European Romantic Review

ISSN: 1050-9585 (Print) 1740-4657 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gerr20

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
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2015.1004544

Published online: 25 Feb 2015.

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European Romantic Review, 2015

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

Unhallowed arts: Frankenstein and the Poetics of Suicide

Deanna P. Koretsky

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

This essay interprets suicide as an essential trope in Mary Shelleys critique of the
fantasy of individualism in Frankenstein, and posits that suicide operates as a
metaphor through which to interpret Romanticisms interest in radical politics.
Frankenstein engages the subject of suicide by way of three kinds of extratextual discourses Mary Shelleys 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 novels
engagement of Percy Shelleys account of the relationship between reading,
sympathy, and love as it concerns the possibility of subject production; and a
larger Enlightenment debate about how subjects are formed and maintain
cohesion. Through the intersection of these three discourses, the novel uses
suicide to stage Romanticisms interest in the political efficacy of the materials
that the Shelleys saw as creating subjects namely, texts.

Romantic literature cant stop talking about suicide. From Keats claim that he has
been half in love with easeful Death (Ode to a Nightingale l. 52) to Balzacs suggestion that chaque suicide est un poe`me sublime de melancolie (each suicide is a
poem sublime in its melancholy, Le Peau de Chagrin 64, translation mine), we are
constantly reminded that the Romantic period was one of repressed sensuality, ineluctable destiny, and irremediable malaise, and that these strong emotions were often
understood to have suicide as their final result. Suicide is also an explicit topic of
many Romantic-era writings, most notably Goethes 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 very recently, few scholars had explored the subject of suicide in
Romantic literature.1
Indeed, most criticism on suicide within the humanities tends toward historical
readings of changing attitudes about suicide. The majority of this work posits David
Humes essay On Suicide (published in 1756 and posthumously reissued in 1777)
as the beginning of modern conceptions of suicide, thereby mapping the modernization 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 with
Enlightenment theories of the individual, and thus, the surge of literary interest in
suicide around the turn of the nineteenth century is read as an extension of the

Email: deanna.koretsky@duke.edu

# 2015 Taylor & Francis

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D.P. Koretsky

eighteenth centurys philosophical interests in individualism. Historians of suicide hail

Enlightenment secularism as an intellectually liberating moment that opened suicide to
critical inquiry beyond religious condemnation. Michael MacDonald and Terence
R. Murphy offer one explanation of how the Enlightenment shaped the history of
suicide:

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Ancient philosophies that condoned and in some circumstances celebrated suicide gave
way in the Middle Ages to theological condemnations and folkloric abhorrence. The
Reformation intensified religious hostility to self-murder in England and some other European countries. Finally, in the eighteenth century, Enlightenment philosophy and the secularization of the world-view of European elites prompted writers to depict suicide as the
consequence of mental illness or of rational choice, and these concepts still dominate discussions 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 incomplete, 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 to
more 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 Enlightenment developed during, for example, the Romantic era.
Mary Shelleys Frankenstein develops one such counter-narrative. Drawing from
discourses on sympathy, textuality and subjectivity, Frankenstein sets the concept of
the individual against the secular rhetoric of suicide in order to interrogate the
legacy of Enlightenment individualism. In so doing, the novel offers a different
mode through which to interpret Romanticisms 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 preconception of suicide as a preemptive, solipsistic act of mourning for the inevitable failure
of ones own poetic vocation. Instead, suicide functions as an essential trope in Mary
Shelleys critique of the fantasy of individualism, and thus becomes a powerful trope
through which to interpret Romanticisms interest in radical libratory politics.
In what follows, I link the issue of suicide in Frankenstein to three kinds of extratextual discourses firstly, to Mary Shelleys attempt to grapple 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; secondly, to the novels engagement of
Percy Shelleys account of the relationship between reading, sympathy, and love as
it concerns the possibility of subject production; and thirdly, to a larger Enlightenment
debate about how subjects are formed and maintain cohesion. Through the intersection
of these three discourses, I posit that the novel uses suicide to stage Romanticisms
interest 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 the social and political
dimensions 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 suicide
appears on 25 August 1814, when she and Percy hear of Patricksons [sic] killing

