Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child

Political Philosophy in "Frankenstein"

Eileen M. Hunt

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780812224566, 9780812249620
• eBook ISBN: 9780812294477
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From her youth, Mary Shelley immersed herself in the social contract tradition, particularly the educational and political theories of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as the radical philosophies of her parents, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the anarchist William Godwin. Against this background, Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818. In the two centuries since, her masterpiece has been celebrated as a Gothic classic and its symbolic resonance has driven the global success of its publication, translation, and adaptation in theater, film, art, and literature. However, in Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, Eileen Hunt Botting argues that Frankenstein is more than an original and paradigmatic work of science fiction—it is a profound reflection on a radical moral and political question: do children have rights?Botting contends that Frankenstein invites its readers to reason through the ethical consequences of a counterfactual premise: what if a man had used science to create a human life without a woman? Immediately after the Creature's "birth, " his scientist-father abandons him and the unjust and tragic consequences that follow form the basis of Frankenstein 's plot. Botting finds in the novel's narrative structure a series of interconnected thought experiments that reveal how Shelley viewed Frankenstein 's Creature for what he really was—a stateless orphan abandoned by family, abused by society, and ignored by law. The novel, therefore, compels readers to consider whether children have the right to the fundamental means for their development as humans—namely, rights to food, clothing, shelter, care, love, education, and community.In Botting's analysis, Frankenstein emerges as a conceptual resource for exploring the rights of children today, especially those who are disabled, stateless, or genetically modified by medical technologies such as three-parent in vitro fertilization and, perhaps in the near future, gene editing. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child concludes that the right to share love and community, especially with parents or fitting substitutes, belongs to all children, regardless of their genesis, membership, or social status.

CHAPTER 1

The Specter of the Stateless Orphan from Hobbes to Shelley

“What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.”

—Mary Shelley, “Introduction to Frankenstein”
(Third Edition, 1831)

I threw the door open as children are accustomed to do when they expect a spectre to stand in waiting for them on the other side.

“Do not ask me,” cried I, putting my hands before my eyes, for I thought I saw the spectre glide into the room. “He can tell! Oh, save me! Save me!” I imagined that the monster seized me; I struggled furiously and fell down in a fit.

—Mary Shelley, The Original Frankenstein (1816–17 Draft)

On a “dreary night of November,” Victor Frankenstein infused “a spark of being into the lifeless thing” that lay at his feet. Against his own expectations, he did not love whom he had made. He “rushed out of the room” at first sight of “the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care” he “had endeavored to form.” In shock, Victor went to bed to seek a mental escape. Yet once asleep, he faced a nightmare about his fiancée becoming his dead mother. To his horror, he found himself kissing this gruesome visage of a rotting corpse. Even when the Creature awoke him like a baby would in the night—muttering “inarticulate sounds while a grin wrinkled his cheeks”—Victor “escaped and rushed down stairs.”¹ The next morning, when he returned to his laboratory, he dreaded to see “the creature” walking around his room. As a child would expect to see a “spectre” on the other side of a door, Victor fearfully anticipated his reunion with him. He felt the polar opposite emotional response to how a new father would joyfully look forward to see the child he has helped bring to life.²

In this pivotal scene, Mary Shelley played with role reversals on two levels. In Victor, the reader encounters a parent fearfully exchanging roles with a child. In the Creature, the reader sees a child forced to switch roles with a ghost. As the nearly nineteen-year-old Shelley already knew when she first worked on this passage, the greatest fear of a new and devoted mother is the death of her baby. Through death, the infant becomes a ghost: a mere memory that haunts the imagination of the parents. At age seventeen, Shelley had experienced such terror when she found her first-born daughter, Clara, dead in her crib, only two weeks after her precarious birth, two months premature.

In her first novel conceived a little over a year after this loss, Shelley had the central parental figure of the story—Victor Frankenstein—behave as her husband, Percy, did in the wake of this personal tragedy. Both men run from the specters of their children instead of facing them. After Victor made and abandoned his Creature, he wandered in the nighttime streets of Ingolstadt until he happened to run into his best friend from home, Henry Clerval. In response to his friend’s innocent query about his strange behavior, Victor hallucinated the presence of “the spectre” or “monster” he had created.³

Just three days after her firstborn’s death, Shelley wrote in her journal, “Still think about my little baby—’tis hard indeed for a mother to lose her child.” Four days later, she reflected, “S.[helley] H.[ogg] & C.[lary] go to town—stay at home . . . & think of my little dead baby—this is foolish I suppose yet whenever I am left alone to my own thoughts & do not read to divert them they always come back to the same point—that I was a mother & am so no longer.”⁴ As she further recounted in her March 1815 journal, Percy regularly went out on the town with her stepsister, Claire, while she mourned the loss of their baby alone at home.

