Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is a key text within the evolution of the Gothic genre in the

nineteenth century. In the midst of personal and political upheaval and insecurity, Mary Shelley
crafted one of the most famous horror stories of all time, exploring some of the darkest aspects of
the human psyche and exploiting the transgressive elements of the Gothic genre in order to deliver a
dark message on the institution of the family.

The Family in Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s presentation of the Frankenstein family is one of the most intriguing aspects of the
novel and yet, at first glance, can seem to be quite ordinary. Alphonse Frankenstein is the moral,
righteous patriarch with whom Victor begins his narrative, describing how his ‘family is one of the
most distinguished of that republic’ of Geneva and setting the scene for Victor, as an arguably
selfimportant, egoistic narrator, to relate the paradisiacal childhood of which he boasts ‘no youth
could have passed more happily than mine’. Christopher Small (1972) highlights that in this
romanticised recollection of the past Victor places ‘a somewhat strained emphasis on its felicity’,
calling the asserted happiness of Victor’s domestic background into question.

Despite Victor’s claims of a happy childhood, there are clues that this idyll may have deliberately
been presented as unconvincing by Mary Shelley. Victor’s assertions of contentment are
counterpointed by seemingly incongruous comments such

as ‘we were never completely happy when Clerval was absent’, describing the importance of his
childhood friend within the Frankensteins’ ‘domestic circle’. The requirement of Henry Clerval’s
presence in the family in order to ensure complete happiness seems odd when Shelley has already
had Victor eulogise

his childhood and family and suggests that Victor’s retelling of his perfect youth is indeed ‘strained’
(Small, 1972). The supposed devotion ‘to the education of his children’ that Victor claims for his
father is undermined by his laying the blame for his ‘ruin’ on his father due to his unwillingness to
explain and debunk the science of

The Family, Freud and Frankenstein

In this article Brittany Wright explores some of the dark and unsettling features of Mary Shelley’s
novel, relating them to Freud’s concept of the Oedipus Complex.

38 emagazine February 2015

Cornelius Agrippa. Victor asserts that

I cannot help remarking here the many opportunities instructors possess of directing the attention of
their pupils to useful knowledge, which they utterly neglect

before blaming his father for his dabbling in the darker arts of natural philosophy. Victor’s narrative
voice is condemnatory here: the despairing ‘utterly’ that precedes ‘neglect’ seems indicative of a
sense of abandonment and resentment that is in tension with his claims that ‘my parents were
indulgent’. In Shelley’s rendering of Victor’s voice there is also a sense of unwillingness to concede
such criticism with his defeatist ‘I cannot help remarking’ suggesting that this confession of
unhappiness and resentment is begrudged.

There are other hints within these early chapters of Victor’s narrative as to the darkness that lies
beneath the surface of the Frankenstein family. Shelley contradicts Victor’s claim that ‘the voice of
command was never heard amongst us’ within just a few lines with the admission that ‘many
arguments had been urged’ upon his mother to try to prevent her from tending to Elizabeth during
her battle with scarlet fever. In this way, the harmony of the Frankenstein family seems to be
deliberately called into question by Mary Shelley herself. Is this to undermine Victor as a

reliable narrator before his more fantastical experiences are revealed or is there a more sinister
darkness to his childhood?

Freud’s Oedipus Complex and Victor

In the early twentieth century, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud identifi ed a psychosexual concept
which he termed the ‘Oedipus Complex’, outlining the idea that young male children sexually desire
their mothers and resent their fathers in the earlier stages of psychological development. Freud
argued that this desire and resentment is resolved

by [boys] forsaking their incestuous wishes for their mother and identifying with their rival – their
father Nevid, 2012

The concept of the Oedipus Complex can easily be applied to Victor Frankenstein and his
relationships with both his mother and Elizabeth Lavenza.

In the 1818 edition of Frankenstein, Elizabeth Lavenza is the niece of Alphonse Frankenstein and
therefore, although doted on by Victor’s mother, Caroline, she is inextricably linked to the masculine
Frankenstein family. However, in her revisions to the text for the 1831 edition, which Shelley
unconvincingly

asserted were ‘principally those of style’ (Introduction, 1831), the position of Elizabeth is shifted
from being a relation of Victor’s father to a poverty-stricken orphan and therefore a double of
Victor’s mother, Caroline Beaufort. Victor relates Caroline’s unfortunate descent into poverty and
praises her ‘mind…and her courage’ before declaring that after her father’s death ‘Caroline became
[Alphonse’s] wife’. The use of Caroline’s Christian name creates a sense of her being equally
positioned with Elizabeth as another poverty-stricken orphan, presenting them more as
contemporaries than as a motherdaughter pairing and reinforcing their

40 emagazine February 2015

doubled nature. The shared ‘unfortunate circumstances’ of the two characters and the relaying of
their backgrounds within the same chapter foregrounds the links between them and arguably
suggests there is some blurring of the two women in Victor’s mind.