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himself . . . another of those cold blooded murders that like Maria Schooning we may
put down to the world (40). Patrickson was a protege of Godwins 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 harrowing
story of female misfortune, written and published by Coleridge in The Friend in
18104:

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Maria is first raped as she sits weeping over her fathers 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 Harlins 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 Shelleys recollection of this fictional narrative in her entry on Patricksons

suicide 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 the
worthlessness of the unfulfilled female life, and to protest womens lack of control over
their own destinies [suggesting] that, for women of her day, life is a cruel prison from
which death (not feminism, alas) will release them (116). In referencing Maria Schoning, a heroine not unlike the suicidal women of Wollstonecrafts Jacobin fiction, Mary
Shelley validates Patricksons decision to end his life.
The specific way in which Mary Shelley references Maria Schoning also highlights
her interest in the socioeconomic dimension of suicide. When Maria convinces Harlin
to 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 a
suicide felo-de-se (literally felon to himself), his property would be forfeited to the
Crown. This policy of forfeiture was notoriously corrupt; Georges Minois has shown
that for almost as long as the forfeiture laws existed, the wealthy swayed coroners
against issuing felo-de-se verdicts to preserve family names and fortunes (21048).
Mary Shelley was soon to become entangled in an example of this inequity when, in
December 1816, the body of Harriet Shelley, Percys first wife, washed up in the
Thames. Henry George Davis, a mid-nineteenth century local historian, recalls that
the verdict returned on Harriets body bears the marks of outside influence (112).
When the coroners 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 Serpentine
River (Rivers, Burial 480). Percy Shelleys note to Mary five days after the
inquest confirms that Harriets death was in fact the result of suicide: It seems that
this poor woman . . . was driven from her fathers house, & descended the steps of prostitution 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 derides
the actions of the Westbrook and Shelley families, invoking a poem on the suicide of a
prostitute, Thomas Hoods The Bridge of Sighs, to suggest that English society
remained unconvinced by attempts to conceal Harriets suicide.6
The immediate fate of Harriets 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 receiving house of the Royal Humane Society. Founded in 1774, the Society worked to
prevent people from drowning by disseminating information about resuscitative

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D.P. Koretsky

methods. While hardly unique in its interests in resuscitation and resurrection, the
Royal Humane Society is uniquely pertinent to Mary Shelleys novel. The science
employed by Victor Frankenstein is similar to that used by the Royal Humane
Society, which engaged contemporary interests in the animating potential of electricity
as elucidated in, for example, the works of Luigi Galvani, John Hunter, and Ben Franklin, whose kite experiment Frankenstein cites as an inspiration for his interest in
science. But more importantly, by the turn of the nineteenth century, the Royal
Humane Society was not only resuscitating victims of accidental drowning, but actively
seeking 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 Societys
interference with her right to die, a fact that haunted Mary Shelley all her life. Carolyn
Williams has noted Wollstonecrafts 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 restore
her to life. In October 1795, she wrote to Gilbert Imlay, I go to find comfort, and my only
fear 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 a
coolly defiant refusal to endorse conventional responses to her situation: I have only
to lament, that, when the bitterness of death was past, I was inhumanly brought back to
life 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 Wollstonecrafts 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). Moreover, as Cora Kaplan reminds us, Godwins descriptions of Wollstonecrafts suicidal
tendencies were among the principle reasons that his 1798 Memoirs undid her influence and reputation for almost a century (262). Thus, the specter of Wollstonecrafts
suicidality 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 mothers desire to die. Though, as Williams grants, the
impact on Frankenstein of Mary Shelleys lifelong distress at the role she played
in bringing about her mothers death in childbirth has been thoroughly canvassed
by other critics, it is also possible to read the text as one in which Mary Shelley
understands herself as a child of the dead . . . conceived after her mothers 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, Fanny
Imlay, 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 the
Welsh newspaper The Cambrian three days later:

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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 such
a creature ever existed as (qtd. in Todd, Maidens 3)

