Microsoft Word - Thesis Template CW- REV2 A.docxA Thesis
In Partial Fulfillment
Master of Arts
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To my family and friends, who believed in me when I doubted myself.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Dr. Debra Best for her constant support throughout
my undergraduate and graduate degree. Thank you for letting me struggle through
what I needed to, and for recognizing when I needed a push.
I would like to thank my husband, Brent Walker, who supported the
decision for me to go back to school and earn a degree and continue the
educational path to a Masters Degree.
I would like to thank my father, E. David Radford, who helped keep stress
in perspective while encouraging me to do more.
I would like to thank three amazing women, Livia Bongiovanni, Brenda
Bran, and Jennifer Henriquez, who forced me to become involved outside of the
classroom. I would not have made it through this process without them.
I would like to thank all of my friends who kept asking if I was alive, and
who waited patiently for me to finish writing yet another paper.
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ABSTRACT
This thesis addresses three physical spaces in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the
polar ice, the summit of Montanvert, and the Alsace region. In these locations, physical
and political boundaries are fluid, and these locations connect the natural spaces with the
physical spaces’ collective knowledge. Their physical presence, natural boundaries and
man-made turmoil affect the characters while critical plot points occur. The polar ice lays
bare the results of pushing nature’s boundaries. In the mountains of Montanvert, the
sublime controls and distorts negotiations between creator and created. Alsace’s idealized
farmland mimics a failed Edenic origin story. The French Revolution’s idealized
philosophy, which was supported by Shelley’s parents, spawned the Reign of Terror’s
numerous violations. The Napoleonic Wars exposed the danger of boundary violations
without moral or ethical oversight. Frankenstein, in responding to these events, leaves a
pointed legacy that reflects on the dangers of ignoring the influence of political and
cultural boundaries.
INTRODUCTION
In the beginning of Chapter one of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein; or the
Modern Prometheus, the narrator, Dr. Victor Frankenstein declares: “I am by birth a
Genovese” (Shelley 64), immediately placing the readers in a location, even though the
importance of that location is not yet known. Shelley’s novel explores Victor
Frankenstein’s blind ambition to create life; forgoing the moral and ethical questions his
ambition creates. As a result, his abandoned creature vows revenge on the Frankenstein
family, creating a bloody chain of events that culminates with Victor being led across the
continent to his doom. Victor’s final moments are witnessed by the ship captain Robert
Walton, who rescues Victor from the frozen ice flow. In the critiques of Frankenstein,
very few submissions discuss location’s importance to the characters, the effects of
locations on the development of the characters, and how various understandings of
location affect the novel’s reader. Nevertheless, Fred Randel’s quotation from Franco
Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 seems relevant: “In modern European
novels, what happens depends a lot on where it happens” (“Political” 465). In
Frankenstein, the physical spaces enhance the novel’s frame narrative and add a
collective cultural significance to the stories centered in each frame. Three specific
locations, the polar ice, the summit of Montanvert, and the Alsace region, reveal the
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effects of natural influences and collective knowledge on the storytellers situated in these
places.
Contemporary Eco-Criticism affords multiple entry points into Frankenstein that
identify location as a defining textural element. Locations carry the greatest importance
when the characters in the location are making decisions. By examining the location’s
physical aspects, the effect of the location, and the cultural history of the location, we can
arrive at a stronger understanding of the novel’s characters. Locations and the historical
background, political background, and mythology or folklore surrounding a specific
location impact not only the characters, but also the reader.
Ecocriticism analyzes more than the role of the collective history of the physical
setting. It also analyzes the roles and the influences of location. Cheryll Glotfelty
expounds: "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the
physical environment… ecocriticism takes an earth centered approach to literary studies”
(Glotfelty xviii). She continues, “all possible relations between literature and the
physical world.…[Ecocritism] studies relationships between things, in this case,
including human culture and the physical world” (Glotfelty xx). Ecocritism asks
questions such as “what role the physical settings play in the plot?” and more
importantly, asserts that “human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it
and affected by it” (Glotflety xix). Mary Shelley selected specific locations for critical
plot points to underscore the actions of the characters. The interpretation of Frankenstein
advances with a focus on the human connection to location and vice versa.
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Location in a novel enhances the characters, how they act, and what struggles
they are facing, and thus provide the reader an immediate clue to the characters’
behavior. Specific locations portray inherent characteristics as Scott Russell Sanders
suggests:
Nature supplies an occasional metaphor to illustrate a character’s
dilemma….no matter how much the land has been neglected or abuse, no
matter how ignorant of their environment people may have become, nature
is the medium in which life transpires, a prime source of values and
meaning and purpose. (Sanders 191)
Locations serve an immediate purpose of providing layers of communal understanding
for the reader. A reader would assume a character lost in the desert to be hot and thirsty,
however, which desert the character is lost in is just as important. The Sahara Desert
would influences characters differently than the deserts separating Los Angeles and Las
Vegas.
The locations of the critical frames, the polar ice, Montanvert and Alsace, in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein play a major role in suggesting sources of values, meaning, and
purpose not only to her characters, but also to the reader’s own experience of the novel.
The reader is supposed to feel the cold desolation of the polar ice. The stark, frozen
nothing emphasizes the literal life or death choice Walton is faced with. The sublime
influence of the mountaintop permeates the quest for peace for Victor, and the quest for
understanding for the creature. The seemingly peaceful farm region of Alsace, Shelly’s
Eden revised, hides the cross loyalties of centuries of national division.
In these three settings, the polar ice, Montanvert and Alsace, physical, cultural
and political boundaries are fluid, and the characters have lingered long enough in each
setting to feel the overlapping influences. The physical presence, natural boundaries, and
man-made political or cultural turmoil associated with each location effects the characters
during critical plot points and reflect these states. Each of these locations is firmly
situated within a distinctive narrative frame and location for storytelling. The polar ice is
a physical location stripped of any embellishment from nature, where the ambition of
man emerges starkly. In this void, life-changing decisions are stripped bare for
examination. The polar ice begins and ends the narration of Victor and is where Walton
applies the knowledge he gains from Victor. Montanvert exists in the liminal boundary
between the spiritual and physical realms allowing accepted hierarchical roles to change.
In the mountains of Montanvert, the creature relates his life story to Victor and bargains
for his future. Alsace externalizes the political collisions between nations and people
while being offered as a substitute Eden. It is the very center of the novel, the center
frame, and appropriately, the beginning of the creature’s understanding of self.
Each of these locations, the polar ice, the summit of Montanvert, and the Alsace
region, have specific boundaries that have been or are in the process of being violated due
to the boundaries’ fluidity. Located in the center of the frame, Alsace has been politically
disputed for centuries as being either part of Germany or part of France. The political
turmoil of the Alsace region exemplifies the nomadic existence of the exiled De Laceys,
whom the creature yearns to join. Montanvert ties the geographical feature of an enduring
mountain to a divine space where Victor and the creature forge a political agreement that
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Victor eventually breaks. Finally, the polar ice boundaries were in dispute between
England and Russia in the 1800’s. The frozen water traps Walton’s ship in place while
the moving water still flows underneath, pulling the vessel into the boundary of the ice
sheet. The characters in Frankenstein either directly cross or are directly affected by the
violation of natural and man-made boundaries which are exposed in each of these
locations and which invoke the novel’s most recognized theme of man’s violation of
nature.
The epistolary form that Shelley uses encourages analysis through the frames set
in different locales. Mrs. Margaret Saville, the sister of Walton, receives the letters
written by Walton about this eerie encounter on the polar ice and the story told by the
man he encountered, Victor Frankenstein. Through the epistolary frame, the story
emerges from each of the storytellers, Walton reconstructs Victor’s tale, Victor
reconstructs the creature’s tale, and the creature reconstructs the De Laceys’ tale. The
frame guides the reader to attend to how the story is told, who tells it, and from where it
is told. Each of the frames nestles inside the next, comparable to a Russian nesting doll.
