“Unhallowed arts”: Frankenstein and the Poetics of Suicide

Abstract

This essay interprets suicide as an essential trope in Mary Shelley's critique of the fantasy of individualism in Frankenstein, and posits that suicide operates as a metaphor through which to interpret Romanticism's interest in radical politics. Frankenstein engages the subject of suicide by way of three kinds of extra-textual discourses – Mary Shelley's attempt to come to terms with the role of suicide in her biography, as well as in the larger cultural debate on legal and medical aspects of suicide at the turn of the nineteenth century; the novel's engagement of Percy Shelley's account of the relationship between reading, sympathy, and love as it concerns the possibility of subject production; and a larger Enlightenment debate about how subjects are formed and maintain cohesion. Through the intersection of these three discourses, the novel uses suicide to stage Romanticism's interest in the political efficacy of the materials that the Shelleys saw as creating subjects – namely, texts.