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Critics have long speculated about the torn-off signature,8 but few have noted how
closely Fannys description of herself as a being of unfortunate birth whose life
brings a series of pain is echoed throughout Frankenstein. Indeed, given Mary Shelleys familiarity with the topic, it is curious that critics have been all but silent on the
theme of suicide in the novel.9
That suicide is central to the novel is evident from its final lines, wherein the creature declares his suicidal intentions:
But soon, he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, I shall die, and what I now feel be
no 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 conflagration
will 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 the
human subject, one wonders why the novels final act should be one of self-murder, the
deliberate undoing of that development. The creatures death is frequently read as a
challenge to Enlightenment ideologies of subject formation. For Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, the darkness and distance into which the creature hurls himself signals an
existential temporality that is coherent with neither the territorializing individual
imagination . . . nor the authoritative scenario of Christian autobiography (259), two
principles that underwrite the logic of British imperialism. Spivaks reading has
spawned a staggering amount of scholarly work positioning Frankenstein as challenging Euro-central, patriarchal dynamics of subject production.10 Within the logics of
such criticism regardless of whether the creatures development is understood in
terms of Rousseaus pedagogical theories, nascent discourses of liberal feminism
drawn through Wollstonecraft, or Kants tripartite theory of the subject critics generally agree that the novel all but necessitates the creatures expulsion from the
social order because he does not fit the criteria, however they are conceived, of Enlightenment subjectivity. For the purposes of this discussion, the particular kind of subjectivity 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 creatures expulsion from the social order is
achieved not merely through death, but through suicide, the role of suicide in the novel
is 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 effectively
setting up his own death: I often endeavored to put an end to the existence I
loathed and it required unceasing attendance and vigilance to restrain me from committing some dreadful act of violence (12627). While Frankenstein does not finally die
by his own hand, he is only too eager to catch the creature so that they may kill each
other. Their pursuit of one another, and Frankensteins desire for death, becomes, in
fact, Frankensteins very reason for staying alive:

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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 is
it 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; I
dared 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 some
mark (141) for Frankenstein to find him, allowing the creature, too, to carry to fruition
his suicidal wish.
That both the creature and Frankenstein seek to kill themselves offers reason
enough to attend to the role of suicide in this novel. But the novels engagement
with suicide is further complicated in that the creatures and Frankensteins suicidal
impulses 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 production of Enlightenment subjectivity. Specifically, as part of her critique of exclusionary narratives of subject production, Mary Shelley engages Percy Shelleys writings on
love from his 18151816 period, which are, themselves, engagements with eighteenthcentury philosophies of sympathy.

On Love: Percy Shelley and the Social Function of Sympathy

Through moments of textual and conceptual similarity, Percy Shelleys works offer a
backdrop against which to read Mary Shelleys 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 On
Love (1815). Mary utilizes Percys ideas in tandem with her own interest in
suicide, recasting suicide from a mode of escape from a problematic world, to a
motif that signals the need to rebuild it. Frankenstein invokes Percy Shelleys theories
of love to signal the ideological necessity of a kind of social suicide in order to lay the
groundwork 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 18151816. At this early stage of
Percy Shelleys career, love is not yet the philosophical doctrine of eternal human
goodness that it would later become.11 In 18151816, Percy Shelley uses love to
rethink 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 the
self through sympathy. Likewise, for Smith, sympathy operates through the imagination which is to say, not necessarily the fact of how someone else experiences
the world, for our senses will never inform us of what [the other] suffers. They
never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination
only 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

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predisposition in man to know his fellow human beings. However, as Smith states
above, that endeavor is finally, and necessarily, centered on ones own person; in
this sense, sympathy in principle only instructs oneself about ones own subjectivity,
and not that of the person with whom one sympathizes.
What will become important for Percy Shelleys theory of love is precisely this
limitation of ones capability to know another, as Percy will turn Humes and
Smiths theories of interpersonal relationality into a theory of subject production
through an individuals relationship to texts. David Marshall has interpreted the
limits of sympathy as part of the aesthetic character of Smiths 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 sympathy 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 . . . In
reading 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 these
very limits. Marshall draws Mary Shelleys engagement with sympathy through the
novels interest in Rousseau, establishing Rousseau as a central influence on Marys
parents and thus, also, for Mary. But a more immediate, and hence, more likely,
source is Percy.
Percy Shelley engages the tension between ones desire to step outside ones subjective experience of the world, and the recognition that it may not be possible, to
develop love as an alternative to Enlightenment theories of sympathy. Like Hume
and Smith, Shelley also takes sympathy as proof of humanitys fundamental goodness.
However, in Speculations on Morals Shelley explores the tension between the
mediated 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 sufferings and enjoyments of others, than the inhabitant of a society of a less degree of civilization. He who shall have cultivated his intellectual powers by familiarity with the
highest 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 Humes emphasis on sympathy as

