# Spiritual Oppression in Frankenstein

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, Spiritual Oppression in Frankenstein, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> Published in the Journal of Bahá’í Studies Vol. 9, number 4 (1999)
> © Association for Bahá’í ™ Studies 1999
> 
> Spiritual Oppression in Frankenstein
> Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis
> 
> Abstract
> This article connects Mary Shelley’s depiction of a complex spiritual malaise in Frankenstein (1818) with
> Bahá’u’lláh’s definition in the Kitáb-i-Íqán of the oppression experienced at the end of a reigning spiritual
> dispensation by the soul who seeks God but does not know where to look. The article examines the spiritual
> oppression of both the over-ambitious Victor Frankenstein, who strives for godlike power, and of his self
> denigrating creature, whose sense of monstrous difference prevents him from finding his place in the world, The
> article also explores the influence of Shelley’s novel on two well-known contemporary critics, Jacques Derrida and
> Julia Kristeva, whose theories enact contemporary versions of the spiritual responses of Victor and his creature.
> Finally, the article uses the above analyses to cast a fresh light on the new emphasis on the feminine and maternal
> qualities of the Manifestation in the Bahá’í Revelation.
> 
> The mythic power of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) has been such that the novel has spawned hundreds
> of film progeny and given rise to increasingly varied and thoughtful literary analyses.1 Critics have branched out
> recently to examine not only Shelley’s other works but also how Shelley acts as a “sensitive register” of her milieu,
> “elaborat[ing] on [its] most compelling trends” (Lowe-Evans l).2 Especially important for our purposes, they have
> also begun to explore how Shelley critiques the response by early nineteenth-century Romantic writers to the
> revolutionary and apocalyptic excitement of the times. As Abrams notes, “The French Revolution had aroused in
> many sympathizers the millennial expectations that are profoundly rooted in Hebrew and Christian tradition”
> (Abrams 12). When the French Revolution disappointed their apocalyptic political hopes, British Romantic writers
> turned instead to a “spiritual revolution” and “proposed that ‘the new earth and new heaven’ of Revelation is
> available here . . . if only we can make our visionary imagination triumph over our senses” (Abrams 13).
> Shelley was in an ideal position to register and reflect on these Romantic ideas as the daughter of two of the
> leading radical thinkers of the day: her father, William Godwin, was a proponent of “egalitarianism” and critic of
> established institutions and ideas about justice; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was the first great feminist thinker
> and writer (Lowe-Evans 2). She also spent her late teens and early twenties (during which time Frankenstein was
> written) as the companion and wife of the visionary apocalyptic Romantic poet Percy Shelley. However, Shelley
> possessed her own “unique perspective on the legacy of Romanticism on the perils of imaginatively remaking our
> minds and our world” (Fisch, Mellor, and Schor 9). For example, in novels after Frankenstein Shelley both uses and
> critiques millennial aspirations: in Va1perga (1823) she uses the teachings of a contemporary millenarian, Joanna
> Southcott, as the basis of the character Beatrice (Sunstein 53), a religious prophetess who is destroyed by her
> visionary imagination (O’Sullivan 140); in The Last Man (1826) she portrays an apocalypse that is not followed by a
> millennium, even though the millennial outcome of apocalypse “had previously been celebrated in some of the great
> works of the Romantic epoch,” including that of Percy Shelley (Paley 110). It is in her masterpiece Frankenstein,
> however, that I hope to show she offers her most thoughtful critique of Romantic ideas and of the special
> “predicament of the creative female” (O’Sullivan 140). Both registering and reflecting on the spiritual condition of
> her time, when numerous groups were anticipating the Return of Christ and just before the declaration of the Báb
> and the beginning of the Bahá'í Faith, Shelley offers an extraordinarily moving and thoughtful depiction of a
> spiritual malaise composed of patriarchal gender relations, perverted apocalyptic dreams, and unsatisfied spiritual
> yearnings.
> Besides registering her own time, Shelley has also powerfully influenced our own. Frankenstein reveals her
> “as a ‘prodigious generator’ of cultural myths, ethical conundrums, and haunting metaphors” (Lowe-Evans 1). In
> this role she has again become a favorite for contemporary literary critics who have used the novel as a “touchstone”
> for everything from investigations of the nature of female authorship, to theories about the construction of identity
> and Eve’s role in Paradise Lost.3 While not specifically using Shelley’s novel as a touchstone, the works of
> contemporary critics Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva powerfully reflect Frankenstein’s influence and use some of
> its key mythic formulations. Derrida, the founder of the philosophic theory of deconstructionism, seems both to
> share Victor’s attitudes and to celebrate the monster’s situation as one of the central symbols in his analysis of
> contemporary theories in the social sciences. Kristeva, a Lacanian psychoanalyst and literary critic, investigates at
> length the complex of ambivalent feelings experienced by the infant toward the mother and their embodiment in
> language and culture, an emotional complex of which the monster represents a unique and most powerful example. I
> will argue that both critics offer contemporary examples of the apocalyptic confusion and spiritual deprivation
> depicted so powerfully in the novel.
> As the basis for my analysis of the spiritual malaise so powerfully portrayed in the novel and manifested in
> the contemporary critics. I will use the Sacred Writings of the Bahá'í Faith, which directly address the complex of
> hopes and fears that characterizes the early nineteenth century’s mixture of apocalyptic dreams and patriarchal
> assumptions as well as our own later version of these spiritual dilemmas. After establishing the key terms in the
> Bahá’í framework that will be brought to bear on the novel, I will then examine the novel in two parts: first looking
> at the overreaching spiritual aspiration and patriarchal domination that characterizes Victor Frankenstein’s creation
> of and response to his creature, and then at the creature’s corresponding self-denigration and acceptance of his
> maker’s perspective (which is in many ways a portrayal of the predicament of nineteenth-century women) as he
> seeks to discover who he is and how he relates to the rest of the world. The paper will then explore how Derrida and
> Kristeva enact contemporary versions of the spiritual responses of Victor and his creature. The last part of the paper
> will return to the Bahá’í framework, using the earlier literary analyses to cast a new light on some aspects of the new
> spiritual paradigm provided by the Bahá’í Revelation which directly answer the needs and correct the
> misapprehensions of both Victor and his creature.
> 
> The Bahá’í Theory of a Spiritual Dispensation
> Shelley’s novel portrays Victor Frankenstein’s and his monster’s methods of constituting the self as symbolically
> suggesting two kinds of response to the oppression experienced by the soul which is unable to satisfy its spiritual
> needs, by the soul seeking to find God and not knowing where to look. In the Kitáb-i-Íqán Bahá’u’lláh discusses at
> some length the nature of this oppression, linking it to “the want of capacity to acquire spiritual knowledge and
> apprehend the Word of God” (Kitáb-i-Íqán 32). This lack of capacity is not only an individual failure but is also
> common to the human condition during periods of civilization marked by a waning of spiritual guidance—periods
> such as the early nineteenth century when the teachings of Christianity, which had dominated the West for almost
> two thousand years, no longer seem able to spiritually vivify the souls of many believers. Bahá’u’lláh identifies the
> oppression which accompanies this loss of spiritual capacity as one of the signs marking the end of a reigning
> spiritual dispensation and the imminent appearance of a new Revelation. Thus, it is “the essential feature of every
> Revelation. Unless it eometh to pass, the Sun of Truth will not be made manifest. For the break of the morn of
> divine guidance must needs follow the darkness of the night of error” (31).
