FRANKENSTEIN

If Faust will not serve as a modern filicidal touchstone, we look elsewhere and find such a benchmark in a rather unlikely place, hidden away in the original version of one of the most famous and frequently re-told of all modern stories: Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851)

Shelley's "monster novel," itself a re-telling of one of humanity's oldest myths, that of the creation of life, turns out to contain the most explicit and detailed representation of the filicidal politics of the patriarchal family that we have available. It is probably no accident that the creator of the definitive depiction of filicidal reality behind modern patriarchal behavior was a woman. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, men had yielded so nearly totally to the seductive pursuit of the rewards for well-practiced control--money, power, and prestige--that we had almost completely lost touch with our humanity.

Shelley, her husband, Percy, and Byron spent a long, somewhat dreary summer in Switzerland in 1816. As Shelley tells the story in her introduction to Frankenstein, there had been much talk in the little group concerning the supernatural, the origin of life, and the recent discoveries in the use of electricity. They had also been reading various German ghost stories. At length they decided on a competition. Each was to compose a supernatural story of some kind for the entertainment of the others. They set to work, but Byron and Percy quickly tired of such an unworthy application of their Olympian talents and turned back to the loftier pursuits of poetry. Mary persevered. For several months she persevered. Between caring for her infant son and her grown-up poet-husband, the writing down of Frankenstein was a matter of a moment stolen here and another stolen there. The novel was finished and sent off to a London publisher who brought it out in 1818. It was an immediate success and has remained popular ever since as a classic of "horror fiction." And of course the fame of the book has been compounded many times by innumerable stage, movie, and television adaptations.

Why should this rather simple horror story have intrigued so many for so long? For one thing, Frankenstein is a good story well-told. With a sure economy of words (the novel runs to only some 200 pages), which certain more famous male persons close to her might have done well to emulate, Shelley gave the handful of central characters a depth and richness which a long series of adapters have neither matched nor exhausted. Even with its somewhat archaic rhetoric, its occasionally creaking plot, its excess of sentiment, the novel still comes off extraordinarily well. The frequently ill-guided excisions, abbreviations, and additions to which generations of would-be adapters have resorted only show that Shelley understood the story far better than they--and perhaps the rest of us as well.

But no matter how well-written, a novel achieves the kind of enduring popularity which Frankenstein has enjoyed only if it strikes a strong, resonant chord in large numbers of readers. What chord is it this novel has continued to strike for over a century and a half? There are at least two, one obvious and one not so obvious.

The obvious: Frankenstein was the first novel to exploit and explore successfully our fascination with the new god, Science, its attendant promises and dangers. The book bears the subtitle: The Modern Prometheus. Victor Frankenstein is just that, a new Prometheus in the form of the scientist who brings fire--the spark of life--to humanity by creating life itself. As Shelley unfolds the story she reveals to us the irony in the subtitle and thus the irony in science itself. With the best and noblest of intentions Frankenstein sets out to create another human being. He speaks of his task as a means of conquering death and the debilitating effects of various diseases, but he winds up creating Death itself as his creation, a monster of great strength and equally great rage, turns on him and his family. Where the mythological Prometheus was a savior of humanity, this new Prometheus becomes a destroyer of humanity, or at least of Victor's familial portion of humanity. At the same time that the novel appeals to our rather childish belief in the omnipotence of science, it also plays on our fear and distrust of such a potent "god". Shelley thus created the basic formula used with great success and profit by countless imitators ever since. We are both fascinated and frightened by the scientist and by the scientist's creations.

The less obvious chord Frankenstein strikes is filicidal. Shelley has here given us a woman's report on how filicidal, patriarchal humanity looked in the early nineteenth century. It is not a pretty picture, nor is it, it turns out, a very dated one. We see our modern selves, particularly our masculine selves, reflected with an accuracy and a realism often lacking in male-authored modern myths. The novel is in effect a slave's barely disguised report on the real behavior of the master-half of the race. That behavior stands in stark contrast to the pretended behavior of the masters as one generally finds it described in their own self-serving stories about themselves.

Victor Frankenstein, a spoiled and pampered son of an upper-class Swiss family, compulsively driven to solve the mystery of life, creates another male, a "son". He is therefore the perfect filicidal father. He does not need a woman to create his son. (Compare the similar behavior of the Judeo-Christian God in Eden.) At the moment of animation of his creation, Victor's enthusiasm ("love") changes to revulsion and in a dreadful proto-scene he rejects his "son" as a monster and flees in terror. The son, whose mind is initially as unformed and open as that of an infant is left to stumble about the countryside, desperately seeking love but engendering fear and violence in everyone he encounters. When father and son at last meet again, there is still hope. The son is not yet totally committed to a life of violent control. If Victor could find it in himself to show any emotion besides terror and revulsion, the son might learn that some kind of masculine behavior other than that of violent control is possible. Victor does not. In fact he betrays what little trust his son has in him. The son then turns to vengeful murder, seeking out the members of Victor's family, and finally Victor himself. Father and son pursue one another across the world until they finally achieve the ultimate filicidal success--mutual self-destruction.

