The Monster`s Deserts

There is a striking naivety in the expectations of the monster in Mary Shelley`s Frankenstein:

"Listen to my tale: when you have heard that, abandon or commiserate me, as you shall judge that I deserve." (p101)

He is naive in his respect for the listener; he fails to anticipate abandonment in spite of commiseration, and appears to trust that these emotional reactions will directly translate into punishment. The practical and human resorts are far cruder: death or incarceration. These two more realistic `ends` for the monster both involve abandonment, where he craves the fellow-feeling of commiseration. But the two are not as separate as they seem. The senses of the verb `to abandon` fall into two opposing groups: those meaning `to subjugate absolutely`, and those meaning `to give up absolutely`. In the abandonment of justice, however, they come together. Having the power to abandon involves authoritative order and jurisdiction, requiring the wretch to be `fellowed` and included in society, then contained, and disposed of.

Incarceration became increasingly popular through the 18th century, drawing the focus of punishment away from restriction of time through death, to restriction of available space. The experienced space and time of incarceration combine to determine a criminal landscape of abandonment, an appropriate plain on which to build the foundations of judgement, what is served and deserved. Like the landscape, the criminal is surveyed, displayed and depicted; we might suspect that the criminal is also, like the landscape, a human creation. Frankenstein is the ideal literary example in which to explore spatial and temporal relations; `monster` shares its etymological roots with `demonstrate`, and this novel demonstrates as much as it degenerates; it as about showing as well as not showing across and within the various spaces of time.

The `wonderful regions` of Shelley`s novel provide the most definite landscape with which to begin. The monster is first glimpsed by Walton, and the reader, when `we beheld, stretched out in every direction, vast and irregular plains of ice, which seemed to have no end` (p.25); he first speaks to us in the `solitary grandeur` of a `field of ice [.] almost a league in width` `like a troubled sea` (pp. 100, 101). These vast settings, however, do not eliminate the possibility or reality of imprisonment, both mental and physical. It is when alone in the mountains that Frankenstein `found myself fettered again to grief and indulging in all the misery of reflection` (p.98). When the monster proposes to retreat to `the vast wilds of South America`, his creator counters, knowingly, that this will be no freedom: `You propose [.] to fly from the habitations of man, to dwell in those wilds where beasts will be your only companions. How can you, who long for the love and sympathy of man, persevere in this exile?` (pp.148-9). The shift in criminal literary setting to these various, wide open spaces is, therefore, not inconsistent with the shift towards representing the consequences of crime as carceral. The nineteenth-century Journal des économistes (p.238) highlights the similarity between the wilderness and its man-made equivalent: `Alone in his cell, the convict is handed over to himself; in the silence of his passions and of the world that surrounds him, he descends into his conscience, he questions it and feels awakening within him the moral feeling that never entirely perishes in the heart of man`. Being handed over to oneself delivers both senses of the word `abandon`: the criminal is abandoned to justice and abandoned in the space of justice, absolutely given up to the feelings which absolutely subjugate, or `fetter` him. The monster tells of `hours and months of misery which I endured, wasting in impotent passions` as one might waste away in a cell. As the solitude of having `loitered in forests, hid himself in caves, [and] taken refuge in wide and desert heaths`(p.171) removes the distractions of the world, leaving the monster `alone` to `look on the hand which executed the deed` and `think on the heart in which the imagination was conceived` (pp.223-4), the extent to which the wilderness is a prison becomes clear.

But assumptions that `moral feeling` is `in the heart of man`, mean that when the monster arrives, judgment and punishment grow more complex. Blackstone`s Commentaries On the Laws of England state that `when [...]the criminal is no longer fit to live upon the earth, but is to be exterminated as a monster [...]the law sets a note of infamy upon him, puts him out of its protection, and takes no farther care of him than barely to see him executed`(Book 4, p.86). The state can only fully renounce care by disposing of the criminal entirely, and as Foucault points out, the `isolation` of much incarceration is an instrument of closeness, as it `provides an intimate exchange between the convict and the power that is exercised over him` (p.237).

The monster is brought close to the reader in fiction. The Penitentiary Act of 1779 `phrased [the] general ideal in a subjunctive, fictionalized language appropriate to that moment just before the penitentiary`s assumption of architectural shape in the 1780s`. This `fictionalized language` explicates the link between our laws and literature -the noun `novella` itself means `addition to a legal code` - and this novel forces readers to deal with the extra complication of emotional aspects in judgment. `Each convict would be assigned [...] to live out a program or scenario that took as its point of departure a generic classification based upon age, sex, type of offense, and social background` (Bender, p.23). So for the monster: `age: two years; first offense: existence` It sounds quite ridiculous; the extralegal aspects are necessary for incrimination as much as for commiseration. The doctor cannot begin to state the monster`s `type of offense` without fictionalizing the context: `You do not credit my narrative and do not intend to pursue my enemy with the punishment which is his desert` (p.170) He hopes for a concrete return for his `narrative`, which is both pursuit and desertion.