> Before applying this understanding of spiritual oppression to Frankenstein, we need to examine one more
> term—that of the Manifestation of God—and to consider its role in affecting the capacities of the soul at the
> beginning and end of a spiritual dispensation. Bahá’u’lláh explains that “since ... no resemblance whatever can exist
> between the transient and the Eternal, the contingent and the Absolute, He hath ordained that in every age and
> dispensation a pure and stainless Soul be made manifest in the kingdoms of earth and heaven” (Gleanings 66). This
> “stainless soul” is more than a trace of Divine Being, known only by its effects, to use terminology we will discuss
> in more detail when we examine Derrida’s theories. That Soul is the Manifestation of the otherwise unknowable
> Essence, the “Primal Mirror” of the divine, “the Exponent[] ... on earth of Him Who is the central Orb of the
> universe, its Essence and ultimate Purpose.” By His Revelation “all the names and attributes of God, such as
> knowledge and power, sovereignty and dominion, mercy and wisdom, glory, bounty, and grace, are made manifest”
> (Gleanings 47–48). Furthermore, without the aid of this Manifestation the human being is incapable of
> understanding or responding to the divine. While the human being contains a trace of the divine, and while God has
> “focused the radiance of all of His names and attributes” “upon the reality of man,”
> 
> These energies ... lie latent within him, even as the flame is hidden within the candle and the rays of light
> are potentially present in the lamp. The radiance of these energies may be obscured by worldly desires even
> as the light of the sun can be concealed beneath the dust and dross which cover the mirror. Neither the
> candle nor the lamp can be lighted through their own unaided efforts, nor can it ever be possible for the
> mirror to free itself from its dross. (Gleanings 65–66)
> 
> Only recognition of the Manifestation for that age can free the individual to realize her spiritual potential.
> When a dispensation draws to an end, humankind loses the capacity to know that it is a tarnished mirror,
> that it has lost the essence of faith and is now carrying out a purely formal religious exercise. Thus it loses the
> capacity to respond to or even be aware of the loss of the sign of true Being. This is the condition of spiritual
> oppression which we will see portrayed in Frankenstein and embodied in the contemporary theories of Derrida and
> Kristeva. However, this negative understanding of the end of a dispensation is only half the picture. When a
> dispensation loses its power to spiritually awaken humanity, then a new Manifestation appears with the power to
> cleanse the dross from the mirror of the inner being of humankind so that individuals can again perceive and respond
> to the Manifestation as the sign of Being. Less than twenty years after Shelley’s novel was written, such a new
> Manifestation appeared in the form of the Báb and His Revelation marks the beginning of the Bahá'í Faith. It is this
> new spiritual dispensation which allows us to grasp fully the nature of the oppression portrayed in the novel and
> demonstrated by the critics.
> In many ways Victor’s narrative powerfully figures the oppression that results from an overreaching
> ambition that divorces the scientific from the spiritual and a harshly patriarchal understanding of gender
> relationships that identifies women with domestic duties and with nature; this mode of response emphasizes taking
> control of nature as a defense against the unknown or the incomprehensible. Derrida’s theories will provide a
> contemporary working out of Victor’s assumptions. The monster’s story, symbolically embodying key elements of
> Shelley’s own story, conveys the psychological and spiritual oppression that results from a traditionally “feminine”
> response to domination and deprivation; here the response involves self-destructive submission to the definitions of
> self provided by others and a failure to recognize one’s inner spiritual reality. Kristeva’s theories will shed light on
> the implications of this complex in a contemporary formulation. Both Victor’s and the monster’s oppression can be
> related to a spiritual failure connected to a devaluation of the feminine; both fail to acknowledge or respect the
> caring, nurturing dimension of psychological and spiritual strength.
> Again the novel and the critics present only the negative side of the picture. The subsequent appearance of
> the Bahá’í Faith with its emphasis on the feminine and maternal qualities of the Manifestation and its revolutionary
> new understanding of the spiritual role of the feminine would inaugurate a new spiritual maternal paradigm which
> answers the critics and satisfies the spiritual needs of the novel’s characters.
> 
> Victor Frankenstein’s Intellectual/Spiritual Oppression
> Fascinated from childhood with metaphysical speculation, Victor Frankenstein’s search for intellectual and spiritual
> knowledge has no positive outlet. His early interest in alchemy leads him nowhere, and his father can provide no
> meaningful alternatives. Both father and son are “afflicted with ‘oppression’ and hardship, knowing not whither to
> turn for guidance” (Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán 32). Thus Victor arrives at university possessing an intense desire to
> discover the secrets of nature, a desire combined with spiritual ignorance. Furthermore, his powerful intellectual
> drive is also combined with an ignorance of his own emotional needs or feelings. At home his extremely self-
> sacrificing mother and adopted sister Elizabeth had taken on all the nurturing, care-giving responsibilities, leaving
> Victor free to pursue passionately his intellectual interests with little regard for others. His mother’s death just
> before Victor leaves home symbolically suggests the severing of his links with nurturing domesticity.
> Although Victor rationalizes his scientific work at university as a means of benefiting humankind, Victor,
> nonetheless, rapidly begins to reveal the signs of his spiritual and emotional inadequacy (Shelley, Frankenstein 52).
> Having discovered the secret of life, Victor decides to begin work at once on creating a human being, explaining
> with unconscious hubris that he had no doubt of his ability to give life to “an animal as complex and wonderful as
> man” (52). Next he decides to make the creature “of a gigantic stature,” “as the minuteness of the parts formed a
> great hindrance to ... [his] speed,” completely ignoring the effect that his decision might have on the emotional well-
> being of his creature. These glaring examples of his spiritual and emotional emptiness are complicated by more
> devious faults. The only time he thinks of the possible feelings of his creature is when he fantasizes how he will
> create a new species “that would bless ... [him] as its creator and source” and anticipates from this new species a
> gratitude such as “no father could claim ... so completely ... should [I] deserve theirs” (52–53). Thus Victor’s initial
> desire to “bring a torrent of light into our dark world” (52) has metamorphosed into a desire to attain fame and
> godlike power through the creation of a wholly dependent and controllable surrogate family. What had been spiritual
> ignorance and emotional inadequacy has rapidly given way to corruption, illustrating the oppression that comes
> when “the portals of divine unity and knowledge ... will have been closed and ... corruption will have usurped the
> place of righteousness” (Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán 29).
