SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Daniela Garofalo, David Sigler, Daniela Garofalo, David Sigler

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438473475
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Lacan and Romanticism uses the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to deliver progressive readings of Romanticism by examining canonical Romantic authors such as William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and Jane Austen, as well as lesser-known writers such as the graveyard poets and Sarah Scott. The contributors develop innovative approaches to Lacanian literary studies, focusing on neglected or emergent areas of Lacan's thought and approaching Lacan's best-known work in unexpected ways. The essay topics include the visible and seeable, war, the death drive, nonhuman sexualities, sublimation, loss and mourning, utopia, capitalism, fantasy, and topology, and they range from the mid-eighteenth through the early decades of the nineteenth centuries. The book reveals new ways of thinking about art and literature with psychoanalytic theory and suggests how theoretical approaches can contribute meaningfully to literary studies in general.

Chapter One

THE GAZE OF Frankenstein

PAUL A. VATALARO

MARY SHELLEY foregrounds the formidable and often devastating power of vision when, in the 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein, she tells the story of how she conceived her first novel. Looking back on the ghost story writing contest in which she, her husband, Lord Byron and his personal physician, John Polidori, participated during the summer they spent together in Geneva in 1816, she recollects that, while Byron “began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the end of his poem Mazeppa,” and Percy Shelley, unsuited as he was “to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life” (334), Polidori managed to draft something that stuck with her.1 She remembers that

he had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole—what to see I forget—something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her. (334)

The legend of Tom of Coventry, punished with blindness because he peeked while Lady Godiva rode her horse naked through village streets, and Polidori’s adaptation of this story about voyeurism and retribution, provoked the nightmare that inspired Frankenstein, specifically what in a dream Shelley “saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together” (339). After rushing away from the scene of “his odious handywork,” the student seeks refuge in sleep, but when “he opens his eyes,” she writes, “behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes. I opened mine in terror” (339). The spectacle haunts Shelley as it does the protagonist of her novel and over the course of his narrative, the activities of looking, watching, and gazing (a word Frankenstein himself uses to describe conditions at his remote Scottish workshop: “I lived ungazed at and unmolested”) are never far from punishment and in the creature’s case they escalate to voyeurism, surveillance and aggressive scopophilia (252).

Vision determines the creature’s personal history: his creator flees when waking to find the creature staring at him above his bed; the creature travels “only at night, fearful of encountering the visage of a human being” (221); he finds voyeuristic pleasure in watching the daily activities of the cottagers; a rustic, upon “seeing” him, wounds him with a rifle shot; the insults levied by William Frankenstein fill him with homicidal fury; he keeps Victor Frankenstein under constant surveillance; a shadowy specter of himself haunts him in the moonlight. Emphasis in the novel on seeing and being seen exposes the hypocrisy and shallowness Shelley witnessed in her culture; however, the traumas the creature experiences as he navigates the visual field originate at a deeper psychological stratum.

Interpretations of Frankenstein that have applied concepts taken from Lacan’s theories about psycholinguistic development have focused on what befalls Frankenstein-the-subject once his creature opens its eyes and forces its maker to experience the disruptive capacity of the uncanny. Though Frankenstein’s trials and escalating anxieties leave little reason to question this approach, the creature’s disproportionately large body suggests he is more than just the specular instrument of his creator’s punishment. He, too, becomes vulnerable to the liabilities that haunt those who can be seen. In order to appreciate the extent to which Shelley’s novel illuminates visual expressions of the uncanny, therefore, the histories of creator and creature require equal attention. As much as the creature obsesses over his ostracism from his creator’s life and society, his ghastly physical appearance and vulnerability in the visual field trouble him almost from the instant he becomes conscious. From the beginning, the creature’s story emphasizes the physical and aesthetic grounds informing his creator’s rejection of him, exemplified best when he places his hand in front of Frankenstein’s eyes to shield him from his creature’s monstrous appearance (174).

