Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel is many things: a cautionary tale, a harsh critique of scientific progress at any cost, and also in many ways a feminist text, presenting the alarming consequences of what happens when men intoxicated by their own power attempt to play God. In the following essay I will attempt to interpret Frankenstein through an intersectional feminist lens using assemblage theory in a style described by Jasbir K. Puar in her 2012 article “Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory”. Puar acknowledges the essential nature of intersectionality in feminist critique and understanding and dismantling systems of oppression, but she suggests that an intersectional approach does not extend far enough, mostly because intersectionality does not recognize the “active” nature of oppressive systems (patriarchy and racism for example), and the way in which these systems of oppression attempt to exercise their power and control over people and “tweak and modulate bodies as matter” (Puar, 63) through what Puar terms “relations of force” (57). And, alternatively, the fixed and binary language of intersectionality cannot necessarily encompass the importance of context, relationships, and the fluidity in our identities. So why exactly would approaching Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through a lens of feminist assemblage theory be important? I would argue that Frankenstein is a perfect example of the ways patriarchy, white supremacy and the quest for scientific progress combine, interact and collaborate to create the novel’s violence and tragic ending. The ways in which these things interact with each other is something that goes beyond intersectionality, and a feminist critique should acknowledge the complexities that result from those relationships.
I will begin with a brief definition of intersectionality, assemblage theory and how they are relevant to feminist critique based on Puar’s essay. Intersectionality, developed in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, is a theory that our identities are made up intersecting parts. For example, you cannot just talk about a woman as if that is her only identity or the only aspect of her identity that is relevant in a conversation about feminism, because, for example, being Black and a woman means that a person experiences both sexism and racism. The assumption that feminism is about equality for a generic “woman” to which all women can relate is comes from white feminism and is a harmful and racist view that erases the experiences of most women. Intersectionality was (and is) an important and necessary way of drawing attention to the double or triple layers of oppression faced by members of oppressed groups of people, and is not just used within feminism. Crenshaw used the metaphor of a grid of intersecting lines to illustrate her theory, each line being representative for an identity.
Assemblage theory, developed by French theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the late 20th century, is the theory that it is in their connections with other ideas that ideas find their meaning. In assemblage theory, all concepts come from relations. Assemblage is a theory that privileges action and interaction. Puar explains that “assemblages do not privilege bodies as human, nor as residing within a human animal/nonhuman animal binary. Along with a de-exceptionalizing of human bodies, multiple forms of matter can be bodies—bodies of water, cities, institutions, and so on.” (Puar, 57). Assemblage theory values all contributing factors in a situation equally, and recognizes that none of these “bodies” can be confined or explained by language or binary identities. Assemblage recognizes the need to look beyond and outside of language in order to reckon with and dismantle systems like patriarchy.
So while intersectionality is helpful, it does not go the full distance. A feminist critique that utilizes assemblage theory is one that can transcend merely labelling a situation to unravelling how all its disparate parts are intersecting and working together to create a specific outcome. And to me, this seemed to be the best (albeit a challenging) way of looking at Frankenstein.
The novel follows Victor Frankenstein, who, as a young man deeply enamored by science and newly independent from his parents, attempts to create a “human”—to make a creature from body parts and bring it to life. He is “successful”, that is the creature comes to life, but Victor flees from his creature the moment it opens his eyes, terrified at what he has done. After being abandoned by his creator, the creatures enters a world that is hostile to him and slowly becomes monstrous and revengeful.
The novel is defined by the connection between Frankenstein and his creature, a connection that could be labelled resembling one between a God and human or a parent and child but is neither and somehow beyond these. Frankenstein has chosen to bring his creature to life, but naively. He is in the role of God or parent (both?), but does not realize it and is incapable of accepting any form of responsibility toward his creation. Frankenstein refuses to acknowledge his relationship to the creature. However, the creature relentlessly pursues a relationship with Frankenstein.
Victor Frankenstein, as his creation’s closest thing to a parent, invites a critique of the novel based on ideas of parenthood. The creation of life is almost always associated with mothers, specifically. And could reframing the central relationships in the novel through a feminist lens include seeing Victor’s relationship to his creature as a “corruption” of motherhood? In her essay “On Maggots and Motherhood: Feminism in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley”, Amie Souza Reilly writes about how Victor’s creation of the monster involves a creating of life that is deeply intertwined with death. She writes that while Victor’s process of creation is deeply wrong and unnatural, the strange and disturbing juxtaposition of life and death associated with it could be Shelley’s way of exploring the isolation, darkness, and strangeness in the experience of motherhood. Mary Shelley was pregnant three or four times and all but one of her children died shortly after birth, and her own mother, the feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft, died after giving birth to Mary Shelley. Reilly states that: ”Much has been written about Mary Shelley’s relationship to motherhood, how it was so fraught with death, how those experiences may have influenced her writing.” (Reilly, 9). Perhaps Mary Shelley was attempting to make sense of these traumatic experiences through her writing. Women, especially mothers, faced an immense amount of isolation, neglect, and sexism in 19th century England, and to have something as profound and powerful as motherhood be combined with these traumatic experiences results in motherhood becoming an experience that links the beautiful with the isolating and painful. “Shelley’s novel, perhaps born from her own connections to loss and motherhood, complicates our understandings of life and death. Victor creates new life from dead parts, and the life he creates brings death to others.” (Reilly, 10) . Amie Souza Reilly’s essay focuses on Victor Frankenstein’s role as parent and God and monster, and she attempts to capture the way in which the relationships in Frankenstein between creator and creator, parent and child, monster and God, are so fraught and the lines between them so blurred. This “corruption” of relationships is a direct consequence of a society that exercises its power through stigmatization, oppression and control. Patriarchy, for example, exerts its control by making motherhood monstrous and those who are perceived as different into threats. And in Frankenstein, Victor’s abandonment of his duty as creator and the way he (and every other person) perceives his creature as hideous due to its appearance, are a direct illustration of this. The first time the creature speaks to Frankenstein, he says: “You, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble 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.” (Shelley, Vol. II, Chapter II). This “duty” is one that parents owe their children and gods owe their creations, but the world Shelley presents in her novel is one where these obligations of love and respect based solely on the relationships we have with one another are entirely disregarded and corrupted, a world where oppression is best understood through the lens of assemblage theory and its understanding of relationships and interactions as the basis for meaning and therefore the tools our society uses to oppress.
