The soul yearns, with inexpressible longings, for the society of its like. Because the public safety unwillingly commands the confinement of an offender, must he for that reason never light up his countenance with a smile? Who can tell the sufferings of him who is condemned to uninterrupted solitude? Who can tell that this is not, to the majority of mankind, the bitterest torment that human ingenuity can inflict?
William Godwin, Political Justice 228-29.
William Godwin’s radical text Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness (1793) highlights the importance of society and social interaction for the overall health and happiness of an individual. This section of Political Justice begins by stating that individuals are social animals and a certain balance is needed between society and solitude to reap the advantages of both.
For about the past six months, the entire world has experienced the unprecedented circumstance of social distancing due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The lockdown has turned our daily realities upside down and within a few weeks of the shutdown, the effect of isolation and the absence of physical interaction with our peers slowly crept up on our subconscious. Moreover, at the end of month of May the world was shocked by the brutal murder of George Floyd that brought the Black Lives Matter campaign to the forefront in the global media. The Black Lives Matter global network that started to organize about four years[1] ago is a call to justice against the law enforcement authorities and vigilantes that commit violence against Black communities. As major cities in the United States erupted with protests as a call to justice against the state violence against Black communities, we became conscious of another kind of isolation ─ an isolation that stems from intentional marginalization and oppression of communities, which forces them into a state of worthlessness with daily experiences of desperation.
The murder of George Floyd amidst an on-going pandemic sheds a new light on the cultural and literary significance of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The way the narrative resonates with our contemporary events two hundred years later is scary, but also interrogates the condition of our current society and how it deals with systemic racism.
What we observe in Shelley’s novel predominantly is isolation: social isolation of an individual and then their reaction to the oppression in the form of revolutionary violence. Shelley’s Frankenstein is an apt depiction of disasters stemming from isolation. In her novel, she conveys that isolation can have powerful consequences whether chosen, begrudgingly adopted, or more importantly if inflicted upon someone. Victor Frankenstein’s inability to confess the truth about his scientific creation (i.e. the monster), and the fear of its hideous appearance which leads him to abandon it in an unfamiliar world, are manifested in silent oppression and injustice.
Prolonged effects of physical isolation can have disastrous effects on an individual psychological condition. Within a few months of lockdown governments and the public observed mounting rates of anxiety and a mental health crisis around the world. In a recent article, “This is not a normal Mental-Health Disaster,” Jacob Stern provides a survey of the rising statistics of anxiety and PTSD related cases in the on-going aftermath of the pandemic, specifically in the Unites States. This aftermath involves everyone, from immediate loved ones of the victims, health-care workers, and frontline workers to everyone dealing with work and education at home. In the article, Stern examines the unpredictable nature of a pandemic in comparison to a natural disaster. During a pandemic there is no sense of certainty as there is no clear boundary and end in sight. Therefore, the anxiety and depression it produces are extraordinary in nature (Stern “Not a Normal”).
Stern includes the comments of the longtime PTSD researcher Joe Ruzek at Stanford University and Palo Alto University, who describes this condition as having “no safe zones.”
This idea of having no safe zone is poignantly depicted by Shelley in the monster’s conditions of living and survival. He essentially lives in hiding and his disastrous interaction with the real world and other people inflicts upon him constant fear and isolation:
I had hardly placed my foot within the door, before the children shrieked, and one of the women fainted. The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me, until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kind of missel weapons, I escaped to the open country, and fearfully took refuge in a low hovel…” (124)
This image of panic and commotion also resonates with the panic induced by the initial spread of the virus within communities globally. The monster’s act of escape into his hovel and his hiding becomes a necessity for his survival, just as physical distancing has become a necessity for us as we hide from the virus in our homes.
In the article, Stern directly relates the lack of physical and spatial safety to a lack of temporal safety: “From spatial uncertainty comes temporal uncertainty. If we can’t know where we are safe, then we can’t know when we are safe” (Stern). Therefore, the monster’s process of continual hiding also makes him aware of his transient and unacknowledged existence.
The monster’s state of physical isolation is deeply intertwined with the formation of his identity. His attempts to free himself from his misery and isolation involve his intense and deep observation of his environment, which includes his admiration of and affinity with the De Lacey family. Furthermore, he educates himself by listening to Felix’s narration of Volney’s Ruins of Empires and by reading the three books that he discovers in the leather portmanteau: Plutarch Lives, Paradise Lost and the Sorrows of Werter. His accomplishment is a proof of his intellectual abilities and he applies this learning to voice his sorrows to Victor and make demands for justice and freedom. However, his attempts to free himself, which include interaction with the outer world and verbal negotiations with Victor to create a female counterpart to remedy his isolation, all succumb to failure. This continual failure fuels his sense of desperation and comes out as revenge specifically against his creator, Victor.