We think we know the story so well. Just as the Greeks thought they knew the story of Oedipus quite well: the scientist alone in his laboratory, face to face with the biggest mother of them all. Mother Nature. Note, in passing, how the Japanese reduced the story to its essence. In the Godzilia re-tellings, the monster becomes both hero and villain. And all humanity is sacrificed in the bottomless maw of the monster. We who in an earlier age were cannon fodder have in the age of science become monster fodder. We keep on seeing the monster as the Son of Science, failing to realize that Science is us and that scientific behavior is only the latest of our attempts at control. So we dismiss these stories as childish, foolish nonsense, the stuff of dreams and nightmares. Indeed. Since as a society we are in the habit of ignoring our dreams, it is no surprise that we have so easily consigned Mary Shelley's particular dream to the world of irrelevant fantasy.

* * *

Frankenstein: The New Prometheus begins in one of the most desolate parts of the world, the arctic icecap. In a series of letters to his sister in England, Robert Walton describes his expedition to find the northwest passage. In a kind of adumbration of the later development we will see in the main character of the novel, Walton speaks of the compulsion which drove him to mount such a dangerous undertaking. Also, as Frankenstein will later do, he refers to his feeling that some hidden destiny is controlling him. And he feels isolated--he longs for a friend. He, as commander, cannot be friends with the crew of his ship. He must be their captain, their father, he says.

He describes an apparition who appears one day, more dead than alive, stumbling across the ice. Half-frozen, the person is taken aboard and revived. It is Victor Frankenstein in the final pursuit of his monstrous creation--though he doesn't admit this to his rescuers. When they ask how he came to be in such a place he says only that he is there to "seek one who fled me." When Walton tells Victor that they had recently seen another, huge figure moving across the ice, Victor becomes excited but refuses to explain the situation. Days pass and Victor spends all his time on deck, constantly scanning the endless ice. To use Shelley's rhetoric: a bond of affection develops between Walton and Frankenstein. They are after all brothers-in-compulsion. As time passes with no further sign of his creation, Victor sinks into despair.

Walton gently goads him into telling his story. The main body of the novel ensues. Each night after Frankenstein has gone to sleep, Walton records the tale as he remembers it, to send to his sister. Thus the bulk of the novel is a frame-story, a common device for making a fantastic story more believable to the reader. The device also gives the appearance of removing the writer one step from direct responsibility for the story--a fact of more than scholarly interest since the novel eventually turns into a story within a story within a story within a story. Hidden in that fourth level we will find the one fairly well-developed female character in the book, a character who bears more than a little resemblance to Mary Shelley.

So Victor Frankenstein begins his story.

His father married late. His mother was the daughter of his father's recently deceased, poverty-stricken best friend. The couple spent several years traveling. Victor was born in Naples. He describes his childhood as idyllic:

I was their plaything and idol.... During every hour of my infant life I received a lesson of patience, of charity, and of self-control...

Here and throughout the book it is obvious that Victor idolizes his parents as much as he believes they idolized him.

When he was five, the family was vacationing at Lake Como, where his mother befriended one Elizabeth Lavenza, the young orphan daughter of a bankrupt Italian aristocrat. Victor's parents bring Elizabeth home one day and introduce her to Victor as "a pretty present." As soon as Victor saw her, he:

looked upon Elizabeth as mine--mine to protect, love, and cherish All praises bestowed on her I received as made to a possession of my own. We called each other familiarly by the name of cousin. No word, no expression could body forth the kind of relation in which she stood to me--my more than sister, since till death she was to be mine only.

That is the way Victor treats Elizabeth for the course of the book, as his prized possession, and as his better half. She has in abundance all those virtues which he lacks--patience, open affection, consistent tenderness, sensitivity to the effect of one's actions on others. She is in other words the ideal and idealized woman--and wife. Though they do not marry till near the end of the story--and then their union ends quickly and tragically--this chaste pair serves as the ideal, asexual parents of Victor's monster-son. Victor, as the ultimate father, does not need to copulate with woman to create new life. He'd rather do it himself. And he does. But no matter where his studies and the awesome result of his studies take him, Elizabeth is always back in Geneva, keeping the home fires burning for her less-than-husband-but-more-than-brother, whenever he may find it advantageous to return to her. She is the stabilizing, emotionally secure anchor which enables the man in her life to get out there and succeed, always knowing that he has her to come home to.

Victor is no fool. He is aware of the differences between himself and Elizabeth, is aware of her sensitivity and to some extent is aware of his own lack of sensitivity. But, he tells Walton:

While my companion contemplated with a serious and satisfied spirit the magnificent appearances of things, I delighted in investigating their causes... The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine. Curiosity, earnest research to learn the hidden laws of nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they were unfolded to me, are among the earliest sensations I can remember.

With that, the two major themes of the novel are stated. The scientific theme, which will drive Victor to create his own son, and the filicidal theme of compulsive control, which will drive him to destroy his son and himself. His parents saw him as their plaything, but they were traditional parents, meaning filicidal parents. They also saw him as:

their child, the innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by heaven, whom to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in their hands to direct to happiness or misery, according as they fulfilled their duties towards me.