In many ways, Frankenstein is the perfect novel to use in an examination of the ways in which assemblage theory can work to enhance a feminist reading of a text. The character of Safie is another example. When the creature, in his efforts to learn about humanity, observes Safie’s lessons in language, history, and philosophy, it is interesting to note that Safie is receiving these lessons in the first place, something that points to her dehumanization in the narrative. She is receiving these “lessons” based on her perceived ignorance as a young woman of color who has recently immigrated to Europe. And, as well as being positioned as a naive student by the text, Safie also never speaks, although it is her letters to Felix that are used as evidence by the monster later in the novel when he is proving the legitimacy of his story to Victor. Safie’s narrative certainly benefits from an intersectional lens (she is a female character, but she is also the only character of color and the only immigrant, etc) but the combination of racism and sexism she faces also benefits from an assemblage theory approach. Who is Safie within the context of the novel? How is her relationship to the narrative illustrative of the dehumanization she faces within the story itself? In a recent essay titled “Can Safie Speak? Language and Representation of the Oriental Woman in Frankenstein” by Reyam Kareem Rammahi, the character of Safie is compared to the other women in the novel and her relationship, (or lack of relationship) to Frankenstein’s other representations of femininity. Rammahi argues that Safie being quite literally denied a voice leaves her a “dependent woman” and denies her “the means to represent her culture.” (Rammahi, 4). In other words, the relationships she should have with her environment are denied her. Safie’s shadowed existence is an act of colonialism and racism, these forms of oppression operating in a story where women are already oppressed. Safie is made unable to speak for herself, both by the text and by the forms of oppression operating through and inside the text. Rammahi writes that: “As a result, Safie’s initiation into Western society serves the goals of colonizing the mind through the culture. By controlling Safie’s choice of language, Felix becomes the colonial power that obliterates Safie’s identity. Ngugi Wa Thiongʼo explains such a process in his focus on languages. He asserts that to control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.” (Rammahi, 25). If language can be used as a tool of colonization (and racism and sexism), then it is important to look at the language inside Frankenstein, independently to the supposed intentions or beliefs of Shelley. The language used about the character of Safie, and denied her in the novel, both of these are active forces that combine in many ways throughout Frankenstein to create a novel that fails to be fully feminist. In other words, Frankenstein’s feminism is absolutely not intersectional, but the way in which it fails to be intersectional can only be explained using an assemblage approach. Assemblage theory acknowledges the importance of looking beyond and outside of language in order to reckon with and dismantle systems like patriarchy and colonialism.
Frankenstein’s creature himself is an assemblage of many parts, and yet he is so much more than the sum of those parts—his meaning in the novel is defined through his interactions, experiences, and actions. The novel itself can be viewed in such a manner: utilizing assemblage theory (as well as intersectionality) can result in a feminist reading of Frankenstein that closely examines the relationships, situations, and systems that guide the novel. So is Mary Shelley’s novel feminist or not? It depends. The novel, written by a young woman at a time where women’s voices were generally silenced, is a radical and dangerous critique of what a patriarchal and misogynistic culture is capable of, but it also fails to be intersectional. A feminist and assemblage criticism of Frankenstein acknowledges these disparities, but instead of labelling them, interrogates them in hopes of learning how the many “parts” of Frankenstein work together, exist in opposition to each other, and exist in relationship to each other and the world outside the text.
Works Cited
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus. 1818 Edition. Oxford World’s Classics. 1995. Originally published in 1818.
Puar, Jasbir K. “ ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’ Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory. 2012. https://jasbirkpuar.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/JKP_Cyborg-Goddess.pdf
Reilly, Amie Souza. “On Maggots & Motherhood: Feminism in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley”. https://theadroitjournal.org/2019/03/09/feminism-in-frankenstein/
Rammahi, Reyam Kareem. “Can Safie speak? Language and Representation of the Oriental Woman In Frankenstein” … (n.d.). http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue181/PDFs/rammahi.pdf
Sprockets and Springes 