Literary Conceptions of Self and Authenticity in Frankenstein and Madame Bovary
Patrick Mooney
English 180N
September 25, 2000
To say that either Victor Frankenstein's monster or Emma Bovary -- or both -- have had their fundamental conceptions of reality shaped by their reading is merely to repeat a commonplace. Emma Bovary is a sort of Frankensteinian monster; but Frankenstein's monster is a sort of Bovarian character, as well. Even to point out that both characters have been shaped by their reading experiences in remarkably similar ways is merely to articulate an observation that should be painfully obvious to perceptive, thoughtful readers of both texts. And yet, a close examination of the similarities (and, just as importantly, of the differences) of the manners in which both of these characters use their literary experience to construct their interpretation of their respective realities is highly instructive. This analysis will show that both Emma and the monster have a fundamental faith in the power of language as a near-magical force that can shape the actions and perceptions of other characters and allow the speaker to achieve certain desired ends. It will also show that Michael Bakhtin accurately predicts what these varying literary foundations of the construction of experience mean for the characters and their conceptions of self and other.
In the cases of both characters, this fundamental (and, as it turns out, fatally naïve) faith in the power of language leads the character to a crisis where all of the desire the character has experienced up to that point in the novel is denied any possibility of satisfaction. In each case, this crisis is a point at which the plot of the novel abandons any possibility of a happy resolution and embarks on an irrevocably tragic course. This can be seen from the examination of the authors' descriptions of these turning points.
In the case of Frankenstein's monster, this crisis comes when the monster, who has coiled all of his hopes for his future happiness into the moment in which he implores the goodwill of the De Lacey family, asks the elder, blind DeLacey for help. The monster explains to De Lacey, "I am full of fears; for if I fail there, I am an outcast in the world forever." (Shelley 90) De Lacey reinforces the monster's faith in language by telling him, "there is something in your words which persuades me that you are sincere." The monster later explains the significance of this moment to Victor, saying, "This, I thought, was the moment of decision, which was to rob me of, or bestow happiness on me for ever." (91)[1]
Several points in the brief section of the novel delineated by these statements deserve comment. The first is that the monster believes (optimistically and naïvely) that language alone, the "godlike science" which he perceives the cottagers to have, can overcome the natural repugnance people feel at his appearance. (75) It is for this reason that he appeals to the single member of the De Lacey family who can perceive only his words. The second point is that he has, in fact, put all of his hopes into this single moment, and it is the disappointment of these hopes in this moment that sets his future course of action; he tells Victor that it was "from that moment [that] I declared everlasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him who had formed me." (emphasis mine; 92) The monster also relates to Victor that, "[f]or the first time[,] the feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom." (93) The murders of William, Clerval, and Elizabeth, and the monster's planting of evidence on Justine to implicate her in William's murder, all occur after the rejection of his plea for acceptance and assistance in obtaining the acceptance of others, toward which he has been working for most of a year.
The monster's specific language in explaining his rejection and the manner in which he responded to it is informative. He declares "everlasting war" against man, as Milton's Satan does against God. He also closely paraphrases words that Milton ascribes to Satan and shows that he is familiar with their source when he tells Victor that he, "like the arch fiend, bore a hell within [him]." (92) The monster has already related to Victor the fact that the books he found contained material which he "applied much personally to [his] own feelings and condition." (86) Of the three volumes the monster finds in the forest, "Paradise Lost excited different and far deeper emotions" than did either of the other books. (87) The monster's conception of himself, then, is literary, and is especially influenced by Milton's religious epic, which he "read [...][2] as a true history." (87)
The third point here deserving of comment is that the monster's language is inadequate to achieve his intended result of overcoming the disgust the De Lacey family experiences in response to his appearance.
It is worth noting here that the monster's faith in language, although shaken, remains with him through the end of the novel: When he encounters Victor on the glacier atop Montanvert, he says, "I entreat you to hear me, before you give vent to your hatred"; he then expresses surprise at Victor's reaction, asking, "Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye upon thy creature[?]" (66) And Walton, on first encountering the monster on his ship at the end of the novel, is "at first touched by the expressions of [the monster's] misery," but is not sufficiently touched to attempt to comfort the horrible creature, express sympathy, or attempt to restrain him from leaping to his almost certain death in the polar north. The monster's faith in the magical effectivity of language, despite his highly developed "powers of eloquence and persuasion," proves useless to help him in the end. (154) The monster's nexus of desire for acceptance and communion with human individuals becomes disconnected from any hope of fulfillment by the rejection of the DeLaceys. Although the monster later hopes for communion with "a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself," Victor is already persuaded by the murders that the anguished creature has committed that any female of the monster's type will also be a "dæmon," and asks his creature, "Have you not already shewn a degree of malice that should reasonably make me distrust you?" (98-9; 116; 100) The rejection by the De Lacey family of the monster's lingual plea, then, has determined the outcome of his fate -- from that point forward, no happy conclusion is possible for him.
