Reading Meaning through Deconstructing the Writing of Shelleys Frankenstein - Essay Example

13 January The Nature, Production and Interpretation of Meaning: Reading Meaning through Deconstructing the Writing of Shelley’s Frankenstein The death of Shelley as a writer brings life into the text. Ronald Barthes forcefully argues the assassination of writers in his essay, “The Death of the Author.” His ideas are related to post-structuralist notions of “reading” the text. Post-structuralism argues that readers should deconstruct meaning and social relations from the text that they are interacting with. Meaning comes from the text itself; language has meaning embedded in it already that will explain what the text means, including how it functions and for what purposes. This essay analyses Mary Wollstonecraft’s Frankenstein. Post-structuralist ideas assert that Frankenstein explains how the nature, production and interpretation of meaning in the text comes, not from analysing who the writer is, but understanding the writing itself through a deconstructive reading process, where women shift from being the Creation to being the Makers of their identities and destinies. A feminist deconstructive analysis argues that Frankenstein describes a patriarchal society, where sexuality and textuality clash. In The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Mary Poovey argues that the making of Frankenstein asserts the struggles between women’s sexuality as the norm and as their nature: “[T]he narrative strategy of Frankenstein... enables Shelley to express and efface herself at the same time and thus, at least partially, to satisfy her conflicting desires for self-assertion and social acceptance” (131). The monster is not Shelley, but the system that women live in. On the one hand, women exist in a society, where patriarchy both condemns and romanticises them. They have to live within it, as they try to make their own identities. The society values the “face” that is evident to the human eye, as Scott J. Juengel explains in “Face, Figure, Physiognomics: Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and the Moving Image.” Women’s physical characteristics and the outward lives they are forced to take are imperative to the repressive society. On the other hand, the Otherness of the female sex can induce them to produce and invent another life, a hybrid of identity that can be acceptable to men and women alike. The uneven parts of Frankenstein represent the irregularity of womanhood’s meaning; one meaning comes from prevailing social norms, which opposes their natural sexuality. It, this abominable monster, is the “He”; it is also the “She.” The combination, nevertheless, becomes unacceptable to the patriarchal society, where the “She” must remain in its hidden corners, most especially, the corners of the house and the home. Post-structuralism underscores the meaning of the “fissures” in the text, the gaps that are missing but say more, where the woman is omitted, but the more she becomes ironically present. William Christie, in “The Critical Metamorphoses of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” explains that the monster is “the story’s uninterpretability.” He states: “The monstrous in Frankenstein is at once the source of and the explanation for the story’s uninterpretability, an uninterpretability that nonetheless invites rather than discourages our vain attempts to interpret” (19). This essay argues that the “uninterpretable,” however, is in what is not openly discussed in the novel. In “Frankenstein, Feminism, and Literary Theory,” Diane Long Hoeveler explores the novel through feminist and literary theory. She asserts that, based on Jacques Derrida, the “fissures” in the text are powerfully meaningful (48). Women are not active characters in the novel; they are objects, the receivers of the action (Boonzaier 135). What they are belong to the rules in the discourse system of their society and history (Heracleous 84). Elizabeth is chosen to be a future bride; Justine receives injustice. They are passive pawns in the power play, arguably the Godhood play, of Victor. Soon, they become victims, all dead in the end. The physicality of their deaths depicts the truism of womanhood. People who have no free will to become who they want to be, as in the case of the chosen bride, and who cannot defend themselves, as in the case of Justine, are not people (Weininger et al. 179). They are Frankenstein. They have no inner self, no identity. Meaning itself can be understood from the act of reading. Barthes argues that readers should not analyse literature through the author’s life because its meaning is in the language of these writings and their various interpretations. He states: ...for Mallarme, as for us, it is language which speaks, not the author: to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality — never to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realistic novelist — that point where language alone acts, “performs,” and not “oneself” (Barthes 3). The novelist does not produce the meaning; those who read it make the meaning of the text. The language “acts,” as if it is an organism of its own, someone who has the right to be known for what it is. Indeed, the Monster understands who he is by reading. His knowledge of reading brings him knowledge of his nothingness, as he shows the papers of his origins to his Maker: I sickened as I read. `Hateful day when I received life!' I exclaimed in agony. `Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred. (Shelley Chap.15, Par. 8) The Monster explores his loneliness in his nothingness. The reading process reveals his ignorance, and so reading and knowing become his curse too. In addition, knowing what he is has made the Monster long for who he can be with, a possibility for life through living with someone, who can give meaning to his life. He recognises that his identity cannot be full without