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Disruptive affects: shame, disgust, and sympathy in Frankenstein

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10509580701844967

1740-4657

James C. Hatch,

Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art

Abstract Many critical approaches to Frankenstein have relied on an ethical reading of the Creature’s predicament – that he is benevolent within and ugly without. The emotional responses to the Creature’s condition that the novel evokes are illuminated when cast in psychoanalytical light. This article traces how shame and disgust, as theorized by Silvan Tomkins, operate in the novel, and how these responses disrupt or undermine the function of sympathy, as described by Adam Smith. In doing so, the article attempts to show that ethical readings of the novel – readings which participate in both Enlightenment ideas of sympathy and Romantic ideas of the “Other” – remain problematic because of the enduring presence of shame and disgust throughout the novel. The novel remains as powerful as it is partly because of the irreconcilability of the affects of shame and disgust with the ethical operation of sympathy. Notes 1. The texts of Percy Shelley’s review and of the 1818 edition of the novel are in the edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein used throughout this article. 2. Ngai is referring to Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought 453–54. 3. Abbreviated in the text as AIC. Selections from this work are available in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. For an extended treatment of Tomkins’s theories, see Nathanson; for an article that raises criticisms of Tomkins’s theories, see M. Lewis. 4. Tomkins refines his description of disgust by adding “dissmell” to the affects (see AIC 3: 21–25). As Darwin described the affect, disgust is a reaction to ingestion or the threat of ingestion, so the position of the lips in scorn (a kind of disgust) originates in the form of the mouth as it ejects noxious food. Dissmell involves a movement away from what could offend. For the purpose of this essay, I use “disgust” in the general sense of dissmell and disgust together, and in their most heightened form. 5. This passage is cited in part by Gigante 568. 6. Gigante 577 cites this passage in a different translation. 7. Shelley’s description in the 1831 preface of the vision that inspired the work has the proto‐Frankenstein a “student of the unhallowed arts” and an “artist” (357), but these descriptions do not erase the fact that the text itself describes a process that is discursive and logical (proceeding step by step, through causation). The artist here is of course Mary Shelley herself. 8. Nancy Yousef demonstrates the ways in which the novel is a reaction to Lockean theories of development that treat the child’s mind in isolation, and have little room for interpersonal relations. Part of the possible critique at work, she shows, comes in the way the Creature is fully grown but mentally a child, which points up the problem of treating the mind’s development in isolation from the body and its environment. 9. But apparently, not aiskune to aidos: see Konstan. 10. See Darwin 309–46. For Darwin, “Blushing is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions” (309), and it is of great concern to determine whether people of different races blush (315–20). 11. See Yeazell. This quality is shared with the high‐born characters of romance (whose innate superiority shines through their disguises). 12. For Nietzsche, bad conscience (“schlechtes Gewissen”), which perhaps better translates what most of us mean by guilt, involves the same blocking structure as is found in Freud’s struggle between the super‐ego and the ego or between ego and id: “This instinct for freedom forcibly made latent … this instinct for freedom pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within and finally able to discharge and vent itself only on itself: that, and that alone, is what the bad conscience is in its beginnings” (523; author’s italics). 13. Compare Freud’s evaluation of children’s reactions to strangers, which stresses separation anxiety and libido: “At the very beginning, what children are afraid of is strange people; situations only become important because they include people, and impersonal things do not come into account at all until later. But a child is not afraid of these strangers because he attributes evil intentions to them and compares his weakness with their strength… . A child is frightened of a strange face because he is adjusted to the sight of a familiar and beloved figure – ultimately of his mother. It is his disappointment and longing that are transformed into anxiety – his libido, in fact, which has become unemployable, which cannot at that time be held in suspense and is discharged as anxiety… . [I]n this situation … there is a repetition of the determinant of the first state of anxiety during the act of birth – namely, separation from the mother” (505–06). 14. Because shame has this structuring effect, it would be a worthwhile project to see if shame is then the primary or enabling affect of narrative, the affect that allows literary experience, insofar as narrative articulates events. 15. For a discussion of this aspect of Tomkins’s theory, see Sedgwick and Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins,” Shame and its Sisters, 1–28, esp. 8–11 (also found in Touching Feeling, 93–121, esp. 101–104). 