Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in "Frankenstein"

by Eileen M. Hunt

Overview

From her youth, Mary Shelley immersed herself in the social contract tradition, particularly the educational and political theories of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as the radical philosophies of her parents, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the anarchist William Godwin. Against this background, Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818. In the two centuries since, her masterpiece has been celebrated as a Gothic classic and its symbolic resonance has driven the global success of its publication, translation, and adaptation in theater, film, art, and literature. However, in Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, Eileen Hunt Botting argues that Frankenstein is more than an original and paradigmatic work of science fiction—it is a profound reflection on a radical moral and political question: do children have rights?

Botting contends that Frankenstein invites its readers to reason through the ethical consequences of a counterfactual premise: what if a man had used science to create a human life without a woman? Immediately after the Creature's "birth," his scientist-father abandons him and the unjust and tragic consequences that follow form the basis of Frankenstein's plot. Botting finds in the novel's narrative structure a series of interconnected thought experiments that reveal how Shelley viewed Frankenstein's Creature for what he really was—a stateless orphan abandoned by family, abused by society, and ignored by law. The novel, therefore, compels readers to consider whether children have the right to the fundamental means for their development as humans—namely, rights to food, clothing, shelter, care, love, education, and community.

In Botting's analysis, Frankenstein emerges as a conceptual resource for exploring the rights of children today, especially those who are disabled, stateless, or genetically modified by medical technologies such as three-parent in vitro fertilization and, perhaps in the near future, gene editing. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child concludes that the right to share love and community, especially with parents or fitting substitutes, belongs to all children, regardless of their genesis, membership, or social status.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812224566
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	09/20/2019
Series:	Haney Foundation Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Eileen Hunt Botting is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and author of Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women's Human Rights and Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family.

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Preface
Welcome to the Creature Double Feature

Growing up in suburban Massachusetts in the 1970s, I spent my Saturday afternoons, like most kids in the Boston area, watching the Creature Double Feature on Channel 56. The double feature consisted of two monster movies—usually beloved B-movies made by Universal Studios of Hollywood, Hammer Studios of London, and Toho Studios of Tokyo from the 1930s through the 1960s. In the matinee lineup, there was typically a giant monster movie, such as Mothra vs. Godzilla, paired with a small monster movie, such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Battles between monsters (usually of the same size) were common, but these battles derived their interest from the original Universal monster movies of the 1930s, which centered on a single creature of supranatural (and typically malevolent) powers.

In this ménage, Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein's Creature loomed large in my imagination. They were the archetypal monsters from which all other monsters were made—though small compared to Godzilla and the radiation-spawned mutants of the Pacific Rim. The Japanese giant monster movies, in fact, all seemed to mine from the core theme of the Frankenstein story: humans could use the power of science to create or alter life irresponsibly, thus causing their own destruction. In the aftermath of Hiroshima, this lesson from fiction felt all too real.

To my childhood self, however, Dracula was the scariest monster by far. The Count appeared human yet used his supernatural powers to deliberately and emotionlessly do inhuman things to his vulnerable human victims, who were usually young women. By contrast, werewolves were frightening if only because a completely innocent person could become one by chance, as when bitten by a wolf in the middle of the night. After that stroke of bad luck, all it took was the light of the full moon to trigger one's transformation into a bloodthirsty animal ruled by instinct. Dracula was scary for his intentions, but the Wolf Man was frightening for his lack of them.

The real puzzle to my young mind was why Frankenstein's Creature was even considered a monster. The Frankenstein films were simply not scary in the way that the blood-soaked vampire and werewolf flicks were. Most of the time, I could not even watch the opening credits of a Hammer Studios vampire movie without running out of the room as soon as their signature special effect—Technicolor blood—dripped down the neck of a maiden victim of the Count. Unlike Dracula and the Wolf Man, Frankenstein's Creature commanded a spooky fascination and awe but not horror. Although he was assembled from the parts of human and other animal corpses, then animated by electricity, his oversized, even clumsy frame—grotesque as it was—elicited more sympathy than fear. The Creature was not evil incarnate like Dracula, nor an animal gone haywire like the Wolf Man. The Creature was more like an orphan child, made and abandoned by his scientist father and abused by nearly everyone he encountered as he strove to survive in the world on his own.