Less than two weeks after she found their baby lifeless in her crib, Shelley had a waking nightmare. Her journal recalled a “Dream that my little baby came to life again—that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by the fire & it lived—I awake & find no baby—I think about the little thing all day.”⁵ Shelley beheld her reanimated baby in a dream, only to find her dead, again, upon waking. A little more than a year later, she depicted Victor Frankenstein’s feverish imagining of the presence of his Creature as a “spectre”—a mere ghost, image, or memory of the “man” he had hoped to make. Like Shelley’s dead baby, the Creature is also a “monster”—a hideous “corpse” who is terrible to face.⁶ She brought this imagery full circle in her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein. Recalling the night in June 1816 when she was possessed with the idea for a “ghost story,” Shelley described her first vision of the Creature as “the hideous corpse,” which his maker had thought would be “the cradle of life.” She instantly knew that this image of a living corpse, unexpectedly rising from the “cradle” as it were, would “terrify others.” She only had to find the words to describe to readers this “spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.”⁷

While Shelley’s March 1815 dream may contain the psychic seeds of Frankenstein’s story of a scientist who brings dead tissue to life, it is also illuminating for understanding the novel’s concern with the ethics of parent-child relationships.⁸ Shelley’s dream of her dead baby, reanimated by the warm touch of her parents, suggests her deep reverence for the power of parental love to bring life into the world and sustain it.⁹ Her private record of grief in her journal—however abrupt, toneless, and slightly numb the entries might feel to a modern reader—are reflective of her willingness to confront her baby’s death in all of its sadness rather than avoid it. In the wake of the loss of her firstborn, Shelley behaved as a parent, not a child—despite her mere seventeen years. In contrast, Percy and his fictional alter ego, Victor, behaved not as parents but as children by running from the specters for whom they were responsible rather than confronting them head on.

By representing the Creature not only as a (reanimated) child but also as a specter, Shelley drew upon her harrowing experience of grief for her dead baby. As U. C. Knoepflmacher and Anne K. Mellor have argued, she may have also drawn from a deeper psychological reservoir: her own experience of maternal loss and paternal neglect during her infancy.¹⁰ Looking beyond her (in)famously tragic biography, it is less well known that Shelley also drew upon her deep reading in the social contract tradition, especially John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to depict the Creature as a child who is at once both real and unreal, appearing and disappearing like a ghost at the outskirts of the imagination.

It cannot be proven that Shelley’s loss of her mother and her firstborn baby made a deep psychological impression on the themes of Frankenstein. Likewise, it cannot be known beyond a shadow of a doubt that she used the story of the Creature to symbolically overturn the marginalization of children in the early modern social contract tradition. Just as scholars have seen the ghosts of her dead mother, dead baby, and distant father lurking in the shadows of the story of her first novel, I propose that much can be learned from treating the social contract thinkers as subterranean sources for her engagement of the question of children’s rights.

Haunting the Margins: The Specter of the Stateless Orphan in the Social Contract Tradition

Haunting images of the stateless orphan—a child abandoned to survive or die on its own, without protection of family, society, or state—loomed at the perimeters of the theoretical social contracts drawn up by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. A dark typology of the stateless orphan was implicit within the early modern social contract tradition. This typology moved beyond the simple concept of the de jure orphan as technically lacking a family altogether by exploring other, dire ways that children could lack love, care, and protection by adults. Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s state of nature theories posited scenarios in which children were de facto orphans who had family but lived without their love and care. Locke pictured a child who was either de facto or de jure orphaned in a state of war. Kant’s theory of the state engaged the case of effective orphans who initially lived within families that did not (or could not) love and care for them. These early modern social contract thinkers also forebodingly imagined different types of statelessness for such orphans. The children of the state of nature were de jure stateless (technically lacking a state altogether). Thus, any orphans (de jure, de facto, or effective) in the state of nature were doubly deprived of the protection of either family or state. Kant went still further and argued that illegitimate babies ought to be effectively stateless (born into a state without entitlement to formal, registered legal status as a subject or citizen) and killed by their mothers with impunity while the state looked the other way. If neglected or abused in the family before death, such an illegitimate baby would have been effectively orphaned. If exposed by the mother before death, such an illegitimate baby would have been made a de facto orphan, if only briefly.¹¹