16. See Tomkins’s discussion of shame as the “underlying affect” to guilt (AIC 2: 150–52). Shame, guilt, and shyness “are differentiations of the varying conditions under which the same affect is evoked or reduced, and under which it is included as a component in varying types of central assemblies. Like a letter in an alphabet, or a word in any sentence, the other sub‐systems of the nervous system with which shame is assembled, and the messages in those sub‐systems at the moment, as well as components of the preceding and following central assemblies, are capable of radically transforming the apparent quality and meaning of shame” (AIC 2: 150). Since affect is the primary material out of which emotion is made, it unites what are usually seen as separate feelings: “Shyness, shame, and guilt are identical affects, though not so experienced because of differential coassembly of perceived causes and consequences. Shyness is about strangeness of the other; guilt is about moral transgression; shame is about inferiority; discouragement is about temporary defeat; but the core affect in all four is identical, although the coassembled perceptions, cognitions, and intentions may be vastly different” (AIC 3: 23). See AIC 1: 111–15 for a description of the “central assemblies,” which involve the “messages” from the nervous system and a “transmuting” mechanism that makes them conscious. 17. See Rousseau, chaps. 13 and 14 (284–88). 18. For treatments of sympathy in Frankenstein, see Brooks, Marshall, and Yousef. 19. References in parentheses are to section numbers, followed by page numbers in square brackets. 20. Even before the Creature understands that the De Laceys “possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds,” a process which is basically emotive (words “produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearers” [137]), he considers the relationship between appearances and interior life (“What did their tears imply? Did they really express pain?” [137]). Apparently, it is this earlier stage which allows the Creature to say that words can bring about facial expressions and emotions (“in the minds and countenances”). Peter Brooks points out that the Creature also learns “an important corollary to Rousseau’s postulate of the emotional origin of language: the radical figurality of language, its founding statute as misnaming, transference” (209). 21. Lee Zimmerman shows that Frankenstein can be considered to have been “invisible” as a child (i.e., not allowed to develop a self), and that the Creature shares this with him. Zimmerman usefully discusses Winnicott’s and W. R. Bion’s ideas of the importance of looking and being looked at in the development of a self. Though I agree that Frankenstein may have been invisible as a child, and remains in some sense invisible to himself, the Creature is unseeable, not invisible, i.e., ugly, affectively shocking, and very present. 22. Of this moment, Brooks writes, “This speculary cogito, where the Creature witnesses his outward identity as alien to his inner desire, estranged, determined by the view and judgment of the Other, clinches the importance of language as the symbolic order that must compensate for nature” (210), but there is no direct evidence that the Creature’s “view and judgement” comes from anyone but himself. 23. The relationship of Mary Shelley’s reading and the intertextuality of Frankenstein is covered in numerous works: for an overview, see Pollin. Frankenstein and its relationship to Paradise Lost is considered in detail in Gilbert and Gubar 213–47. See also Baldick 37–44. 24. “Because of the possibilities of such shared awareness there is no greater intimacy than the interocular interaction. It is an incomplete intimacy when one is looked at, without seeing the other, or when when one looks at the other without being looked at” (AIC 2: 180). As the Creature says of the De Laceys, “my heart yearned to be known and loved by these amiable creatures: to see their sweet looks turned towards me with affection, was the utmost limit of my ambition” (157). 25. This knowledge is dependent on maintaining ocular contact, not on the parity of affects: “Nor is mutuality of awareness limited to homogeneity of shared affect. If I smile at you and you frown at me, we share the knowledge that I like you but you hate me” (AIC 2: 180). 26. Taken as a topos, the reference to Narcissus in Shelley’s work reflects ironically on Frankenstein. As Christopher Fox points out, it is illusion that becomes a major component of the way the Narcissus story is interpreted, in manners which range from “the (a) folly of worshipping an image, to the (b) blindness that arises from pride, and … to a (c) self‐pleasing delusion, a mental aberration created by his own imagination,” all of which could apply to a moralistic reading of Frankenstein’s own behavior (27). The Creature’s singularity is the parodic literalization of Narcissus’s own pride. On the Narcissus topos in general, see Vinge. How the Creature should see himself mirrors the epistemological problem of the female autobiographer, as Barbara Johnson has shown: “The problem for the female autobiographer is, on the one hand, to resist the pressure of masculine autobiography as the only literary genre available for her enterprise, and, on the other, to describe a difficulty in conforming to a female ideal which is largely a fantasy of the masculine, not the feminine imagination” (10). 27. When Frankenstein attributes an affect to the Creature’s face, it is anger: “A fiendish rage animated him [i.e., the Creature] …; his face was wrinkled into contortions too horrible for human eyes to behold” (169). 28. On the relationship of the Creature’s face to sympathy, see Yousef 223–25.