mediated through the imagination. For Hume, imagination refers to a broad faculty
of mind that reproduces faint, languid copies of impressions (Treatise 89), 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 which
every 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, where
Hume and Smith consider primarily face-to-face encounters, Shelley is interested in
textually-mediated encounters, because the process by which one is constituted a

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D.P. Koretsky

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

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The only distinction between the selfish man and the virtuous man is, that the imagination
of the former is confined within a narrow limit, whilst that of the latter embraces a comprehensive circumference . . . Virtue is thus intirely [sic] a refinement of civilized life; a
creation of the human mind or, rather, a combination which it has made, according to
elementary rules contained within itself, of the feelings suggested by the relations established between man and man. (309)

Shelley maintains throughout Speculations that humanity is inherently oriented to be

good, but as he notes above, goodness is also given particular form and context socially.
Shelleys emphasis on the relationship of texts to shape morality in individuals may
thus be called a grammar of virtue, or further, a grammar by which we become civilized subjects a topic also of primary concern in Frankenstein.
In Speculations, Shelley shifts the Enlightenments concern with how the subject
(the reader) is shaped through sympathy, to the emphatically Romantic interest in the
writer 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 concluding 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 he
is misunderstood? These questions, in turn, drive both Alastor and, especially, On
Love.
In On Love, it is the writer, not the reader, who requires sympathy from others;
but the writers attempt to find sympathy only indicates to him not only how little ordinary people understand each other but, worse still, how little the writer the moral force
of the universe is, himself, understood:
I know not the internal constitution of other men, nor even thine, whom I now address. I
see that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when, misled by that appearance, 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 sympathy been withdrawn. With a spirit ill fitted to sustain such proof, trembling and feeble
through its tenderness, I have everywhere sought sympathy, and have found only
repulse and disappointment. (503)

One can almost hear Frankensteins creature here. But it is not just the creature who
wishes to have someone understand his inmost soul. Frankenstein is framed by a
wish 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 Shelleys articulation of love from sympathy On Love shifts
the terms of Shelleys discussion decidedly away from the overarching question of
society at large, toward the society that is formed between readers and writers.

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Thus, even while On Love laments the limits of sympathy, it is even more precisely
an 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 Shelleys refusal of the Wordsworthian poetic model of solitary
genius has been observed by a number of critics.13 While I do not have space here
to develop a reading of Alastor, I nevertheless want to propose that the poem establishes a paradigm for Mary Shelleys novel, for it connects a concern with how sympathy might go wrong to the image of the charnel house: I have made my bed / In
charnels and on coffins, where black death / Keeps record of the trophies won from
thee (ll. 23 25), the frame-poet tells us, as he prepares to divulge the Poets 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 Shelleys texts on love by turning his questions
about the limits of authorship over to the terms associated with the suicide debate.
The relevance of Percys works on love to Frankenstein is established in the first
pages of the novel. Walton admits to his intended reader, his sister Margaret, the
same anxiety Percy betrays in On Love about having ones 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 he
meets 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 pain
and sorrow and evil dare not overleap (On Love 504). For Percy Shelley, such a connection is not about learning to read someone else, but finding someone who can properly read you:
[Love] is that powerful attraction towards all we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, 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 ourselves. If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within anothers; if we feel, we would that anothers
nerves 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 quivering and burning with the hearts 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 his
loneliness 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 one
year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche
in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated. You are well
acquainted 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 very
friend he had sought.