> Perhaps what is most original about Shelley’s portrayal of Victor’s corruption is her linking of intellectual
> overreaching with the appropriation and distortion of the maternal role. In artificially creating a humanlike being,
> Victor is doing in a complicated way what any mother does naturally (Homans 101). Furthermore, Victor’s response
> to his creature after its “birth” resembles the “revulsion against newborn life” sometimes experienced as a result of
> normal birthing (Moers 93). At the moment that the creature comes alive, Victor suddenly sees for the first time how
> ugly it is. In recognizing his creature’s loathsomeness, Victor seems to be experiencing what Julia Kristeva calls
> “abjection,” the feeling of repulsion experienced not only by the mother but by the infant from the mother as the
> child tries to establish its own identity vis-à-vis the mother—i.e., casting off and being cast off by the mother.
> Kristeva extends this sense of repulsion to the crossing of forbidden boundaries, such as in incest or necrophilia
> (Powers of Horror 1–17). I will discuss the implications of Kristeva’s theory later; for now, it is sufficient to note
> that Victor’s sense of horror at the creature’s ugliness seems to involve a repulsion from the creature’s blurring of
> identity between the animal and the human, the living and the dead, a horror ultimately associated with being unable
> to extricate one’s identity from being blurred with that of the mother.
> Victor’s sudden and dramatic awareness of the creature’s ugliness also suggests Victor’s first partial
> awareness of his own failure as a creator/parent. This recognition contains within it the possibility of his recognizing
> that he has committed a spiritual transgression (that the creature is created in some sense in his own spiritual image),
> but he denies this insight, and rather than take responsibility for what he has done, he flees, projecting his
> transgression onto the creature, calling him a “demoniacal corpse” (Shelley 57). Ironically, the incident that sparks
> his flight is the creature’s attempt to reach out and establish an emotional bond with his creator through touching
> him. The incident seems deliberately to evoke Victor’s assumption of the role of “mother” and to place the creature
> in the role of an infant instinctively attempting to establish contact with the one who gave it birth. Victor’s
> repugnance at being called upon to play a maternal role combined with his sudden realization that he does not have
> full control over his newly awakened creature complicates his sense of guilt and contributes to his decision to
> abandon the new life he has created. Both psychologically and spiritually, Victor’s creation and subsequent rejection
> of the monster seem to circle around his ambivalence over maternal powers and qualities.
> Unable to face the sight of his creature and all that he symbolically represents, the scientist flees. But, of
> course, he takes his emotionally and spiritually flawed self with him, and his actions again and again reflect this
> limited, fractured self. His thinking is characterized by his inability to perceive or respond to the emotional needs of
> others and by a rationalized obsession with safeguarding his own reputation and safety. When his creature murders
> his brother and implicates an innocent young woman in the crime, Victor is incapable of informing the authorities
> about the existence of the creature, excusing himself by assuming that no one will believe him, that he will be
> thought crazy. Later when he actually meets and converses with the creature for the first time on the glacial slopes of
> Mont Blanc, he is incapable of responding to the monster’s story of loneliness and persecution by providing any
> kind of nurturance for his creature.
> 
> The Monster’s Story of Psycho-Spiritual Oppression
> Victor’s tale of the attempt to control emotional ambivalence and perverted spiritual yearnings through
> overreaching, obsessive technological creation is not, however, the novel’s only autobiographical account of the
> response to spiritual oppression. When the creature confronts Victor on the slopes of Mont Blanc and tells the
> scientist his story, we realize for the first time that the creature, too, faces his own form of spiritual oppression. With
> the switch in narrative points of view, we suddenly also face a switch in the symbolic significance of the creature.
> Up to now, the creature has been presented from Victor’s perspective, as the embodiment of the scientist’s
> transgression—the mirror of his monstrous inner world. However, as the creature begins to recount his story and
> share his earliest memories, we suddenly realize that despite his unnatural creation and grotesque appearance the
> creature’s mental world is very like that of an ordinary young human. Here we encounter one of the strangest
> features of the novel and one of its most effective. Without giving any explanation for how the monster acquired a
> normal human inner world, Shelley chooses to portray the creature as passing through the various stages of normal
> infancy and developing equivalent moral and spiritual understanding.
> One source of Shelley’s mode of portraying the creature’s development seems to have its roots in a
> conversation between Lord Byron and Percy Shelley concerning the scientific origin of life, a conversation she had I
> listened to the night before she experienced the “waking dream” that gave birth to Frankenstein. Apparently
> troubled by the two men’s purely technical considerations regarding the way “the component parts of a creature
> might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth” (“Introduction” 9), Shelley seems to have
> immediately grasped how totally the men left out considerations of the human needs of such a creation. In effect, she
> seems to have asked what would it feel like to be the child of such a procedure.
> Shelley was highly sensitized to the plight of an unwanted child by her own difficult childhood, which
> began with the death of her famous mother ten days after Mary was born and was complicated by her father’s
> remarriage when Mary was four to a woman who was jealous of Shelley’s famous mother and resented Shelley’s
> superiority to the stepmother’s own daughter from another father (Sunstein 30). Perhaps the most painful result of
> the new marriage, for Shelley, was her father’s withdrawal to his study and his remoteness from her (Sunstein 30–
> 31). Shelley was never to accept her stepmother and continued to believe all her life that her father loved her “more
> than anyone else in the world” (Sunstein 33).
> However, by the time she began Frankenstein at eighteen, she had become even more sensitized to tensions
> surrounding parents and children. She had no contact with her father for two years after he had rejected her for
> eloping at sixteen with the unhappily married young poet Percy Shelley. Furthermore, as she began what was to be
> her most famous novel, she had already lost her first child, a premature baby who died after two weeks, and her
> second was an infant of six months. The shock over her father’s rejection, as well as the new responsibilities and
> emotions that motherhood brought, tempered her to the overreaching “male” ambition and aspiration that she had
> partly shared with Percy (Sunstein 107). These newer experiences of childbirth, motherhood, and infant death,
> combined with her own childhood sense of maternal deprivation, all coalesced in her imaginative creation of the
> creature. In bringing all her imaginative sympathies to bear on the physically grotesque, mechanically constructed,
> emotionally uncared-for creature, Shelley seems to have been freed to imagine and to explore feelings and concerns
> that she would not otherwise have dared to acknowledge. In so doing, she would hold up a mirror to nineteenth-
> century women’s unsatisfied emotional and spiritual yearnings.
