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In Chapter Five of Valdine Clemens's The Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror from The Castle of Otranto to Alien, Clemens turns her attention to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. As concerns the significance of Shelley's famous monster, Clemens observes,
the monster's symbolism is multivalent; he plays the role of both victimizer and victim. He is the destructive force of industrialization; he is a monstrous nation; he is an enraged citizen; he is Victor's shadow; and he is a needy, abandoned child. He not only inflicts pain and devastation on the innocent and vulnerable, but he also demonstrates the moral and spiritual degradation that follows upon the frustration of basic human and developmental needs. (113-14)
I quote this passage at length because it encapsulates both the primary strength and weakness of Clemens's ambitious analysis of Gothic horror: the attempt to develop multiple related yet distinct theses simultaneously. Each of the contentions catalogued above concerning the multiplicitous significations of Frankenstein's monster is clearly provocative; however, the attempt to explore the dynamic of victim and victimizer in the context of nineteenth-century British technological and industrial development and class-stratification, the Jungian implications of the monster as shadow or double of Dr. Frankenstein, and the eschewal of the feminine in the text and the importance of maternal nurturing in childhood development