companionship. Through the human language, he understands and identifies his goals: to live a fuller life with someone else, who is like him. The reading impregnates him with the idea that humanity is about having someone to share life with: “And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property” (Shelley 13.17). Being alone forever for him is being a monster in its essence, someone with no direction and sense of fulfilment. Another way of seeing this realisation is that readers can find meaning through novels; they are true companions that reveal insights and hindsight about humanity and human development. In the “Introduction,” Yarrington and Everest argue the “limits of normative discursive practice” (2). The text must be deconstructed, in order for its various meanings to be exposed. As long as readers read the text as itself, the more they can understand its meaning. The nature of the text is in the reading. Language can also lead to newly-made discourse systems. Language is critical to post-structural reading; it contains discourses that shape womanhood, who they are and who they can and cannot be. Hoeveler stresses that some feminists use Foucault’s theories to analyse literary genres as products of “discourse systems,” which “control and dominate how women function in a society that prescribes how they appear and behave” (49). Gender is socially constructed, and it can be deconstructed from Frankenstein too. While Frankenstein can be understood as the produced gender norms and expectations that define and control womanhood, women can take the place of Victor too. They have also contributed to their own “making” by following gender norms, but they can also undo the system. Victor takes responsibility for his horrific “son” as he says: Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? I had before been moved by the sophisms of the being I had created; I had been struck senseless by his fiendish threats; but now, for the first time, the wickedness of my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the whole human race. (Shelley 20.1) Women can destroy the system that oppresses them. But the process and consequences, as the novel goes, is not entirely simple. Victor dies first, and then his Creation. Women have to kill their “women” selves, so that they can be born again (Waraschinski and Lemert 256). This essay argues that the death comes with fully opposing what society says about gender, especially womanhood. Being ostracised is expected, and loneliness kills too, but if women want to be de-womanised, they must do so by killing their socially-produced identities. Readers produce the meaning of the text, and women will produce the meaning from their own lives. In foregoing the writer, post-structuralist readings concern the analysis from the readers’ viewpoint, so that they can “restore the status of the reader” (Barthes 3). Women must be prepared to think of something they have not done before, so that they can do something they have not done before. To be free of the monsters in society that control them, they must be free of their gendered identities. Barthes asserted: “...we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author” (6). While the death of the Maker can induce the birth of the Creation as the Maker, the readers are not homogenous, and their heterogeneity enables the text to be meaningful for every reader, where options and opportunities for a meaningful freedom can be attained. Barthes states: We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture. (3) Meaning lies on the language and context of the text and how readers interpret them. The writer must be killed off, before the reading begins, and the readers will dictate new meanings. The production of meaning lies in women’s power “to become” in their own terms and dreams. Frankenstein is deconstructed in Barthes’ framework. Shelley is destroyed for the text to have meaning. The meaning is challenging, but clear. The Creation can and must be the Maker. Women must leave and kill their gendered selves. They must be Victor and beyond him. They must be prepared for the unknown charters of being new Women, not wo-men, of beings made from men’s definitions and constraints. The language of Frankenstein reveals that to be truly free, women have to kill their Makers and re-make their images. Works Cited Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. 1967. Web. 4 Jan. 2012. . Boonzaier, Floretta. “A Gendered Analysis of Woman Abuse.” The Gender of Psychology. Eds. Shefer, Tamara, Boonzaier, Floretta, and Peace Kiguwa. Capetown, South Africa: UCT Press, 2006. 135-150. Web. 4 Jan. 2012. Google Books. Christie, William. “The Critical Metamorphoses of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Sydney Studies (2008): 1-34. Web. 4 Jan. 2012. Heracleous, Loizos. Discourse, Interpretation, Organization. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2006. Print. Hoeveler, Diane Long. “Frankenstein, Feminism, and Literary Theory.” Cambridge Companions Online, pp. 45-62. Web. 4 Jan. 2012. . Juengel, Scott J. “Face, Figure, Physiognomics: Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and the Moving Image.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 33.3 (2000): 353-376. Web. 4 Jan. 2012. MasterFILE Premier. Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. 1818. Web. 4 Jan. 2012. < http://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm>. Waraschinski, Tamara, and Charles Lemert. “Identity, Mortality and Death.” Handbook of Identity Studies. Ed. Anthony Elliott. Oxon: Routledge, 2011. 236-253. Print. Weininger, Otto, Lob, Ladislaus, Steuer, Daniel, and Laura Marcus. Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles. Bloomington, IN: Indiana U P, 2005. Print. Yarrington, Alison, and Kelvin Everest. “Introduction.” Reflections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism. Ed. Alison Yarrington. London: Routledge, 1993. 1-9. Print. Read More