It is precisely that sense of compulsive, controlling parental duty which will be the undoing of both creator and created as the story unfolds. Reflected in that attitude is the inability to allow the child to learn to accept responsibility for its own deeds, which, as we have already seen, lies at the heart of filicidal behavior.

As a youth, Victor has one close friend other than his de facto wife-to-be. He is very drawn to a schoolmate, Henry Clerval, who is on the surface anyway a kind of male version of Elizabeth. Where Victor is driven to find the secrets of nature Henry spends his time contemplating the surface of nature and pondering the "moral relations of things." (Obviously there is also a biographical level to the novel, of which scholars have made much; Victor can be seen as a broadly drawn portrait of Byron. Elizabeth is a reflection of Byron's half-sister with whom he may or may not have had a sexual relationship. Henry of course is Percy Shelley.)

With Henry on stage all the main characters are present--except one. In a masterful bit of plotting, Shelley keeps the last and crucial character offstage until almost halfway through the book. The monster is created long before that but is then set loose in the countryside, and we are left to our own imaginative devices concerning what he may be doing while Victor sits around wringing his (and of course Elizabeth's and Henry's) hands. Anyhow, with these three characters, the stage is set. Victor grows up attracted to science or, as it was known at the time, natural philosophy. He gets off on the wrong track for a while by reading the alchemists. Then he goes to an Austrian university where a few modern chemistry professors set him straight. Victor, it turns out, is a fast learner. Within two years he has assimilated all that the university has to offer. He sets up his own laboratory, in hot pursuit of the secret of life.

During this time he is aware that something is compelling him, but he can do nothing about it. In his first interview at the Austrian university, the professor ignites Victor's young soul with his praise of the wonders of science. Victor recalls the professor’s little speech as "the words of fate":

One by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being, chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose... [to] pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

As men are wont to do, whether seeking a polio vaccine, an atomic bomb, or success in the business world, Victor drives himself mercilessly in his quest for the secret of life. He even stops writing home to Geneva. His efforts pay off. Soon enough he discovers the "cause of generation and life," a discovery which he feels is reward enough for any difficulties caused by his compulsion.

. . with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiry.

Having discovered the secret of life, Victor is faced with the problem of what to do with it. He interrupts his narration here to scold Walton when Walton asks him just what that secret consists of. After a brief sermon from Victor, Walton retreats and the story continues. Victor decides he will make--what else--a man. In fact he will make a man bigger than life. Because of the delicacy of many of the necessary operations, he will construct his man about a third larger than life, which is to say, about eight feet tall.

There we have a detail which opens up some intriguing possibilities. Certainly if one is writing a novel about a monster, one way to make the monster frightening is to make it very large. There may be more involved here. Perhaps Shelley, through Victor, is creating man as he appears to women. To female children Daddy is of course bigger than they are. Even when they grow up he is still bigger. Another possibility is that Shelley is here creating the forbidden childhood memory of Father as the very large, omnipotent filicide who, even when we--whatever our sex--grow up, remains psychologically just enough bigger that he continues to be a threatening and controlling influence in our lives.

Which brings us to the heart of the novel: the first meeting between father and son, the playing out of the proto-scene when Victor animates his creation.

Lobby poster for the 1931 movie.

The scene (Chapter 5) was, significantly, written first. Shelley tells us in the introduction to the novel that after she wrote this scene she was thinking of leaving it in that form as a short piece of fiction. It was at Percy's suggestion that she began turning it into a novel. Also in the introduction she offers some revealing remarks concerning the origin of this central scene. Her little group had been reading aloud German ghost stories. She summarizes the plot of one of these which, in this filicidal context, is rather striking. The story concerned

the sinful founder of his race whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise.

Shelley reproduces the climactic scene:

His gigantic, shadowy form, clothed like the ghost in Hamlet, in complete armor, but with the beaver up, was seen at midnight, by the moon's fitful beams, to advance slowly along the gloomy avenue. The shape was lost beneath the shadow of the castle walls, but soon a gate swung back, a step was heard, the door of the chamber opened, and he advanced to the couch of the blooming youths, cradled in healthy sleep. Eternal sorrow sat upon his face as he bent down and kissed the forehead of the boys, who from that hour withered like flowers snapped from the stalk.

In its way the story is an even more poignant reflection of filicidal reality than is Shelley's novel--this father's very kisses are fatal. One can also wonder at the fact that Shelley for some reason felt it necessary to tell us about having read this particular story. Another indication, perhaps, that she was aware that her novel was concerned with much more than demonstrating the irony and dangers of the new promethean science.

Adding to the evidence that Shelley was working here from the very deep layers of human perception and motivation is the fact that the central scene of Frankenstein came to her as a dream. When the group had decided on its little writing competition, the men at once set about to work on their stories. A fourth person was involved, a certain Dr. Polidori, whose vampire tale would become the model for Bram Stoker's classic Dracula half a century later. Shelley had trouble getting started. She couldn't think of a proper beginning for her story. One night the group had been talking about electricity, specifically about the possible creation of life using electricity. Shelley tells us in her introduction what then happened.

Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw with shut eyes, but acute mental vision--I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful it must be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade, that this thing which had received such imperfect animation would subside into dead matter, and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps: but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.