As each doll opens, a smaller one rests inside. Each frame in Frankenstein opens to
reveal more of the story and exposes a new location. Connecting the frame to the location
creates a different way of examining frames and the frame’s influences on the narrative.
The polar ice becomes the first frame’s focus. The Russian polar ice invites a
comparison of Victor Frankenstein to Napoleon, a self proclaimed Modern Prometheus,
and his ill-fated campaign of 1812 that left frozen soldiers retreating from Moscow and
the rumored destination of St. Petersburg. The frozen, sterile landscape of the polar ice
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highlights the exposed humanity left in Victor and the hauntingly similar choice that
Walton has before him.
The second commonly accepted frame is the creature relating his life story to
Victor Frankenstein on Montanvert. When Frankenstein was written, Mary Shelley and
her husband, Percy Shelley, were staying in Lake Geneva within view of Mont Blanc, the
glacial home of Montanvert. During their stay in Lake Geneva,1 Percy Shelley wrote his
famous poem, “Mont Blanc.” Many critics have pointed out that Percy Shelley wrote the
introduction to Frankenstein, but debate on how much editing he provided on the novel.
The critical canon on Percy Shelley’s influence is immense. Mont Blanc is the very
mountain and glacier that her husband wrote about. Nevertheless, the influence of the
mountain setting on the characters leaves much to be explored.
The Frame’s center is located in the rural farmlands of Alsace. Mary Shelley uses
Alsace to echo another location in Judeo-Christian culture, Eden. In this replicated Eden,
the creature becomes aware and develops his self-cultivation through observing the De
Laceys and reading select literary texts such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Mary Shelly
purposefully leads the reader in the analogy to Eden: “This coincides with the description
given in History of a Six Weeks Tour, “ [in which] memory, taking all the dark shades
from the picture, presents this part of the Rhine to my remembrance and the loveliest
paradise on Earth” (Phillips 65). While Mary Shelley toured the Rhine River, the
physical representation of the border of Alsace between France and Germany, she
pictured a paradise. She places the De Laceys and the creature in her duplicated Eden.
1 The Shelley party stayed at Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva during the month of June 1816 when she started to Frankenstein.
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While education of the creature, or lack thereof, takes place in Alsace, other
influences of nationality and political structures swirl before the creature ever learns
his first word.
The original 1818 text is a closer reflection of the cultural forces that Mary
Shelley explores in her settings. 2 Although many scholars focus on the influence from
the French Revolution on Mary Shelley, the Napoleonic Wars had just as much influence,
if not more. Mary Shelley originally published her novel a mere six years after the French
invasion of Russia in 1812 and three years after Napoleon’s disaster at Waterloo in 1815.
Jeanne Moskal discusses this impact: “Frankenstein”, published soon after The History
of a Six Week’s Tour, continues Mary Shelley’s reassessment of Rousseau and Geneva,
creates an image of humanity that, like the Revolution, begins in benevolence and ends in
murder” (Moskal 245). Victor, the Genovese, contains traits from both Rousseau and
Napoleon. Rousseau, who was born in Geneva, was a key figure in the philosophy of the
French Revolution. Rousseau believed in the ability to rule oneself with only the rules the
self enacted without an authoritative figure of rule. Each person is sovereign not to a
monarch but to himself or herself. However, his philosophy was also the key influence
for the Reign of Terror. Napoleon ended the Reign of Terror by seizing control from the
political factions in France, creating stability. He thought he could rule all of Europe, and
the invasions of other countries led to Napoleon’s downfall. Mary Shelley links the 2 keep the To original voice of the text, many scholars choose to study the 1818 edition. The
original text was revised and reissued in 1831. Subtle and not so subtle changes between editions color the reading of the novel. An older and more mature woman revises the 1831 edition. The thirteen years between editions included the loss of two children, Clara and William, a miscarriage, and the deaths of her husband Percy and close friend Lord Byron. The impact of these staggering life events would not be conceivable in the writings of the eighteen-year-old Shelley. Looking at the original 1818 text thus allows for the analysis of the characters as Mary Shelley wrote them with all of her original passions, ideas and influences.
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overreaching ambition of Napoleon to her overreaching ambitious scientist, Victor
Frankenstein. Victor wants to create life; the life he creates leaves a trail of bodies
pointing to Victor’s shattered humanity. Mary Shelley labels Victor as the modern day
Prometheus in the title, forever linking Victor to Napoleon’s thirst for power and
Rousseau’s misused philosophies.
Mary Shelley cannot escape the influences of her European settings anymore than
Victor can escape from his creature. Each of the locations where Mary Shelley places a
storyteller embodies strong, specific influences that the reader not only feels, but also
reacts to. She invites the reader to experience more than a horror story and more than a
tale of science fiction. Mary Shelley exposes through the actions of her characters the
location’s natural influences and collective cultural knowledge through a fictionalized
travel novel.
THE POLAR ICE
Mary Shelley sets the opening frame of Frankenstein in the unembellished space
of the polar ice. The polar ice at first glance seems quiet and serene, yet the natural force
of frozen water and man clash in the sterile landscape. This location of the polar ice not
only characterizes man pushing scientific boundaries, but also evokes the political
boundaries of the early 1800s, specifically the failed political and nationalistic boundaries
of Napoleon. In October of 1812, Napoleon and his army struggled across the frozen ice
returning from the ill-fated invasion of Russia. The empirical boundaries of Russia,
France and Great Britain are fiercely fought over even in this frozen no man’s land. The
stark physical properties of nature thwart man’s political boundaries even as man
struggles to create them. The ice shifts not only political boundaries, but also the
boundaries of Walton’s quest to discover the Hyperborean zone.
In Mary Shelley’s time, the polar ice captured the imagination of scientists
following the Hollow Earth theory, a debunked theory suggested by the brilliant
mathematician and astronomer Edmond Halley in 1692. According to Nicholas
Kollerstrom, Halley, who discovered the eponymous Halley’s comet, also theorized that
there was a temperate world encases within the earth, with access at the poles
(Kollerstorm 1). While Walton pursues the fabled Hyperborean zone, the natural
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boundaries of water and ice encapsulate his ship, creating a seemingly static location.
However, while the natural boundary of ice constricts movement in the vast frozen
landscape, the current under the ice pulls the wooden ship into the jagged edges. Walton
fails to see the danger of his obsession, just as Victor failed to understand the
implications of his quest to create life.
Mary Shelley’s ship captain Walton believes in the Hollow Earth theory and is
willing to cross the frozen boundary to discovery a new paradise. He gathers an
expedition to approach the North Pole searching for the world inside. He writes to his
dear sister, Margaret Saville, to assuage her fears:
I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and
desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty
and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible; its broad disk just
skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendor. ….There snow
and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a
land surpassing in wonder and in beauty….what may not be expected in a
country of eternal light. (Shelley 51)
The theory of a Hyperborean zone retained some credibility in the early 1800’s. The idea
of being able to travel past the frozen wasteland to find a temperate paradise was still
viable and discussed in scientific and philosophical circles. Walton dismisses the
boundary of frost and desolation as something to pass through, not to experience. Much
like Victor, he focuses on the results, or achievement of his discovery.
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Walton’s journey of scientific discovery parallels Victor’s scientific experiments
in creation. Both Walton and Victor are pushing the boundaries of human knowledge
without thinking of the boundaries to cross or the consequences of crossing them. Their
quests, one to find a new world and one to create life, consume both men. Victor
succeeds in his quest, and his triumph condemns his family members. Walton, on the
other hand, starts his journey blinded by the thought of finding eternal light only to
become trapped along the way in the polar ice. Walton is firmly placed inside of the
boundary, neither succeeding nor failing, when he discovers Victor and the creature.
