The Paradoxical Self-Rebirth and the Ethics of Love in Frankenstein

Abstract

Frankenstein showcases a male scientist`s fantasy of a self-rebirth and abjection against the maternal presence through narrative and scientific creation, which represents patriarchal culture of the early nineteenth century Britain. Victor`s narrative of demeaning description of women and his creation of life without female body are equal to the abjection process which Julia Kristeva explains in Powers of Horror. However, the novel makes a paradoxical turn for change and suggests the new ethics of love, as symbolized by the maternal body. As the mother`s body becomes a matrix space to create split subject and nurture the infant, the novel becomes the abject narrative: within this abjected body of a novelistic form, Mary Shelley embraces and incubates the socially subscribed subject. In the ending of the novel, the creature, the result of abjections, conducts Victor`s funeral-death and willingly embraces death, which becomes symbolic subversion and the manifestation of Kristeva`s ethics of love within the mother. Through writing the novel, Shelley creates a womb-like space to subvert the process of abjection and embrace the other within, thereby calling upon the new ethics of love encompassing abjection.