The keynote of the creature’s autobiography, however, involves the unavoidable peril of being exposed prematurely to the paternal gaze and, therefore, to the uncanny awareness of loss and lack he cannot escape. This occurrence short-circuits the creature’s experience during the mirror stage of his development by eliminating the emergence of his imago and propelling him toward a symbolic order that excludes him. Lacan has indicated that, very early on in its development and well before the onset of the mirror phase, the infant looks at the world from the center of a boundless circle, perceiving everything in that world as an extension of its being. Eventually, the child realizes that, as it can see, so it can be seen, and this recognition, for Lacan, constitutes an alteration in the child’s perception that amounts to a loss, a symbolic castration. He refers to that castrating recognition as the “gaze.” The gaze represents a lost object the subject cannot control, fuels the desire for its recapture and reintegration into the subject’s perceptual field, and makes the subject vulnerable to the sudden and destabilizing irruption of the gaze into normative reality. Its capacity to function as both familiar and alien at the same time unites the gaze with the uncanny; it triggers an anxiety in the subject that he or she is not what he or she desires to be.

The uncanny emerges at the contact point at which extremes interlock, an experience Freud and Lacan believed forces the observer to confront something that is intimate and threatening at the same time. Lacan regarded the uncanny, or “extimité,” as something “located there where the most intimate interiority coincides with the exterior and becomes threatening, provoking horror and anxiety.”2 From this perspective, the sutured and scarred creature jeopardizes convention and signals to other characters in the book that achieving subjectivity requires amputation. For Lacan, all individuals must gradually be shorn from a state of unbounded being—the “real”—in order to enter a symbolic order where boundless desire drives each subject to compensate for that lack.

Inability to escape the visual field curses the creature and, within the context of the novel’s symbolic order, Frankenstein’s physically imposing monster dominates every sight line he crosses. He magnifies the unavoidable liabilities attendant upon the faculty of vision with each grand appearance he stages. Whether towering above Frankenstein’s bed, bounding unexpectedly toward his maker over crevices cut into the Mer de Glace, leering at his unfinished mate through a moonlit window casement, springing from his hiding place on William Frankenstein, shocking the De Lacey children at their cottage, or facing Walton from beside his creator’s coffin, the creature forces every onlooker to confront the fragility of his or her own subject status. Ironically, the creature’s dominance of the visual field belies his inability to escape his own image and find any compensatory fantasy that would offer him coherence and acceptance.

Mladen Dolar, Denise Gigante, and David Collings have applied Lacan’s interpretation of the uncanny to Frankenstein as a way of elucidating the myriad ways in which Shelley exposes the flaws of Enlightenment aspirations. Dolar has asserted that Frankenstein’s creature participates in the Enlightenment quest to realize a “ ‘zero degree’ of subjectivity, the missing link between nature and culture.”3 Frankenstein’s rejection of the creature forces it outside the symbolic order, making it a threat to the fabric of that order, and for Dolar it comes to present itself as the gaze each time it catches its creator’s eye, serving as an

irruption of the real into “homely,” commonly accepted reality. We can speak of the emergence of something that shatters well-known divisions and which cannot be situated within them. … The status of both subject and of “objective reality” is thus put into question.4

In Dolar’s estimation, the creature tears the fictional screen against which all subjects appear as inherently indeterminate and incomplete images. The creature performs an account of his own “subjectivation,”5 and one of the results of that process is that the creature seeks a social contract that would install him in the symbolic order, where he would no longer represent disruption. Denied that contract, the creature’s case illustrates the failure of eighteenth-century social ideals. “The paradox of the creature,” says Dolar, “lies in the fact that this embodiment of the subject of the Enlightenment directly disrupts its universe and produces its limit.”6