Walton is frozen on the brink between scientific discovery and a fatal violation of
nature’s boundary.
The characters are completely affected by the overpowering manifestation of their
location as well as their environment. The polar ice becomes more than the surroundings
of Walton and his ship. It threatens to overcome his tiny vessel, not just by crushing it,
but also by simply overwhelming it in the vast nothingness of the frozen ice. This
situation can be read fruitfully through Mazel’s conception of “environs”:
What remains of our sense of environment, by contrast, is not any action
but a thing;…we no longer speak of what environs us, but of what our
environment is. This is not a trivial distinction, for restoring to
environment the sense of its originary actions allows us to inquire into not
only what environs us, but how it came to do so, by means of what agency,
and so on. (Mazel 138-139)
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The definition of the noun form of environment, the label of what is around us denies the
effect of the environment on us. The polar ice is the location, a place the characters are
located in or try to move through. However, the Mazel’s Oxford English Dictionary-
derived form of ‘environ’ carries the effect of the environment. There is now agency, so
the location can affect the characters or objects in the setting. The polar ice environs the
ship. The polar ice is active, pressing against the ship.
The polar ice thus becomes more than a location; the polar ice becomes the
boundary that Walton must navigate. Walton, an Englishman, writes from his Russian-
based vessel that is trapped in ice:
Our situation was somewhat dangerous, especially as we were compassed
round by a very thick fog….the mist cleared away…and we beheld,
stretched out in every direction, vast and irregular plains of ice, which
seemed to have no end…..we heard the ground sea; and before night the
ice broke and freed our ship. (Shelley 58).
A thick fog obscures the view, and figuratively obscures the destiny that Walton will
have to choose. The frozen sea has trapped Walton and his men. The water under the boat
is still able to move, yet any progress towards a destination is completely stopped. Ice
will still flow, but at a much slower rate. The compressing ice sheets threaten to crush the
vessel. The vast, irregular ice plains are void of life, void of humanity, and void of any
life giving substance. Even after the ship is freed, there are still pieces of ice that can
slam into the hull, so it can no longer safely travel between the boundaries of land.
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Walton, unlike Victor, has been physically stopped from completing his quest. The
setting, the natural polar ice, halts Walton’s progress forward.
The physical properties also reflect Walton’s mental state. Walton can only
visualize this quest. Walton writes: “we were compassed round by a very thick
fog….About two o’clock the mist cleared away, and we beheld, stretched out in every
direction, vast and irregular plains of ice, which seemed to have no end” (Shelley 58).
The fog and mist lift allowing Walton to see that he is in a harsh sterile landscape. For the
first time, Walton recognizes the dangers represented by the physical boundary. He now
has the clarity of mind necessary to hear Victor’s tale and to recognize the boundaries
with which he is colliding.
Walton, with the help of Victor and Victor’s story, is able to assess the futility of
his quest and his responsibilities to his ship and men. Victor gives a deathbed decree to
Walton: “Seek Happiness in tranquility, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the
apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discovers. Yet, why do
I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed” (Shelley
216). Victor exposes Walton’s ambition. He acknowledges his own failure of
recognizing boundaries, and he cautions Walton to not make the same mistake of failing
to see the danger in ambition pushed too far into obsession.
Walton discovers Victor and chronicles Victor’s story when he writes to his sister
from a setting of cold, dangerous uncertainty. Victor’s humanity, or lack thereof, reveals
itself to Walton, so that he can clearly see the results of Victor’s quest, and the
unintended results of boundaries colliding. Walton recognizes a parallel between himself
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and the person he has rescued. They have more in common than both being out on the
polar ice. Joyce Carol Oates expands the frozen landscape to include Victor: “ Frozen in a
posture of rigorous denial” (Oates 545) and fittingly located in a country of “eternal light
that will prove, of course, only a place of endless ice, [the polar ice is]the appropriate
landscape for Victor Frankenstein’s death and his demon’s self immolation” (Oates 543).
She reads Victor being literally frozen in the Arctic ice as a symbolic representation of
his frozen acceptance of responsibility for any of his actions. The eternal light, in itself
death-defying, is the essence of what Victor has tried to create; instead, this never fading
light mocks Victor’s life’s work. His humanity has been stripped away leaving only the
frozen pieces of the narrative he provides Walton.
Even though the uninhabited polar ice’s vastness overwhelms Walton and his
ship, and can be read symbolically, it does not escape national political borders. Mary
Shelley writes Frankenstein during the rise of the second British Empire. Walton, an
Englishman, writes to his sister. Walton has commissioned his voyage while in the main
port of St. Petersburg, Russia, and he has recruited an international crew to explore the
polar ice. There, he meets a Swiss man pursuing an enemy across the polar ice, low on
provisions, and almost dead. Further, that nemesis was assembled in Germany. Shelley
intentionally uses the starting point of St. Petersburg to suggest the ambiguity of national
boundaries. Geographical and political boundaries are established and reestablished with
every map drawn, war, or treaty.
The polar ice’s political dimension is complex. The political boundary between
Britain and Russia was not established until the Treaty of Saint Petersburg of 1825.
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While the French Revolution would still be fresh in the minds of Shelley and her readers
when Frankenstein was originally published in 1818, fresher still would be the War of
1812, and Napoleon’s fateful invasion of Russia. Images from the failed conquests of
Napoleon were still raw in the minds of Europeans six years after the end of the war.
Mary Shelley intentionally leads the reader to connect her novel to Napoleon by using
the shared analogy of Prometheus in her title, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.
Napoleon is associated with Prometheus by both Lord Byron in the sixteenth stanza of
“Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte” and his own propaganda machine (“Political” 467).
Napoleon marched on Moscow, identified as the Russian’s heart, despite rumors of an
invasion of St. Petersburg, known as Russia’s head. As Napoleon advanced, Russian
soldiers retreated, burning everything left behind. Napoleon invaded Russia with 500,000
troops, yet only 100,000 survived the retreat across the ice (Staff 1). Napoleon failed to
create a new empire out of the Russian body parts, much like Victor failed to create a
beautiful new being out of parts from the charnel houses.
Napoleon and his army were caught by the severe Russian winter storms with no
provisions and no shelter. Readers would easily relate Victor’s pursuit of the creature
over the polar ice to Napoleon’s failed campaign:
The French army was never trapped amidst ice floes in the Arctic like
Victor, his creature, and the men on Walton’s ship. But the atmosphere of
baffled movement, wintery disorientation, and despair which envelops the
novel’s characters is a figurative counterpart to the plight of Napoleon’s
retreating forces…The Count De Segur, Napoleon’s Quartermaster-
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General on the Russian campaign of 1812, invokes the metaphor of a ship
on a sea of ice….In this shipwreck, the army, like a great vessel tossed by
the most violent storm, was throwing overboard on a sea of ice and snow
everything that might encumber it or delay its progress. (Randel,
“Political” 468)
The image of disoriented baffled movement enveloping Victor, Walton, and his ship
revels the political dimension of Victor’s quest and accentuates the confusion of the polar
ice. The polar ice is palpable with menace. The Russian winter punishes men who have
invaded the icy wasteland. The frozen Russian ice has claimed many a victory in battle.
Having wisely surrendered his own conquest, Walton is in place to witness the final
battle between Victor and the creature, not on the figurative ship of Count De Segur, but
on a literal ship frozen in place.
