Fiction, the Law, and the Docile Body: The Uncanny Presence of Kant and the Marquis de Sade in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Abstract

The essay compares Sade’s narrative Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu (1789) to Shelley’s Frankenstein in order to show that both seek to identify modern justice as an instrumental force turning the individual into an object - a docile body fit to be disciplined according to the rules and routines laid out by an abstract and universalising view of justice. Enlightenment philosophy, propelled by the growth of investigative and evidential processes in jury trials, and the increase of popular participation in judicial proceedings, had put stress on the need for a universal moral law underpinning all judicial acts, a law ever-present to the mind yet also mysteriously ungraspable. The servant Justine, in Frankenstein, is turned into a popular victim of this transcendental concept of law, thus embodying the writer’s critique of jurisprudence in a supposedly secularised, enlightened culture. Frankenstein, like the writings of Sade, exposes the shortcomings of rationalism by showing how abstract Kantian law has failed to make excuses for the concrete historical circumstances in which modern individuals find themselves situated