Luciferian Construct

The Essays #12

IN honor of October and Halloween, I am finally getting in a Wednesday post. The Luciferian Construct!

Once again this is one of the papers I wrote in pursuit of my Bachelor’s Degree. As such there are certain perimeters and a rubric I needed to follow. In the course of writing this paper I completely changed my direction and thoughts during the early drafts.

Not to take away too much from the paper but in reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein I found that unlike many readers I have ZERO sympathy for the monster. The paper started out talking about Victor and his pursuit of science and god-hood, but it very quickly started to focus on the alien-ness of the monster and what IT was really about. I then constructed the term “Luciferian Construct” to explain the true nature of the monster (but I couldn’t devote the entire paper to this concept due to, again, grading and rubrics.

The Supernatural in Frankenstein; Or

How the Creature is a ‘Luciferian Construct’ of Victor’s Sins/Persona

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

–Arthur C Clarke, Third Law.

A fitting quote to preface a reading of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, as many consider the work to be the first science fiction novel. Also, a glib replacement for the anecdotes that normally would start a New Historicist reading, if only those theorists had an interest outside of the Renaissance. But there is a certain art to the methods employed by the Historicists in using literature to create a view of a historical period, and then also using the history of the era to redefine the literature. In broad strokes, a reading of Frankenstein can give an image of society and culture of the early 19^th century, as there are many examples of social norms, education, culture, and religion throughout the book. But this is also a work of genre, of Gothic Romanticism that employs the fanciful and the supernatural. Many seem to want to forget the fantasy part of the story, to dismiss the supernatural to the background, and merely read it as a testament to the folly of seeking forbidden knowledge. But if one embraces the supernatural, then the narrative shifts. The creature is no longer a being to be pitied but is rather a curse; a ‘Luciferian Construct’ that is the manifestation of Victor’s ego, sins, and wrongs, powered by the Devil to destroy a man who would be a god.

Romanticism is a genre that gave birth to modern fantasy and science fiction. It was interested in pursuing imagination, emotional thoughts, embracing nature as a living thing, and infusing wonder and whimsy into what would otherwise be more ordinary setting/ character. The ‘gothic’ tales took it step further by introducing flawed characters, with emotional instability and even psychological issues long before the ‘science’ of psychology truly existed. Frankenstein embraces the gothic, Victor is a deeply flawed, as is his creation, and every moment of beauty and triumph is also weighted down with tragedy, or as Crimmins puts it; “one fantastically optimistic foot followed by one of deep despair—an ambulation that mirrors the novel’s thematic oppositions.” (561) The gothic likes to explore these juxtapositions of beauty and depression, joy and angst; and the romantic likes to embrace a world like, but not wholly ours. “For whatever light gothic novels and their ilk might shed on real-life questions, the world they portray is not like the real world.” (Brown 145) Frankenstein is no exception to these rules, while it gives us the Swiss countryside and parts of England it also gives us characters like Walton who believe they can cut a path through to the north pole, and Victor who can chase his creature on foot through a Russian winter and then continue also toward the north pole with a sled and minor supplies. The accomplishments of all the characters in the novel reach out of the realm of realism and place them at a higher degree, as this is the nature of the genre. Victor who mastered several languages and went to university at only seventeen is brilliant, but even he is out-stripped by his creature who masters French in barely more than a year and teaches himself to read. These characters exist at a higher level of capability. Yet, despite this, many critics have analyzed the texts for their “reality” and make much of interactions, psychology, and myth building that Shelly has created. If one takes everything as “reality,” acted like a New Historicist, and created an image of the Enlightenment from the text then we would be forced to accept that learning and education were easy pursuits, free of hardship aside from long times away from home; that traveling across country by foot and horseback was easy, labor free, and that nature practically fed all freely from it’s bounty; and that the people of the time were of the shallowest of character. After all, in the text the beautiful are expected intelligent, graceful, noble, and ‘good.’ While the ugly are considered base, rude, dumb, and evil. Take for example that Walton, in his framing letters to his sister, talks about Victor as an “interesting creature […] whose whole countenance is lighted up [… with] a beam of benevolence and sweetness.” (Shelly 11) Even half frozen and barely able to talk, Victor has enthralled Walton who declares of him, “I begin to love him as a brother, and his constant and deep grief fills me with sympathy and compassion. He must have been a noble creature in his better days, being even now in wreck so attractive and amiable.” (Shelly 12) This is the same Walton who will rebuke the creature when he meets him later and stands as a strong mirror to the overall treatment of the creature throughout the story. But that will be addressed later.