In this way, Shelley’s presentation of Elizabeth’s contraction of scarlet fever and Caroline’s
subsequent death from the disease suggests a sense of Victor’s sexual desire being transmitted
unwillingly from his mother to another sexual object. On her death bed, Caroline tells Elizabeth she
must ‘supply my place to the younger children’, directly transferring her maternal responsibilities to
Elizabeth and firmly situating her as a mother figure, whilst

also paradoxically casting her as Victor’s future bride with ‘my firmest hopes of future happiness
were placed on the prospect of your union’. Here, Shelley presents Elizabeth as assuming the
maternal role in the Frankenstein household whilst simultaneously assuming a marital relation to
Victor, providing possible evidence for an Oedipal interpretation of the text.

The doubling between Elizabeth and Victor’s mother is most explicitly presented within Victor’s
dream in Chapter 5, an event which not only confirms the transference of sexual desire from his
mother to a replacement mother figure but also firmly establishes his fear of sexuality. In describing
the dream, Victor is described as saying ‘I thought I saw Elizabeth’, already hinting at the uncertainty
and ambiguity regarding both his affections and her role within his life with the uncertain ‘I thought’.
This vision of a woman who may or may not have been Elizabeth is met by Victor with a sexual
pleasure that is not found anywhere else in the text, when he describes how ‘Delighted

and surprised, I embraced her’. This warmth and sexuality is never expressed by Victor towards
Elizabeth outside of this dream sequence and is particularly interesting as her image immediately
transforms into that of his ‘dead mother’ at the very moment he ‘imprinted the first kiss on her lips’.
Victor’s subsequent fear could be seen as a result of the incongruous vision of his mother in a sexual
dream. However, it is also possible that his revulsion is a result of her dead, decaying state rather
than the Oedipal presentation of her. In this way, the structure of these early chapters is also
significant as Victor’s scientific exploration can be seen as a result of his reaction to his mother’s
death in Chapter 3 and his desire to ‘renew life where death had apparently

devoted the body to corruption’, which is revealed in Chapter 4. The positioning of the dream
sequence in Chapter 5 could then further illuminate the sexual motivation of Victor’s ‘workshop of
filthy creation’. Sherwin (1981) argues that Victor’s dream represents a

pubescent irruption of libido, and the idea of the mother, set free by death for fantasy elaboration

reinforcing Victor’s Oedipal desires and recasting his scientific exploration of reanimation in the light
of this lust.

A Likely Story?

The unsettling features of Gothic horror novels like Frankenstein, with disturbing dreams,
transgressive behaviour and terrifying events, are ripe for psychoanalytic approaches that explore
sub-conscious desires and unspoken feelings below the surface. Shelley’s own experiences of sexual
infidelity suggest that the potential Oedipal readings of the text could reflect her domestic situation
at the time. Ty

(1992) argues that Mary and husband Percy Shelley were involved in a ‘ménage à trois with Jane
Clairmont’ and that their early relationship saw Shelley encouraging Mary ‘to reciprocate [friend]
Hogg’s sexual overtures’ in 1815, despite their own relationship. In this way, Mary’s first experiences
of life away from her father may have been typified by sexual practices that could be considered
deviant. The arguable temptress Jane (sometimes known as Clara) Clairmont was linked to both
Percy Shelley and Lord Byron and had been seen as something of a proponent of Romantic free love
until her memoirs were recently rediscovered. Writing in her 70s, Clairmont described how Shelley
and Byron’s attitudes to sexuality ‘abused affections that should be the solace and balm of life’
(quoted in Alberge, 2010). The promiscuity of this famous Romantic circle was clearly viewed by
Clairmont as unnatural in the later years of her life. Perhaps, in Mary Shelley’s depiction of a
potentially twisted, morally compromised family, she was able to express her own feelings regarding
her unusual new ‘family’ in the few years prior to the first publication of Frankenstein.

Brittany Wright is an English teacher and Gifted and Talented Co-ordinator at King Edward VII
Science and Sport College, Leicestershire.

• Frankenstein – Order, Narrative and Chaos, emagazine 61 • Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – What to
Call the Monster? emagazine 23 • Frankenstein – The Eloquence of the Creature Made Real,
emagazine 52, • Exploring Voice in Frankenstein, emagplus 52 • Frankenstein – the Making of a
Modern Myth, emagazine 12/13 • Who’s the Real Monster in Frankenstein? emagazine 64 • The
Romantic in Frankenstein, emagazine 44

emag web archive

February 2015 emagazine 41