The social contract thinkers consistently resorted to images of the stateless orphan to develop their justifications of the rights of adult white propertied men in opposition to those persons who were perceived as lacking the reason and independence to take on the responsibilities of rights-holders. Through this trope, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant defined rights-holders in terms of what they were not: children. In so doing, they strongly implied that children—like women, nonwhites, non-Protestants, the poor, the disabled, and other persons deemed inadequate for full membership in modern Western European conceptions of political community—should be excluded from formal legal provision and enjoyment of rights.¹²

The social contract tradition furnished unforgettable images of relatively powerless and isolated children exposed to violence and the cold of nature: Hobbes’s stony defense of a mother’s right to expose (and de facto orphan) her baby in the state of nature, Locke’s stoic picture of the rather limited freedom of the child who is de facto or de jure orphaned by military conquest, Rousseau’s disturbing hypothesis that savage mothers would release their crawling babies into the wild of the state of nature and de facto orphanhood, and Kant’s greater sympathy for a mother who intends to kill her illegitimate child than for her victim, an effectively stateless and orphaned newborn. This iconic recurrence of the stateless orphan served as the ultimate conceptual foil for the justification of the rights of powerful adult men united together in the bonds of politics. According to the social contract tradition, men had rights because they had a share in power—whether it was property, the governance of the commonwealth, or the protection of the absolute sovereign as guaranteed by the communal social contract. Children had no or few rights because they had no or little power to share or because they were simply forgotten or ignored.

Although almost invisible on the fringe of the social contract tradition, the specter of the stateless orphan has been arresting, even frightening, and thus enduring because it forces adults to confront their worst fears: What would it be like to be so abandoned by parents and other adults, helpless and alone? How would one’s own children feel if they found themselves in such a dire predicament? By eliciting these fears, the worst-case scenario of the stateless orphan positioned powerless children and powerful adults at opposite points in the Western social imaginary of the modern state.¹³ In this theoretical vision, powerless children survived or died at the margins of politics, or even beyond politics, while powerful adult men had the power to protect (or not protect) children within the bounds of the political community. Worse, the patriarchal biases of modern European political thought meant that if children were construed as warranting protection under the law, it would typically be limited to firstborn boys who could potentially inherit the father’s estate under the rule of primogeniture. Worst, this political theory often corresponded with legal practice. From the seventeenth through the bulk of the twentieth century, fathers were subjects or citizens with rights over their children and wives under the patriarchal systems of Western law. As a consequence, modern Western culture and law has tolerated, if not enthusiastically endorsed, the relative or absolute absence of children’s (especially girls’ and unprivileged boys’) and women’s rights.

The disquieting predicament of the abandoned Creature dramatized the problems with the social contract thinkers’ exclusion of children from meaningful access to basic rights to care, love, education, and sometimes even life itself. Living without the care and love of his family, the Creature is a de facto orphan. As a child migrant surviving on his own without the protection of a state, he could be read as either de jure stateless (technically lacking a state altogether) or effectively stateless (lacking a formal birth record in his country of origin, Germany).

Responding in part to the social contract tradition, Shelley reframed the image of the stateless orphan in an unexpected way by changing the reason why it is fearsome. Conjured in the person of the Creature, her specter begs readers to consider the moral bankruptcy of justifying rights for adults on the backs of children. By chronicling the Creature’s violent rampage for provision of the rights to care, love, and education that he had deserved as much as any newborn, she staged a profound critique of modern Western political theory. Her implicit target was the social contract tradition, particularly its assumption that children and women belong to the cold realm of nature, beyond the protective barrier of rights provided to adult men under the laws of the state.

Shelley’s critical appropriation of the image of the stateless orphan is uncanny. It reverses the trope and its significance while retaining its eerie familiarity. Unlike the social contract thinkers, Shelley did not depict the stateless orphan as a phantom with the power to spook us into defending rights solely for privileged adult men. She rather transfigured the icon to subvert the idea that children lack rights when they are forced by their makers to haunt the margins of the political community. In this way, she built on her father’s commitment to fighting political injustice on the broadest scale and her mother’s intere...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface. Welcome to the Creature Double Feature
• Introduction. Frankenstein and the Question of Children’s Rights
• Chapter 1. The Specter of the Stateless Orphan from Hobbes to Shelley
• Chapter 2. Wollstonecraft’s Philosophy of Children’s Rights
• Chapter 3. Shelley’s Thought Experiments on the Rights of the Child
• Chapter 4. Three Applications of Shelley’s Thought Experiments: The Rights of Disabled, Stateless, and Posthuman Children
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments