"Parallels Between Frankenstein and the Cyborg"

by

Dr. Frankenstein’s monster was a phenomenon introduced to the world in the book Frankenstein by Mary Shelley in 1818. In 1818 the word "cyborg" did not even exist. Even if it had existed it would be incomprehensible to the people of that time due to their lack of technology. Despite the absence of the term cyborg, Frankenstein’s monster upholds many parallels between it’s own nature and that of Donna Haraway’s interpretation of a cyborg in her essay A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. Although referred to as a male at times, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster also exhibits a certain sort of gender ambiguity, which the monster has in common with Donna Haraway’s cyborg. Another similarity between the monster and a cyborg is that they have both been created and therefore do not identify with nature.

Ostensibly, Frankenstein’s monster was created as a male, and at times Dr. Frankenstein even refers to his monster as a "he" or "him"; however, I feel that Dr. Frankenstein sees his monster as more of a genderless being. He refers to his monster more commonly as "creature" or "monster". Dr. Frankenstein describes the original moment he saw his monster move, "...by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs" (Shelley 43). He calls his monster a "creature" and specifically says "it breathed hard" and "its limbs" showing that he had not considered it a man that he had created. Though in the very next paragraph Frankenstein refers to his monster as a male by saying, "His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips" (Shelley 43). The fact that Frankenstein, the creature’s own creator, refers to the monster as both "it" and "he" draws attention to the ambiguity of the monster’s gender. The monster actually refers to even itself as a creature or monster rather than the man that it was originally intended to be, "At first I stared back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification" (Shelley 97).

Donna Haraway states that "The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality" (Haraway 150). Before the monster could even speak and had ever met humans (whom had established societal gender roles), Dr. Frankenstein’s monster appeared, to me, to be a being that merely existed and reacted to its environment according to however it felt and without concern for societal gender roles. Rather than being "post-gender", such as Haraway states about the cyborg, Dr. Frankenstein’s creature was living a life before it knew what gender was. It was living a life pre-gender in a sense. I believe the monster seems quite enamored with both of the sexes, but I do not exactly think this creature is a sexual being (being driven by lust or the need to pro-create). I think the creature is just extremely interested in humans in general and thinks that they are all beautiful (before they hurt him). The monster sees a woman ride up to the family it had been observing. The monster describes the woman as beautiful and leads one to believe that he is showing signs of acting like a heterosexual male, but then right after that the creature states that he thought one of the men in the family had been just as beautiful. "Felix seemed ravished with delight when he saw her, every trait of sorrow vanished from his face and it instantly expressed a degree of ecstatic joy, of which I could hardly have believed it capable; his eyes sparkled, as his cheek flushed with pleasure; and at that moment I thought him as beautiful as the stranger" (100). The monster expresses how he feels both the male and female of the human species are beautiful.

Donna Haraway suggests that due to a cyborg having to be made and not simply born and raised with a family, that it has no "original unity" and that this could affect it’s ability to form into a certain gender or grow into a certain gender role. "Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of the original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of women/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense" (Haraway 151). Frankenstein’s monster has also been created like this and skips the step of original unity. The monster had no family of it’s own to grow up and learn with immediately after it was created. This creature was simply made, it’s creator ran from it and did not teach it, it did not have anyone to learn from. Dr. Frankenstein talks about his monster soon after he created it and was running from it rather than nurturing it, "I took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited, where I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life" (Shelley 44). If Dr. Frankenstein had taken the time to teach his monster, or to treat it as his son, the monster may have possibly exuded much more masculine qualities and have had more of an identity. A great deal of gender identity, like most of what children learn, is acquired through imitation. Dr. Frankenstein had not even spent enough time around the monster for it to gain any sort of knowledge through imitation, because of this the monster starts learning about masculinity later in his life through the male character Felix.

I believe that after the monster had learned to mimic the family that it had observed, it started to play into more masculine gender roles to be more like the male that it had been created to be. Prior to seeing the family, the monster had often exhibited the supposedly feminine quality of being vulnerable and displaying it’s emotions through crying when it is upset or frustrated. The creature says, "I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing; but feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept" (Shelley 87). After observing the family for a while, the monster had started to play a more masculine gender role by shoveling the snow, and chopping firewood for the family. These were both roles that one of the males in the household, Felix, did for the female, Agatha. Frankenstein’s monster says that it had performed the duties of the male in the household, "When I returned, as often as it was necessary, I cleared their path from the snow and performed those offices that I had seen done by Felix" (Shelley 98). The monster started mimicking those acts performed by the male, Felix, as if in order to begin taking on a more masculine gender role.

Besides being seemingly genderless, Frankenstein’s monster also has to deal with the issue of having been made, just like that of Donna Haraway’s cyborg. "The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But Illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential" (Haraway 151). Frankenstein’s monster is illegitimate. The monster is, like Donna Haraway’s cyborg, unfaithful to it’s origins. The creature, in fact, curses it’s creator and even kills Dr. Frankenstein’s legitimate offspring. The monster says this about its creator, "From you only could I hope for succour, although towards you I felt no sentiment but that of hatred. Unfeeling, heartless creator! You had endowed me with perceptions and passions and then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind. But on you only had I any claim for pity and redress, and from you I determined to seek that justice which I vainly attempted to gain from any other being that wore human form" (Shelley 121). The monster wanted nothing more than to cause a great deal of pain and suffering to Dr. Frankenstein and exhibited no signs of affinity toward him.

Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, upon having traits of cyborgs such as genderlessness and the notion of being created rather than born, demonstrates a couple other traits of Donna Haraway’s cyborg as well. "The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation" (Haraway 150). I feel that Frankenstein’s monster also is "a condensed image of imagination and material reality". The monster is fictional, it exists in our imaginations. A human has never been pieced together of organs from our material world and been successfully reanimated, but still we have these pieces in our material world in which we can toy with the idea in our imaginations of it being possible. Donna Haraway also describes her cyborg as not having to deal with the struggles of the Oedipus complex developed by Sigmund Freud to explain a male child’s unconscious lust for his mother’s exclusive love and hatred for his father due to jealousy. "The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse" (Haraway 150). Dr. Frankenstein’s monster also does not have to "heal cleavages of gender" because the monster did not grow up with a mother and father in which the creature could not lust after its mother and it did not grow up with any stages of life. The creature was merely a lump of dead adult tissue before it came to be, and when it was cast into life, its body was past the stages that Sigmund Freud had conceded.

Dr. Frankenstein’s monster and Donna Haraway’s cyborg have numerous similar characteristics. They both appear genderless, they were both created and not birthed, they both come into existence without developing through Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual stages, and they are both made of imagination and material reality. Frankenstein’s monster could be one of the earliest forms of a cyborg known in literary history, existing before the word cyborg had ever been created and before the advent of the technological means to create a cyborg was ever imaginable.

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in theLate Twentieth Century" Stanford University. December 2nd, 1997.October 25th, 2006. <http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html>

Shelley, Mary. "Frankenstein" University of Virginia Library. 1999. October 25th, 2006.<http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/browse-mixed-new?id=SheFran&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public>

* Adrienne Renee Gelardi is an undergraduate student at Columbia College Chicago (2006).