Troubled Gender

According to Ian’s seminar paper “The critical moment for Victor is the destruction of the female monster before giving her life; by destroying the she-creature, Victor sets in motion the destruction of his own family and his inevitable premature death” (MacAllen). Ian also suggests that “The male creature alone presents no threat to the dominant culture Victor represents” (MacAllen). I would argue that the destruction of the she-creature is the pivotal moment in the Monster’s potential cultural indoctrination into the gender performance and that the Monster is never able to actualize, or in the sense of society legitimize, any maleness. In destroying the she-creature, Victor effectively obfuscates the Monster’s actualization of a gender and further ostracizes his creation from the acts and roles prescribed by society. I agree that Victor’s decision to destroy the creature heralds his own demise and the unraveling of his immediate society, but it turns out that the solitary creature is the greatest threat to “the dominant culture Victor represents” (MacAllen). Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble can be applied to this idea. In framing the body as a surface on which gender may be inscribed and displayed or performed, Butler concludes that “the body as the medium must be destroyed and transfigured in order for ‘culture’ to emerge” (2543). There is nothing essentially male or female inherent of the body; anything natural or inherent of the body is culturally appropriated to create and enforce an ‘Other’. In a sense, the Monster, as any other person, begins as neither male nor female, but due to its existence outside of society, the Monster is never able to receive or establish a gender. The Monster may see gender modeled by Felix and Safie, but it is never expected to satisfy nor perform gender specific acts and actions. The Monster’s uncertain identification with the different characters of gender in Paradise Lost – explored by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in “Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve” – speaks to this claim. The Monster is never indoctrinated by society, it is never persuaded to adopt a gendered identity, and in result its body is never claimed or ‘destroyed’ as in the framing by Foucault and Butler. This unclaimed space results in the Monster’s frustrated relation with its body and its image; the Monster concurrently despises and dwells on its body, while the body itself is described as incredible powerful, graceful, while otherwise indescribable. Arguably, the Monster attempts to actualize a male identity and claim its body for maleness in asking Victor to create a female mate. With the creation of an ‘Other’, a female creature, Victor may have indoctrinated his creature into maleness; he may have projected or inscribed maleness onto the Monster’s body/surface. This projection or inscription would have functioned as the transmission and repetition that “become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony” (2551). The Monster is denied this opportunity and then dangerously adopts “certain kinds of parodic repetitions [which are] effectively disruptive” to the social norms his unclaimed body and apocryphal identity traverses (2551). The Monster has no recourse once denied a gender and externalizes either his frustration or his vacant identity with humorless parodies (the pastiche) of others’ actions (2550). Violence is revisited by violence, in the way that Milton’s language is pathetically appropriated. The Monster’s wish with the desired female creature to ascribe to the patriarchal model may also be seen as pastiche or mock-performance. The solitary Monster, denied an inscribed or self-determined gender or identity, employs an unclaimed body in inimical performances to disrupt and destroy the dominant culture and society.