The Universal Frankenstein films of the 1930s reinforced this view of the Creature as a child who was not born evil but rather made monstrous as a result of mistreatment. In the 1931 classic Frankenstein, directed by James Whale, the reanimated Creature first greets the light with the sensitive eyes, inarticulate sounds, and inquisitive hands of a newborn. This innocent moment is soon disturbed by his sadistic abuse at the hands of Dr. Frankenstein's servant Fritz, who tortures him with a stick set on fire. Once he escapes, the Creature roams the countryside looking to satisfy the basic needs denied him by his father and Fritz: food, water, shelter, security, care, companionship, and love. He instead finds villagers who respond to him with violence due to his strange appearance. Seeking a respite from this abuse, he encounters a little girl, who has been let outside to play by her parents. In a striking cinematic image, the towering Creature and the tiny child sit together contentedly, tossing daisy petals into a sunlit pond. When the petals run out, the Creature assumes the girl, pretty like a flower, wants to be thrown into the water. Unaware that she will not float like the petals, he unintentionally causes her to drown. Horrified, the Creature runs away, as a child does when he cannot face the consequences of what he has done. In fact, the actor Boris Karloff wanted to underscore the Creature's innocence by laying the girl in the water gently like a flower, but Whale directed him to pick her up roughly and throw her in the pond. Either way, Karloff ingeniously interpreted the Creature as an affectionate and playful child who, without the guidance of a parent or any other adult, does not know his own strength or how to reason the consequences of his actions. Sensing the childlike quality of Karloff's Creature, the actress Marilyn Harris—who played the girl by the pond—felt a strong sympathy for the "Monster" on set. She developed a fond relationship with Karloff, perhaps because she had suffered abuse and physical torture by her sadistic stage mother since infancy.

Whale's 1935 sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, manipulates the image of the Creature as a child to both comic and tragic effect. In an almost slapstick scene, the Creature proves himself to be an amiable companion to an old blind man living alone in the woods. Unafraid of his guest because he cannot see him, the hermit unwittingly spills soup on the grunting Creature but cheerfully bonds with him over shared wine and tobacco. "Mmmmm good!" the Creature blurts to his "phwend," as a toddler would happily babble to a parent who feeds him. Some villagers stop by the cottage and disrupt this brief domestic idyll, attacking the Creature on sight. Later, the Creature learns more words under the tutelage of Dr. Pretorius. He uses the power of language to demand that his father furnish him a companion. Dr. Frankenstein makes him a bride despite his reservations about Dr. Pretorius's plan to use the so-called monsters to create a new species. When the bride unexpectedly rejects her intended mate, the Creature does not seek revenge against his father or his wife, Elizabeth. All grown up, yet truly alone, he chooses to immolate himself, his bride, and Dr. Pretorius in the flames that consume his father's laboratory in order to prevent further harm that they (or his father's science) could do to others. Watching these films directed by Whale, my young self sympathized with the Creature more than anyone. As Stephen King cogently remarked, "We see the horror of being a monster in the eyes of Boris Karloff."

Paying homage to Whale's classics in his 1974 dark comedy, Young Frankenstein, the director Mel Brooks even used the same sets, similar scenes, black and white film—and, most crucially, the image of the Creature as a child. Like Bride, Brooks's adaptation sardonically played with the absurdity of the Creature's predicament as a stitched-together, electrified, hulking orphan, even as it recognized its tragedy. In one of the most evocative scenes, Gene Wilder—in the role of the great-grandson of Dr. Frankenstein—enters a cell that contains the wailing Creature, thinking he will be killed by the supposed monster. But when his friends break in to save him, the doctor is found cuddling the giant Creature like a baby, promising to love and care for his child forever.

Young Frankenstein thus responds to a comic counterfactual that cuts to the heart of the tragedy of Mary Shelley's original story: what if the Creature had been given a hug by his father, instead of being exposed to suffering by him? Even the seemingly facetious title Young Frankenstein suggests that the deeper meaning of Shelley's story is rooted in the intense, yet perhaps insatiable, demands of parent-child relationships. Imagining the impact of a hug between Dr. Frankenstein and his Creature is no joke, even as it makes us laugh at Wilder.