> The creature’s own emotional and spiritual yearnings are developed in the context of responding, while
> hidden, to a spied-on surrogate family. Deserted by Victor, the creature eventually finds shelter in a hut behind the
> cottage of the De Laceys, an educated family fallen on difficult times. Secretly watching the loving behavior of the
> blind father with his grown son and daughter, the creature first starts to learn about feelings such as pity, kindness,
> and love, seeing them reflected on the faces of the cottagers. Eventually, the creature comes to regard the De Laceys
> as his protectors, but he knows enough from earlier persecution by peasants because of his monstrous appearance to
> conceal his presence and his feelings from them for fear of being spurned. His role of mainly passive observer,
> biding his own needs and emotions, powerfully captures Shelley’s own childhood situation. She later wrote that by
> the age of twelve her feelings were “covert—except that Mrs. Godwin had discovered long before my excessive &
> romantic attachment to my father” (Letters 2:215). Those “covert” feelings also included her anger and resentment
> of her father and stepmother, but these emotions too had had to be suppressed due to “her inhibitions as a female, an
> idealist, and by her training” (Sunstein 35). She was not alone in her need to suppress unsatisfied feelings and the
> accompanying anger toward those who failed to recognize those needs. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point
> out, nineteenth-century writing by women is filled with images of women suppressing their inner worlds, forcing
> their lives to fit a mold from which they burst forth imaginatively in images of mad and violent doubles when the
> anger brought by such suppression can “no longer be contained” (85).
> The creature’s acquisition of literacy raises to a crisis point his search for self-understanding and
> ontological meaning. Obtaining a copy of Paradise Lost, Milton’s retelling of the story of humankind’s creation and
> fall in Genesis, the creature—like Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft—searches for a way to situate
> himself in the text.4 He is struck by both his similarities to and his differences from “our first parents.” Like Adam,
> he is alone, but unlike Adam he does not have the benefit of a loving creator. Reading Milton’s mythic poem “as a
> true history” (Shelley, Frankenstein 126), he is unable to find in it a symbolic representation of his lonely, un-
> nurtured state, or an answer to his troubled ontological questions. Instead, he is left feeling more deprived and
> isolated than ever, identifying more with Satan than Adam in his envy of the cottagers’ joy.
> The creature’s ontological search and moral ponderings seem to be the representation of Shelley’s own
> unanswered ontological questions and the embodiment of her own sense of spiritual deprivation. His “unnatural,”
> originless state mirrors not only Shelley’s motherlessness but also her own sense of a gifted girl’s abnormality. On
> the one hand, she was encouraged to write, but, on the other, she was also discouraged from putting herself forward
> and was not educated as well as her brothers (Sunstein 42, 40). Lacking the companionship of equals, she chose to
> be alone much of the time as a young girl, resorting to reading and daydreams to satisfy unmet needs, defining her
> sense of self through poring over the books of her parents (Sunstein 48, Gilbert and Gubar 223). Through the
> creature’s dilemma, Shelley seems to portray her childhood attempt to find out “How do I fit in? Where do I
> belong?”
> If Paradise Lost stimulates but does not answer the creature’s ontological cravings, the next text he finds
> and reads seems to answer some of his questions directly. He discovers Victor’s journal account of the four months
> preceding his animation. There in gruesome detail he learns the secrets of his physical construction and of his
> maker’s revulsion toward his hideous form. Grasping the implications of Victor’s story, he immediately realizes that
> his physical grotesquerie is the embodiment of Victor’s emotional and spiritual defects. He notes that “God, in pity,
> made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even for the
> very resemblance” (Shelley, Frankenstein 126–27). Thus the monster is forced to recognize that his very form belies
> his desire for a transcendent and good God.
> The monster’s awareness that he is a grotesque imitation of Victor’s normal form also captures the
> nineteenth-century woman’s sense that physically and emotionally she is an aberration from the male norm. Indeed,
> womanhood was defined as a kind of illness: a lady was expected to be frail and sickly and practiced “tight-lacing
> and vinegar-drinking” to look suitably beautiful and frail (Gilbert and Gubar 54). Nineteenth-century women
> writers, both reflecting and rebelling against these imprisoning gender definitions, “often envision an ‘outbreak’ that
> transforms their characters into huge and powerful monsters” (Gilbert and Gubar 86). The creature’s grotesqueness
> seems to express such an outbreak, embodying in part Shelley’s repressed anger over societal pressures to be a lady.
> Such an unconscious resistance is all the more ironic because in real life Shelley inevitably surprised new
> acquaintances by her ladylike, frail, and quiet demeanor (Sunstein 244). The monster’s discovery’ of his origins
> through reading a journal also seems to be directly modeled on Shelley’s own situation. She too as an adolescent
> may have read her mother’s love letters to her father “during the first four months of their relationship in 1796”
> which describe in loving detail her mother’s feelings during the time when Mary was probably conceived
> (Rubenstein l70). Indeed, the creature’s disgust at thus account of his origins may in part express Shelley’s
> adolescent discomfort with the evidence of her parents’ sexuality.
> The monster comes to feel his abjectness in the most comprehensive form, instinctively aware that his
> physical being violates the boundaries between self and other, just as Victor’s artificial act of mothering also
> violates the boundary between procreation and creation. Moreover, he can find no explanation for his moral being,
> no source for his spiritual yearnings. Unsatisfied by his discovery that he is nothing but filthy materiality—the
> monstrous product of Victor’s technological manipulation—the novel offers him no other explanations for his
> longing for transcendence. The creature is truly spiritually oppressed.
> The creature’s spiritually deprived state offers us a second, more poignant representation of the oppression
> that Bahá’u’lláh claims is “the essential feature of every Revelation,” that “grievous” oppression in which “a soul
> seeking the truth, and wishing to attain unto the knowledge of God, should know not where to go for it and from
> whom to seek it” (Kitáb-i-Íqán 31). However, unlike Victor’s aggressive intellectual response to spiritual and
> emotional confusion—his determination to understand and control the secrets of nature—the creature experiences a
> self-denigratory response to emotional and spiritual deprivation— submission to the other’s ability to define the self.
> He accepts Victor’s journal as his Genesis even though he finds it even less satisfactory than Paradise Lost as an
> answer to the cravings of his inner self.
> Above all, the creature yearns to be nurtured—emotionally and spiritually. He searches out his physical
> creator to fulfill that need, bestowing on Victor not only filial affection but also the reverence and respect of a
> creature for his God. Confronting the scientist, the creature calls himself “thy creature” and vows to be “even mild
> and docile to my natural lord and king” (96). The creature’s reverence for Victor suggests both Shelley’s personal
> history and the whole structure of the patriarchal nineteenth-century family. Shelley later wrote that as a child she
> had thought of her father as a “God.” and remembered “many childish instances of the excess of attachment”
> (Letters 1:296). This adulation was in part the result of the admiration and respect for her father’s greatness that
> were instilled in her: “His very name and his followers’ admiration intensified the child’s reverence” (Sunstein 27).
> “Moreover, he was reserved and to a child, awesome” (Sunstein 24). However, these early feelings were
> strengthened after her father’s remarriage by her resentment of her stepmother, who, she felt, kept her father away
> from her, and by her father’s tendency to be withdrawn and remote (Mellor 13, Sunstein 33). All these feelings left
> Mary adoring her father but hungry for more recognition from him.