The vast bareness of the polar ice positions both Walton and Victor to scrutinize
their quests and the choices made, or the choices yet to be made. Walton and Victor have
pursued obsessively their scientific objectives. The allusion to Napoleon’s defeat on the
Russian ice emphasizes the failure of political and scientific obsessions along with the
reality of the frozen environment. The ship and her crew are a microcosm of
multinational interests firmly stuck in the ice and at the mercy of the undercurrent. The
shifting boundaries surrounding the ship accentuate the actions and decisions that these
characters make on the ship. Inside of this sterile environment, the actions of the
characters become amplified. Napoleon’s and Victor’s defeat are complete. Victor has
succeeded in creating life, but at the cost of his family members’ lives as well as a his
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own. Walton receives a rare chance to assess his quest. The frozen wasteland lays bare
the results of Victor’s failed attempt, while it holds Walton, along with his ship, long
enough to reevaluate.
The novel ends on the polar ice upon which it started. Victor has died, exhausted
from his self-imposed atonement to end the creature. After one last declaration of
farewell, the creature leaps to his ice raft and paddles off into the frozen landscape, “lost
in darkness and distance” (Shelley 221). Victor and the creature remain in the polar ice.
They are as frozen in their mindset as Walton’s ship had been. The ice that has threatened
Walton’s ship and men gives way to the tidal pull of the water underneath. Walton, the
chronicler of the tale, surrenders his ambition and turns his expedition around. Walton
follows the fluid boundary back to port, choosing the safety of his men and understanding
the responsibilities of his quest that Victor failed to recognize. Much like Napoleon’s
dreams of conquest, his dream of finding the Northwest Passage lies abandoned, lodged
fast in the frozen polar ice.
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MONTANVERT
Montanvert, the northern glacier of Mont Blanc, presides over the long-delayed
discussion between Victor Frankenstein and his abandoned creation. Mary Shelley uses
the contradictory emotional pull of the sublime to influence a key point of the novel, the
telling of the creature’s story in his glacial home on Montanvert. Montanvert’s mountain,
Mont Blanc, is the geographical boundary between the countries of Italy, Switzerland and
France, and symbolizes a physical boundary between earth and the heavens. The
mountain setting creates overlapping boundaries between the physical and spiritual, earth
and the heaven, created and creator. The sublime, an aesthetic effect produced by the
intertwining of opposites, occupies the shared boundaries and impacts both Victor and his
creature. In this liminal space, Victor and his creation shift the roles they have embodied;
the assumed boundaries of authority reverse. The combined emotions, which thrill and
horrify simultaneously, reflect the sublime experience of location, and the actions of the
characters that unfold in this setting. The meeting on Montanvert creates the shift in
relationship between Victor and his creature because of the boundary blurring influence
of the sublime.
The sublime, defined as the intertwining of opposites, such as awe and terror, that
transcends the human condition is illustrated in the mountain setting of Montanvert.
Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The
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Sublime And Beautiful in 1757, and the Romantic poets fully embraced the sublime and
the archetypal locus of the European sublime, the Alps. Greg Garrard points out that not
only did Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Shelley, write the quintessential poem on Mont
Blanc, but her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, also wrote about the sublime effects of the
Alps in A Short Residence is Sweden (Garrard 72). Burke goes on to define the sublime in
terms of breaking down the passions: “The passion caused by the great and sublime in
nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is
that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror”
(Burke 53). Nature stirs the passions and therefore embodies aspects of the sublime. The
Alps embody both the cause and source of the sublime according to Burke: “Greatness of
dimension, is a powerful cause of the sublime” and also “Magnificence is likewise a
source of the sublime” (Burke 66, 71). Mary Shelley places the meeting between Victor
and his creature in an area that epitomizes the sublime. Even before the first sighting, or
the first word is spoken, the reader is already in a state of tantalizing, anticipated horror.
While the reader is experiencing the effects of the sublime, Mary Shelley uses the
overlapping boundaries of the physical and spiritual to accentuate the in-between status
of Victor. The physical setting elevates the characters above the earth but not as high as
the heavens. Victor is compelled to seek the boundary between earth and heavens
because he does not fully belong to one plane or the other and he can identify with both
physical and spiritual qualities. Victor has successfully created life, yet he is human and
not a god. The uncertain space he and the creature, human yet not human, both cohabit is
augmented by the collision of these boundaries. The crossover of these boundaries
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creates a liminal space where the sublime flourishes as seen thus in Fig1:
Fig 1 Venn diagram of the sublime created by the author; (11 June 2016).
The sublime is firmly anchored in the union of these boundaries. Characters in the
location feel the effects of the overlapping boundaries and the sublime. Inside of this
sublime liminal space, what was conventional before the climb to Montanvert is now
suspended, allowing for change even if the change is only temporary while inside the
blended boundary. This space influences Victor to listen both sympathetically and
emphatically to his creature and to be swayed by the creature’s argument.
The valley of Chamounix, where Victor and his family go to recover from the
murder of the youngest sibling, William, is located in the northern approach to Mont
Blanc. The view of the mountain landscape affects Victor and portends the mountaintop
meeting. Shelley describes the vista view during Victor’s travels to Chamounix:
It was augmented and rendered sublime by the mighty Alps, whose white
and shining pyramids and domes towered above all, as belonging to
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another earth, the habitations of another race of beings…the supreme and
magnificent Mont Blanc, raised itself from the surrounding aiguilles, and
its tremendous dome overlooked the valley. (Shelley 114-115)
She foreshadows the meeting to come with the phrase “habitations of another race of
beings,” specifically referencing the creature. Chamounix removes the Frankenstein
family retreat from the realm of earth, yet it is still part of earth. The sublime saturates the
landscape and creates a space where affinities of the sublime not only belong, but they
can also thrive.
The sublimity of the Alps is in relation to the civilized village, the picturesque
Chamounix. The Frankenstein family travels to Chamounix to experience the “wonder
and sublime” (Shelley 114) while forgetting their grief for Justine and William’s deaths.
The creature, however, is still lurking, waiting to confront his creator just as the
picturesque mountain village conceals the wilderness of the Alps. By defining wilderness
as a space untouched by man, Alison Byerly aligns wilderness with the sublime and
contrasts that effect with that of the picturesque:
The feeling of awe that is inspired by a ‘sublime’ scene depends on the
spectator’s sense of its dominant power and its ability to call forth a
visionary grasp of infinity. …wilderness, however, has been gradually
reduced and circumscribed until it no longer seems to stretch into infinity,
but is contained and controlled within established boundaries. (Byerly 52)
Mont Blanc and its glaciers are defiantly not contained. The dominant power of Mont
Blanc has inspired not only Percy Shelley, but also millions of travelers who have visited
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Montanvert and Chamounix. In this space, the true wilderness becomes clear. The
creature is at home in this untamed glacial setting. As Victor climbs from the safety of
the picturesque Chamounix to view Mont Blanc and feel the effects of the sublime, the
wilderness overpowers the picturesque. Man, or Victor, is overcome by the wilderness of
Montanvert or the creature that then emerges.
Percy Shelley’s ode “Mont Blanc” describes the greatness and magnificence of
the mountain attributing the sublime to it. Readers in 1818 would be very familiar with
the qualities of the sublime conjured by the poem and would easily transfer the sublime
of Mont Blanc to Frankenstein. The final stanza begins, “Mont Blanc yet gleams on
high:—the power is there, / The still and solemn power of many sights, /And many
sounds, and much of life and death” (P. Shelley 1). Mont Blanc fills the scenery,
powerful and still. The mountain has overseen eons of sound and existence. Mankind’s
lifespan is one small slice of time compared to the permanence of the Alps. Mont Blanc
allows alignment with the spiritual, yet stops just short of the heavens. The awe, terror
and compulsion that Mont Blanc delivers is echoed in Frankenstein, as it not only affects
the individual, but also manifests itself in the characters inhabiting the glacier. Victor
climbs the summit of Montanvert to experience the sublime, leaving the picturesque town
behind and venturing into the wilderness alone. He remembers the effect of the glacier:
It had then filled me with a sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul,
and allowed it to soar form the obscure world to light and joy. The sight of
the awful and majesty in nature had indeed always the effect of
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solemnizing my mind, and causing me to forget the passing cares of life.
