turning his questionsabout the limits of authorship over to the terms associated with the suicide debate.

The relevance of Percy’s works on love to Frankenstein is established in the first pages of the novel. Walton admits to his intended reader, his sister Margaret, thesame anxiety Percy betrays in “On Love” about having one’s feelings (mis)understood in the medium of writing:

I have no friend, Margaret . . . I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. (10)

What Walton describes, and what will come to the fore even more profoundly when hemeets Victor, is the desire for what Percy Shelley calls “a miniature of our entire self . . .a soul within our own soul that describes a circle around its proper Paradise, which painand sorrow and evil dare not overleap” (“On Love” 504). For Percy Shelley, such a con-nection is not about learning to read someone else, but finding someone who can prop-erly read you:

[Love] is that powerful attraction towards all we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond our-selves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within our-selves. If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy chil-dren of our brain were born anew within another’s; if we feel, we would that another’snerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once

and mix and melt into our own; that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quiver-ing and burning with the heart’s best blood. This is Love. (503–4)

For Percy Shelley, as for Walton, love (what Walton calls friendship) is tantamount not to understanding, but to being understood . Indeed, not coincidentally, in describing hisloneliness to his sister, Walton recalls his background as a would-be poet. In his second letter to Margaret, he recalls that before he was an explorer, he was “a poet, and for oneyear lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a nichein the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated. You are wellacquainted with my failure, and how heavily I bore the disappointment” (8). Dejected

by his inability to write, Walton turns to desiring a friend, hoping to be “read” in life, if not in verse. And thus, when he meets Frankenstein, he believes him to be the veryfriend he had sought.




The opening pages of the novel link Walton’s desire for friendship to the topic of suicide. They do so at first circumspectly, for Walton finds Frankenstein on the brink of death and, anticipating the creation scene, describes how he and his crew “restored him to animation” (14), recalling Wollstonecraft’s restoration by the Royal HumaneSociety. Frankenstein notes, in an expression of apparent gratitude, that Walton has“benevolently restored me to life” (15). Walton, in turn, becomes attracted to Franken-stein’s gratitude, which, for Walton, indicates deeper qualities of “benevolence and sweetness”:

I never saw a more interesting creature: his eyes have generally an expression of wild-ness, and even madness; but there are moments when, if any one performs an act of kindness towards him, or does him any the most trifling service, is whole countenanceis lighted up, as it were, with a beam of benevolence and sweetness that I never sawequaled. (14)

But what most clearly emerges about Frankenstein’s character over the course of the

novel is his “melancholy and despairing” nature, and his self-involvement. Thus, thequote above continues, “But he is generally melancholy and despairing; and sometimeshe gnashes his teeth, as if impatient of the weight of woes that oppress him” (14). This is

perhaps most evident in Frankenstein’s repeated and, arguably, baseless rejection of hiscreature. For instance, the “breathless horror and disgust” (35) that Frankenstein feels inthe moment of the creature’s animation derives from his shock at what he has wrought;and while that shock may be warranted, it overwrites any sense of responsibility that Frankenstein might have felt toward the creature and so, instead of facing his conse-quences, Frankenstein flees. Indeed, at no point in the novel does Frankenstein demon-strate the “benevolence and sweetness” (14) that Walton claims to see in him. Even

Frankenstein’s apparent gratitude to Walton for saving him from death is a fundamentalmisreading on Walton’s part – by this point in the novel, Frankenstein’s only desire isto kill the creature and to die. He admits to Walton that the only reason he made himself visible to the crew was on the chance that the ship was headed south, so that he could continue his chase; he is dismayed to learn they are bound north. If Frankenstein isgrateful to Walton for anything, it is for prolonging his life so that he may kill the crea-ture, and when he is well enough, he explains that he cannot be the friend Walton seeks

because of this mission:

