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this “sublimity” in the male monster as encouraging his connection with
Victor, while the female monster’s raw representation of “female sexuality”
and the female body threatens Victor and drives him to destroy her. In
this sense, Elizabeth is more clearly connected to the male monster. Her
other-worldliness reflects the sublimity of the creature and forms a space
of connection with Victor’s identity. In fact, Elizabeth’s incompatibility
with the raw reality of death, of the gruesomely constructed body further
disassociates her from the female monster who offers only that to the text.
Thus establishing the connection between Elizabeth and the male
monster, the third space occupied by each character can be further
explicated in their identities’ relations to the symbolic and imaginary
orders. Exploring this aspect of Elizabeth and the monster’s identities
sheds light on their ultimate compatibility with reality and their ability to
maintain a state of fluidity in the novel. Gigante argues that the ugliness
of the creature is distinct from the Freudian concept of the uncanny.
She states that “while something may be uncanny for one person and
yet not so for another, the ugly is universally offensive” (567). Moreover,
she claims that, in this way, the creature is “that aesthetic impossibility:
the positive manifestation of ugliness” (567). In becoming such a
manifestation, the creature is set apart by his ugliness in the same way
that Elizabeth is set apart by her ethereality. While Halberstam argues
that the creature’s ugliness traps him forever in the Lacanian imaginary 2
order (44), Gigante contends that the true horror of ugliness is its threat
to “consume and disorder the subject” (569). Both critics, therefore,
argue for the monster’s embodiment of the imaginary that forever resists
the symbolic. The creature’s resistance of the symbolic is paramount to
the continuation of the fluid identity that the third space of his ugliness
creates. Elizabeth can also be seen as resisting the symbolic order, which
Gigante claims that Victor defines in his opening statement of his family
history as a means of identifying himself (580). Elizabeth’s lack of clear
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origins, the mystery that shrouds her parents’ identities, and her own
unclear identification within the family structure points to her failure to
be incorporated into the symbolic order. Elizabeth’s marriage to Victor,
however, imposes a structure upon her identity. Incorporating her into
the symbolic order by labeling her as Victor’s wife, Elizabeth’s ethereal
nature is drawn into the social structure of a life/death binary with which
her identity is ultimately incompatible.
The connection between the identity of Elizabeth and that of the
male monster can be seen most clearly in Victor’s dream as Elizabeth
actually morphs into the monster. Victor’s vision of Elizabeth walking “in
the bloom of health” transforms first into the corpse of his dead mother
and then, upon his waking, into “the miserable monster” (61). The
transformation that takes place in this sequence signifies the connection
of Elizabeth and the monster, the fluidity of their identities, and their
interchangeability.
The intervening image of the dead mother, however, is important to
note in the sequence. Julia Kristeva writes: “the abject, on the contrary
… is what is radically excluded, drawing me towards the point where
meaning collapses” (126). Kristeva’s concept of the abject is useful in
understanding the identity of the monster, as well as the identity of
Elizabeth in the text. The abject, according to Kristeva, repulses because
it reminds us of the other. It is unrecognizable and opposed to the object,
or the self (126). Abjection entails what is horrifying and repulsive:
blood, vomit, corpses, puss, etc.—all of which the Frankenstein monster
is clearly a prime example. The abject, primarily the corpse, collapses
meaning in its jarring reminder of death, specifically our own death,
and its breakdown of the self/other, subject/object distinction that
is necessary for entrance into the Lacanian symbolic 3 order in which
identity is secured in a socially-constructed form (Introductory Guide to
Critical Theory n. pag.). The interjection of Caroline’s corpse into Victor’s
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