Thus was the modern myth of Frankenstein's monster born in a hypnogogic vision of Mary Shelley. And thus was born Mary Shelley's attempt to break the ultimate taboo of a filicidal society: to see and report on the reality of the proto-scene. Thus began the saga of Frankenstein, a childish horror story whose ending we are, it seems, still in the process of devising.

The proto-scene of the novel: adult Father, physically mature, wise, skilled, omniscient, meets newborn Son, physically malformed, ignorant, clumsy, naive. Father, who until that moment of face-to-face meeting had been able to keep himself going with an idealized internal picture of Son as beautiful and perfect, is suddenly faced with the reality of this male person whom he has created. When Victor animates his son, the son hardly stirs, but Victor's disillusionment is immediate and total:

His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing, his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips.

One assumes that the nonphysical, transcendent God of the Bible had thought that he had created beautiful children. One assumes that that nonphysical creator found the behavior of those two children as ugly as Victor finds his son's physical appearance. Both creators react in similar ways. Of course it does not befit a patriarchal deity to flee, so God commands his creations to flee. Victor, being something less than a transcendent deity, has to do the fleeing himself, which he does. In passing we should note another similarity to the Eden story. When circumstances later bring Victor and his creation together, Victor's standard response to his son's repeated requests for help is a lofty and Jehovah-like, "Begone!" The lesson being that you should make sure that you are either bigger than your creation or that you so intimidate your creation that it thinks you are bigger.

Victor rejects his son and flees. He goes to an inn near his laboratory in the little Austrian town where he has been working and spends a restless night. He is engulfed by two emotions: terror and despair. One wonders if his despair is not a kind of masculine postpartum depression. He describes his feelings:

. . . dreams that had been my food and pleasant rest for so long a space were now become a hell to me; and the change was so rapid, the overthrow so complete!

Or is he perhaps merely suffering the classic, patriarchal, post-copulative let-down (Victor after all has just come like no man has ever come before him) which men have been complaining about since antiquity?

Are we to see in Victor's response to the sight of his living creation some kind of automatic paternal rejection syndrome? Is it possible that we have been being killed by our parents so long that filicide has become if not an instinct at least a deeply ingrained, learned response to one's child? We learn later, from the monster himself, that at his "birth" he, like any newborn, was perceiving what was going on around him, but only very vaguely. He later tells Victor that he knew he had been left alone (exposed on the mountainside, as it were), but at the time was not aware of the intensity of Victor's feelings. So that Victor, if he could have found it in himself to love, could have repaired much of the emotional damage done by this initial rejection. But Victor, as a man, can behave only as a man behaves, which is to say, filicidally. He is caught in the same trap with Oedipus and Hamlet.

Next morning, following Victor's fear-filled night at the inn, Shelley contrives to bring his old friend, Henry Clerval, into the lobby as Victor is passing through. Henry has come from Geneva to find out why Victor hasn't been writing. Victor's relief is enormous at the sight of his friend, but he doesn't tell Henry what is going on. With Henry to lean on, Victor returns to his laboratory. It is empty. As Victor puts it to Walton: ". . my enemy had indeed fled." His son has been alive less than a day and already is his enemy. Victor is literally wild with joy to find his creation gone. Henry is puzzled but Victor tells him nothing. Victor's emotions are so intense that he collapses and remains in a semi-conscious state for several months.

A year passes during which Victor regains his sanity. He manages to put the monster completely out of his consciousness and represses his former life so completely that he develops a "violent antipathy even to the name" of science. But the relationship between this father and his monstrous son has hardly begun. A letter arrives from Victor's father with the news that Victor's young brother, five-year-old William, has been murdered. Victor returns to Geneva and before going home visits the spot where his father said William was killed. A thunderstorm is raging. As Victor contemplates the spot a flash of lightning reveals an unmistakable, giant figure stealing off through the bushes.

In that moment of terror everything falls into place for Victor. His memories return and he relives his suppressed past. Although he cannot imagine how it came about, he must assume that his own son was the murderer of William. He has a sudden insight into the reality of his life as he perceives that his creation is in fact his own "vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave and forced to destroy all that was dear to me." Several times in the future Victor will come up against this insight, but it is always too much for him to accept. He cannot face the part of himself which seems so creative and clever but which is in reality so destructive. That which he cannot accept, he hates. Notice that this son who is the father, this "vampire" which is Victor's creation, remains nameless--that is perhaps the most serious rejection of all in this patrilinear society where one of the keystones of the masculine personality is the "immortality" gained through the imposition of one's name on one's wife and children. Victor cannot recognize his son's paternity. There is an ironic bit of folk wisdom in the fact that the name "Frankenstein" is now popularly understood to refer to the monster-son and not to the father.

In despair Victor returns to his mourning family. The plot creaks badly at this point. Another of the Frankenstein family's adoptive daughters, Justine, is tried for the murder of William on the basis of circumstantial evidence. This is Shelley tightening the vise on Victor seemingly to the breaking point, but of course the worst is yet to come. Victor wrestles with his conscience. If he tells the truth, no one will believe him. But even if his story is believed, Victor is certain the monster would wreak terrible vengeance if pursued. Thus Victor remains silent. After Justine is convicted Victor and Elizabeth visit her in prison. Elizabeth is miserable but Victor realizes that she suffers the misery of innocence in the presence of atrocity while he suffers the misery of guilt. Justine is executed, and Victor realizes the double bind in which he is trapped. If he remains alive he will have to bear the torment of his guilt. If he kills himself he is certain the monster would go on a rampage of destruction. Such is the filicide's burden, here again, as it was for Hamlet: to live successfully means to control successfully.

