Lyrical Sociability: The Social Contract and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Abstract

Abstract: As a sociable being that is barred from society, Frankenstein’s monster presents a sustained engagement with a major dilemma of eighteenth-century philosophy: whether individualism can produce sociability. Through the bodies of the monster and his planned partner, Shelley constructs a dark allegory of Rousseau’s social contract theory, which draws on his use of the lyric in The Confessions . With its vague causality and tolerance of contradiction, Shelley suggests that the lyric provides a space for exploring the fractures, inconsistencies, and philosophical underpinnings of a social theory that protects individuals from each other instead of bringing them together.