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The opening pages of the novel link Waltons 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 Wollstonecrafts restoration by the Royal Humane
Society. Frankenstein notes, in an expression of apparent gratitude, that Walton has
benevolently restored me to life (15). Walton, in turn, becomes attracted to Frankensteins gratitude, which, for Walton, indicates deeper qualities of benevolence and
sweetness:

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I never saw a more interesting creature: his eyes have generally an expression of wildness, 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 countenance
is lighted up, as it were, with a beam of benevolence and sweetness that I never saw
equaled. (14)

But what most clearly emerges about Frankensteins character over the course of the
novel is his melancholy and despairing nature, and his self-involvement. Thus, the
quote above continues, But he is generally melancholy and despairing; and sometimes
he gnashes his teeth, as if impatient of the weight of woes that oppress him (14). This is
perhaps most evident in Frankensteins repeated and, arguably, baseless rejection of his
creature. For instance, the breathless horror and disgust (35) that Frankenstein feels in
the moment of the creatures 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 consequences, Frankenstein flees. Indeed, at no point in the novel does Frankenstein demonstrate the benevolence and sweetness (14) that Walton claims to see in him. Even
Frankensteins apparent gratitude to Walton for saving him from death is a fundamental
misreading on Waltons part by this point in the novel, Frankensteins only desire is
to 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 is
grateful to Walton for anything, it is for prolonging his life so that he may kill the creature, 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 obsession with killing the creature. For, while their deaths ostensibly serve to propel Frankensteins revenge plot and while Elizabeth and Clerval may well have been good
friends to Victor Victor was never a good friend to them. Frankensteins relationships
are 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 the
throes 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 employment . . . I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection.
(33)

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By procrastinating his social affections, Victor posits feelings at least those feelings
relating 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 him
regain 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 to
love the aspect of nature, and the cheerful faces of children. Excellent friend! How sincerely 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 my
senses. (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 really
motivated his isolation: If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to
weaken your affections . . . then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting
the human mind (33). Thus, by this later point, Victor realizes that his motivations were
reprehensible, even unlawful, because they weaken[ed] his affections for other people.
Through this declaration, Mary Shelley reemphasizes the novels interest in the distinction between individual selves and other people. By this point in the novel, it is clear
that selves cannot exist without others, for Frankensteins 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 domestic
affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country;
America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico
and Peru had not been destroyed (33). Here, crucially, the narrative breaks: But I
forget that I am moralizing in the most interesting part of my tale; and your looks
remind me to proceed (33). Even as he attempts to relay a narrative of progress, Frankenstein cannot help but become aware of this story as a story, and of Walton as his
audience, 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 Mexico
and Peru not destroyed? How might the course of history been altered if Europeans
emigrated to America more gradually, or not at all? Here, Mary Shelley returns to
the 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. Frankensteins
friendships, for example, are entirely self-centered he has friends when he needs
them, but when occupied, he ignores them. Even his betrothal to Elizabeth is self-interested. When he decides to marry her, it is not only, nor even primarily, for love, but in
order to hasten his plan to die. When the creature promises to be with Frankenstein on
his wedding night, Frankenstein assumes that the threat is directed at him, and thus
reasons that marrying Elizabeth would lure the creature to him:

