Conceiving monstrosities: Frankenstein, sexuality and place

Mulvey-Roberts, Marie

Abstract

Mary Shelley’s novel has been seen as encoding the forbidden sexuality of homo-erotic desire and the taboo of illegitimate births. In regard to the former, Lord Byron’s physician, John Polidori, will be discussed as a catalyst for her waking dream which, as she explains in her preface to the novel, was the genesis for Frankenstein. This moment of conception will then be extended and shifted from the shores of Lake Geneva to the Georgian city of Bath where the tale was transformed into a novel. It is perhaps even less well-known that Mary Shelley’s reason for being there was tied to a birth out of wedlock.
The conception of the monster as a product of solitary male propagation without the nurturing female, I will argue, could have been rectified through Victor’s earlier interests in the alchemists whom he abandoned. The monster’s own sexuality has been a matter of speculation. Indeed, it is Victor’s fear that his creatures will reproduce and replicate their hybridity, compounded by the possibility that the female monster could mate with man, that prompts him to destroy his female monster. I will argue that the monster’s virility has been secretly encoded within the frontispiece of the novel, partly as a ludibrium, along with the semiotics of sexual difference, which can be seen to be united through the esoteric traditions of the occult.

• Presentation Conference Type: Keynote
• Conference Name: The Gothic, the Abject and the Supernatural: 200 Years of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• Start Date: Oct 31, 2019
• End Date: Nov 2, 2019
• Deposit Date: Apr 29, 2024
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11930299
• Additional Information: Keynote Lecture