Frankenstein's sense of guilt is further increased as he compares the failure of his own life with his father’s "serene conscience and guiltless life." That his mild-mannered, gentle-voiced father might have been responsible for initiating Victor into the filicidal life of violent control at an early age is so inconceivable a possibility that it is not considered. The problem is me. Or that Elizabeth, in her pristine innocence, might somehow be playing a passive, accessorial role is equally inconceivable. As she says to Victor: where, before, the terrors of the world of men were

remote and more familiar to reason than to the imagination .. now misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other's blood.

She is as thoroughly trapped in her filicidal woman's role as Victor is in his man's role. She at least establishes the equation:

men = monsters.

But it is a long step from that to the more accurate statement of the equation:

filicidal men = monsters,

with its implication that men can perhaps cease being monsters by ceasing to be filicidal. And it is an even longer step to the final equation of traditional family politics:

filicidal humanity = monsters,

which implicates both sexes at the same time that it offers hope for release for both sexes.

Victor's reaction to his half -sister's words is predictably filicidal:

I listened to this discourse with extremest agony. I, not in deed, but in effect, was the true murderer.

Of course he does not mean he is responsible for turning his son into a murderer. Behind his statement lies the unspoken filicidal syllogism:

1. I created a son.

2. All sons are murderers.

3. I created a murderer.

It is the, same syllogism which produced all those mythic fathers who were convinced their sons would kill them. Being unable to see, accept and then deal with his or her violence, the parent transfers it in toto to the child by treating the child from the outset as a violent and dangerous creature who must be forcibly tamed.

To salve his spirit Victor sets out on a horse trip through the Alps, coming at last to Chamonix. On the glacier there, in a field of ice, father and son meet.

* * *

For many centuries men have been more or less consistently oppressive toward women, and women have more or less acquiesced in the oppression. During that time men spoke, they felt, for all humanity. So sure of their rightness were the English-speaking males that the word "man" came to mean all humanity while the word "woman" meant only half of humanity. In the past two hundred years women have begun to report on their view of the oppression, and to do something about it. Their view, stated through the actions and literature of the feminist movement as well as in the lives of many individual women, is somewhat at odds with the long-standing view which men have held of themselves as the only possible rulers of families, nations, and the planet.

Kate Millett pointed out some time ago that the power of the patriarchy rests on a three-cornered base consisting of women, children, and young males. Each of those three groups is exploited in different ways to provide support for the maintenance of the patriarchal structure. Women have for some time now been at work changing the inequities to which they are subject in this system of things. The hippie rebellion represented the protest of a significant proportion of one generation of young males against their fathers’ filicidal dominion. But what of the children?

How will we ever get the child's, the infant's version of what we have done to it? Perhaps it is impossible. Study of the self and observation of others yields clues. One can pierce the curtain of repression hanging over the past, up to a point. But what lies beyond that point? No infant can speak to us and communicate the reality of its feelings in the first year or two of life when the act of filicide is usually carried out. And we have every reason to distrust our adult observations of parent-infant interaction. They are most likely as self-serving as the male-authored analyses of "femininity" and "woman's place," from St. Paul to Freud, so beloved of patriarchs past and present. The actual experience of filicide is securely hidden in all our minds, but those preliterate, preverbal memories are stored away in areas of the mind marked NON-EXISTENT at worst, or MYTHIC at best. We forget, and we forget we have forgotten.

As awareness of the magnitude of our oppression enters our consciousness and as our behavior toward our adult selves begins to change from control to love, our attitude toward other persons, including--mirabile dictu--children, also changes. Somewhere in the process perhaps some of us will attain sufficient sensitivity that we may capture in some medium the infant's response to filicide. Our presently rather badly atrophied sense of empathy may, as we begin to develop it consciously, yield a picture of the long-hidden universal experience of filicide.

Until that happens, one of the most extraordinary attempts at such a report is the one contained in this meeting between Victor and his son. Analyses of the most profound aspects of human experience using the scientific way of knowledge can, at this late date, be pretty well dismissed out-of-hand, because that way of knowledge is so thoroughly contaminated by filicidal limitations and motivations. Art is its own way of knowledge based on a paradoxical combination of control ("technique") and loss of control ("ecstasy," for want of a better term). The knowledge acquired through the process of art is often at odds with the knowledge acquired from the institutionalized ways of patriarchal knowledge. The ecstasy of the creative process places one outside one's normal, everyday self, and by a mysterious harmony one then functions as a medium through which ordinarily inaccessible knowledge and realities flow. It is of course the same process no matter what discipline one is working in, whether one calls it art, or religion, or even science. For some reason that behavior which we call art has resisted institutionalization better than have other behaviors, such as that which we call science. Perhaps we can therefore put somewhat greater trust in the reports of artists when we come to deal with the hidden realities of human behavior.