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The remembrance of the threat returned . . . But death was no evil to me . . . and I therefore, 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, as
I 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 decision
to 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 Frankensteins life
begins to revolve around a death wish motivated by self-loathing and despair.
The creature exhibits a suicidal motivation similar to Frankensteins. By the time he
kills Elizabeth, the creature has vowed to ruin Frankensteins life by severing his affective 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 Frankenstein
feels strongly for his relations when he does feel for them, that he can so casually
forget them in pursuit of his studies suggests that friendship and love do not motivate
Frankensteins life as strongly as they do the creatures. For, even as the creature is, like
Frankenstein, 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 his
early days, the creature is disappointed by the unlikelihood of his ever finding a
friend; 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 character 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 creatures early interest in people is sincere and nave. The creature focuses on
who people are and on how his presence in their lives might benefit them, rather than, as
Frankenstein does, on how a relationship benefits him: I longed to discover the
motives 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). Observing
the De Laceys, for example, the creature demonstrates what we might call true or disinterested sympathy, feeling what they feel without any attention to himself: When
they 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 sympathy. For Hume and Smith, sympathy is limited to the experiences of the self. For Percy
Shelley, 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 Percys handwriting, These words are ineffectual
and metaphorical. Most words are so No help! (Bodleian 454), suggesting the
authors frustration with the inefficacy of words, and that the essay, which laments
the 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 sympathizes
with 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 creatures curiosity about his feelings for others motivates him to share, as it were, in Safies education: I found that
these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to
one 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 the
hearers (7475). But in learning the godlike science of language, the creature is
initiated into a world of subjecthood to which he cannot reconcile himself, and from
which his only escape becomes death, as underscored by his recollection of how he
comes to view himself as monstrous:
The words [of Volneys Ruins] induced me to turn towards myself. I learned that the possessions 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 creation
and creator I was absolutely ignorant; but I knew that I possessed no money, no
friends, 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 less
injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs. 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 is
larger, faster, stronger, and more resilient. But he learns to hate himself because he is
taught that identity is constituted through relations to others, and that those relations
are, themselves, constituted and measured by social institutions. The single most important lesson the creature gleans from his education is that he does not fit into the structures that govern social life, and that because of this, he has no choice but to die: I
learned 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 the
creatures development, Goethes Werther, is about suicide,14 and further, what the
creature gleans from reading is not, as Enlightenment tradition would have it, selfunderstanding 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 considered the possibility of his own death. Initially, he was guided by an instinct to
survive, 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 in
him a wonder about the novels 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 to
whose conversation I was a listener. I sympathized with, and partly understood them, but I
was uninformed in mind; I was dependent on none, and related to none. The path of my
departure was free; and there was none to lament my annihilation. My person was
hideous, 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 creatures experience of reading suggests that for this text to be understood, a
subject must be present to understand it; but in order for a subject to understand it,

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the text needs to teach one how to be a subject. That the creature reads about suicide is
less important than the fact that, in highlighting the fact that he does not belong to the
category of subject, his reading leads him to want to kill himself. The texts he reads
have, in this sense, the opposite of their intended effect. Rather than cultivating the
subject of Enlightenment, they bring into sharp focus the fact that the creature
cannot 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. Following
the 1774 publication of Goethes 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 European
novel, 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 see
him, he might even have passed, as implied in De Laceys assumption that the creature
is not only European, but French like him, my countryman (90). And yet, the creature, having been so inculcated with all of the ways in which he does not qualify as a
subject based on its physical determinants for example, the social standing that
Enlightenment subjects possess through landedness, which is determined, first and foremost, 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 an
option other than suicide for those like the creature, who are not legible within
Enlightenment social structures. Saidiya Hartman has warned against the potential
danger of simply writing the non-subject into subjectivity. Recalling the abolitionist
John Rankins attempts to express the atrocities of slavery by imaginatively describing
himself in the position of slaves being whipped, Hartman worries that insofar as sympathy 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 identification
threatens to disappear . . . [I]n making the others suffering ones own, this suffering
is occluded by the others obliteration (1819). What Hartman describes is precisely
the problem at the heart of Percy Shelleys anxiety about the limits of texts to generate
understanding. Imagining the other through the self fails to expand the space of the
other 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.
Frankensteins creature is exactly such an isolated being, and Mary Shelley emphasizes that the creatures 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 creature explains that he wants to excite the sympathy of some existing thing (99). In so
doing, he aligns himself with what the novel holds to be a most human characteristic,
the need to be understood by another like oneself. Frankensteins destruction of the
mate, in turn, indicates his failure to recognize this need for sympathetic engagement
as part of the process of subject formation. Frankensteins act of destruction has

