Mary Shelley on the therapeutic value of language

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 1994 by Brewer, William D

The monster refuses, however, to give up in his quest to form a relationship through language, and asks Frankenstein to create a female monster: "my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to a chain of existence and events, from which I am now excluded" (109). But when Frankenstein destroys the unfinished female, the monster is condemned to perpetual linguistic isolation--he is convinced that he will never experience the consolation of expressing his thoughts and feelings to a sympathetic "equal." Only in the last scene of the novel, after Frankenstein has died, can the monster express his powerful emotions to an attentive listener, and the extravagance of his language does seem to give him some relief: "But soon,' he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, ,'I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames" (164). Before Walton, the monster can play his final part "with sad and solemn enthusiasm." While language cannot in and of itself enable the monster to have the relationships he craves, he can finally experience the satisfaction of confessing his crimes and articulating his miseries before a man who, if not totally sympathetic, is at least torn between "curiosity and compassion" (161). But, despite his last impassioned monologue, the monster is never truly admitted into the symbolic order--from the moment he sees his own hideous visage reflected in "a transparent pool" (84), he is condemned to remain in the mirror-stage, irrevocably cut off from the linguistic community.

Mary Shelley's speculations about language and therapy may have begun when she was a child and her father allowed her to hear Coleridge recite "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In the epigraph to her short story "Transformation," she quotes from the section of Coleridge's poem in which the Ancient Mariner is compelled to tell his tale, and "Transformation" begins with the protagonist wondering about his motivation for narrating his story:

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrench'd With a woful agony, Which forced me to begin my tale, And then it set me free. Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns; And till my ghastly tale is told This heart within me burns. (Coleridge's Ancient Mariner) I have heard it said, that, when any strange, supernatural, and necromantic adventure has occurred to a human being, that being, however desirous he may be to conceal the same, feels at certain periods torn up as it were by an intellectual earthquake, and is forced to bare the inner depths of his spirit to another....in spite of strong resolve--of a pride that too much masters me--of shame, and even of fear, so to render myself odious to my species--I must speak. (286)(5)

This passage describes both the innate human need "to bare the inner depths of [one's] soul" and the sense that the consequences of this self-exposure could well be devastating and could, in fact, make one appear "odious" to one's entire species. These contradictory urges to reveal and conceal are typical of