Romanticism is steeped in the fanciful, even if it is hidden as adjacent to the reality that one expects. Critics force it to conform to that reality and deny the supernatural from having its full effect on the narrative, at least in how it pertains to their interpretations of the text. They all define the supernatural, as it pertains to Gothic Romanticism, in their own ways. Brown says, “Originally ‘supernatural’ was a religious term referring to God and angels, and the religious or mythic sublime persists in discussions of the gothic novel,” (148) While a good definition, Shelly shoots it down though with Victor’s story, wherein in his teens he found the works of classical Alchemists and leapt to them as scientific fact. He quested for the philosopher’s stone, he tried to summon devils and spirits, and to him all of this was science, not the supernatural. In his own words, Victor defines the supernatural as only “supernatural horrors” and left to ghosts, spirits, and superstitions that were not to taught to him. “In my education my father had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors. I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition or to have feared the apparition or spirit.” (Shelly 28) Victor believes in Alchemy, does not see religion as supernatural, and doesn’t fear the dead or the devils.

Focusing now on Victor and away from genre we are presented with a deeply flawed character. As he is telling his own tale one must accept that he is an unreliable narrator, but from studying his words so minutely the picture of an extreme narcist is revealed. While his words are sometimes couched to be more favorable to his actions, his very language still reveals the extremity of self-aggrandizement. His childhood, he tells us, is full of love and learning, yet reading between the lines we see a lone child dragged along around the country by parents in a “May-December romance.” As an only child he was spoiled for the first seven years of his life before his brothers were born and the family settled down in their estates. In the above paragraph he mentions his father overseeing his education and yet he was still allowed to devolve into studying alchemy and trying to summon devils. So how much was he really overseen? Victor has a skewed sense of what is scientific and what is “magic,” and the book reinforces that. The creation of the creature is mostly glossed over, merely that in studying chemistry and in working in the morgues that he suddenly understood the power and was surprised that no one else had followed the same reasoning. When talking about creating the body, other than mentioning building it larger for ease of access and constantly calling the parts “materials,” we have no details.