> Moreover, like her monster, Shelley also seems to have “needed transcendence” (Sunstein 43). Offered
> only a vague theism by her father, whose real religion was humanism, and discouraged from respecting the religion
> of her country by her stepmother’s hypocritical practice, Shelley seems to have found an unconscious outlet for her
> religious yearnings in her worship of her father and in an “idiosyncratic faith” in her mother’s spirit watching over
> her (Sunstein 43). Angry and hurt by her father’s rejection of her after her elopement with Percy Shelley, Shelley
> seems to have bequeathed to her monster both her unsatisfied childhood idolatry and her adult resentment of her
> father’s hypocrisy.
> In identifying his human creator with a spiritual Creator, the monster experiences the confusion between
> “God as Creator and humanity as creature” that Ross Woodman identifies with the Romantic poets, in general, and
> the philosopher Nietzsche, in particular (“End of the World” 63). He also falls into the idolatry that Bahá’u’lláh
> describes as “servitude to the gods of ... idle fancies—gods that have inflicted such loss upon, and are responsible
> for the misery of, their wretched worshipers. These idols form the obstacle that impedeth man in his efforts to
> advance in the path of perfection” (Gleanings 93). In the monster’s case his idolatry of his flawed creator and his
> acceptance of his own inferiority, embodied in his gross physical form, symbolically capture the acceptance by
> nineteenth-century women of the dictates of the patriarchal family with its elevation of the father to godlike
> authority and its perception of women’s physical, intellectual, and emotional inferiority, and its insistence that they
> fit their inner lives to its Procrustean bed.6
> The monster’s face-to-face encounter with Victor and his enunciation of Victor’s moral responsibility bring
> to a climax the different responses to spiritual oppression experienced by the two. Victor, anticipating what
> Woodman calls “the moral and spiritual crisis” of the nineteenth century, the “usurpation of power that belongs to
> God” (“End of the World” 63), first technically creates a humanlike being which in some unexplained way turns out
> to possess a fully human inner world and then fails to come to terms with the moral and emotional responsibility that
> French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas associates with encountering the face of another (352). He fails to recognize
> the sign of the soul, what Bahá’u’lláh calls the sign of God, in the monster’s scarred face.7 However, the monster’s
> confused acceptance of Victor as his god suggests Mary Shelley’s representation of her own childhood situation and
> of the socially and spiritually oppressed understanding of the women of her day who allowed their understanding of
> themselves to be dictated from without by fathers, husbands, and society.
> 
> Frankenstein and Derrida’s Theory of Centerlessness
> Victor’s assumption he possesses the power to create a new species of being is echoed in the thinking of the
> influential postmodern theorist Jacques Derrida, who himself seems to find a parallel between his theory and
> Shelley’s novel. He ends “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1967) by evoking an
> image that seems to be deliberately drawn from Frankenstein to characterize the new birth in the human sciences
> that will affirm the ability to play (with structures, interpretations, words) without the limitations imposed by a
> “center,” or “fundamental ground,” or “origin” or “end” (279). Self-consciously using the language of
> “Childbearing,” he speaks of the “conception, formation, gestation, and labor” of the “as yet unnamable which is
> proclaiming itself and which can do so…only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and
> terrifying form of monstrosity” (293). Although Derrida seeks to celebrate the birth of this formless monster as an
> escape from an outmoded and imprisoning sense of origin and structure that he finds in Western ontology, he also
> includes himself among those who “turn their eyes away” (293) from its sight. His ambivalence powerfully connects
> him to Victor Frankenstein. Furthermore, Derrida seems, like Mary Shelley, to sense that one whole era of history
> has come to an end and that whatever the future brings will be different and unimaginable. Like Shelley, although
> living over a century-and-a-half later, he still seems to suffer under the oppression of living in the last days of a
> cycle of Revelation. While he theorizes that he is living at the end of Western philosophy’s 2500-year-old
> metaphysical way of thinking and partially grasps the nothingness identified by Bahá’u’lláh as characterizing the
> moment when one spiritual dispensation ends—the moment when “the entire creation hath passed away!”
> (Gleanings 29)—he cannot grasp the new creation that follows this apocalyptic moment. He imagines that the state
> of centerlessness, of which he is so vividly aware, will itself usher in the future. But his vision of the centerless
> future is precisely what Shelley’s creature embodies.
> The monster can find no origin or purpose for his creation beyond being a function of Victor’s obsessive
> ambition. Rather than celebrating his freedom to create his own meanings, however, the monster offers a sober
> critique of the dangers of centerlessness. He does not deny his need for a center, instead he accepts a purely material
> and mechanistic center—as the physical product of Victor’s technology. But Shelley has unsettled this reading by
> giving the creature a powerful inner world that cannot be accounted for by his creation and that yearns for spiritual
> meaning and transcendence. Unsatisfied with the purely material base for his origin, the creature finally looks to
> Victor as his center and god, and grants to the scientist the exclusive power to render him happy. When his technical
> maker completely fails to satisfy his needs, the creature is left with no center to his existence but his obsession with
> exacting revenge on his parent-god, with making him suffer as the monster has. His acts of violence not only destroy
> all those close to Victor but also testify to the monster’s destruction of his own instinctive moral values and create
> his own subsequent self-loathing. Looking back on his crimes, the monster explains, “My heart was fashioned to be
> susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of
> the change without torture” (Shelley, Frankenstein 212). Ironically, when it is too late, the monster discovers he
> does have a moral center. The ultimate freedom of this centerless being, the monstrous freedom to destroy what he
> cannot acquire, casts an ominous shadow on Derrida’s theory.
> Derrida’s terrifying, centerless future, like Shelley’s creature, also raises the vexing question of
> responsibility. When the wartime letters and articles of a prominent associate, Paul de Man, proved de Man to have
> been actively involved in writing Nazi propaganda, Derrida himself spoke of deconstructionism, his new theoretical
> understanding, not in terms of the play of signs without a reference outside themselves, but in terms of the trace left
> by a past that must be remembered even as it is forgotten. He declares in an interview that “‘Auschwitz’. . . has
> never been ‘very far from my thoughts’ and notes that “the thought of the trace, without which there is no
> deconstruction, is a thought about cinders and the advent of an event, a date, a memory” (Logomachia 211). Here
> Derrida seems to contradict the very strong denial of origins in “Structure, Sign, and Play” and suggest that at least
> the trace of a memory of the origins of an unthinkable event of the past remains. But Victor’s inability to recognize
> the trace of the other in the face of the monster, and the moral responsibility that Levinas (and implicitly here
> Derrida) attach to it, suggest that humankind without the aid of spiritual understanding is incapable of meeting its
> moral responsibilities.
