In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Family, Humanity, Polity:Theorizing the Basis and Boundaries of Political Community in Frankenstein
  • Colene Bentley

When Victor Frankenstein comes face to face with his creature on the peaks of Montanvert, he is revolted at the sight of the monster and challenges him to mortal combat. "Be calm!" replies the monster as Victor advances, "I entreat you to hear me, before you give vent to your hatred on my devoted head."1 The creature addresses Frankenstein, saying, "I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee. I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me." "Oh, Frankenstein," the monster continues, "[B]e not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due" (128). The creature explains that his hideous physique, for which Frankenstein is responsible, has made him a social outcast and that he longs for the company of others. But Frankenstein rejects the creature's pleas, saying, "Begone! I will not hear you. There can be no community between you and me; we are enemies" (128). As Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein unfolds, Victor is proved to be both right and wrong in his conjectures about community with the creature. He is right in believing that so long as monster and man are sworn "enemies" and hold nothing in common, they cannot possibly inhabit a shared social union. But Victor is wrong to think that coming up with things to hold in common is an insurmountable task. He in fact does hear the monster's story, and upon its completion creature and creator enter into a compact that obliges Victor to assemble a female monster. On the basis of the compact they forge, monster and man are able to reimagine the nature of their affiliation with each other. Their agreement renders them no longer "enemies" but individuals who commit themselves to each other for the foreseeable future. In this crucial scene on Montanvert, Shelley's protagonists remake their world out of necessity and through a process of agreement making. [End Page 325]

Frankenstein is a novel that is deeply interested in a particular kind of social union, namely, the political community. Written in 1818 and in the moment between revolution and reform, Shelley's novel invokes contemporary discussions and theorizations of political community. At the turn of the century, writers like Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, and Thomas Paine variously modeled political relations on a network of rights, duties, and common conceptions of time. Burke and Bentham, for example, proposed that the identity of the polity was tied to its constitutional form. In vastly different ways they looked to the British constitution to articulate the rights and duties that define the space of political membership and distinguish the scope of the polity from the universalism of all humankind that underwrote natural rights doctrines such as Paine's. Burke and Paine, for their part, argued over the temporal limits of the political community and the extent to which contemporary persons are obligated to historical or future generations. Debate over the polity's identity and boundedness and how to represent them resonated throughout the period's philosophical, anthropological, and literary reflections on social life. In Frankenstein Shelley engages with these debates by depicting characters who endeavor, like the monster, to attach themselves to others. Victor's declaration on Montanvert that "there can be no community" among "enemies" voices Shelley's belief that enmity and alienation are untenable conditions of being for people. It also draws attention to the novel's preoccupation with building new communities on new terms. From Walton to Victor, Felix, Safie, and the monster, Shelley's characters lament their singularity and long for companionship. Thus the principal task the novel sets for its characters is the project of community building, that is, of specifying the basis and boundaries of shared life. Victor, the monster, and the De Laceys must determine how—and on what grounds—they will commit themselves to one another now and over the long haul. At Montanvert the novel poses...

pdf