I was in high school in the late 1980s when I first read Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. I picked it up partly out of curiosity to see the genesis of all those Creature Double Features that had mesmerized me not so long ago on Saturday afternoon television. What I found in Shelley's text was a story that resembled, in themes and symbolism, its many film adaptations. Yet the novel—with its three-tiered, Chinese box-like structure—was far more complex, mysterious, and compelling than any of its cinematic versions.

Plot points also differed in important ways across the novel and the films. Unlike the 1931 Frankenstein, the Creature's major wrongdoing was not the accidental drowning of a girl. For his first and worst crime, Shelley had the Creature kill Victor's Frankenstein's little brother, William, in a fit of vengeful and jealous rage against his maker's family. The Creature recounts how the murder was a deliberate attempt to avenge his father's abandonment of him: "I gazed on my victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and triumph: clapping my hands, I exclaimed, 'I, too, can create desolation; my enemy is not impregnable.'" The Creature's joy in causing the death of the young boy is childish, as he claps his hands with glee for his evil deed, but it is not childlike, for it marks the end of his innocence. To compound the gravity and intentionality of this offense, Shelley had the Creature frame the servant girl, Justine, for the murder of William, the child she helped to raise.

The Creature's growing sense of desolation in the wake of these crimes drives him to demand of his father the provision of a basic "right" to "live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being." Because Victor had failed as a parent to provide the Creature love, he as a parent must arrange for a loving substitute. Since his monstrous features cause people to fear him, the Creature reasons that this substitute must be a female companion who is equal to him in every respect, including ugliness, so that they may live together in sympathy and peace, alone in a South American desert far away from the hostility of human beings. Unlike the 1935 film by Whale, Shelley had Victor begin but then abruptly terminate the making of the equal female companion—not a "bride." Robbed of any hope of finding friendship and community in this life, the Creature responds with gruesome violence of the most calculated kind: he murders Victor's best friend, Henry Clerval; frames his maker as the killer; and then strangles Victor's wife, Elizabeth, on her nuptial bed. Through these dark episodes, Shelley consistently stressed how the Creature's cruel intention to do evil for the sake of vengeance made him into the immoral monster that society had originally, tragically, mistaken him to be.

In college, I was fascinated enough with the story to read it for fun during summer breaks—along with my other (quirkily chosen) favorite books, Augustine's Confessions, Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, and Dickens's Great Expectations. Coincidentally, the Creature taught himself to read with three books—Milton's Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther—before he deciphered the story of his own creation in his father's journal. With more of a literary background, I was able to appreciate the philosophical richness of Shelley's story, especially her reworking of the narrative of the fall of once innocent creatures into sin, death, and tragedy. In this light, Frankenstein looked like a bildungsroman gone wrong.

What kept drawing me back to Shelley's novel was the sympathetic aspect of the character of the Creature, despite all of his crimes. Growing up in the security of a loving and prosperous family, the story confronted me with a truly terrifying thought experiment: what would it have been like to be brought into this world only to be immediately rejected and exposed? Contemplating this worst-case scenario, I came to see the Creature's double identity as a superhuman avenger and a hideous monster to be a dangerous psychological fiction, foisted upon his self-image by his father's and society's horrified reaction to his features. Once his two-faced mask of inhuman mutant and righteous nemesis was removed, one could see the Creature for who he really was: a stateless orphan, abandoned by family, abused by society, and ignored by the law. A product of circumstances beyond his control, yet ultimately responsible for his own actions, the unnamed Creature deserved sympathy from other people, even when he had behaved very, very badly.

Even—perhaps especially—a child could see that.

Table of Contents

Preface. Welcome to the Creature Double Feature
Introduction. Frankenstein and the Question of Children's Rights
Chapter 1. The Specter of the Stateless Orphan from Hobbes to Shelley
Chapter 2. Wollstonecraft's Philosophy of Children's Rights
Chapter 3. Shelley's Thought Experiments on the Rights of the Child
Chapter 4. Three Applications of Shelley's Thought Experiments: The Rights of Disabled, Stateless, and Posthuman Children

Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"Readers of Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child will never again be able to read Frankenstein simply as a work of Gothic fiction that questioned the counter-theology and scientific bravado of its day. Eileen Hunt Botting, more thoroughly than any previous commentator, has revealed the philosophical content of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and has firmly placed it in the context of modern political thought."

Rutgers University Gordon Schochet

"Botting's intervention in Frankenstudies is an important one."

Times Literary Supplement

"Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, in its passion and commitments, vividly illustrates Frankenstein's continuing power, two hundred years on, to comment on the pressing political issues of the day."

Modern Philology

"Treating the creature as an abandoned and abused child, Eileen Hunt Botting brilliantly uses the novel Frankenstein to mount a series of thought experiments that interrogate the enduring political questions of whether children have rights and, if so, which ones. Deftly summarizing the positions of such writers as Hobbes, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, and Onora O'Neill, Botting persuasively argues for a child's universal rights to care, identity, and love-rights that Botting here extends to disabled, stateless, and genetically modified children."

Anne K. Mellor

"While there has been a great deal written within literary theory and criticism on the novel Frankenstein, and there is a substantial, and growing, literature within moral and political philosophy on the rights of children and the obligations of parents, Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child is the first book to bring these two areas of inquiry together. Eileen Hunt Botting's fascinating analysis shows how literary texts, suitably reinterpreted, can make better sense of key philosophical claims."

Queen's UniversityBelfast David Archard

"Botting's intervention in Frankenstudies is an important one."—Times Literary Supplement

"Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, in its passion and commitments, vividly illustrates Frankenstein's continuing power, two hundred years on, to comment on the pressing political issues of the day."—Modern Philology

"One sets a very high bar in claiming that a book on Frankenstein advances a new, important reading—especially one appearing in 2018, when worldwide commemorations of the bicentenary of the first edition are focusing unprecedented attention on Shelley's novel. But such a feat is ventured and gained by Eileen Hunt Botting's Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child"—The Modern Language Review

"Treating the creature as an abandoned and abused child, Eileen Hunt Botting brilliantly uses the novel Frankenstein to mount a series of thought experiments that interrogate the enduring political questions of whether children have rights and, if so, which ones. Deftly summarizing the positions of such writers as Hobbes, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, and Onora O'Neill, Botting persuasively argues for a child's universal rights to care, identity, and love—rights that Botting here extends to disabled, stateless, and genetically modified children."—Anne K. Mellor, University of California, Los Angeles

"While there has been a great deal written within literary theory and criticism on the novel Frankenstein, and there is a substantial, and growing, literature within moral and political philosophy on the rights of children and the obligations of parents, Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child is the first book to bring these two areas of inquiry together. Eileen Hunt Botting's fascinating analysis shows how literary texts, suitably reinterpreted, can make better sense of key philosophical claims."—David Archard, Queen's University Belfast

"Readers of Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child will never again be able to read Frankenstein simply as a work of Gothic fiction that questioned the counter-theology and scientific bravado of its day. Eileen Hunt Botting, more thoroughly than any previous commentator, has revealed the philosophical content of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and has firmly placed it in the context of modern political thought."—Gordon Schochet, Rutgers University

From the Publisher

"One sets a very high bar in claiming that a book on Frankenstein advances a new, important reading-especially one appearing in 2018, when worldwide commemorations of the bicentenary of the first edition are focusing unprecedented attention on Shelley's novel. But such a feat is ventured and gained by Eileen Hunt Botting's Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child""

The Modern Language Review

"Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child shows that Botting’s measured, logical, stepwise scholarly approach has produced a truly revolutionary intervention in the understanding of, and potential responses to, posthuman justice, speciesism, and cosmopolitan belonging."

1650-1850: Ideas

While there has been a great deal written within literary theory and criticism on the novel Frankenstein, and there is a substantial, and growing, literature within moral and political philosophy on the rights of children and the obligations of parents, Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child is the first book to bring these two areas of inquiry together. Eileen Hunt Botting's fascinating analysis shows how literary texts, suitably reinterpreted, can make better sense of key philosophical claims.

Queen's University Belfast David Archard