In the case of Madame Bovary, this crisis of desire is similar and comes when Emma Bovary, in an extremity of financial need and emotional distress, asks Rodolphe to loan her the money that she needs to save herself from financial ruin, is denied, and makes a final plea:
I would have given you everything. I would have sold all, worked for you with my hands, I would have begged on the high-roads for a smile, for a look, to hear you say 'Thank you!' [...] yet you loved me . . . you said so. [...] There is the spot on the carpet where at my knees you swore an eternity of love! You made me believe you [...] Oh, your letter! your letter! it tore my heart! And then when I come back to him [...] to implore the help the first stranger would give, a suppliant, [...] he repulses me because it could cost him three thousand francs! (Flaubert 227-8)
Again, several points in this passage deserve comment. The first is that, like the monster's conception of himself and his relation to others, Emma's perception of her love for Rodolphe is intensely literary: She claims that she would have gone through any hardship merely to experience the ecstasy of being loved by him. The language she uses is dramatic in the same way as the novels she read as a teenage girl at the convent, which Flaubert describes as "all about [...] persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, [...] horses ridden to death on every page, [...] gentlemen [..] virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and weeping like fountains." (26) The similarity suggests that Emma constructs her view of her feelings for her lovers in terms of the novels she has read. This suggestion is made explicit in several places throughout the novel, including the passage where Flaubert describes Emma as seeing herself as "the mistress of all the novels, the heroine of all the dramas" for Léon. (192)
The second point is that Emma's language itself is self-referential. Certain words and phrases she uses indicate a fundamental faith, which she also shares with Victor's creation, that her language itself can achieve her desired end, the persuasion of Rodolphe to ease her financial burden -- her plea is full of words and phrases that refer to the effectivity of speech: "begged," "say 'Thank you,'" "said so," "swore," and "implore." The third point is that the utterance of many of these words and phrases is closely conjoined with the attainment of desire in Emma's mind. When Rodolphe "swore an eternity of love," he "made [her] believe [him]." Emma is certain that he "loved [her]," because he "said so." Rodolphe's written language, his letter, also "tore [her] heart," and precipitated a forty-three day delirium. (227-8; 151) A scant one and a half paragraphs after Rodolphe's final refusal, Emma begins to lose her grip on reality; Flaubert writes, "Madness was coming upon her." (228)
Although this crisis, in which Emma is finally convinced that the effectivity of language as a magical or persuasive device is completely lacking, is precipitated by financial troubles, Emma "suffered only in her love." (228) The unraveling of Emma's knot of desire through the destruction of her faith in language, as with the unraveling of the monster's desire, is caused by an inability to connect with a human being. The monster and Emma are equivalent in this important respect, as well.
Although both Emma and the monster construct their perceptions of their reality in literary terms, the differences between the literary sources of these constructions are immensely significant. The understanding of reality constructed by Victor's creation derives primarily from Milton's epic;but Emma Bovary's understanding of reality derives primarily from novels. The differences in the manners in which each character sees, first, himself or herself, and second, his or her relationship to authenticity, corresponds exactly to what Michael Bakhtin theorizes we should expect from these genres.
The monster's conception of self and authenticity is built on the literary foundation of the epic Paradise Lost. Bakhtin suggests that characters in an epic are sacred and authentic. A brief examination of the monster's character will show that he sees himself in terms of these problems. He compares contrasts himself to the sacred, mythological characters of both Adam, the first man, created by God and imbued with divine breath, and Satan, the enemy of God. (Genesis 2:7; Shelley 87) The monster, in juxtaposing himself with Adam, forms the most complex and thoughtful of his existential questions in terms of this comparison; he explains to Victor that Adam "was allowed to converse with, and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature: but I was wretched, helpless, and alone." (Shelley 87) This comparison with Adam forces him to compare himself to another figure from Paradise Lost, Satan; forces him to compare his own creator to God, and find Victor wanting; and gradually grows into a complex set of thoughts on ethics and responsibility, which earns him the pity of Victor and Walton and allows him, in his own mind, to escape at least some of the responsibility for his crimes by claiming that he would be virtuous if he were only happy. (66; 154-5)
Emma's conception of self and authenticity, too, is exactly what Bakhtin's theory of the epic and the novel suggests. This conception, for her, is based on a literary foundation, but this foundation is the novel, not the epic. Bakhtin says that a novel establishes a zone of contact between the characters and the reader (as well as the author), and Emma Bovary lives in this zone of contact with literary characters. In fact, her experience is so grounded in this fictional zone that she excludes the possibility of contact with people from the real life around her because they are dull in comparison. "The nearer things were," Flaubert says of Emma, "the more her thoughts turned away from them." (42)
Bakhtin also says that the novel is not authentic; as the reader might expect, Emma is in no way concerned with questions of authenticity. She does not seek a meaningful understanding of her own existence at any point throughout the book; the closest she comes is in wishing that she were not married, that she were dead, or that she had chosen some vocation (such as working "as a nursing Sister") that would be seen by others as channeling her own pain into utility. (31; 169)
Emma's and Victor's monster's conceptions of language, the literary roots underlying these conceptions, and the manners in which they conceptualize their problems have been shown to correspond precisely to what Bakhtin's theory of the epic and the novel suggest we should find. However, there are several additional questions that this analysis suggests.
Perhaps foremost among these deals with the question of authenticity -- the question of whether Victor's creature actually does live in an authentic manner. This analysis also opens up new possibilities for discussing the manner in which each character attempts to gain access to meaning through his or her literary conception of existence. Finally, there are interesting possibilities for exploring the manners in which the literary conceptions of these figures are mirrored in the structural aspects of each novel. Unfortunately, however, all of these questions are beyond the scope of this discussion.
Works Cited
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Ed. and trans. Paul de Man. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1965.
Holy Bible. King James translation.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996.
Footnotes
[1] Page references to both Frankenstein and Madame Bovary refer to pages in the Norton Critical Editions of these texts. Full bibliographic information will be found at the end of this discussion.
[2] In this discussion, ellipses in square brackets are my own insertion and indicate a portion of the text which has been excised; ellipses without square brackets are in the author's or translator's original text.
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