> While Shelley’s novel powerfully portrays Bahá’u’lláh’s discussion of the oppression that marks the last
> days of a spiritual dispensation, it suggests as well the possibility of the new dawn to come that such oppression also
> indicates. Both Victor’s search for the secrets of the physical universe and the creature’s search for his origins and
> for a spiritual center to his existence represent the early nineteenth century’s search for a new understanding of the
> relation of the human being to the universe. However, the narrative’s portrayal of the disastrous results of Victor’s
> unthought-out creation of a new being and the creature’s desperate acceptance of Victor (and mechanistic thinking)
> as his god, signal the failure of such a search at the end of a dispensation and leave the way open for a new spiritual
> vision to be revealed. As Woodman notes in his article on the changes in the nineteenth century’s understanding of
> its relationship to God, each soul must expire symbolically before it is able to be recreated through the coming of a
> new Revelation (“End of the World” 61)8
> The creature’s story powerfully suggests that passing away of all the known understandings of human
> reality. Nothing about him fits what we ordinarily associate with a human being, neither his grotesque physical
> makeup nor his technological creation. It is only his possession of an inner spiritual reality that marks him as
> symbolically representing a human being. Shelley presents this inner reality as symbolically expiring, as facing the
> unthinkable nothingness of its creation and situation without the knowledge of a new Revelation.9
> Derrida’s theory of deconstruction gives us a contemporary restatement of the passing away of all meaning
> and the facing of nothingness so powerfully portrayed in the novel. In “Differance” (1968), as part of his
> investigation of the nature of meaning in language, he defines the trace.10 He characterizes it as suggesting an aspect
> of language, and of human understanding, that is not and cannot be fully and absolutely manifest, that senses
> something beyond itself, just as the unconscious cannot be fully known by consciousness. Derrida, however,
> pessimistically feels that even the knowledge of the power of language to evoke a referent beyond itself, to evoke a
> trace of an otherwise unknowable reality, has been lost. Thus the trace of the trace has been lost. Derrida finally uses
> the word differance to capture the play in language (as well as in metaphysical understanding) brought on by
> language’s haunting suggestion of an unknowable absolute referent: the difference between presence (the total
> presence of the subject to his or her consciousness) and present (subject’s temporal existence), between Being (the
> state where humanness is fully revealed) and beings. Because he feels that “there is no name for this, not even
> essence or Being. . . . there never has been and never will be a unique word, a master name There will be no unique
> name, not even the name of Being” (“Differance” 159). But, in fact, Bahá’u’lláh defines this master name and
> announces that a unique word has been spoken which overcomes the loss of the knowledge of the trace of the
> unknowable. Moreover, for the first time the understanding of why we forget that we have lost the knowledge of the
> difference between Being and being and of how to overcome this loss has been revealed.
> 
> The Unique Word and the Dispensation of Bahá’u’lláh
> The Manifestation of God, according to Bahá’u’lláh, makes it possible for the individual to become aware of not the
> trace of Being, to use Derrida’s terminology, but the presence of Being. Bahá’u’lláh’s writings define the
> Manifestation’s person and words as more than a trace; they are a sign of the divine, of a real essence that provides a
> ground or origin or center by Being. As we noted earlier, toward the end of a dispensation, humankind loses the
> capacity to respond to or even to be aware of the loss of the sign of true Being. This is the condition which
> characterizes Derrida as he describes the loss of the trace of the trace. In this state, language loses its power to evoke
> Presence and falls into an endless chain of words referring only to other words. It is at this point that a new
> Manifestation appears with the power to awaken those who recognize Him to the presence of One who is the Sign of
> Being and thus to a reality outside an endless free play of signifiers.
> Bahá’u’lláh specifically links the power of the Manifestation to the creation of a unique Word. Bahá’u’lláh
> writes that “He Who hath been manifested is the Hidden Mystery, the Treasured Symbol, through Whom the letters
> B and E (Be) have been joined and knit together” (Prayers and Meditations 321). This unique Word recreates and
> reanimates the trace of the divine that is present in all aspects of life and most completely in human reality. It
> rekindles the human desire for and capacity to find the Sign of God revealed in the Manifestation. It creates the
> capacity to understand the Words spoken by the Manifestation, and awakens the capacity to perceive new meanings
> in older words and thus, in effect, it creates new selves. It also circumscribes differance, the capacity of words to
> endlessly evoke a referent that is not there, and provides for the period of the dispensation a center or moral standard
> against which to measure meaning. Bahá’u’lláh explains that in this day humankind has a new capacity not available
> earlier to understand the whole cycle of the rise and fall of dispensations. Thus, as Derrida seems to partially intuit,
> this is the time of a birth that is not commensurate with the birth of earlier dispensations. This is the beginning of
> human maturity in which we can grasp the whole panorama of humankind’s spiritual history. For the first time, we
> can understand how the centers that past dispensations provided can no longer hold and how a new center, a new
> sign, can be revealed. Thus we can accept the unifying but progressive nature of spiritual understanding and its
> ability to partake of a multiplicity of meanings.
> 
> Frankenstein and the Quest for the Presence of Being
> Let us return to Frankenstein with this new understanding and terminology. The monster’s face, however configured
> by human error, symbolizes the human being or Levinas’s “other,” with its implicit moral claims. His inner self
> figures the soul—the tarnished mirror or effaced trace of the transcendent—in the world. As the embodiment of
> nineteenth-century women’s (and Shelley’s in particular) spiritual deprivation and oppression, he symbolizes their
> inability to clean that mirror, to find the trace of the divine in themselves, or interpret it in texts. He represents the
> gap in spiritual understanding that exists just before the appearance of the Manifestation who recreates the power of
> words to evoke the sign of Being and the capacity of human beings to grasp those words.
> Victor also figures the confusion and false assumption of power of those who have lost the knowledge that
> anything exists beyond the self. In particular, he associates power with the masculine intellect and associates
> mothering with weakness and dangerous loss of control. His disastrous attempt to play God and create new life by
> appropriating a form of mothering power for himself suggests how much his spiritual oppression consists of an
> inability to understand the maternal qualities that will be an important part of the human and spiritual power that the
> new dispensation will establish.
> The creature symbolizes another form of spiritual loneliness and, specifically, feminine oppression that
> exists just before human reality is recreated in the dispensation of Bahá’u’lláh. His hunger for meaning, recognition,
> and spiritual re-creation, while being fed with the dead words of texts cut off from the mother word, provides still
> another powerful figure for the peculiar lack of feminine nurturing in the spiritual oppression of the time. Both
> Victor’s aggressive denial of his emotions and spirit, while usurping the power of God and mother, and the
> monster’s denial of his inner spiritual reality, while accepting Victor as his parent and god, suggest the lack of an
> adequate appreciation of the spiritual power of the feminine in themselves or in the universe.
> 
> Kristeva and the Maternal Power of the Word
> Kristeva, unlike Derrida, is aware in some ways of a distinctly feminine aspect to the spiritual deprivation associated
> with the contemporary era, in particular in her analysis of language. Following the work of psychoanalyst Jacques
> Lacan, Kristeva identifies language, the realm of the symbolic, with the authority of the father (and the institutions
> of society in general), to which the child turns as a substitute for physical and psychic closeness to the mother.