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been read as motivated by a Malthusian worry that the two creatures would begin a new
species, 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 McLane
notes, 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 even
more than he fears the creatures getting along, Frankenstein worries that the female
will 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 physical shape, but the community they might form through their shared exclusion from
human society that interests him. But Frankenstein imagines that the mate will see
the creature as he does, and that she will attempt, instead, to join mankind (never
mind the fact that mankind would surely reject her). Frankensteins projection here
underscores his general inability to register anything from a perspective not squarely
his own. And, as the novels early emphasis on his schooling suggests, Frankensteins
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 through
the right kind of education, without regard for what such a model privileges and
what (or whom) it leaves out. The novels critique of this model of education is
further exemplified by Frankensteins 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, Frankensteins first education was in
literature. And in a certain sense, so is the creatures. Before his initiation into language
in 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 in
my 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 erstwhile 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 novels readers, Frankenstein positions the creature as the
author of the storys 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 literally
inscribes messages for Frankenstein to read, the final author of both destinies, while
Frankenstein is only too eager to read on. But what neither Frankenstein nor the creature understands is that in their mutual oath of destruction a relationship that Mary
Shelley 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 attraction 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 in
my misery (154). When he was alive, even while the creature destroyed [Frankensteins] hopes he still desired love and fellowship (154). But in rejecting
Waltons invitation to the creature to stay, the creature reveals that the love he
desired was, in fact, the fellow feeling that he shared with his creator. Their mutual

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commitment to each others destruction was precisely the image of a soul within my
soul imagined in Percy Shelleys On Love.
Thus, if the relationship between Frankenstein and his creature is configured analogously 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 implicitly
claim to cover the entirety of the social field, but which thus leave no space for an outsider, signaled by the creature. Just before he kills himself, the creature asks Walton,

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Why do you not hate Felix, who drove his friend though his door with contumely? Why
do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, they are
virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be
spurned 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 frequently
mirror those of supposedly rightly formed subjects in the text most obviously Frankenstein, himself.16 But even while the creature may not count in the social world of
nineteenth-century Europe, his friendship with Frankenstein their mutual mission
of destruction constitutes both as subjects of sorts within each others relational
spheres. Their mutual suicidal drives reveal the novels critique of the assumptions
of subject formation held by Enlightenment culture. Mary Shelley offers this cautionary
tale of the trouble with teaching subjectivity through texts in order to complicate
Enlightenment 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 the
creature learns from texts never intended for him, but it is equally underscored in the
fact of the creature, himself the creature is a text created by an author with expectations that he (the creature) defies. For Mary Shelley, the expectation of sympathetic
engagement that underscores such didactic constructs was based on assumptions
about what would happen to a person when she reads a certain kind of text. Frankenstein stages the difficulty of constructing subjectivity through the experience of sympathy 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 a
subject. 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 novels suggestion of
the creatures suicide, Mary Shelley finally submits the possibility that European
culture needs to rethink its prevailing, and discriminatory, notions of who counts as
a self. And while Frankenstein styles its provocation to kill the self through the fantastical tale of a Gothic monster, Mary Shelleys critique is grounded in tangible social
problems. For, to suggest the destruction of the self is to open the social field to
recognize all non-subjects. Mary Shelleys use of the trope of suicide to critique a
rigid understanding of social relations interrogates the roots of inequality within a
social structure based on selective individualism. What remains at the end of Frankenstein, 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.

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2.

3.

4.
5.
6.
7.

8.

9.

Exceptions include Margaret Higonnets work on suicide in Mme. De Stael, as well as in