Art is also subject to self-serving error. What Shelley recorded as happening between father and son may be less than accurate. My experience as child and parent--to the extent that I am able to face honestly my behavior as parent and can remember my experience as child--and my observations of human behavior past and present indicate that she came very close to speaking the truth about what transpires between all parents and all children in this civilization, namely, filicide.

The meeting which she describes is between two males, and I shall discuss it in terms of masculine behavior, as father meets son. It would be erroneous and dangerous to assume that the same scene is not played out in only slightly different terms between mothers and daughters, with the same rejection, the same denial of love, the same competitiveness, the same acceptance of hatred as norm, the same psychological violence.

Two men meet on a glacier. If warmth is to come, it must come from them. They meet alone. For males this scene is the universe. It is all of life: the meeting with the ugly, threatening, hostile, deceitful, violent, murderous Other. Since we recognize no equals except creatures of our own species and gender, this meeting for a man is always with another male, who is always our father, our son, our self. Those other meetings--with women, with children, with young males, with the vast collection of objects we call nature--all those meetings are subordinate to this meeting of equals, this test of wills, this proof of manhood. The meeting occurs in two stages. In the first stage the participants determine which, if either, will blink first, which will back down first. If neither party blinks, the second stage follows immediately. This is the real battle for supremacy, to prove that one person is better at controlling than the other. In the second stage all restraint is dropped and each individual uses all the weapons he has been able to develop in his filicidal life. The second stage may consist of anything from a very subtle battle for psychological control to some form of the classic filicidal solution to major problems, physical violence.

When Victor first sees the monster running across the glacier he is terrified, but he recovers quickly.

I trembled with rage and horror, resolving to wait his approach and then close with him in mortal combat. He approached; his countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with disdain and malignity, while its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes. But I scarcely observed this; rage and hatred had at first deprived me of utterance, and I recovered only to overwhelm him with words expressive of furious detestation.

So the first thing Father does is to give Son a tongue-lashing:

"Devil," I exclaimed, "do you dare approach me? And do you not fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone .. ! Or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust!"

Do you dare approach me, your creator? I, the unapproachable, the divinely untouchable, pronounce judgment on you, my son, and my judgment is that you are worthless. I reject you completely. I expose you on the mountainside, I cast you out of Paradise, I circumcise you, I crucify you, I curse you from the grave.

And how does the son respond to this outpouring of hatred from his father?

"I expected this reception," said the demon. "All men hate the wretched, how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and scorn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties dissoluble only by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, / will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends."

Monster or not, this is no ordinary son. In contrast to his father's rage, his response is a model of patriarchal cool. He is not in the least intimidated by Victor's threats of physical violence. Neither does he laugh at the ridiculous spectacle that this person two feet smaller than he makes of himself. He reminds Victor of the actual nature of their relationship, for Victor appears not to realize that he is cast in the role of father to this unlikely creature-of-a-son. Being physically larger and more powerful than his father, this son can make demands and bargain in ways no human infant ever could. And he does so with a straightforward rationality any patriarch would have to admire. But for all his size and strength, he is still a child. He is dependent on Victor and he knows it. The problem is me and the solution is my father.

Neither in this first meeting nor in any subsequent meeting does the son threaten his father directly with physical violence. Is it possible that our sons are not quite the patricidal maniacs which our own worst fears about ourselves and our adult capacity for violence lead us to believe? This monstrous son may articulate the infant's filicidal pain as none of us ever could, but even he fails to see that the problem originates with his father's behavior toward him, with his father's rejection of him as an independent entity responsible for his own behavior and development. Part of the filicidal deal is that both parent and child unquestioningly and unconsciously accept the validity of the filicidal syllogism. That being the case, the son does threaten persons close to Victor. Violence or the threat of violence is the accepted way to get Victor to do his duty (we will find our shortly just what Victor's duty is, as the son understands it). If Victor fails to do his duty, the son feels that his life will be meaningless and that he can do nothing but cause Victor maximum pain as Victor has caused him maximum pain.

As Shelley has the monster put it, we are bound by "ties dissoluble only by the annihilation of one of us." The reality of the human situation is that we are locked in mortal embrace. We share this universe, this planet, this existence, but the filicidal aspect of ourselves cannot tolerate the thought of any other entity trespassing on what we filicidally see as my universe. Transfigured by our filicidal fury, the human situation becomes one in which we are locked in mortal combat. The proto-scene becomes the model and source for that way of being which we call reality. In that scene our two basic choices--to love or to fight, embrace or combat--are reduced to one: we fight. And we want so desperately to fight to the death, to get rid of all those other no-good sons-of-fathers... but something has held us back as a race up to now from the total yielding up of ourselves to Thanatos. We can now state the theory of filicide in its simplest form: we want to destroy because we have been destroyed (or so we believe).

Freud, unable to see and accept his own filicide, at the end of his life was reduced to darkest pessimism as he finally had to face the Manichean orthodoxy which had been implicit in the theory of psychoanalysis from the beginning, namely the assumption that human beings and their cultures are trapped in a hopeless struggle between the forces of life (Eros) and the forces of death (Thanatos). That our seemingly instinctual commitment to the forces of death might spring from some culture-based experience escaped him.