Most analysis focuses on Victor as the modern Prometheus, this then is the mythic part of the tale and where, in general, most believe the supernatural resides. Afterall, the myth of Prometheus is of religious significance, and the establishment of the genre defines the supernatural through God and religion. The myth of Prometheus is about teaching man that gods exist, but also liberating them from their ignorance and allowing them to grow and thrive as free-thinking peoples. “The ancient Greek Prometheus had sought to liberate his people by separating mortals from immortals and thereafter reuniting them by means of a festive, religious ritual. By contrast, the modern pseudo-Prometheus promised to liberate humanity by effacing the division between heaven and earth and by seeking to make the natural scientific universe the ultimate object of all cultural activity.” (Jager 268) But of course, Victor is a self-centered Prometheus, his goals are for his own entitlement, as much as he constantly says that he is working for the betterment of mankind; in his first studies toward the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life, the latter “soon obtained my undivided attention. Wealth was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery if I could banish disease from the human frame…” (Shelly 20) His first thoughts are toward the glory he’d gain in healing all and banishing disease. Jager does acknowledge the variances needed to fit Victor into the mold of “modern-Prometheus” later in his paper, “Victor’s ultimate project is that of establishing an equality that will erode all difference so that it will no longer be possible to distinguish between heaven and earth, mortals and immortals, parents and children, men and women and, ultimately, between self and other.” (270) While it’s true Victor wants the powers of life and death, that he wants to break the barriers between heaven and earth, there is little that suggests he wants to raise all humanity to the same level. Elizabeth Bear better understands the nature of Victor, “The trouble with comparing Victor to Prometheus, however, is that in stealing fire, Prometheus actually accomplishes something of great utility to humanity and is punished by the gods for his temerity. Victor does indeed step into a role previously defined by his society as being appropriate to a god—that of progenitor of life—but Mary makes it evident from the beginning that any scientific utility in his work is of very little interest to him.” (Bear 231) Victor is defined by his lack of compassion, his lack of understanding others, and only thinking about how everything affects him. When the creature threatens to appear on his wedding night, Victor automatically assumes that it’s coming to kill him. As such he sets out from his hotel, armed with a gun and walks out waiting for the creature to strike, only to then hear the screams as his bride is murdered. It would be a shocking scene, if only months earlier in the narrative the creature hadn’t also killed his best (only) friend in retaliation for destroying the female body, and Victor’s brother murdered even before that. For a man who is brilliant enough to learn multiple languages, to excel in chemistry and alchemy, and create life… he is incredibly stupid. He can’t think of attacks to the people around him as attacks toward himself. He fears that his resurrected woman might be more evil than the creature, and that they would birth a “race of demons.” Yet, could he not have rendered the female sterile? And could long dead flesh even create viable offspring in the first place? And with these questions and the peculiar from of stupidity in his character, a different reading is needed to shift the view to make this right. Reading him as a brilliant young scientist, as a product of the enlightenment who had to throw off the past (Alchemy, Agrippa, Magnus) and embrace the natural philosophies (chemistry and science) before he could take on the mantle of Prometheus and become a new god, creates a dissonance. But if he is read as a throwback, as an Alchemist and a diabolist, who did confess that he attempted many times to summon the spirits and devils, but met no known successes? When read as a wizard, dabbling with a mixture of the new methods and the old alchemy then the narrative makes a little more sense. His lack of reasoning and vision can be explained away with a lack of actually embracing scientific principles. The lack of details in the creatures’ creations can also be explained away that they might be more mystical than anatomical. Victor does make reference to the biblical ‘breathing life into inanimate clay’ and if it wasn’t for the references to working in the churchyards and morgues at the beginning of the book, and the single description of one hand “in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy.” (Shelly 141) then the creature could have fact been a clay golem. When Victor destroys the female creature, whose body was already near completion and must be assumed to also be of great stature, he was able to put the parts in a basket and carry it to the beach to sink it into the depths of the sea. How heavily where these parts? How large? And entire dismembered female body that could be packed into a basket and carried by a man to the ocean? But if the body was more of a framework with preserved flesh over and perhaps something was summoned to “drive” it?

These assumptions might sound silly, might sound groundless, and yet they are still supported by the text. So many read the story of the creature and speak of sympathy and ask the question about nature versus nurture. Had Victor accepted his creature and nurtured it then would have been a noble creature. No. First, the creature’s tale is also unreliable, it can not be expected to tell the whole truth, and even if it did it is related to the reader from Victor, who has no reason to make his creature look pure. It is then further filtered by Walton, who obviously is infatuated with Victor and doesn’t read between the lines of the story that Victor is telling him. The creature breaks the laws of science, he cannot exist through any naturalistic mechanism, therefore he must exist through an unnatural mechanism. He is a Luciferian Construct. Defined as a creature/golem given agency through demonic/other power. The creature is the manifestation of the obsessions and sins of Victor. It is a curse that follows him and torments him, that reminds him of his obsession even after he has given up and moved away from such things. Even as Victor tries to reestablish a link to his family and the life he ignored during his studies, the creature is a constant punishment that stalks him. Victor started his pursuit of the dark arts through alchemy and the elixir of life, the ability to banish disease and heal any ailment, which was more than likely elevated to an obsession with the death of his mother. Victor literally pours years of his time and his life into creating his creature. Working days at a time without sleep or proper food and breaking his body to the point that when he actually succeeds in creating his creature, he promptly has a hysterical breakdown. The body he has created starts as beautiful, artfully created, but as the “life” is infused into it, as it “breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs” and it opens its yellow eyes, all the beauty flees. It changes and becomes a horror. In some texts on devils and spirits there are mentions of yellow-eyed devils, and due to the lack of clear details when the creature is discussed we don’t know if it is the iris or the sclera that is yellow. This is an important distinction that never gets clarified, as they have vastly different inferences linked to them.