I enjoyed friends, dear not only through habit and association, but from their own merits;and wherever I am, the soothing voice of my Elizabeth, and the conversation of Clerval,will be ever whispered in my ear. They are dead; and but one feeling in such a solitude can persuade me to preserve my life. If I were engaged in any high undertaking or design,fraught with extensive utility to my fellow-creatures, then could I live to fulfill it. But such is not my destiny; I must pursue and destroy the being to whom I gave existence;then my lot on earth will be fulfilled, and I may die. (147–48)

It is significant that Frankenstein names Elizabeth and Clerval in justifying his obses-sion with killing the creature. For, while their deaths ostensibly serve to propel Fran-kenstein’s revenge plot – and while Elizabeth and Clerval may well have been good friends to Victor – Victor was never a good friend to them. Frankenstein’s relationshipsare motivated by a mix of self-interest and denial of his need for other people. For example, he admits to ignoring his duties to Clerval and his family while in thethroes of his research:

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The same feelings which made me neglect the scenes around me caused me also to forget those friends who were so many miles absent, and whom I had not seen for so long a time.I knew my silence disquieted them . . . but I could not tear my thoughts from my employ-ment . . . I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection.(33)

By “procrastinating” his social affections, Victor posits feelings – at least those feelingsrelating to friendship – as a mechanism that can be turned off or ignored. However,when frightened by his success, it is his friendship with Clerval that helps himregain himself:

Study had before secluded me from the intercourse of my fellow-creatures, and rendered me unsocial; but Clerval called forth the better feelings of my heart; he again taught me tolove the aspect of nature, and the cheerful faces of children. Excellent friend! How sin-cerely did you love me, and endeavor to elevate my mind . . . A selfish pursuit had cramped and narrowed me, until your gentleness and affection warmed and opened mysenses. (43–44)

Although he claims that he does not want his friends to know about his “loathsome”employment, in relating this part of his story to Walton, Frankenstein lets slip what reallymotivated his isolation: “If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency toweaken your affections . . . then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befittingthe human mind” (33). Thus, by this later point, Victor realizes that his motivations werereprehensible, even “unlawful,” because they “weaken[ed] his affections” for other people.

Through this declaration, Mary Shelley reemphasizes the novel’s interest in the dis-tinction between individual selves and other people. By this point in the novel, it is clear that “selves”’ cannot exist without others, for Frankenstein’s self-involvement is, by his

own admission, his downfall. Pondering the effects of his isolation, he conjectures, “if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domesticaffections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country;America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexicoand Peru had not been destroyed” (33). Here, crucially, the narrative breaks: “But Iforget that I am moralizing in the most interesting part of my tale; and your looksremind me to proceed” (33). Even as he attempts to relay a narrative of progress, Fran-kenstein cannot help but become aware of this story as a story, and of Walton as hisaudience, or, in other words, of the presence of other people, his literal and implied audiences. This break, in turn, offers readers a moment for reflection – would it

have been so bad if fellow-feeling had been better implemented throughout history,and Greece were not, for example, enslaved under Caesar, or the empires of Mexicoand Peru not destroyed? How might the course of history been altered if Europeansemigrated to America more gradually, or not at all? Here, Mary Shelley returns tothe limits of sympathy to imagine, however briefly, the possibility of a world based on a less self-interested mode of relationality.

But, the novel emphasizes, this is not how human relation works. Frankenstein’sfriendships, for example, are entirely self-centered – he has friends when he needsthem, but when occupied, he ignores them. Even his betrothal to Elizabeth is self-inter-ested. When he decides to marry her, it is not only, nor even primarily, for love, but inorder to hasten his plan to die. When the creature promises to be with Frankenstein onhis wedding night, Frankenstein assumes that the threat is directed at him, and thusreasons that marrying Elizabeth would lure the creature to him:




The remembrance of the threat returned . . . But death was no evil to me . . . and I there-fore, with a contented and even cheerful countenance, agreed with my father, that if my cousin would consent, the ceremony should take place in ten days, and thus put, asI imagined, the seal to my fate. (132)