> Unlike Lacan, however, she theorizes that language is not just a substitute for closeness to the mother. She asserts
> that language contains also a primal, physical quality. It contains not just abstract meaning but sounds and rhythm
> that connect it to our physical sense of self and our earliest physical connection to the mother, both before birth in
> the womb and after birth through being carried, sung to, and rocked. Thus through this “semiotic” dimension of
> language, which ties language to our earliest relation with the mother, Kristeva finds a connection between
> mothering and the physical properties of language (“From One Identity to Another”).
> For Kristeva, however, it is almost impossible to recapture this hidden connection to the mother through
> language. Kristeva is too aware of the difficulties and dangers involved in the mother-child relationship, specifically
> the difficulties involved in the child’s separation from the mother, both psychically and physically. Defining this
> separation in terms of setting boundaries between oneself and the mother, she defines the fear of crossing that
> boundary between the self and the mother as giving rise to a sense of confusion about the limits of one’s identity and
> thus as the source of the feeling of abjection or nothingness. In Powers of Horror (1980), she identifies the attempt
> to control this fear of being loathsome or undifferentiated or nothing with the rise of religions—i.e., with the
> prohibitions of Judaism and the internalized prohibitions that constitute the sense of sin in Christianity (90–132).
> Since for Kristeva, as for Derrida, these religions are now seen as illusions and no longer have their power to
> absolve sin, the only recourse for the modern individual is the cry of loathsomeness and horror of modern literature
> and the speaking of one’s self-horror to the therapist (Powers of Horror 133, 209).
> 
> Spiritual Mothering and the Language of the Soul
> Kristeva’s sense of the peculiar difficulties of managing the fear of separation from the maternal in the
> contemporary world implicitly points to the need for a new understanding of the mother-child relationship and the
> role of language, one in which closeness to the mother would not entail loss of one’s own unique identity (the fear
> that led Victor to leave home and to appropriate for himself the act of procreation), one in which language would not
> symbolize only the child’s relationship to the father and to the world of culture (as it does for the creature who can
> find in language only evidence of the technological power of his father).
> On a secular level psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, an adherent of the intersubjective school of psychology,
> has partly answered this need, recasting the mother-child relationship in terms of a balance between mother and
> child in which each is both autonomous and dependent, each asserting the self and needing the recognition of the
> other; from birth each part of the duad participates in creating a shared interaction.11 Benjamin’s theory suggests the
> psychological implications of a new spiritual maternal paradigm implicit in Bahá’u’lláh’s Revelation in which a
> reciprocal relationship exists not only between mother and child but also between the individual soul and the
> Manifestation. While the Manifestation calls out in this day to all humankind (Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings 320), each
> individual must choose to listen and respond, for the Manifestation cries out, “Love Me, that I may love thee”
> (Bahá’u’lláh, Arabic Hidden Words no. 5). Such choice, however, does not wipe out the individual’s need to think
> for himself as he attempts to live in accordance with the laws and ordinances of this new dispensation. Furthermore,
> each individual soul is responsible for his or her own spiritual decisions and does not have the right to justify failure
> to recognize the Manifestation as the result of the failure of others: “For the faith of no man can be conditioned by
> any one except himself’ (Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings 143).
> If the new Revelation provides a spiritual nurturing which makes possible recognition of the Manifestation
> while still retaining individual responsibility, it also brings attunement with and the capacity to understand the
> mother spiritual principle of unity without the loss of self. The new relationship between unity and individuality at
> the heart of this new Revelation allows for a new balance between individuals in which a person may choose at
> times to sacrifice her own interests for the benefit of the group without losing her sense of self. Such a choice is only
> possible, however, when an individual possesses a strong sense of her own center, her own soul, and its connection
> to the Manifestation. (Frankenstein’s creature shows what happens when one lacks this center and connection). In
> such a case being true to one’s own deepest needs and caring for others are not mutually exclusive.
> Not only does the new maternal paradigm for this day recreate the individual’s relationship to the
> Manifestation and to other individuals but also Bahá’u’lláh endows the mother-child relationship with an intense
> spiritual purpose and meaning. Whereas Kristeva finds a negative spiritual significance in the fears of encroachment
> or abandonment which grow out of the mother-child bond, Bahá’u’lláh reveals that the earliest stages of life and the
> earliest bond of mother and child provide a symbolic spiritual grounding for the individual and enact in an
> analogous form the relationship of the Manifestation and the rest of humanity. Not only do the Bahá’í Writings
> stress that “mothers are the first educators” of children and “train them in all the perfections of humankind”
> (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in Women 27–28), but through her sensitive care for the infant’s earliest needs, the mother models
> the spiritual love at the heart of the universe.12 The signs of the mother’s care, beginning with her ability to provide
> the perfect nourishment for her child and including later her wisdom in deciding when to wean the child are used by
> Bahá’u’lláh as symbols of divine love and justice (Persian Hidden Words no. 29; Gleanings 175). Bahá’u’lláh, in
> fact, describes the act of creation itself as the outcome of a divine maternal birthing. Thus He describes God as One
> who “hath delivered His creation from the nakedness of non-existence, and clothed it with the mantle of life.”
> (Gleanings 77). Furthermore, Bahá’u’lláh designates the Báb’s Revelation, which marks the beginning of the Bahá’í
> Faith, as the “Mother-Word’ and the “Mother-Book.”13 Moreover, Bahá’u’lláh elevates not only maternity but also
> the feminine itself. Whereas Kristeva defines the feminine as figured in religion as the forbidden, the veil that
> separates the individual from the spiritual (Powers of Horror 101–8), Bahá’u’lláh reinscribes the feminine as the
> mystic bride—the inner capacity of the word when wedded to the Manifestation to give birth to new meanings.
> Woodman points out that this marriage gives birth to “the consciousness of the oneness of God and of creation”
> (“Role” 90), which is the heart of Bahá’u’lláh’s Revelation. Thus, the feminine becomes the source rather than the
> veil between the individual and the spiritual. It is this new understanding of the feminine as the inner spiritual
> meaning of the word that has, until now, been veiled. Thus Bahá’u’lláh ends the Hidden Words by announcing that
> “the mystic and wondrous Bride, hidden ere this beneath the veiling of utterance, hath now, by the grace of God and
> His divine favor, been made manifest even as the resplendent light shed by the beauty of the Beloved” (51). This
> mystic bride bequeaths to all language a marriage of inner spiritual meaning and outer form and to each individual a
> marriage of closeness to the Mother-Word (the Manifestation) with closeness to one’s own soul.
> Returning to Frankenstein, we can say that from Victor’s perspective the monster represents the sign of the
> body as abject—as removing the veil between the individual and the other, and the living and the dead—the sign of
> the body without a soul. This in part is why he sees the creature as “daemonic.” Because Victor separates his
> emotions from his intellect while creating the monster and then comes to fear the creature after animating it, the
> creature suggests his fear of his own abject surrender to the impure mixing of thought and feeling, of self and
> mother.
> From the monster’s perspective, he represents the abject, self-loathing of the unnurtured, deprived being
> who can only find connection to the other through total masochistic submission to the other’s definition of him.