(Shelley 116)
Victor wants the location to affect him when he climbs the summit. His desire to forget
the passing cares of his life drives him further into the wilderness. The scenery is
“terrifically desolate” reflecting his mental state of despair, “add[ing] to the melancholy
impression I received from the objects around me” (Shelley 116). Victor is running from
his responsibilities, yet he is seeking relief from a cold, desolate, dangerous location. He
recognizes the danger of speaking when sound can “produce a concussion of air
sufficient to draw destruction upon the head of the speaker” (Shelley 116). Victor is
willing to walk through a path where avalanches occur to feel the sublime effect of
Montanvert.
Montanvert dominates the characters, yet the characters assume a hierarchy of
creator and created; however, these assumed boundaries become fluid during the meeting
on Montanvert. Burke wrestles with the quandary of boundaries in a mountain space:
“does it bring us down to earth, or link us with the divinity of the skies?” (Burke xviii).
That quandary is particularly apt in relation to Frankenstein. There is not a question of
the sublime: “The sublime object is beyond doubt or criticism; the sublime experience is
one of domination….what ever acts in conformity to our will…can never be sublime”
(Burke xxii). Mont Blanc dominates the scenery and in so doing, creates a fluid boundary
where power in one location or in one person flows to another. In this fluidity, the created
meets with the creator, and domination becomes a dance between Victor and the creature.
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Having reached the top of the ascent, Victor is firmly centered inside of the
overlapping boundaries controlled by the sublime. His heart “now swelled with
something like joy” (Shelley 117). The location has affected Victor and gives him the
courage to tempt the gods: “Wandering spirits, …. Allow me this faint happiness. Or take
me, as your companion, away from the joys of life” (Shelley 117). Victor is issuing a
challenge, a challenge that we know will be accepted. He enjoys a temporary mood shift
heightened by Montanvert. This allows Victor access to a space to address the wandering
spirits and attempt to make his own bargain, to either feel joy again or be taken away
from the joys of life. Immediately after issuing the challenge, Victor sees the creature:
As I said this, I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance,
advancing towards me with superhuman speed. …I was troubled: a mist
came over my eyes, and I felt a faintness seize me; but I was quickly
restored by the cold gale of the mountains. I perceived, as the shape came
nearer, sight tremendous and abhorred!) that it was the wretch whom I had
created. (Shelley 117)
The wandering spirits answer Victor’s challenge, not in the way he expects, but with a
paradox. They issue Victor the same challenge with Victor being the authoritative
position to grant happiness or take away the joy of life from his creature. His creature
approaches him the same way that Victor approached the wandering spirits. Victor is
momentarily blinded and overcome, but the cold gale from Montanvert, the very breath
of the sublime, clears his vision. Victor occupies the position of both supplicant and
provider.
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The sublime creates a liminal space for Victor and the creature to negotiate.
Boundaries in the mountain setting are blurred and they two are brought more closely
together physically and emotionally than at any other point. This emotional linking is
also a product of the sublime. According to Randel: “The privacy of rapture before the
sublime landscape overwhelms other considerations but then wakens thoughts about the
preferability of participation in society” (“Mountains” 522). Through the overwhelming
experience of the sublime, the urge to connect to people emerges. In this sublime setting,
Victor is willing to listen and connect to his creature. Randel describes mountains as
being “either other worldly or divided against itself” (“Mountains” 516). The location
where Victor and his creature finally speak includes both of these elements. The creature
is otherworldly, and there is a strong division between Victor and the creature. However,
the meeting on the mountain allows Victor to change his perspective: “his words had a
strange effect upon me. I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him”
(Shelley 158) He no longer withdraws from the creature. Rather, he sees the creature on
the glacier, and he actively pursues and then agrees to not only hear his creature’s plea,
but also to enter into an agreement with him.
The plot hinges upon the agreement between the creator and created. The creature
holds power over Victor; he is no longer a shadow but in the direct line of Victor’s sight.
Victor accepts some responsibility for being a creator when he agrees to the creature’s
demands. According to Colene Bently: “The agreement achieved at Montanvert
ultimately produces a reality effect in the novel, for it is the moment in which characters’
conflicting opinions and interests converge on a common political world” (Bently 12).
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Bently recognizes that the agreement between Victor and the creature is more than a
creator/creation discussion, but also a treaty between two politicalized entities. Both want
something from the other. The conflicting boundaries between the two are separated, just
like the physical setting, until only their commonality is left. The creature wants the
chance to live and populate the earth away from man. Victor wants the creature to be
gone. The physical location of Montanvert between two countries and between earth and
the heavens embodies the differences between Victor and the creature, while it allows for
the commonalities, to be exposed to view, just like Mont Blanc overlooking the setting.
The mountain top meeting of creator and creation is an archetype that symbolizes
a spiritual journey. Victor is seen as both the god listening to his creation, a creation that
has been abandoned up to this point, and as the student; Randel identifies the meeting as
“A mountaintop experience that holds a potential for enabling Frankenstein to grow up”
(Randel, “Mountains” 526). Victor listens to the creature, and for the first time hears his
responsibility as a creator being defined. Victor acknowledges some responsibility: “For
the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were, and that I
ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness” (Shelley 120). Until
this moment, Victor has physically run from all responsibilities as a creator. In the liminal
space between earth and the heavens, fueled by the sublime, the creature not only justifies
his right to life, but also gains the promise of a mate from his creator, Victor. Victor
continues to be the life-giving god figure, but a god figure working at the direction of his
creature.
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Creators meeting with their creations on mountains are a common motif.
Mountains and divinity have been aligned through pictures, stories and songs familiar to
Judeo-Christian cultures and pagan cultures alike. A mountain setting implies a physical
closeness to the creator. Randel points out that Shelley turns this common motif around:
“As usual, a creature has access to his creator on a mountain, but now man is the creator”
(“Mountains” 526-527). The parallel in Judeo-Christian culture to Moses climbing the
mountain to speak with God, and bringing back the commandments is immediately
understood. While the mountain reaches into the realm of spirituality and heavenly
aspirations, the attachment to earthly matters still exists. The power dynamic shifts fueled
by the encounter with the sublime affecting matters of reason and domination inside of
the mountain heights’ fluid boundaries. Mary Shelley flips the convention of the
god/creation paradigm with Victor being the god. Victor must climb the mountain to
meet his creation. The reader would expect the creation to bargain or plead; however, the
creature demands and even threatens his creator. Rather than God telling Moses how to
behave, the creature tells his creator what to do.
The agreement between Victor and the creature has been made in a liminal space
where boundaries overlap. By using the location of Montanvert, Mary Shelley shrewdly
allows the characters to be altered in the presence of the sublime. Burke warns against
reasoning in the presence of the sublime, “The Sublime in nature is a form of paralysis, a
literally stunning invasion…. The Sublime makes reasoning impossible and is the
antithesis of philosophical enquiry” (Burke xxi - xxii). The creature pleads his argument
in a location that impedes reasoning. Yet the creature is able to clearly construct his
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argument based on his dominance and alliance to the sublime presence. Victor gives his
final reason for agreement: “his power and threats were not omitted in my calculations: a
creature who could exist in the ice caves of the glaciers, and hide himself from pursuit
among the ridges of inaccessible precipices, was a being possessing faculties it would be
vain to cope with” (Shelley 158). Victor is not able to deliberate clearly; his final reason
for agreeing lies partially in the fact that he is in the presence of the sublime and being
dominated.
