Sexual desire fuels that desire, and sexual get in touch with, since Ricoeur implies, breeds defilement of lives to come

Ricoeur speculates darkly to the archaic family relations between defilement and you will sex: "From the limit, the child will be considered to be created impure, contaminated from the beginning of the adult seeds, by the impurity of your own maternal genital part, and also by the excess impurity from childbirth" (29)

The note of helplessness in the monster's voice affirms his defilement, for such a fate is impersonal and descends without regard for responsibility. 15 The monster's impurity is not the monster's fault. It derives from an external, not an internal, causality. We ought to inquire, then, into the causes of so complete and arbitrary a defilement. Is the monster's misery wholly the result of its creator's egoistic or masculine presumptions? I think evidence to the contrary appears in a startling remark the monster makes regarding his spurned existence. Defending his essential innocence, he bitterly and mockingly contrasts his being with the purer sort of his persecutors: "Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and abandoned, am an abortion to be spurned at, kicked, and trampled on" (219). 16 The important point here is not merely that the monster equates spotlessness with virtue, but that he describes himself as an "abortion," a term that places the problem of defilement in a specifically biological -- and sexual -- context. Again we find Shelley reducing suffering to the body, but this time to emphasize its symbolic origin. The monster's is a prenatal existence, an "imperfect animation" (228) suspended between conception and delivery. Shelley locates the objective cause of his suffering in the domain of sexuality -- specifically female sexuality -- which appears, if the monster's complaint is credible, to be the paradigm of defilement.

Through the monster's defilement and its disgusting consequences, Shelley looks at the human curse out-of maculate conception. Are born defiles getting; this is basically the archaic facts one personal norms never accommodate.

One to might object up to now the monster's defilement show, maybe not off his mere production (he had been never truly "born"), however, from his asexual development by the a solitary male whom usurps a beneficial female's generative energies

The monster is an ugly botch because he incarnates a male fantasy of creative autonomy. And indeed, at a literal level this reading is hard to contest. But there is a kind of sexual sub-symbolism that betrays Shelley's deep allegiance to the body, even in the midst of a fantastic tale of asexual creation. Ponder for instance the bodily implications of the site of the monster's conception. Frankenstein's "workshop of filthy creation" is a "solitary chamber situated . . . at the top of the house, and separated from all the apartments by a gallery and a staircase" (50). A psychoanalytic reading of this description might discover here a symbolism of the female womb, displaced upward as in a dream, accessible only through clandestine physical exertion. The workshop is filthy and loathsome because symbolically it is sexual -- a female space into which a masculine principle enters to advance the unclean cause of procreation. If Frankenstein's workshop is a womb-room, then his creative undertaking might not be so exclusively masculine as it first appears. Shelley subtly qualifies the apparent asexuality of Victor's creative enterprise with a pervasive symbolism of sexual defilement that quietly asserts the inescapability of bodily imperatives. "A resistless and almost frantic impulse" (49) urges him on; his exertions build up to "the most gratifying consummation" (47). Although Shelley unmasks through such language the narcissistic origins of Frankenstein's creative passions, she implies symbolically the dubiousness of sexuality itself. Frankenstein in his dirty workshop symbolizes the sexual act in all its ambiguity, at once gratifying and necessary for creating life, and yet the origin too of defilement. Says Frankenstein, "often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, . . . still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased" (50). The sexual sub-symbolism of Frankenstein's activity shows Shelley wrestling with the archaic paradox of impure birth.