> However, the monster’s search for spiritual meaning and recognition, although unsuccessful, like Victor’s earlier
> search for a spiritualized science, points the way to a new capacity, beyond horror and self-loathing, that is about to
> be revealed: a capacity that would allow Victor to find in the materials of science and of the physical world not a
> veil to spirituality but a sign of it; that would allow him to integrate his feelings and intellect without the fear of
> losing autonomy.
> This capacity would allow the monster to discover and honor in himself his own symbolic spiritual reality
> while understanding his imperfect materiality. In this way he would symbolize the ability of the women of Mary
> Shelley’s time to find their place in the universe without succumbing to a false or incomplete identity imposed on
> them from the outside. Frankenstein dramatically illustrates the need for a new spiritual dispensation which would
> create the capacity to respond to a new maternal spiritual paradigm—a capacity that would solve the tragic
> dilemmas of both Victor and the monster, and more generally, of men and women. By illuminating the spiritual gap
> that has opened up in humankind’s understanding just before the revelation of a new spiritual dispensation,
> Frankenstein reveals to us the implications of the “passing away of all creation” in the culmination of a tyrannical
> patriarchal vision of humankind in which “man” aspires to be God and woman is man’s creature. Written in the
> shadow of the Bahá’í Revelation, it prepares us to acknowledge that nothing remains in creation except the Face of
> God, about to be newly unveiled.
> 
> Notes
> 1. See “Frankenstein and its Cinematic Translations” by Tracy Cox (1998) for a discussion of film adaptations of
> the novel. Starting with Literary Women by Ellen Moers (1963) there have been a steadily increasing number of
> interesting literary interpretations of Frankenstein including “‘My Accursed Origin’: The Search for the Mother
> in Frankenstein,” Marc Rubenstein (1976); The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel,
> ed. U.C. Knoepflmacher and George Levine (1979); “Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve” in The
> Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979); “Bearing Demons: Frankenstein’s
> Circumvention of the Maternal” in Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century
> Women’s Writing, Margaret Homans (1986); Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, Anne K.
> Mellor (1988); “Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Woman Writer’s Fate,” Stephen Behrendt (1995); and
> Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction, Betty T. Bennett (1998).
> 
> 2. For example, they have examined how she captures the patriarchal biases of early modern science and reveals the
> problematic nature of the nineteenth-century separate spheres philosophy in which a woman’s place was
> believed to be in the home where she could establish a moral and emotional haven from the harsh economic
> world that men inhabited (Mellor, “Feminist Critique,” Ellis).
> 
> 3. Stephen Behrendt uses it to characterize the unique problems of the woman writer. Margaret Homans to
> investigate the implications of current Lacanian psychological theories about women and language, and Gilbert
> and Gubar to discuss the way Victor and his monster play all the “neo-biblical parts” of Paradise Lost but
> especially that of Eve (230). The word touchstone” comes from Behrendt (134).
> 
> 4. See Mary Wollstonecraft’s comments on Paradise Lost in chapter 2 of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
> 
> 5. She also may have read her fathers diary account of their courtship with its intimate discussion of his relations
> with Shelley’s mother (Mellor 45).
> 
> 6. Gilbert anrt Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, Homan’s Bearing the Word, and Mary Poovey’s The Proper
> Lady and the Woman Writer all discuss nineteenth-century women’s sense of physical, emotional, and
> intellectual inferiority under patriarchy.
> 
> 7. From a Bahá'í perspective, if we read the novel literally the creature has no soul (being created unnaturally by
> Victor). However, such a literal reading does not acknowledge the novel’s powerful mythic and symbolic
> structure. Shelley has clearly endowed the creature with an inner life, one that so strongly parallels her own that
> we could say that she has symbolically endowed the creature with her soul.
> 8. Woodman quotes Bahá’u’lláh’s words that when the entire creation has passed away, “Nothing remaineth except
> My Face [the face of God], the Ever Abiding, the Resplendent, the All-Glorious’ (Gleanings 29).
> 
> 9. See Ross Woodman’s “The Role of the Feminine” for a fuller discussion of the negative side to the passing away
> of all creation (82).
> 
> 10. In “Differance” Derrida draws on the structuralists’ definition of language as a binary system of signs consisting
> of the signifier or sound pattern and the signified or concept (Lehmann, “de Saussure” 467). Saussure, the
> founder of structuralism, “argued that signs mean what they mean not through direct correspondence with
> external objects, but through their difference from other elements in the system” (Heble, “Trace” 647). Derrida
> extends Saussure’s definition “to its ultimate consequences: if there are only differences then meaning is only
> produced in the relation among signifiers not through the signified; the signified is thus endlessly deferred and
> delayed through the differential network” (Adamson, “Differance/difference” 535).
> 
> 11. See chapter 1 of Benjamin’s The Bonds of Love.
> 
> 12. In Persian Hidden Word no. 29 Bahá’u’lláh connects His creation, love, and spiritual nurturing of the individual
> soul with a mother’s maternal care and physical ability to feed her child. “Out of the wastes of nothingness,
> with the clay of My command I made thee to appear, and have ordained for thy training every atom in existence
> and the essence of all created things. Thus, ere thou didst issue from thy mother’s womb, I destined for thee two
> founts of gleaming milk, eyes to watch over thee, and hearts to love thee.”
> 
> 13. Paula Drewek discusses in some detail feminine images in Bahá'í scriptures, including mothering images, in
> “Feminine Forms of the Divine in Bahá’í Scriptures.” Ross Woodman also discusses the new paradigm for not
> only the maternal but for the feminine in general in his article “The Role of the Feminine in the Bahá’í Faith.”
> 
> Works Cited
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Some Answered Questions. Comp. and trans. Laura Clifford Barney. 4th ed. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í
> Publishing Trust, 1981.
> 
> Abrams, M. H., et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 1993.
> 
> Adamson, Joseph. “Differance/Difference.” In Makaryk 534–35.
> ———. “Metaphysics of Presence.” In Makaryk 589.
> 
> Bahá’u’lláh. Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh. Trans. Shoghi Effendi. 3d ed. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í
> Publishing Trust, 1983.
> ———. The Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh. Trans. Shoghi Effendi. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1985.
> ———. The Kitáb-i-Íqán: The Book of Certitude. Trans. Shoghi Effendi. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust,
> 1974.
> ———. Prayers and Meditations. Trans. Shoghi Effendi. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1962.
> 
> Behrendt, Stephen. “Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Woman Writer’s Fate.” In Lowe-Evans 133–51.
> 
> Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York:
> Pantheon Books, 1988.
> 
> Bennett, Betty T. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
> 
> Cox, Tracy. “Frankenstein and Its Cinematic Translations.” In Lowe-Evans 214–29.
> Derrida, Jacques. “Canons and Metonymies: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” In Logomachia: The Conflict of
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> — *Spiritual Oppression in Frankenstein (Used by permission of the curator)*