Homosexual Calm: Pausing to Listen to Queer Shame in Frankenstein

Scholars tend to consider panic the typical nineteenth-century male response to queerness, exemplified in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Nearly all men in the tale respond to Frankenstein’s and the Creature’s queerness with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “homosexual panic,” or the fear of associating with the non-heteronormative. What has received less critical attention is Shelley’s narration of a calmer response to queerness—quiet listening. Robert Walton, the captain whose voice begins and ends the narrative, responds to Frankenstein’s and the Creature’s queerness not by panicking, but by listening. We might call his reaction to queerness not homosexual panic but homosexual calm. Walton stands as Shelley’s quiet correction of homosexual panic at its historical inception. Queerness is fundamentally, as the Creature tells Walton, an expression of “excellent qualities” and “the majesty of goodness.” Walton’s Arctic discovery is this noble language for queerness that he gains through his patience to sit through the novel and listen. Queer listening is Shelley’s proposition to heal both homophobia and the heteropatriarchy which produces it.