We destroy because we have been destroyed. But somewhere, usually far beyond the limits of this defense mechanism personality we create in ourselves as a result of that destruction, there exists awareness and knowledge of potentials greater and finer than those expressed in our incessant, internecine battles. It is that knowledge which holds us back from the final war. Wanting to fight all the time, we find ourselves restrained, faced with an unending series of half-battles. Confronted with the incomprehensible fact that we cannot unleash our supposedly infinite filicidal prowess, we react like spoiled, angry children (since that is in essence what we are) and make the hourly, daily half-battles even deadlier and more intense. We fight to live and we live to fight.

There's more to our aggression yet. We are restrained not only by portions of ourselves which lie outside of our filicidal consciousness. We are also restrained by a paradoxical situation within our filicidal behavior. If the real fight to the death occurs and the enemy is eliminated, then who am I to fight? My filicidal life loses its meaning precisely to the extent that I am a genuinely successful filicidal adult. This I, this filicidal self, has been constructed, trained, and reared to control, but I have to be careful not to control too much because if I do there won't be anything left to control. If the son kills the father, if the monster kills Frankenstein, his life becomes meaningless. The monster knows that. The same holds for Frankenstein. If he kills his son, his life too becomes meaningless. What evidence do we have that, if he did kill the monster, he could return to Geneva, marry Elizabeth, and settle down to a life of contented contemplation of the beauties of his wife, his possible future children, and his old adversary, nature? None. His whole life has been spent in the pursuit of control, with only brief rest and recreation breaks in which he catches his breath and enjoys a short dose of domestic tranquillity or natural beauty.

He, of course, thinks that the life of domestic repose is the one he wants. All of us compulsive workers and controllers who are existing at levels of affluence above subsistence are striving for the same end--the good life. It is the visionary rallying flag every ideology hoists over the distant and rather vague finish line. But even when we get old and in accordance with our social training convincingly pretend to ourselves and to others that the vital energies of life are almost exhausted and we "retire," even then notice how many of us have difficulty in making the adjustment to the good life of domestic tranquillity. If that is the case when we are old, are we to expect a man at the height of his powers (as we are so fond of putting it) to retire from the battlefield to a life of quietude, serenity, and repose? Or course not, at least not as long as that man does not understand what has been driving him to exist on and for that battlefield.

Victor responds to his son's calm and reasoned statement with another outburst of verbal abuse. His rage overcomes him and he hurls himself at the nameless creature. The father strikes the son. But this son easily eludes this father, physically anyway. And again the son speaks with quiet reason:

"Be calm! I entreat you to hear me before you give vent to your hatred on my devoted head... [He then points out that he is physically superior to Victor.] But I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee. / am thy creature, and / will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou will also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein be not equitable to every other and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember that / am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather thy fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere / see bliss, from which / alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and happy; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."

The monstrous son asks the monstrous father for help, but it is already too late. The son is already molded by the filicidal stamp. He can seek salvation and redemption only outside of himself. He admits he is devoted to Victor, he acknowledges Victor as his "natural lord and king." But he does not understand. He blames his fall from goodness not on Victor but on humanity. It's their fault. And he is also already the dupe of the great grown-up deception. He has fallen for the front of happiness and bliss which humanity puts up before itself and its children. He has fallen for our pretense of successful control. The son obviously does not, cannot understand the world, but anyone wise enough to create him and bring him into the world must understand it. Therefore he throws himself on the mercy of the omniscient father: "Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."

Not only has the monster fallen for the appearance of happiness in humanity generally. He apparently has also been observing Victor's life, since in his opinion Victor behaves equitably toward everyone except him. Like the infant lying in the crib, the monster has had to view humanity from a distance, relying solely on his powers of observation. He can't get close enough to ask questions because everyone flees at the sight of him; He has observed adults, as we all did during infancy, and what he has observed is the surface of filicidal reality, that slick, convincing surface determined by the rules of filicidal behavior.

Everything appears to be well under control. He has watched, as we did, the skilled grown-up actors moving about in front of the artfully painted scenery-flat of reputation and respectability which we have erected to impress the neighbors, the boss, and other nations, and to convince ourselves that the roles we are playing are correct and justifiable. Like the Greek writers of tragedy, we find it most effective for all concerned if the really bloody action takes place offstage (except in times of direst emergency, such as war). Each of us even carries a piece of the scenery about with us in the form of clothes. We spend a great deal of time keeping the scenery clean and tidy and safe. Both the scenery and the acting are so convincing that we ourselves fail to notice the decay and flabbiness of the covered bodies and the turgid viscosity of the emotional morass in the societally concealed minds. All the rest, the real, smelly rot, is kept at a safe distance, well offstage, where we find that vast cultural landfill of humanity consisting of the poor, the insane, the criminal, the dying, and the already dead.