The creature and Montanvert draws the same emotional response. David Ketterer
aligns the sublime with the creature’s description:
The qualities of Burke’s sublime—terror, fear, horror, wonder, and power-
are most obviously manifested in Mary Shelley’s descriptions of
mountains, ice, and raging seas; and it is from the Alpine environment
especially that Mary Shelley’s Monster gains the same qualities. (Ketterer
548)
Ketterer ties the physical space of Montanvert to Burke’s qualities of the sublime and
applies the definition of sublime to the creature, tying the physical space to human
interaction with the sublime. As the sublime Montanvert overpowers Victor’s emotions,
the creature overpowers his reason.
The blurring of the boundaries creates a commonality where first a meeting, and
then an agreement can be made. The physical location, between nations and between the
Earth and heavens, allows for the differences between Victor and his creature to be put
aside. The overlapping boundaries of Montanvert allow the sublime to flourish. In the
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liminal space of the sublime, the characters shift roles and become open to the suit that
each presents; Victor challenges the wandering spirits, and the creator bargains with him.
The wandering spirits do not engage Victor directly. Instead, Victor is immediately
placed into a parallel role where his creature presents his petition to Victor. The creator
and the created bargain as equals, or at least they are two parties with an equal amount to
gain. The union between Victor and the creature is fruitful, if only for the time they
inhabit the liminal space controlled by the sublime. The effects diminish as they leave the
sublime controlled Montanvert, allowing the differences between Victor and the creature
to regain prominence. The collisions between the physical and spiritual boundaries
affecting Victor recover dominance outside of the mountain union. Without the buffer of
the sublime influencing his emotions and reason, Victor no longer focuses on the
commonality and he begins to work against his creation, resulting in the pursuit of the
creature across continents.
ALSACE
Mary Shelley puts Alsace in the center in Frankenstein’s frame as means to
explore the creature’s origin story. By prominently placing John Milton’s Paradise Lost
as one text from which the creature gains knowledge, she encourages the analogy
between Alsace and a mythical Eden. However, Shelley’s Alsace is not the mythical
Eden central to Christian belief, but a location that has been culturally and politically
disputed for centuries. This innermost frame narrows in on the political exile of the De
Lacey family from a post-revolution Paris yet still experiencing violations of political
boundaries. The seeming peacefulness of this farm region, where the creature develops,
hides the cultural cross-loyalties produced by centuries of national division. The
deceptively serene setting of Alsace in fact epitomizes the turmoil of clashing political
and cultural issues.
The political and cultural collisions contained in the landscape are not always
visible. Reading a landscape involves more than knowing the name of physical
formations on a map. Here, eco-critical readings of landscape can prove useful: “In
learning to read land, one can’t just name objects....one scholar of place notes, the
landscape contains many names and stories, so that learning and writing them becomes a
way of mapping cultural terrain” (Howarth 80). The cultural terrain incorporates the
people and their stories into the land. Starting with the cultural impact on the terrain,
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Howarth adds: “A biogeographer works in similar ways, reading regional life and land
forms, then using ecology to map their interactions ” (Howarth 80). The cultural map of
Alsace exposes both the overlapping boundaries of national and natural terrain, and the
people being affected by these overlapping boundaries.
Alsace’s shifting national boundary between Germany and France creates a zone
of contact between cultures defined primarily by blurred boundaries:
The Revolutionary Wars and the wars of liberation (Befreiungskriege)
gave rise to nationalist sentiments which proved enduring. Thus, German
travellers after 1815 increasingly thought of the French-German border as
a linear national border, whereas they had perceived it as a zone with
successive cultural transitions before….During the political upheavals of
the French Revolution, the revolutionaries of 1789 adopted the idea of
"natural borders", which in the case of France's eastern border was
primarily defined as the Rhine River. During the French Revolution, the
idea also emerged that the residents of a region should decide themselves
which nation they belonged to. (Hopel 1)
The wars between Germany and France created an area between them where the idea of a
precise division of nation was foreign. In fact, for many people, nationality was based on
a cultural identity, not location.3 The natural geographical border adopted in 1789 by the
3 Very little has changed in Alsace over the centuries. The cultural overlap of Germany and France melds into the now peaceful countryside. Alsace is known for the white wines produced from the grapes grown on the eastern slops of the Vosges Mountains. The steep slopes are still plowed by horse, and the acclaimed French wines are made in the German tradition. A culinary specialty of the region is choucroute, or sauerkraut, which most gourmets would trace to German and not French cuisine. Standing on the slopes,
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French revolutionaries was overrun by Germany in WWI and again in WWII. After
WWII, the Rhine River once again became the easily identifiable physical boundary to
separate the two countries.4 Whereas previously one would travel from one cultural area
to another, there is now a physical marker, the Rhine River, creating a clear visual
boundary. The Rhine River bisects the geographical lands that Germany and France
fought over for centuries. The ideas of personal liberty and freedom that vivified the
French Revolution crossed into the cultural boundary lines of Alsace, which is exhibited
by the people living in the area promoting their own rule and culture as Alsace-
Lorrainers. The idea of letting people identify with the nationality of their choice directly
relates to Mary Shelley’s placing the De Lacey’s hut amidst the turmoil of Alsace’s
national identification, exposing the clashing political and cultural boundaries.
Shelley capitalizes on Alsace’s confused historical nationality. History parallels
the characters’ own confused national alignment, French, German, or a cultural identity
that is neither. C. C. Eckhardt’s article “The Alsace-Lorraine Question” published in
1918, he discusses the history of the Alsace. He points out, “It was the French Revolution
that aroused in the Alsace-Lorrainers a French sentiment….Many Alsace-Lorrainers
fought in the French wars in the armies of the Republic and Napoleon” (Eckhardt 433).
the border of Germany is visible across the Rhine River. One can visit the Frankstein winery in Dambach- la Ville, one of the fifty-one designated Grand Cru wineries dating back to the Middle Ages (Francis 1). 4 Conflicting allegiances appear again in 1898. Emile Zola exposes these conflicts with his letter addressing the President of France, Félix Faure. “J’Accuse” addresses the treatment of Richard Dreyfus, an Alsace-born Jew in the French army falsely accused of giving documents to the German government (Zola). On a smaller scale, the political distrust still affects the name of a globally popular dog breed. If you are French Alsatian, you own beautiful Alsatian Shepherds to help with your sheep. If you are an Alsatian with German alliances, or anti French, you own German Shepherds. Even the label in A Field Guide in Color to DOGS by Josef Novotny and Josef Najman shows the breed as “Alsatian (German Shepherd)” (Novotny 50) and then gives a single breed description.
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Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818 when Alsace was under French rule. However,
the creature tells Victor that he discovered the De Laceys and their cottage in Germany
(Shelley 140). This mistaken boundary illustrates the confusion of where or to whom
Alsace belongs. A century after Frankenstein was published, wars, treaties, and
inheritances continued to change the ownership of Alsace and ultimately combined
Alsace with the province of Lorraine. This confusion about political and cultural
boundaries impacts both the characters and the landscape. By placing the origin story into
a politically and culturally blurred area, Shelley leverages the confusion of where does
the creature belong, if at all.
The frame’s center confirms the multinational influences the creature experiences.
Shelley intentionally uses a location that culturally claims more than one nationality
consequently highlighting the different nationalities of the De Laceys, Saphie and the
creature:
Shelley’s efforts to contemplate community independent of family…that
can bind together members in denaturalized groups. In the process of
doing so, she troubles the very borders that enclose community by
relocating them, theoretically speaking, somewhere beyond the immediate
horizon of the familiar attachments and yet short of the global reach of all
humanity. (Bently 9)
Bently distinguishes between community and nationality. A mixed community, such as
the community in the cabin or in Alsace more broadly, is troublesome to national
identity. The characters in Alsace are multinational, yet they create a community out of
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relocated refugees. The creature discovers the displaced nobility in this rural farming
community, and they create a working family unit. With a guide’s help, Saphie arrives
later. The De Laceys are French, and Saphie is an Arab Christian from Turkey. A
German nationality can be assigned to the creature since he was assembled in Ingolstadt
from German body parts. To forge this denaturalized group into a family dynamic that
works, their known nationalism must be removed and not emphasized. Alsace’s idealized
space provides a safe Edenic haven for the multinational and multicultural inhabitants as
long as they remain in the safety of the non-aligned unknown.