Recognizing that the creature’s hideous appearance places it in a nonexistent aesthetic category, Denise Gigante has observed that, though the ugly generates an effect similar to the uncanny, the two phenomena differ in scope, in that the uncanny remains specific to issues repressed within the individual whereas the ugly is universal. In her view, the creature, as a manifestation of the ugly, stands outside of Enlightenment era aesthetic categories, and represents an excess of the real, which bursts through the protective covering of the symbolic. The creature is, she says, “like the blood and guts oozing from the fissures in his skin, an excess of existence, exceeding representation, and hence appearing to others as a chaotic spillage from his own representational shell.”7 According to Gigante, as an irruption of the real, the creature becomes not a lack of beauty but an excess of that which lies beneath the symbolic and threatens to consume it, an angle that inflects William’s characterization of the creature as an “ogre” (224). The creature eats away at all representational structures, which include the currency of the Frankenstein family name, its civic service record, and its position on the social register. Gigante writes,

Once we confront him, as Victor does, in the raw ugliness of his own existence, we discover that he symbolizes nothing but the unsymbolized: the repressed ugliness at the heart of an elaborate symbolic network that is threatened the moment he bursts on the scene, exposing to view his radically uninscribed existence.8

Her reading provides a compelling account regarding why Frankenstein’s “uninscribed” issue never acquires a name.

David Collings has established that Frankenstein’s creature embodies a political and philosophical form of the uncanny. Shelley, expanding her father’s critique in his novel St. Leon of Enlightenment values, including his own former views, in Frankenstein takes aim at “any ideology that would reduce society to an expression of itself and by so doing deny that it is given by an unknowable and unmasterable Other, that its collective life will forever transcend its representation.”9 For Collings, Frankenstein sets out to create a being that will become the “demonstration model” of an abstract human object free of its “biological past” and therefore beyond inherited and other pathological imperfections. He succeeds, however, at constructing a being from the bodies of others that “is not human at all.”10 In seeking to achieve the abstraction Man, in other words, Frankenstein eliminates the man from the abstraction and he fails to recognize his error until the moment when the creature stares back at him, indicating to Frankenstein that his progeny embodies something—subjectivity—his maker did not put there.

What unnerves Frankenstein most, according to Collings, is that he has somehow bestowed subjectivity onto a “dead object, producing a creature who looks back not with a genuinely human gaze but with the hollowness of a sentient thing.”11 What began as a project attempting to master “natural laws” by means of a technological process ends up producing something that exceeds both: “[T]he creature,” writes Collings, “assaults the integrity of human embodiment on several counts at once, desecrating the human in a visual image so powerful that it inevitably terrifies any human being who encounters him.”12

Following Dolar and Gigante, Collings has underscored the distortions and reversals that occur during this mock-up mirror stage in which the creature serves as his creator’s “monstrous double,” the material realization of Frankenstein’s abominable intention, but also the fiction of embodied human coherence. He reads the creature’s compound uncanniness as a product of “his inexplicable subjectivity and his incoherent embodiment,” an opposition that “collapses the difference between them, suggesting that the uncanny subject is already a version of the incoherent body and vice versa.”13 Ultimately, Frankenstein manages what Collings refers to as a “magnificent demystification of the human, disclosing the literal form that underlies the fiction of its s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Lacan and Romanticism
• 1 The Gaze of Frankenstein
• 2 Goya’s Gaze: Seeing Non-relation in Los Caprichos
• 3 Jacques Lacan and John Keats’s “Noble Animal Man”
• 4 Abandoned by Providence: Loss in Jane Austen’s Persuasion
• 5 Logical Time and the Romantic Sublime
• 6 The Eros of Thanatos: Eighteenth-Century Graveyard Poetry and Melancholic Sublimation
• 7 Toric Tropes Are Stolen Boats: Reading Wordsworth’s The Prelude Topologically, with Lacan
• 8 Tyranny as Demand: Lacan Reading the Dreams of the Gothic Romance
• 9 Jouissance, Obscene Undersides, and Utopian/Dystopian Formations in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover