‘괴물’이라는 관점에서 본 「레이디 수전」과 『프랑켄슈타인』

Abstract

In this article, I analyze Jane Austen’s epistolary novel, Lady Susan, and Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein for the “monsters” they depict. On one level, Lady Susan can be called a monster because she is an icon of disobedience; neither a good mother nor a good wife, though pretending to be a “Proper Lady.” However, by making Susan an attractive lady despite her immoral and unethical behaviors as an adulteress, Austen encourages her readers to have sympathy for her in her second marriage and in so doing subtly critiques the nineteenth-century patriarchal standards in England. By contrast, Shelley’s monster, the creation of Frankenstein, is depicted as an object of fear both because of its mysterious and grotesque “birth” by a man and its isolation from human society. Though not born a monster, the creature became one after having been repeatedly rejected, first by Frankenstein, and then by the De Lacey family, which had accepted Safie, but had recoiled at the creature’s grotesque appearance despite admirable qualities. The De Laceys’ differing responses to Safie and the creature suggest not only the limitation of a bourgeois family that cannot accept “otherness,” but also the limitations of English society more broadly. Therefore, my paper argues that, through Lady Susan, Jane Austen pokes fun at the ideal of the “Proper Lady” and the English patriarchal system, while through her monstrous creature, Mary Shelley comments on the prejudices and limitations of bourgeois English society.