Nevertheless, the analogy of Alsace to Eden fails. Eden, as a concept, has no
overlapping boundaries and no conflicting cultural influences. The representation of Eden
can be found in rural or farming locations in literature, yet those locations stay mythical
and unnamed. Eden represents an origin story for mankind. In comparison, in Shelley’s
Alsace, there is no origin story. All of the characters in this region’s story come from
somewhere else, France, Germany, or Turkey. They were not created in Alsace; they
have all fled from somewhere else to Alsace. While Eden had one boundary – do not eat
of the tree of knowledge- Alsace is created out of contested boundaries. Whereas Adam
and Eve were provided for in Eden, the De Laceys struggle to exist in Alsace; political
refugees are ill equipped to be farmers. They have no guidance, no manna from heaven
provided on the ground every morning. The strongest tie to an idealized Eden is a
protected space where the creature becomes enlightened. However, the creature is only
allowed to be an invisible part of the community learning in secret. Once the idealized
Eden is destroyed, one cannot return to it.
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Shelley captures the political and cultural conflicts of Alsace, which historically
claims both French and German ownership, and aligns that heritage with her characters’
backgrounds. The people living here promote their own rule and culture as Alsace-
Lorrainers. The De Laceys, however, have no national ties. They are political refugees
who have fled west from Paris. They create their own cultural identity and parallel the
allegiance of Alsace- Lorrainers to their own cultural identity. The creature runs east
from his creator in Ingolstadt into the rural farmland of Alsace. Even in his education, the
creature exhibits the Germanic cultural experience of Bildung, the process of personal
and cultural development unified with a sense of self. He takes shelter in the covered
woodshed of the De Lacey family farm. Both parties meet in Alsace, the contested anchor
of the framed narrative. The creature receives his education in a location that consists of
as many different pieces as he is. The rural cabin becomes a single forged culture for the
creature. The creature feels the most comfort and the strongest connection in an area
without political stability or known boundaries.
The familial members share bonds with each other, yet they have no shared bond
to the setting. All have arrived either by chance, through escape, or because they have
nowhere else to run. They live in a forgotten cabin in the rural farmland of Alsace, yet
sorely lack a farmer’s connection to the land. Garrard discusses: “The possibility of
coming to dwell on the earth in a relation of duty and responsibility. ‘Dwelling’ is not a
transient state; rather, it implies the long-term imbrication of humans in a landscape of
memory, ancestry and death, of ritual, life and work” (Garrard 117). Dwelling is more
than the location of where you sleep. Dwelling is the very act of being part of the area’s
36
cultural history on an ongoing basis. There is a duty and responsibility to the land, and to
the culture, as well as to the people to whom one bonds. A farmer cares for his land, the
livestock on the land, and the people in his community. As an illustration, modern day
Amish farmers connect with the land for crop plantings and the well being of livestock
and create a community of support as demonstrated in a barn raising. Similarly, the
members of the cabin have created a closed community populated solely by the members
inside.
While the De Lacey family corresponds to the Alsace countryside, the creature
represents the outside national force imposing itself on the agrarian space. In his story,
the creature first crafts Alsace as an idealized Eden. However, the creature’s allegory to
Eden breaks down in several areas. Whereas Eden had no imbricated history and no
influence from previous generations, Alsace is rich in layered memories. The De Lacey’s
community is compelled to fail, since it is a transient community unable to honor the duty
and responsibilities of a long term resident. They are transients not connected to the land,
and they struggle in the agrarian culture. Even though the creature is not accepted into the
De Lacey home, the fruit of the creature’s labor is accepted as a miracle, a gift from God,
a parallel to the manna that was left for Adam and Eve. The duty of Adam and Eve was
to keep the garden, a job the De Laceys struggle with. They nearly starve to death until
they receive the creature’s help. However, accepting the creature would also mean
accepting an outside Germanic force into their agrarian space.
Shelley uses the fluid boundaries of Alsace to heighten the bonds of the people
within the cabin. Exiles, run-aways, political escapees, and invisible creatures can all live
37
in peace; however, even within the cabin’s community, the creature must stay invisible.
He laments his role as an unseen, unknown member: “I was shut out from intercourse
with them, except through means which I obtained by stealth, when I was unseen and
unknown, and which rather increased than satisfied the desire I had of becoming one
among my fellows” (Shelley 136). The creature receives a multicultural education while
secretly observing the De Laceys. The creature desires to become a known member of the
De Lacey’s community, yet he is a complete outsider to any human community. The
creature occupies the conflicted position of insider and outsider simultaneously. The
creature’s invisible status protects him as an unknown and non-aligned member. His
desire to become visible changes his status. Once the creature makes himself visible, the
outside national boundaries once again encroach upon the cabin members.
The De Lacey’s family dynamic does not escape Alsace’s political influence.
Alsace has been politically unstable with different national governments claiming and
governing it. Despite these conflicting allegiances, Alsace still retains a local culture and
community that can parallel the family structure. The De Laceys choose whom they want
to allow into their family, or culture:
The De Laceys take on the character of closed political communities,
because, among other things, they undertake the political activity—
perhaps the fundamental activity that politics perform—of making
decisions about the allocation of memberships and the rights and
protections that go with it. (Bently 8)
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The family unit acts as a small political community. The family has ultimate control over
who joins, who is allowed in, and how much the family gives and protects a new
member. Both the creature and Saphie join the De Laceys after the family establishes
their farmhouse community. The creature remains a hidden contributor to the family unit
while Saphie is welcomed inside. While Saphie gains knowledge through direct
education, the creature learns through his secret observations. The creature educates
himself through his own reasoning with no outside influences. Once the creature enacts
his plan to be known, the community reacts to his plea for membership. After listening to
the creature’s tale of woe, the Father is willing to include the creature in a broad
unspecified community. The Father is blind and unable to react to the creature’s physical
presence, which can be aligned to his German body parts. Felix rejects the creature on
sight without hearing any of the creature’s argument to become a community member.
The creature is denied entry into the family structure, to sit at the table or even socialize
with the other members. There is no protection offered, no shelter, no food, and no
humanity. The French-aligned Felix De Lacey has barred the German-aligned creature
from being part of the community.
The German-aligned creature symbolizes the placement of value from the De
Lacey’s community. He is a valuable member of the community, if only to reduce the
physical demands on Felix. A full woodshed, the benefit of the value he provides, allows
other work to be done, namely, cultivating the garden. But once visible, the creature
becomes a dangerous weed that must be removed. Greg Garrard expands the analogy of a
weed: “ ‘Weed’ is not a botanical classification, it merely denotes the wrong kind of plant
39
in the wrong place. Eliminating weeds is obviously a ‘problem in gardening, but defining
weeds in the first place requires a cultural, not horticulture analysis” (Garrard 6).
According to this definition, a rose in the middle of a wheat field would be a very pretty
weed. Most people see weeds as the sickness in the ordered garden, such as a dandelion,
something that needs to be removed before it damages the aesthetics, reproduces, or
damages the productivity of the garden. The labeling of something as a weed, and who
makes that declaration reflects a cultural bias against the out of place plant. The creature
is accepted as part of the community as long as he is invisible and not recognized for
being different, Germanic aligned, or the wrong kind of member. Once the creature
becomes visible to Felix, Felix immediately begins to remove the weed from the
community’s cultural garden.