In Brown’s article the author dismisses most of the supernatural as irrelevant. Among his points he states the creature’s immense size and strength, “The monster’s physical accomplishments seem disproportionate even to its unusual stature, but they are supernatural only in the older and weaker sense, quantitatively impressive, not qualitatively alien.” (148) Brown is asserting through this section of the text that the creature is only strong based solely on size and construction. He then comments on the creature’s intellect, “A mental prodigy as well as a physical one, the monster apparently learns to manage fire without trial and error and to speak without active practice […] in months it becomes so fluent that the blind De Lacey takes it for a native.” (149) But dismisses even this with, “To a great extent the monster’s supernatural facility is also that of other characters. While slower than the monster, Frankenstein still claims, in the 1818 text, to have mastered English and German ‘perfectly,’ along with Latin, and to have begun to read Greek by the age of seventeen.” (149) Brown conjectures that as part of a gothic romance that these characters exist in a world that is fantasy and as such, they all lead a charmed existence. While these arguments are sound, and they do address all of the supernatural elements in the story and Brown does acknowledge some of them, such as how does the creature move through the world so unseen? Even on the Orkney Islands were barely anyone lives and there are only a handful of huts the creature was watching Victor through the window, out in the open. Even as Victor moves across the country the creature is always keeping up on him. By sure “luck” the creature encounters a young boy who acts out upon seeing the creature. That this child just happens to be Victor’s brother and that the creature wandered at random to the city Victor was from, before Victor could return home? It is far too many coincidences to just dismiss. But read the creature as being created from Victor’s sins and obsession, as being equal and greater than Victor, and it begins to make sense that the creature can always find him. Can always arrive near to him and always stay just ahead of him. They are linked by black magic and ritual. The creature is a punishment for Victor’s hubris in believing he could play god.

Taking it even further, the ugliness of the creature is an important point. As mentioned above, if we take the book as literal then the people in the countryside are extremely shallow. The reactions to the creature are far too extreme to be merely dismissed as “he’s ugly.” Victor is the only one who can even stomach to talk with and look upon the creature, and that is merely as they are linked in whatever Luciferian deal that Victor has enacted in creating the creature. But the other interactions of the creature; first William screaming that creature will eat him. The man who shoots the creature even though he just pulled the man’s daughter out of a river. Felix who savagely attacks the creature who is kneeling on the floor and supplicant to the blind DeLacey. The rejections are over the top and make no sense. They are far too extreme. But the most telling moment is in the end of the book when Walton meets the creature. This scene in critical, Walton enters the room and sees the creature looming over the body of the Victor. Walton, in a moment of courage, calls out for the creature to stay, and he sees the creature’s face once. Immediately he is repulsed and horrified, his body goes into a panic. The only way he can have a conversation with the creature it to look at its chest. What is so powerful, so evil, that Walton can only talk as long as he can’t look at the creature’s face? Walton has been warned of the creature’s ugliness by Victor, therefore no level of “normal ugly” should invoke such a reaction. There must be a supernatural element to its visage. Both blind DeLacey and Walton are the only two characters, other than Victor to have a conversation with the creature. And both are almost seduced by the creature’s words. Which is the final evidence to the creature’s true nature. He has the eloquence and the ability to beguile with his voice. Despite his murderous rages and his unnatural appearance (and strength, intelligence, and even diet), he elicits sympathy in the few people he is allowed to talk to and in almost everyone who reads the book. So many articles love to talk about sympathy for the creature, but really, it’s sympathy for the devil. It’s not a mistake that one of the three texts the creature reads is Milton’s Paradise Lost, a text which helped create the Luciferian/Byronic Hero in the first place. It is also no accident that the creature calls himself a “fallen angel” when he first approaches Victor, and then in his final words with Walton he states; “Evil henceforth became my good. Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly chosen.” (Shelly 141) followed by, “the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.” (142) Even while admitting his acceptance of evil, of reveling in murder and no longer feeling remorse, the creature is still trying to draw sympathy. At this moment he has fully become the ego and sins of Victor. Everything is about him, about how he was mistreated and left to fend for himself, about how everyone else is responsible for evil. Nothing is the creature’s fault, everything belongs to Victor.

