Frankenstein, Invisibility, and Nameless Dread

Early in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1831), Victor Frankenstein tells Captain Walton: “No human being could have passed a happier childhood than myself. My parents were possessed by the very spirit of kindness and indulgence” (43). But is what he says true? Is Victor's claim borne out by the details of his narrative? I would like to propose that it is not, that it is idealized and defensive, and that just as the monster suffers from parentlessness, so too does Victor, who is his double. The monster's story of emotional abandonment is Victor's story.

One might suppose this would hardly be worth taking the trouble to argue, given the common view that, as George Levine puts it, “the hero and his antagonist are one” (1973, 209) and “the monster can be taken as an expression of an aspect of Frankenstein's self … re-enacting in mildly disguised ways, his creator's feelings and experiences” (209-10). But this insight has not informed most readings of Victor's early life. Indeed, a chorus of responses—all notable enough to be collected in the Norton Critical Edition (Hunter 1996) of the novel—despite their differences, unites in taking Victor's glowing report at face value. Strikingly, Levine himself writes that “Frankenstein's father … in caring for him, behaves to his son as the monster would have Frankenstein behave” (211). Christopher Small sees in Victor's upbringing an “atmosphere of perfect love, harmony, and parental indulgence” (1972, 102), and he calls Victor's father “benevolent … wise … altogether un-authoritarian” (103). For Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Victor's “Edenic childhood is an interlude of prelapsarian innocence in which, like Adam, he is sheltered by his benevolent father” (1979, 231); while for Mary Poovey he is “the son of loving, protective parents” who provide the “harmony of his childhood” (1984, 122); and for Ellen Moers he experiences “doting parents” (1976, 98). Typifying the way that Victor is