The innermost frame examines the De Lacey’s political exile from Paris and the
effects of the Alsace countryside on the family. Mary Shelley subtly weaves the
collective knowledge of Alsace’s political and cultural turmoil into the center of
Frankenstein. Political refugees flee to an idealized agrarian space only to recreate the
political system of cultural oppression they escaped. The German national is not welcome
in the French-aligned farmland. In contrast, Alsace represents an Eden to the creature, an
idealized place where he matures. It is not a broken commandment that exiles the
creature, but Felix’s reaction to the creature that removes him from the garden. Felix
cannot see past the monstrous image, the Germanic features and Germanic culture of the
creature. Felix only sees a weed that must be removed from the garden. Alsace is far from
a perfect garden. The cross loyalties from centuries of national and cultural divisions
40
cannot be removed from the actions of the characters who are affected by their location.
Mary Shelley places her compromised Eden in a post revolution Napoleonic France
where the characters epitomize the violations of political and cultural boundaries.
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CONCLUSION
Mary Shelley uses locations and landscapes in her novel to highlight the political
and cultural discussions happening around her in the early 1800s. Although there are
other locations mentioned and even experienced in Frankenstein, the physical settings
that Shelley chose for storytelling, the polar ice, Montanvert, and Alsace, are unique. She
places Walton, Victor and the creature in storytelling locations to expose the political and
cultural conflicts and the monstrous effect of unchecked ambition. Shelley uses her
storytellers to draw attention to physical boundary violations. The locations offer
consistent though sometimes silent testimony to historical, political, and cultural events
that have happened in and around the specific settings. While Victor’s endeavor to create
life exposes the ethical boundaries crossed by science, the blurring of boundaries reaches
beyond scientific ethics. The creature represents not only the crossing of scientific
boundaries, but also the violation of physical and cultural boundaries.
Examining Frankenstein though the lens of Eco-critism allows the modern day
reader to fully understand the currents and influences of location. Garrard recognizes the
importance of understanding the broad range of influences from location and landscape:
As Eco-critics seek to offer a truly transformative discourse, enabling us to
analyze and criticize the world in which we live, attention is increasingly
given to the broad range of cultural processes and products in which, and
through which, the complex negotiations of nature and culture take place.
42
Indeed, the widest definition of the subject of ecocriticism is the study of
the relationship of the human and non-human. (Garrard 5)
The relationship of the humans Walter, Victor, and the De Laceys with each other and
with the non-human, the creature, has been studied in many forms and through many
lenses. Applying an Eco-critical lens allows inclusion of the landscape as a non-human
element. The Eco-Critical consideration of a specific location weaves cultural, political,
and natural forces into a dynamic web. The collision of cultural and political issues
exposes the artificiality of borders drawn on a map. Dividing nations by maps or even by
physical landmarks, such as the Rhine River, does not change the locations’ influence on
Shelley’s characters. They are carefully placed in specific locations to highlight her
characters’ actions and the broader theme of crossing political and cultural boundaries.
Shelley pushes the boundaries to include political identities through the blurring
of national and cultural identity. What started as The French Revolution’s idealized
philosophy, epitomized by Rousseau’s philosophy, which was supported by Shelley’s
parents becomes the reality of the Reign of Terror’s numerous violations, which spawned
the Napoleonic Wars and exposed the danger of boundary crossing without moral or
ethical guidance. The Napoleonic Wars affected all of Europe causing new national
boundaries to overlap cultural boundaries and creating the physical space Shelley
explores.
The novel begins in the frozen polar ice with Victor and Walton, and it ends in the
same location with Victor, Walton and the creature. The polar ice’s vast emptiness allows
for contemplation of not just the landscape, but also the conscience. The polar ice lays
43
bare the results of pushing boundaries, using the specter of the failed Napoleon to add
heft. Victor and the creature are frozen in place while Walton has the ability to break
away from the death-hold of the ice. Victor and Walton both push scientific boundaries;
however, the political boundaries of the ice and the direct analogy to Napoleon’s
devastating loss on the frozen Russian landscape highlight the cost of violating political
boundaries. The loss of life Napoleon’s army suffered in the snowy icy wasteland
foretells the possible result of Walter’s decision to carry on with his quest. At the end of
the novel, Victor and the creature are lost in the inhumane landscape; both succumb to
the boundaries they have violated. Only Walton, the framing storyteller in the polar ice,
has the ability to recover his humanity, but only if he learns from Victor’s tale of woe and
retreats from the harsh setting and certain destruction awaiting him.
The divine space of Montanvert allows for the negotiations between creator and
creation. The intersecting relationship of mountains and divinity creates a liminal space, a
union of the relationships completely controlled by the sublime. Victor, as the storyteller
in this location, has sought out the effect of the sublime in order to elevate his soul.
Contrarily, the sublime space elevates the creature into a position of power above the
human who had tried to play god. On the sublime-controlled mountaintop, the confused
authoritative roles allow the created to demand action from the creator. Victor succumbs
to the creature’s argument, and he ventures to create life again, echoing the Promethean
role of life-giver. Victor reconciles with his creature inside of the sublime-buffered
confessional space, the mountain top union of boundaries. However, Victor has forgotten
the punishment Zeus dealt Prometheus for overreaching. Once outside of the liminal
44
space and the control of the sublime, the collisions of spiritual and physical boundaries
once again separate Victor from his creature.
Cultural and political boundaries intertwine in Alsace. The creature relates the
story of his self-formation. The De Laceys, French political and judicial exiles, create a
temporary safe space in the politically and culturally charged Alsace farmland to rebuild
their community and reinforce who can belong. Forged through the analogies to Eden,
such as calling his hovel “a paradise” (Shelley 125), the creature experiences personal
and cultural maturation. The creature, however, is not Adam, blessed with a kind and
loving creator, but an abandoned creature learning in secret by spying into the De
Lacey’s home. Ultimately, it is not a violation of God’s boundary that removes the
creature from his idealized Eden, but the ingrained cultural reaction of Felix to the
aberration in the French-aligned family community, a weed to remove from the garden.
The conflicting nationalities of the De Laceys and the creature reflect the absorbed
heritage left behind from both German and French rule.
These complex negotiations of location and place enhance our understanding of
the novel’s cultural effect. Many Romantic writers were highly influenced by the French
Revolution. Shelley shared those influences; however, the Reign of Terror that gave rise
to Napoleon illustrated the perversion of ideals without conscious action. Shelley creates
a character, Walton, with an opportunity to see the exposed moral and ethical dilemma of
Victor, and she gives Walter a choice to be different. Mary Shelley forces the reader to
observe through Walton the need to change course if the goal comes at the expense of
humanity, and the ability to understand and evaluate when the cost is too high.
45
At the novel’s end, Shelley abruptly leaves the reader alone on the ice. Victor is
dead. Walton witnesses the creature’s farewell speech, a promise of suicide by funeral
pyre. The entire last paragraph reads: “He sprung from the cabin-window, as he said this,
upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves,
and lost in darkness and distance” (Shelley 221). The creature has completed his
vengeance on his creator, so he disappears into the distance, traveling in the opposite
direction of Walton and his ship. The final location of the polar ice envelopes the
creature. It is not the ice that obscures vision, but darkness. Darkness protects humanity
from the unknown, the funeral pyre of the creature and the unknown destruction that
would be looming over Walton if he had continued pursuing his quest. Walton abandons
his quest in order to save himself and his crew, and he returns to port. Mary Shelley
leaves the future of Walton open to the reader. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not a
simple horror story, but a warning to show the hazards incurred by violating boundaries.
Frankenstein offers a pointed commentary on the dangers of ignoring the influence of
political and cultural boundaries, a powerful legacy for our modern day lives. Without
knowing the affecting influences, the violations of boundaries will continue to happen
whether those boundaries are the ethical boundaries of science and education, or the more
elusive boundaries of politics and culture.
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