In agreeing to marry Elizabeth, Frankenstein expects to be killed: “when I thought that I prepared only my own death, I hastened that of a far dearer victim” (133). His decisionto marry Elizabeth is guided by a suicide wish, even if it is, at this point, an altruistic one(i.e., to save his loved ones from being killed by the creature). But when Elizabeth and the others are gone, that self-sacrificial motivation turns inward, and Frankenstein’s life

begins to revolve around a death wish motivated by self-loathing and despair.The creature exhibits a suicidal motivation similar to Frankenstein’s. By the time he

kills Elizabeth, the creature has vowed to ruin Frankenstein’s life by severing his affec-tive ties to his family and friends. And yet, the creature seems to put more weight on the

power of those relationships than Frankenstein himself does. For, while Frankensteinfeels strongly for his relations when he does feel for them, that he can so casuallyforget them in pursuit of his studies suggests that friendship and love do not motivateFrankenstein’s life as strongly as they do the creature’s. For, even as the creature is, likeFrankenstein, suicidal, he is guided by a desire for companionship and a capacity for sympathy that is (as noted above) almost completely lacking in Frankenstein. In hisearly days, the creature is disappointed by the unlikelihood of his ever finding afriend; first the villagers, and then the De Laceys, teach him that humans will not love him. And yet, even despite this stream of rejection, the creature is the only char-acter in the novel who ever demonstrates any earnest attempt to get to know other

people in addition to trying to get other people to know him.The creature’s early interest in people is sincere and naıve. The creature focuses on

who people are and on how his presence in their lives might benefit them, rather than, asFrankenstein does, on how a relationship benefits him: “I longed to discover themotives and feelings of these lovely creatures . . . I thought (foolish wretch!) that it might be in my power to restore happiness to these deserving people” (77). Observingthe De Laceys, for example, the creature demonstrates what we might call true or dis-interested sympathy, feeling what they feel without any attention to himself: “Whenthey were unhappy, I felt depressed; when they rejoiced, I sympathized with their

joys” (75). Such pure sympathy is outside the scope of most social theories of sympa-thy. For Hume and Smith, sympathy is limited to the experiences of the self. For PercyShelley, too, the wish for transcendent connection, a “soul within my soul,” is the

staging of a fantasy, rather than a reality – in the margin of the fair copy of the“Essay on Love” is scribbled, in Percy’s handwriting, “These words are ineffectualand metaphorical. Most words are so – No help!” ( Bodleian 454), suggesting theauthor’s frustration with the inefficacy of words, and that the essay, which lamentsthe impossibility of its own legibility, reflects this misgiving. For all three theorists,sympathy signals the aspiration for ideal humanity, but it also requires recognition of its limitations. The creature lacks this recognition, and thinks that he sympathizeswith others without regard for himself.

But if the creature is able to sympathize self-lessly, it is only because he does not yet possess understanding as a “self.” For example, the creature’s curiosity about his feel-

ings for others motivates him to share, as it were, in Safie’s education: “I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings toone another by articulate sounds. I perceived that the words they spoke sometimes

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produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of thehearers” (74–75). But in learning the “godlike science” of language, the creature isinitiated into a world of subjecthood to which he cannot reconcile himself, and fromwhich his only escape becomes death, as underscored by his recollection of how hecomes to view himself as monstrous:

The words [of Volney’s Ruins] induced me to turn towards myself. I learned that the pos-sessions most esteemed by your fellow-creatures were, high and unsullied descent united by riches. A man might be respected with only one of these acquisitions; but without either he was considered, except in rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profit of the chosen few. And what was I? Of my creationand creator I was absolutely ignorant; but I knew that I possessed no money, nofriends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endowed with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they,and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with lessinjury to my frame; my stature far exceeded their’s. When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all

men fled, and whom all men disowned? (80–81)

