Mary Shelley´s dead mothers
Reading Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, one can’t help noticing a multitude of elemental family structures that repeat – or rather impose themselves – throughout the novel at all the levels of its complex narrative frame.
The first element is a couple formed by two siblings, brother and sister, in a very close (and sometimes excessively so) relationship that makes them a sort of doubles for each other. At the level of the narrator, it’s Walton and his sister Margaret, to whom his letters – and, for that matter, the whole narrative – are addressed.
In the story he tells her, there’s, of course, Victor Frankenstein and his sister/lover Elizabeth. (Frankenstein and the monster form another couple of doubles, but that one is based on a different principle). Then, again, in the monster’s story we come across another couple, the “cottagers” Felix and Agatha, whom the reader may at first take for husband and wife – before the true nature of their relationship is revealed and Safie takes on the function of Felix’s lover.
So, at the centre of the novel’s structure, we see three couples of siblings. They all share another important characteristic: they are motherless. Two of the couples live with the father. Safie has no sibling but she also lives with her father and is motherless. Elizabeth, before she was adopted by the Frankensteins, had lost both parents. That already makes 5 dead mothers, and yet, as if it were not enough, the author is compelled to add more.
If we go back to the beginning of the novel, we will remember that Caroline Beaufort, the protagonist’s mother, had also lost hers and lived with her father. When the latter dies, she – somewhat incestuously – marries his friend, Alphonse Frankenstein. Finally, the 7th dead mother belongs to Justine Moritz.
To this surprising collection one should add another missing mother – the monster’s. And, of course, that of the author herself, Mary Woolstonecraft, whose absence seems to constitute the traumatic hole around which the whole novel revolves. However, this absence reveals itself as an excessive presence, that of the dead mother (evident in Victor’s dream): an absence made substance, the unmovable (tomb)stone – der Stein – curiously present in both Woolstonecraft and Frankenstein – which the text conceals at its heart.