Now, it is true that Victor is a horrible, narcissistic person who has brought all of his ruin down upon his own head. The argument is not that Victor should be treated better, or read as better. The argument is that too many critics/ analysists dismiss the supernatural from the story and that they continue to write ‘sympathy for the devil.’ There are too many questions about the creature that need answering. Too many people who believe the narratives exactly as they are written, usually because they tend to think that an “unreliable narrator” is a modern invention and that these three frames should be taken as literal and clear. But the point of literature is to parse through the language and look between the words, and images and see what lies beneath. Taken literally we have to assume that ugly or disabled people were practically hunted down and murdered for looking different. Albinos, people with two different colored eyes, people born blind, odd birthmarks, and other birth defects… would any or all of these be a death sentence? If this was a medieval or classical story, the Spartans come to mind for killing children with defects, then there would be more leeway for superstitious people fearing the different. But this is a story that is supposed to take place firmly in the Enlightenment, an era that is all about scientific advancement and higher reasoning/ learning. Some leeway can be made in that genetic studies were still about 50 years away when Shelly wrote Frankenstein. The creature is not science, the creature is the last gasp of magic. Victor is the last wizard, using the new science and new reasoning to have a last surge of the alchemical, one last summoning of the Devil. This is a gothic romance, a fantasy that has been hiding as the first science fiction novel for 200 years.

Works Cited

BEAR, ELIZABETH, and MARY SHELLEY. “FRANKENSTEIN REFRAMED; OR, THE TROUBLE WITH PROMETHEUS.” Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds, edited by DAVID H. GUSTON et al., MIT Press, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS; LONDON, ENGLAND, 2017, pp. 231–238. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1pk3jfp.15.

Brooks, Peter. “Godlike Science/Unhallowed Arts: Language and Monstrosity in Frankenstein.” New Literary History, vol. 9, no. 3, 1978, pp. 591–605. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/468457.

Brown, M. (2003). Frankenstein: A child’s tale. Novel, 36(2), 145-175. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fsearch.proquest.com%2Fdocview%2F205302872%3Faccountid%3D3783

Christie, William. “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Critical and Cultural Heritage.” The Two Romanticisms and Other Essays: Mystery and Interpretation in Romantic Literature, Sydney University Press, AUSTRALIA, 2016, pp. 231–268. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1d10h2h.14.

Crimmins, Jonathan. “Mediation’s Sleight of Hand: The Two Vectors of the Gothic in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein.’” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 52, no. 4, 2013, pp. 561–583. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24247264.

Jager, Bernd. “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Fate of Modern Scientific Psychology.” Humanistic Psychologist, vol. 42, no. 3, July 2014, pp. 268–282. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/08873267.2014.929900.

MacWilliams, Alison Bright. “Science Playing God.” Religion and Science Fiction, edited by James F. McGrath, Lutterworth Press, Cambridge, 2011, pp. 80–94. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1cgdw1p.8.

Shelly, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818 Edition. New York, 2015.