By all indications, the creature is, at least physically, superior to human beings – he islarger, faster, stronger, and more resilient. But he learns to hate himself because he istaught that identity is constituted through relations to others, and that those relationsare, themselves, constituted and measured by social institutions. The single most impor-tant lesson the creature gleans from his education is that he does not fit into the struc-tures that govern social life, and that because of this, he has no choice but to die: “Ilearned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death” (81). In coming to grips with what it means to be a subject, the creature

learns to be suicidal.It is here that the novel most explicitly suggests that the relationship between suicide

and subjectivity is mediated by textual relationality. One of the three texts that guide thecreature’s development, Goethe’s Werther , is about suicide,14 and further, what thecreature gleans from reading is not, as Enlightenment tradition would have it, self-understanding or self-creation, but an understanding of “the self” as something that can, and in this case should, be killed. Prior to his “education,” the creature had not con-sidered the possibility of his own death. Initially, he was guided by an instinct tosurvive, proclaiming that “life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish,is dear to me, and I will defend it” (66). But when his understanding is cultivated,

he becomes aware not only of the possibility, but also the necessity of his death.This awareness becomes especially clear when he reads Werther , which incites inhim a “wonder” about the novel’s “disquisitions upon death and suicide” (86):

As I read . . . I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar, yet at the same time strangely unlike the beings concerning whom I read, and towhose conversation I was a listener. I sympathized with, and partly understood them, but Iwas uninformed in mind; I was dependent on none, and related to none. The path of mydeparture was free; and there was none to lament my annihilation. My person washideous, and my stature gigantic: what did this mean? Who was I? What was I?Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them. (86)

The creature’s experience of reading suggests that for this text to be understood, asubject must be present to understand it; but in order for a subject to understand it,




the text needs to teach one how to be a subject. That the creature reads about suicide isless important than the fact that, in highlighting the fact that he does not belong to thecategory of “subject,” his reading leads him to want to kill himself. The texts he readshave, in this sense, the opposite of their intended effect. Rather than cultivating thesubject of Enlightenment, they bring into sharp focus the fact that the creaturecannot be one, and thus, they impel him to seek a way out of a world that, he realizes,he was never meant to inhabit.

Suicide as “Self”-Destruction: Re-Marking Legibility

Anxiety over the capacity of texts to affect minds in undesired ways was at the forefront of the European cultural consciousness at the turn of the nineteenth century. Followingthe 1774 publication of Goethe’s Werther , Europe became concerned, almost to the

point of hysteria, about the effects on young people of reading about suicide. But what Frankenstein gets at so presciently through its references to Werther (among

other texts) is the limited capacity of the didactic tradition of Bildung in the Europeannovel, of which none other than Goethe is the ur-master.15 That is, the creature almost

masters the teachings that would mold him into a subject. To anyone who cannot seehim, he might even have passed, as implied in De Lacey’s assumption that the creatureis not only European, but French like him, “my countryman” (90). And yet, the crea-ture, having been so inculcated with all of the ways in which he does not qualify as asubject based on its physical determinants – for example, the social standing that Enlightenment subjects possess through landedness, which is determined, first and fore-most, by being male and white – fails to realize how close he has actually come to

becoming a subject internally.

The problem that Frankenstein ultimately poses, then, is whether there exists anoption other than suicide for those like the creature, who are not “legible” withinEnlightenment social structures. Saidiya Hartman has warned against the potentialdanger of simply “writing” the non-subject into subjectivity. Recalling the abolitionist John Rankin’s attempts to express the atrocities of slavery by imaginatively describinghimself in the position of slaves being whipped, Hartman worries that insofar as sym-

pathy “is a projection of oneself into another in order to better understand the other,”Rankin does more to reveal his own ideas about torture than to allow us to understand the tortured. For Hartman, “by virtue of this substitution the object of identificationthreatens to disappear . . . [I]n making the other’s suffering one’s own, this suffering

is occluded by the other’s obliteration” (18–19). What Hartman describes is preciselythe problem at the heart of Percy Shelley’s anxiety about the limits of texts to generateunderstanding. Imagining the other through the self “fails to expand the space of theother but merely places the self in its stead” (Hartman 20), effectively creating, in

both subject and object, an isolated being, “misunderstood like one in a distant and savage land” (Shelley 503), and without hope of being understood.

Frankenstein’s creature is exactly such an isolated being, and Mary Shelley empha-sizes that the creature’s isolation is imposed on him both by others’ inability to read him, and by failed efforts to write him. For example, when he asks for a mate, the crea-ture explains that he wants to “excite the sympathy of some existing thing” (99). In sodoing, he aligns himself with what the novel holds to be a most human characteristic,the need to be understood by another like oneself. Frankenstein’s destruction of themate, in turn, indicates his failure to recognize this need for sympathetic engagement as part of the process of subject formation. Frankenstein’s act of destruction has

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been read as motivated by a Malthusian worry that the two creatures would begin a newspecies, but it is, arguably, better read as another example of the exclusions created by

patriarchy. The population reading is troubled by two points. As Maureen McLanenotes, it is not clear that the creature and his mate can reproduce (103); indeed, it seems reasonable to assume that if this were a real fear for Frankenstein, he could engineer its impossibility. The problem, then, runs deeper than speciation. For evenmore than he fears the creatures getting along, Frankenstein worries that the femalewill reject the original creature in favor of “the superior beauty of man” (114). What the creature desires in his mate is a complementary outsider; it is precisely not her phys-ical shape, but the community they might form through their shared exclusion fromhuman society that interests him. But Frankenstein imagines that the mate will seethe creature as he does, and that she will attempt, instead, to join mankind (never mind the fact that mankind would surely reject her). Frankenstein’s projection hereunderscores his general inability to register anything from a perspective not squarelyhis own. And, as the novel’s early emphasis on his schooling suggests, Frankenstein’s

perspective was precisely cultivated by an Enlightenment education.The real problem addressed by the second creation scene, then, is not population but

patriarchy and all that it has wrought; and one key cipher of the problems associated with patriarchy is the notion that subjectivity may be crafted and perfected throughthe “right” kind of education, without regard for what such a model privileges and what (or whom) it leaves out. The novel’s critique of this model of education isfurther exemplified by Frankenstein’s inability to coordinate his capacities for reading and authoring. His inability to step outside of himself, his failure to understand either of his creatures for what they are or could become, or even to accept the task of shaping them, register Frankenstein as, in a certain sense, a failed reader; but he is also,

quite explicitly, a creator, a writer. Like Walton, Frankenstein’s first education was inliterature. And in a certain sense, so is the creature’s. Before his initiation into languagein the De Lacey cottage, the creature describes how he “tried to imitate the pleasant songs of the birds, but was unable. Sometimes I wished to express my sensations inmy own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again” (69). Walton, Victor, and the creature are, in some sense, all erst-while poets.

Mary Shelley emphasizes this meta-allegory of her central characters as authors and readers so that even as he narrates his story to Walton, who in turn writes it down for Margaret and, implicitly, the novel’s readers, Frankenstein positions the creature as the

author of the story’s end. As Frankenstein and the creature lead each other to their mutually desired deaths, the creature leaves textual traces, “marks in writing on the barks of trees, or cut in stone” (142) to guide Frankenstein. Thus, the creature literallyinscribes messages for Frankenstein to read, the final author of both destinies, whileFrankenstein is only too eager to read on. But what neither Frankenstein nor the crea-ture understands is that in their mutual oath of destruction – a relationship that MaryShelley depicts analogously to reading – they enter into exactly the relationship that Percy Shelley desires with his readers in “On Love,” and that Walton seeks in his attrac-tion to Frankenstein. It is deeply significant that when Frankenstein dies, the creature,having always sought sympathy, announces to Walton, “I seek not a fellow-feeling inmy misery” (154). When he was alive, even while the creature “destroyed [Franken-stein’s] hopes” he “still desired love and fellowship” (154). But in rejectingWalton’s invitation to the creature to stay, the creature reveals that the love hedesired was, in fact, the fellow feeling that he shared with his creator. Their mutual




commitment to each other’s destruction was precisely the image of “a soul within mysoul” imagined in Percy Shelley’s “On Love.”