nineteenth century female writers more generally, and Janet Todds work on the suicidal
tendencies 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 more
central position in our understanding of Romanticism one that corresponds to cultural
shifts that challenge the privileging of certain subject positions over others, which may
include, but are not limited to, the feminine.
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 on
suicide in the period just preceding Romanticism are also worth noting here: Kelly
McGuires Dying to Be English and Richard Bells We Shall Be No More. Curiously,
much of the historical work on suicide bookends what literary scholars would recognize
as the Romantic period in Europe. Although most accounts begin with Hume, some
also take Emile Durkheims 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 analysis
of suicide in the centurys latter half and, thus, a handful of studies focus on suicide in the
Victorian period e.g., Olive Andersons Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England
and Barbara Gates Victorian Suicide but none on Romanticism.
Although beyond the scope of this paper, given the novels Miltonic overtones, it is worth
clarifying its position with regard to Christian prohibitions against suicide. Ana M. Acosta
has read the novels invocation of Genesis via Milton as part of Mary Shelleys secularism,
which reveals itself, in part, in the creatures decision to commit suicide. Acosta suggests
that the creatures suicide comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how to read literary texts, which he reads theologically, as true histories, and this practice ironically produces in him an inability to believe in anything beyond his own reason. Acostas reading
helps 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 Shelleys engagement of Enlightenment secularism. (163 69).
On Coleridges narrative of Maria Schoning, see John Beer, Coleridges Play of Mind.
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).
On this connection, see Rivers (Tenderly 327 329).
Nor was Mary Shelleys interest in suicide limited to Frankenstein. She returns to suicide
throughout her fiction, as, for example, in this passage from The Last Man (1826), which
considers 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 produces
suicide (105).
Among suggested explanations are: that the maid did it in order to avoid the taint of suicide
on 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 sensationally, that Percy did it because of a secret affair with Fanny. See Pollin; Todd,
Maidens.
Though the role of suicide in Frankenstein is sometimes mentioned within the context of
larger questions (such as, for example, Acostas study of Genesis in eighteenth-century
novels, discussed above), only Richard K. Sanderson has endeavored to position
suicide as central to the novel. Sanderson reads the theme of suicide through the
novels allusion to Eves suggestion, in Paradise Lost, that she and Adam either practice
abstinence or mutually destroy each other. Reading echoes of this in Frankenstein, Sanderson posits that suicide is an essential part of the novels interest in procreation.

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10.
11.

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12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

D.P. Koretsky
Beyond merely extending Sandersons reading of textual references to suicide, my reading
proposes that suicide is part of the novels larger political critique. While Mary Shelleys
personal encounters with suicide are important to recognizing her familiarity with the
subject, she engages the topic not only to work through her personal feelings, but also
to interrogate British social life.
As, for example, in readings by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Barbara Johnson, Anne Mellor,
Peter Kitson, and Alan Richardson, among others.
That is, the notion of love that unfolds in close association with Godwins interest in
Necessity, and involves Shelleys 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.
Though the Shelleys appear to have read more Hume than Smith, Percys works suggest,
also, familiarity with Smith. Percy cites Hume through much of his prose, including in A
Fragment on Miracles (ca. 1813 1815), A Refutation of Deism (1814), Speculations
on 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 Marys journals, nor does Percy cite Smith in his prose from this period.
Still, in his introductory essay on the development of Percys thought in Shelleys
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 Percys early views
on love as engaging both Hume and Smith.
Because the Alastor volume includes Shelleys derisive sonnet To Wordsworth, its
titular poem is typically read as an engagement with the elder poet. However, with
exactly which version of Wordsworth that is, with which poetic model the poem
argues has been debated by critics. Beginning in the 1930s and extending into the
present day, critics have considered Shelleys engagement of Wordsworth as a vital part
of the poem, though no consensus exists regarding which version of Wordsworth
Shelley 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 question
of precisely which Wordsworth had offended Shelley so remains unsettled whether it
is the Wordsworth of the early Lyrical Ballads for his nave 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 religious
orthodoxy and political apostasy, or some other Wordsworth against whom Shelley rebels.
Sanderson has argued that all three are about suicide. In addition to his reading of Paradise
Lost (see n. 9), Sanderson also suggests that Plutarchs Lives engages suicide by making
doubling . . . its organizing principle, and for Sanderson, suicide is almost a structural
necessity in doppelganger stories (53). However, Paradise Lost and Lives do not engage
suicide as explicitly as Werther and, thus, I find Sandersons claims thin, and even excessive. The creatures fascination with Werther is convincing enough of his interest in
suicide.
Franco Moretti posits Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship as the decisive thrust
of the Bildung tradition (3). While Goethes Bildungsroman is not Werther but Wilhelm
Meister, it is at least plausible that some of the panic over Werther was owing to the
fact that the subject that the proper novel is supposed to shape is presented, by its
very own master, as so fallible that he would choose to kill himself rather than, per
Bildung, cultivate and manage himself.
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 a
semblable, he sees an other who appears to him as a stranger, a beast, a monster (Surprising 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 like
him.

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