One might easily recast the entire theory of filicide in theatrical terminology. Were it not so deadly, we might see our behavior as the ultimate in method acting. As adults we are constantly playing to an audience, ignorant of the fact that we have a responsibility and a potential to live improvisationally in any way we can dream of. So caught up in the roles are we that we remain ignorant of the fact that the audience is also playing a role and that role-interchange is constantly going on. We are now the actor, now the audience. As long as we succeed in the role, we are happy and can either ignore the mess backstage or blame it on someone else. We are such good actors by now that it is no wonder that the infant in the crib is taken in by our performance.

Or we might recast the theory in pedagogical, educational terms. The traditional classroom situation is only a somewhat formalized re-creation of the proto-scene. The experienced, certifiably educated adults have set the problems for the class. They, as the teachers, have determined which problems shall be dealt with. They have also determined what shall be considered the correct answers to those problems. They grade the tests and punish those who do poorly. And it's the only game in town, educationally.

So our monster throws himself on his omniscient teacher-creator and pleads, "Make me happy!" Too late. The son is already a filicide-in-training. His plea is phrased in terms of duty, debt, and obligation, the standard terms in which men deal with the world. We act from duty, not from love. Why? Because we act out of guilt. And where does the guilt come from? From the debt we owe our omniscient parents because of the bargain they struck with us by deigning to help and raise and train such ignorant and unworthy creatures as ourselves. It is the very bargain we see being struck here between this improbable father and his improbable son.

Again the story of Frankenstein brings us closer to the true nature of filicide. The mythological sons we looked at earlier never asked their fathers for anything. But here on the glacier the son asks the father for help, and--as we shall soon see--the father eventually agrees to the son's request. Reluctantly, but he does agree. What is at work here is one of the subtler mechanisms of filicide. The son is not yet wholly a creature of violence the way the father is, which means the son can still ask for love, in one form or another, as the monster does here. And the father says yes, all right, I'll give you what you want.

For clarity, let's get a bit ahead of the story. What the monster is working up to is that Victor create a mate for him. Victor will agree; and as Victor is working on the new female creature, the monster does become the virtuous person he had promised Victor he would be if Victor helped him. Then at the last minute, as Victor is about to animate the new woman, he has second thoughts and destroys her instead. It is that betrayal of the monster's trust which finally kills the son.

What is significant about the son's request for help is not only that he has fallen for the filicidal front of successful control, he has also unwittingly accepted the masculine view of woman as property. And the masculine view of woman as solution to the problems of masculine filicidal existence. That view of woman is another of the implicit promises which fathers make to sons as they raise them in the nuclear family. Obviously, mothers make a similar analogous promise to their daughters. There lies the schizoid essence of the traditional feminine role: men make women chattel and at the same time elevate them to such heights of expected goodness, gentleness, and loving affection that they come to be seen--and they come to see themselves--almost as redeeming angels.

In effect the monster says, "Father, give me a woman and I will be virtuous." As it happens, of course, Victor, the super-scientist, is in a position to grant this request. But the giving is an illusion. That is what Victor realizes just before he animates her. His second creation will have a mind of her own and may well react to the son with the same horror and rejection with which Victor and others have reacted to him. What then? Neither Victor nor the monster realizes what Shelley clearly knew, that the only thing either of them can give the other is the forgiveness of friendship and that the rest of whatever salvation it is our lot to know is up to the individual. For, having opened himself to friendship with all persons and things, male and female, animate and inanimate, the individual is on the way to being freed from the consuming forces of fear, guilt, hatred, and the need to control which comprise the syndrome called filicide. If Victor had been able to forgive himself for creating his son, and if his son had been able to forgive Victor for creating him as he is--ugly, monstrous, an object of universal loathing--then matters might have turned out differently. But that is the same as saying, if Jehovah had forgiven himself. So deep does our filicidal experience run and so long has it been running that such an act of self-forgiveness is almost unthinkable. We can hardly imagine the outcome if we were to change mortal combat to mortal embrace.

Back on the glacier, the father-son encounter continues in much the some style of attack and riposte. The monster has not yet revealed his request. All he asks of Victor for now is that Victor listen to his story of what has happened to him since he was "born". Victor, who still can't let go of his anger, blurts out the accusation that the monster murdered young William and, in effect, Justine. Victor's son may be a monster and a naive one at that but he's nobody's fool. He comes right back with:

"The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own defense before they are condemned. Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder, and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!"

Not bad for a one-year-old. With his child's eyes he has seen through at least part of adult hypocrisy, that part in which we transfer the blame for our own violence and suffering to this or that person or group of persons whom we call "the enemy," so that we then feel little or no guilt about killing off those persons. To gain such illusorily cathartic satisfaction we have to ignore the metafamilial reality which lies just beneath the surface of this meeting between Frankenstein and his monster. Biologically they are not father and son. Legally they are not father and son. But the unique nature of their relationship forces them to behave according to the only model either of them has, the traditional microfamilial father-son model. Their situation at the same time forces them toward an awareness of their larger, metafamilial relationship for which neither they nor we have any very good models. They both resist accepting awareness of the fact that their most important relationship is their common membership in the family of humanity. It is only the desperate nature of the monster's situation that causes him to goad Frankenstein toward awareness that they are as much brothers as they are father and son.

Victor's response remains that of the orthodox older male. He is trapped in the father-role, and his fatherly conscience begins to bother him.

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.