Thus, if the relationship between Frankenstein and his creature is configured analo-gously to the textual exchange imagined by Percy as part of the work of poetry, what Mary draws our attention to is a picture of reading and writing gone awry. Texts are at their most dangerous, Mary suggests, when their authors write in genres that implicitlyclaim to cover the entirety of the social field, but which thus leave no space for an out-sider, signaled by the creature. Just before he kills himself, the creature asks Walton,

Why do you not hate Felix, who drove his friend though his door with contumely? Whydo you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, they arevirtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to bespurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. (154 –55)

The creature is hated not because of his actions, but because of his appearance; that is,he does not look like a subject in any traditional sense, even as his actions frequentlymirror those of su p posedly rightly formed subjects in the text – most obviously Fran-kenstein, himself.16 But even while the creature may not “count” in the social world of nineteenth-century Europe, his “friendship” with Frankenstein – their mutual missionof destruction – constitutes both as subjects of sorts within each other’s relationalspheres. Their mutual suicidal drives reveal the novel’s critique of the assumptionsof subject formation held by Enlightenment culture. Mary Shelley offers this cautionarytale of the trouble with teaching subjectivity through texts in order to complicateEnlightenment criteria of subject formation.

But Mary Shelley does not undermine the efficacy of texts to shape people; instead,she also validates it. For Mary Shelley, texts may possess pedagogical capacity, but that

capacity is quite divorced from authors’ intentions. This is evidenced in the fact that thecreature learns from texts never intended for him, but it is equally underscored in thefact of the creature, himself – the creature is a text created by an author with expec-tations that he (the creature) defies. For Mary Shelley, the expectation of sympatheticengagement that underscores such didactic constructs was based on assumptionsabout what would happen to a person when she reads a certain kind of text. Franken-

stein stages the difficulty of constructing subjectivity through the experience of sympa-thy by revealing that, within the didactic logic of Enlightenment, to sympathize (either with another person or with a text) is to take for granted that the sympathized-with is asubject. Thus, the novel asks, what happens to sympathy when its object is precisely not

a subject?The results, in Frankenstein, are disastrous, revealing the sympathetic subject of the

Enlightenment as one intrinsically closed to alterity. Through the novel’s suggestion of the creature’s suicide, Mary Shelley finally submits the possibility that Europeanculture needs to rethink its prevailing, and discriminatory, notions of who counts asa “self.” And while Frankenstein styles its provocation to kill “the self” through the fan-tastical tale of a Gothic monster, Mary Shelley’s critique is grounded in tangible social

problems. For, to suggest the destruction of “the self” is to open the social field torecognize all “non-subjects.” Mary Shelley’s use of the trope of suicide to critique arigid understanding of social relations interrogates the roots of inequality within a

social structure based on selective individualism. What remains at the end of Franken- stein, which leaves almost every character dead, is a call to engage each other without prejudice, and the implicit question of what kind of world will make this possible.

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Notes

1. Exceptions include Margaret Higonnet’s work on suicide in Mme. De Stael, as well as innineteenth century female writers more generally, and Janet Todd’s work on the suicidaltendencies of the women in the Shelley circle. In complementary ways, Higonnet and Todd have developed readings of suicide in the Romantic period as part of a feminization

of culture (Higonnet), or as a feminine response to social or personal problems (Todd).Building on these propositions, I want to move the discussion of suicide to a morecentral position in our understanding of Romanticism – one that corresponds to culturalshifts that challenge the privileging of certain subject positions over others, which mayinclude, but are not limited to, the feminine.

