Jungian Analysis of Frankenstein

Frankenstein’s monster is an enigmatic figure; a fictional character that has grown into a myth as the stanza from this poem implies:

The myth is unchained: It staggers north,

insane. A ghost of lightning glows

in its eyes; its sow hands close in wrath

like child’s hands seizing flowers.

(Gardner 505)

The line from the poem compares Frankenstein’s monster to a child, with the grasp on life of that is childlike and immature.  It seizes flowers with its hands, which only later we find that everything he touches more often than not, he ends up strangling.  This stanza points to the archetypal nature of Frankenstein’s monster, yet to understand the nature of the archetype is to understand the nature between the creator and created, and to the created and society.  Moreover, pointing to a higher archetypal configuration between Victor Frankenstein, his creation, and the cast of characters that litter Mary Shelley’s classic novel. 

.  The archetype as Jung posits are the primordial forms that are formed in the collective unconscious (Campbell 60).  The configurations however that Frankenstein, the monster and society, represent together are grandiosity.  As Moore (48) wrote in “Facing the Dragon,” it is that primordial energy that causes a messianic complex (that is always present) and is an “evil” psychic energy that destroys a person if it is not dealt with.  This is the “Lucifer complex that threatens to seduce and possess the human ego consciousness” (Moore 8).  Moore points out that it is this “greedy little god in the psyche, and everyone has it (Moore 70).”  This archetype is symbolized by the dragon, a powerful image in mythology, yet can also be seen as Lucifer.  This point is made extremely well in a TED talk given by Psychologist Philip Zimbardo where he discusses the Lucifer complex and where this form of evil has arisen; such as with people like Jim Jones, and the abusers of the prisoners at Abu Graib.  This archetype more often than not materializes when people or groups of people, holding power and control, do not realize the limitations of their own beliefs and abilities; eventually turning to all types of abuse.  Zimbardo called it the Lucifer Complex; Robert Moore called this evil, grandiosity. 

Both Moore and Zimbardo come from different schools of psychology, Zimbardo of Freud and Moore of Jung, yet both point to the same thing; this concept of something grandiose and Luciferian which we can see are constellated in the novel Frankenstein.   

            The book itself seems to have a five act structure.  First, the letters from Captain Walton to his sister which detail his trip to cold north; followed by Victor Frankenstein’s narrative; then the narrative of the creature which is nested in Victor’s own narrative, then back to Victor’s narrative and finally to the Captains letters again.  The only necessaity of mentioning the structure is that

            We start with a man wanting to go as far as he can to the north.  Who wants to be greater than he is, who we can see as immature and ignorant to his limits until he meets Victor Frankenstein.  Frankenstein’s story alone is enough to make a more prudent of a man out of Captain Walton and helps him to change course in his life, and turn back to warmer climes.

            The story given to Walton however, received by Walton as didactic, is itself not written to us readers as didactic, yet it still holds those cautionary elements to avoid grandiosity and its evils.
 

            Victor’s tale itself consists first of him growing up, loving his family very much and the adoption of Elizabeth (who he later marries), the birth of William (his brother) and the death of his mother when he was seventeen years of age.  Victory then goes to the University of Ingolstadt in Germany where he creates the monster in his Apartment.  In this moment of creation, this is where Victor has fallen prey to his own grandiosity, becoming Lucifer and being totally blinded by the fact that he is not really gods equal.  His creation goes astray, eventually killing victor’s brother William.  This action gets the blame placed on Justine Moritz who cannot be saved.  In this very narrative, Victor’s own grandiosity about his gifts gets two people he is close to killed. 

            Forward to the monsters narrative, he laments his first encounters with humans.  These include being run out of a village that he was fascinated by.   People running away from him because of his appearance, and his relation to the De Lacy family.  More importantly in the narrative is the Delacy family.  The monster, became obsessed with watching them and helping them collect fire wood, but in the end, he is beaten by Felix De Lacy.  As Bernatchez writes in his article “Frankenstein and ‘The Structure of Torture’” “young De Lacey’s rejection of the ugliness of his body “only served to isolate the monster from society further” (208).  As Moore (37) points out “evil wants to get you alone and isolate you.”  The key word being isolation for the monster, whereas at one point he was moving towards a more virtuous state, he can no longer because not of his own doing, but of societies.  The monster displays his own grandiosity to Victor when he states “slave…remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful of you” (Bernatchez 209).

            In Victor’s final narrative, he decides to make a mate for the monster, but in a fit of rage decides to destroy it.  Victor, in essence decided against what would be evil.  We may see it as a loss for the creature, yet it rouses the nature of the creature and he presumes his killing of Henry Clerval (Victor’s best friend) then Victors newly married wife Elizabeth (his step sister) on their wedding night. 

            The monster followed through on his promise of power and pain that he so explicitly had given Victor.  Victor in his own grandiosity underestimates the monster and gets many people killed.  Moore (34) commented that “Underestimating what you are dealing with is one of the marks of grandiosity and immaturity.”  The monster, represents that pure unfettered power, that is looked over by Victor. 

            In the end, the monsters circle is completed, and Victor Frankenstein dies in the cold north.  The monster is found by Captain Walton grieving his dead creator, where he claims that he will leave and build a funeral pyre that will be his own and end his own life. 

            The madness created by the creature in Victor Frankenstein’s life is the essence of the effects of grandiosity and what it does.  That grandiosity is the dragon, the evil that is representative of all evils that would beset people’s lives.  Only though death and the grief is the grandiosity eventually released and the lone Captain is left to take heed of the lesson that is left before him.  Like a new bearing in his own life and one he can relay to others.  Grandiosity is becoming like that god or goddesses; it is trying to be equal with that which we are not.  And as Victor Frankenstein shows, his greatest following is succumbing to it, and underestimating it. 
  

            Mary Shelley may have not know at the time, but she had made a connection to spirituality in her writing.  If I were to look at this like Robert L Moore.  I would probably say that Victor was possessed by Prometheus which was the Dragon of his grandiosity and the monster was actually another one of victors archetypes battling for ground in his psyche.  The monster, made up of collected grief, only had to cry for his creator in the end and walk to his own death, which in effect is the symbol of Victor finally being released from his pain (toxic shame) of losing those close to him. 

Works Cited

Bernatchez, Josh. "Monstrosity, Suffering, Subjectivity, and Sympathetic Community in

Frankenstein and ‘The Structure of Torture.’" Science Fiction Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, 2009, pp. 205-216.

Campbell, Joseph, editor. The Portable Jung. Penguin Books, 1976.

Gardner, John. “Frankenstein." The Kenyon Review, vol. 31, no. 4, 1969, pp. 505-506.

Moore, Robert L. Facing The Dragon, Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity. Chiron Publications, 2003.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Fiction, Horror Supply: Wikisource, 1818.

Zimbardo, Philip. "The Psychology of Evil." TED TALKS, https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil#t-831981. Accessed 14 March, 2018.