Shelley places the roots of this revenge in the social conditions of abandonment, poverty, isolation, and hunger. The monster is a victim of all of these, and thus Shelley’s exploration of revolutionary violence is effective and complex. These themes are also an important reason that the novel resonates with the Black Lives Matter campaign, as a civil rights movement that demands justice for individuals belonging to communities who have been systematically oppressed and deprived of material resources to strengthen their identities. This sentiment is also expressed by Dr. Robin D.G Kelley in his recent article, “What kind of Society Values Property over Black Lives?” In his article, Kelley acutely examines the rhetoric of the media and how it undermines the voice of justice and revolution by focusing on the elements of looting and destruction. He begins his article by conveying a common and prominent question asked about the protests: “Why are they looting?” Kelley answers this question by stating: “It’s asked every time protests against police violence erupt into civil unrest. We know the answers by now: Poverty, anger, age, rage and a sense of helplessness.” In the first week of June, as cities across US saw massive protests, the news also began covering the accompanying damage to property and looting in these cities.
This aspect of damage and violence is crucial because media coverage begins to undermine the impetus of a civil rights movement that in itself is against violence and oppression in the first place. In my opinion, this process of deflection by the media is a core factor or hurdle in the progress of social reform. Kelley also emphasizes this point by saying that this kind of media strategy deflects the public’s attention from the core problem that brought people to the streets: “The police keep killing us with impunity. Instead, once the burning and looting start, the media often shifts to the futility of ‘violence’ as a legitimate path to justice. Crime becomes the story. Riots, we are told, cause harm by foreclosing constructive solutions.” In Kelley’s opinion, such kinds of rebellions have done more than just shed light on American racism; “they have also spawned investigations and limited reforms when traditional appeals have failed.” What we can understand from Kelley’s examination is the complex nature of these public protests and their necessity and benefit for the betterment of society. On the other hand, the destructive elements accompanying these protests are ultimately used by the forces of oppression as a reason to stifle the voice of justice. Likewise, this double aspect of rebellion and civil unrest is depicted by Shelley in the monster’s acts of revenge.
The monster’s violence in Frankenstein is a form of self-expression and agency in opposition to Victor’s silence. Through Victor’s character Shelley shows us the trajectory of a personal disaster turning into a bigger social and moral disaster. Her novel gives us a glimpse of her perspective on revolutionary violence that stands alongside her father William Godwin’s ideologies of moral and political justice as well as her husband Percy Shelley’s advocacy of non-violent resistance in his works like Queen Mab, The Mask of Anarchy, and Prometheus Unbound. Hence, her novel becomes a dialogue with those ideas, which had a profound effect on her life as well as her development as a writer and a thinker.
Thus, in a time of an on-going pandemic Shelley’s novel forces us to think about the constructive ways through which we can help our immediate community and society at large in the face of ongoing injustice. The Black Lives Matter campaign has a strong and persistent online presence, but in the month of June we witnessed a staggering number of physical protests around North America. The public came out in person to support the movement despite the pandemic. So what does this say to us about the actual nature of revolution? Are physical presence and action necessary when print and verbal efforts fail?
The conclusion of Shelley’s novel does not provide us with any consolation but rather an unsettling circumstance. In the final scene we witness the monster lament the death of his creator, which also serves as a declaration of self-imposed exile and isolation:
I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness. (220)
The monster’s expression of remorse is significant because he is not only grieving the loss of his creator, but more importantly of the only individual aware of his existence, and his connection to the entirety of mankind. Thus, Victor’s death is also the loss of the monster’s self-identity which up until now has been barely intact due Victor’s oppressive silence and fear of his own ambitious scientific creation. Victor’s death does not offer the monster the freedom he has been seeking the entire narrative, but instead serves as the final nail in the coffin, and leads to a pitiful fate of ultimate loneliness and eventual death, whenever that may be.
Works Cited
Godwin, William. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness. In Shelley 223-238.
Kelley, Robin D.G. “What Kind of Society Values Property Over Black Lives?” The New York Times, 18 June 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/opinion/george-floyd-protests-looting.html.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. Edited by Kathleen Dorothy Scherf and David Lorne Macdonald, Broadview Press, 2012.
Stern, Jacob. “This Is Not a Normal Mental-Health Disaster.” The Atlantic, 7 July 2020, www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/coronavirus-special-mental-health-disaster/613510/.