The desert as simultaneous place and punishment again recalls Frankenstein`s own, arguably deserved, suffering:

`Dreams that had been my food and pleasant rest for so long a space were now become a hell to me; and the change was so rapid, the overthrow so complete!` (p.61) This sentence gives `space` as a synonym of time, and also alludes to the rebellious and yet righteous potential of revolutions. It might also recall their tendency to propagate yet more revolutions. Noting the monster`s reference to `eternal revenge` before killing William, we might think of `an eye for an eye` and of the difficulties in judging the blood feud at the centre of Frankenstein. The monster`s insistence on revenge points to what René Girard sees as the element of imitation in all competition, including vengeance: `in its perfection and paroxysm mimesis becomes a chain reaction of vengeance [.] vengeance turns [the two parties involved] into doubles." But the monster is initially rejected because it is not a good enough imitation of the human: it is the monster`s shortcomings, rather than successes, of mimesis that hold back Frankenstein and others from competitive and comparative respect. He could not, for example, convincingly deliver a `fictionalized` narrative as the doctor has done, and even his narrative is shielded from us by its wrapping in Frankenstein`s and Walton`s tales. When he delivers a recognizable metaphor - `my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice` - the attempt to sound humanly indignant is off-key. We are used to hearing `it is enough to make your blood boil`; the monster`s chosen phrasing is so actual that we are still in the body`s landscape (rather than on metaphorical territory), causing us to question his understanding of the concept of metaphor. Abandoned in language, the `Calibanish` monster becomes even less human with this attempt to convince Walton of his vital passion for justice. But with this failure to draw us closer, comes a contrasting failure to assert difference, that difference between the unjust doctor and the accusing monster. Perhaps more important than his failure to sound human is his failure to sound innocent, and the uniformity of creator and creation is as unnerving as Girard`s `formal unity of prohibition` and punishment that commiseration attempts to penetrate: `the formal unity of prohibitions; the structure of symmetrical and identical reproduction, the absence of difference, these are always perceived as terrifying` (Girard p.14). The mimesis of revenge is most clearly seen when the monster faces his creator on Orkney, after Frankenstein has destroyed the monster`s potential mate. The monster returns to a comparison, trying to close the gap: `Are you to be happy, while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness?` (p.173); but further, his very words imitate Frankenstein: `Shall I, in cool blood.` is answered by `Shall each man.` (p.172). Deprived of a `mate`, he threatens to `be with you on your wedding night` (p.172-3). And his `power` of enforcing similarity seems to have immediate effect: he feared and hated being `alone`, but after his departure, Frankenstein `desired that I might pass my life on that barren rock` and `walked about [.] like a restless spectre, separated from all it loved, and miserable in the separation` (p.174). The monster, being a synthetic blend of human and machine, is as terrifying in his unconsciously successful reproductions as in his alienating differences and failed learning. Edmund Burke`s terror as the `ruling` principle of the sublime (referencing natural wonders and man`s monstrosities) also brings to mind the Machinery of Terror and the French Revolution. In his essay on Frankenstein, Fred Botting quotes William Godwin`s claim that: The monstrous edifice [of government by court and ministers] will always be found supported by all the various instruments for perverting the human character. The French Revolution is a prime example of the confusion of monsters and `monster-makers`, it is a magnified version of the effects of self-definition and appropriation upon external judgment. The way people `end up`, is the way that they are remembered, because `the end` is not only a portion of space, but also a boundary; it is the person`s utmost limit. Though he can `pile the glacier, or retire to the inaccessible peaks`(p.156) - much to Frankentein`s jealous dismay, as the doctor cannot retire anywhere - the wretch experiences certain, very tight limits: `The inside of the cottage was dark, and I heard no motion. I cannot describe the agony of this suspense` (p.112). This is the sole instance of the word `inside` in this novel, and refers to a cell that the monster desires to occupy. Considering also that his violent murder of William occurs just outside the city wall, we can really believe this `agony` he talks of, the agony to be contained in the structure and community of both city and cottage walls. It is because of his distance (as well as difference) that the monster comes to idealize the family and city as much as he despises his exclusion from them; John Barrell writes of eighteenth-century gardening that `in no other of the eighteenth century landscape arts was landscape kept so remote from the observer, or did it depend so much on his willingness, his anxiety even, to see ideal structures in what he saw`. Like the gardener, having a view to cultivation and even exploitation, the monster and the people alike require `distance` - the novel`s final word - to keep one another fully and idealistically in sight: abandonment for absolute survey and control. As Helen Deutsch notes, in gardens as elsewhere, `distortions of scale and disruptions of identity abandon and threaten native ground`(p.100).