2. See particularly studies by A. Alvarez, Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy,Georges Minois, and Jeffrey R. Watt, as well as the four-volume compendium of primary documents, The History of Suicide in England . Two recent monographs onsuicide in the period just preceding Romanticism are also worth noting here: KellyMcGuire’s Dying to Be English and Richard Bell’s We Shall Be No More. Curiously,much of the historical work on suicide bookends what literary scholars would recognizeas the Romantic period in Europe. Although most accounts begin with Hume, somealso take Emile Durkheim’s 1897 On Suicide as the first “modern” approach to suicide.A Durkheimian lens caught the attention of literary scholarship in the late 1980s, but quickly dissipated. Durkheim hypothesizes that the first half of the century represented the culmination of some significant shift in the European cultural understanding of suicide (318), but the lack of data from that period forced Durkheim to begin his analysisof suicide in the century’s latter half and, thus, a handful of studies focus on suicide in theVictorian period – e.g., Olive Anderson’s Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England and Barbara Gates’ Victorian Suicide – but none on Romanticism.

3. Although beyond the scope of this paper, given the novel’s Miltonic overtones, it is worthclarifying its position with regard to Christian prohibitions against suicide. Ana M. Acostahas read the novel’s invocation of Genesis via Milton as part of Mary Shelley’s secularism,which reveals itself, in part, in the creature’s decision to commit suicide. Acosta suggeststhat the creature’s suicide comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how to read lit-

erary texts, which he reads theologically, as true histories, and this practice ironically pro-duces in him an inability to believe in anything beyond his own reason. Acosta’s readinghelps to clarify that though Frankenstein may invoke Christian language through Paradise

Lost , it stages a negative relationship to Christian doctrine, and the invocation of suicide is part of Mary Shelley’s engagement of Enlightenment secularism. (163 – 69).

4. On Coleridge’s narrative of Maria Schoning, see John Beer, Coleridge’s Play of Mind .5. Before her body was discovered, Harriet Shelley had been missing for a week, having

rented a room under the name Harriet Smith (see Rivers, “‘Burial’” 478–80).6. On this connection, see Rivers (“‘Tenderly’” 327– 329).7. Nor was Mary Shelley’s interest in suicide limited to Frankenstein. She returns to suicide

throughout her fiction, as, for example, in this passage from The Last Man (1826), whichconsiders what drives someone to suicide: “Conflicting passions, long-cherished love, and

self-inflicted disappointment, made her regard death alone as sufficient refuge for her woe.But . . . though the violence of her anguish made life hateful, it had not yet produced that monotonous, lethargic sense of changeless misery which for the most part producessuicide” (105).

8. Among suggested explanations are: that the maid did it in order to avoid the taint of suicideon the premises; that Fanny tore it off, either as acknowledgement of her long-felt lack of identity, or to spare the Godwins embarrassment; that Godwin did it; or, perhaps most sen-sationally, that Percy did it because of a secret affair with Fanny. See Pollin; Todd,

Maidens.9. Though the role of suicide in Frankenstein is sometimes mentioned within the context of

larger questions (such as, for example, Acosta’s study of Genesis in eighteenth-centurynovels, discussed above), only Richard K. Sanderson has endeavored to positionsuicide as central to the novel. Sanderson reads the theme of suicide through thenovel’s allusion to Eve’s suggestion, in Paradise Lost , that she and Adam either practiceabstinence or mutually destroy each other. Reading echoes of this in Frankenstein, San-derson posits that suicide is an essential part of the novel’s interest in procreation.




Beyond merely extending Sanderson’s reading of textual references to suicide, my reading proposes that suicide is part of the novel’s larger political critique. While Mary Shelley’s personal encounters with suicide are important to recognizing her familiarity with thesubject, she engages the topic not only to work through her personal feelings, but alsoto interrogate British social life.

