Custody Battles: Reproducing Knowledge about Frankenstein

The combined forces of deconstruction, reader-response theory, and publications from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University have dislodged forever the once firmly held view that the “meaning” of a text is fixed and transhistorically available to the (properly trained) reader. Save for the occasional unredeemed formalist, most scholars would agree with the editors of the British journal Literature and History that texts are “produced not just once, but time and again for each succeeding generation,” which makes “its own sense of the text for its own purposes.” ¹ Indeed, one reason certain texts become “canonical” may be their plasticity, their capacity for adaptation to the complex, often bifurcated needs and sensibilities of successive generations of readers. Frankenstein is a case in point, as Paul O’Flinn observes: “Mary Shelley’s monster, having resisted his creator’s attempts to eliminate him in the book, is able to reproduce himself with the variety and fertility that Frankenstein had feared. Apart from steady sales in Penguin, Everyman and OUP editions, there have been over a hundred film adaptations and there have been the Charles Addams cartoons in the New Yorker . . . . in South Africa in 1955 the work was banned as indecent and objectionable.” ² “There is no such thing as Frankenstein,” O’Flinn concludes; “there are only Frankensteins, as the text is ceaselessly rewritten, reproduced, refilmed and redesigned” (197). When O’Flinn asks how “alteration and realignment” of a text are effected throughout history, he proposes “the operations of criticism” and “the unfolding of history itself” as two distinct and separable agents of change (197). It is possible, however, to use recent criticism of Frankenstein to demonstrate that “the operations of criticism” are profoundly affected by “the unfolding of history.”

O’Flinn refers to recent feminist criticism of Frankenstein as an example of the “operations of criticism” that contribute to historical shifts in a text’s meaning, without asking why a criticism that demonstrates that Frankenstein “articulate[s] elements of woman’s experience of patriarchy, the family and the trauma of giving birth” should have appeared when it did and not before (197). I suggest that this meaning of Shelley’s text was not publishable before the emergence of a constellation of political, social, cultural, and institutional conditions in the mid-1970s. Specifically, a reading of the novel that focused on its implications for biological reproduction was unlikely until procreation had become an issue of concern to an increasingly numerous, articulate, and politically conscious body of women and until sufficient numbers of those women had entered the academy as feminist scholars. It was, not coincidentally, in the 1970s that Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, with its central yet critically silenced themes of the horrors of birthing and the costs of mothering, was “rediscovered”—by feminist scholars.

Feminist criticism of Frankenstein has caused anxiety to some male critics. It has also revealed anxieties of its own. In this essay, I will be arguing that as recent criticism of Frankenstein by men and women, feminists and nonfeminists, contests the right to produce knowledge about a major text of English romanticism, it manifests anxieties that eerily reflect the text’s anxieties about gender and procreation. In order to develop this argument, I begin with a brief summary of what may be said to comprise the scholarly Establishment’s understanding of what “feminists” think about Frankenstein, based on a relatively select group of essays published in prestigious journals (Critical Inquiry, diacritics, New Literary History, and PMLA) that are cited repeatedly by other critics of the novel. ³ I then entertain some speculations about what this apparently academic affair has to do with white middle-class American women’s anxieties about biological reproduction. And I conclude by pondering the implications, for cultural history, of the most recent turn in feminist criticism of Frankenstein.

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In 1965, Harold Bloom characterized Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a primer to the really significant literature of the period: “What makes Frankenstein an important book, though it is only a strong, flawed novel with frequent clumsiness in its narrative and characterization, is that it contains one...