10. As, for example, in readings by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Barbara Johnson, Anne Mellor,Peter Kitson, and Alan Richardson, among others.

11. That is, the notion of love that unfolds in close association with Godwin’s interest in Necessity, and involves Shelley’s queries into such questions as the possibility and extent of free will based in reason within the law of Necessity, and the capacity of Love to alter the course set forth by Necessity while still operating within it.

12. Though the Shelleys appear to have read more Hume than Smith, Percy’s works suggest,also, familiarity with Smith. Percy cites Hume through much of his prose, including in “AFragment on Miracles” (ca. 1813–1815), “A Refutation of Deism” (1814), “Speculationson Morals” (1815), “On the Devil, and Devils” (ca. 1819) and A Defence of Poetry (1821).Further, the reading lists that Mary kept in her journals suggest that both Shelleys read Hume extensively in the years 1814 through 1817. Smith, on the other hand, is not listed at all in Mary’s journals, nor does Percy cite Smith in his prose from this period.

Still, in his introductory essay on the development of Percy’s thought in Shelley’s Prose, David Lee Clark notes similarities between Percy and Smith as early as 1812(20). Moreover, many of the Shelleys’ contemporaries and friends read and commented on Smith, including Godwin and Hazlitt. Thus, it is possible to read Percy’s early viewson love as engaging both Hume and Smith.

13. Because the Alastor volume includes Shelley’s derisive sonnet “To Wordsworth,” itstitular poem is typically read as an engagement with the elder poet. However, withexactly which version of Wordsworth – that is, with which poetic model – the poemargues has been debated by critics. Beginning in the 1930s and extending into the present day, critics have considered Shelley’s engagement of Wordsworth as a vital part of the poem, though no consensus exists regarding which version of WordsworthShelley engages in Alastor , or to what end. In 1934, Paul Muenschke and Earl

L. Griggs argued that Wordsworth was used as a “prototype” for the Poet of Alastor ; by 1981, Yvonne Carothers, William Keach, and others had convincingly argued that Alastor was not emulating Wordsworth so much as censuring him, though the questionof precisely which Wordsworth had offended Shelley so remains unsettled – whether it is the Wordsworth of the early Lyrical Ballads for his naıve convergence with nature,the aging Wordsworth of the “Intimations of Immortality” ode for his perceived loss of faith in nature and poetry, the Wordsworth of The Excursion for his newfound religiousorthodoxy and political apostasy, or some other Wordsworth against whom Shelley rebels.

14. Sanderson has argued that all three are about suicide. In addition to his reading of Paradise Lost (see n. 9), Sanderson also suggests that Plutarch’s Lives engages suicide by making“doubling . . . its organizing principle,” and for Sanderson, “suicide is almost a structuralnecessity in doppelganger stories” (53). However, Paradise Lost and Lives do not engagesuicide as explicitly as Werther and, thus, I find Sanderson’s claims thin, and even exces-sive. The creature’s fascination with Werther is convincing enough of his interest insuicide.

15. Franco Moretti posits Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as the “decisive thrust”of the Bildung tradition (3). While Goethe’s Bildungsroman is not Werther but Wilhelm

Meister, it is at least plausible that some of the panic over Werther was owing to thefact that the “subject” that the proper novel is supposed to shape is presented, by itsvery own master, as so fallible that he would choose to kill himself rather than, per

Bildung , cultivate and manage himself.16. David Marshall similarly writes, “Without the ability to compare himself to others and

recognize them as fellow creatures, as beings like himself, the primitive man cannot look on anyone outside of his immediate family with sympathy. Where he should see asemblable, he sees an other who appears to him as a stranger, a beast, a monster” (Surpris-

ing Effects 204). Frankenstein relies on a social grammar to tell him who is his friend, or who loves him; he does not see it in the creature because the creature does not look likehim.

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