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monster’s unnatural development can not be erased. As Brown puts it:
the monster “hardly stirs before it walks, feeds, and clothes itself, and
within days it has begun to think … long before it learns about speech”
(198). The reality of the monstrous nature of the creature’s development
will always be present, no matter the efforts the creature makes to erase
that reality. Brown states: “Nor can monstrosity be localized; it pops up
in the most out-of-the-way places” (198). Regardless of the monster’s
perceived efforts to assimilate into society’s identity structures, such a
desire will ultimately be resisted, if by nothing else than the monstrosity
inherent in the identity of his existence.
Having established that Elizabeth and the creature become
interchangeable in the text, both occupying and establishing a third
space where their monstrous, fluid identities can exist, the issue of
Elizabeth’s identity comes to the forefront. Her all-encompassing
identity, incompatible with the reality of death, becomes problematic at
the murder of William and ultimately breaks down entirely upon her
own death. Gubar argues that Elizabeth’s complicit guilt in the murder
of William is a reflection of the Miltonian concept of Original Sin (55).
Beyond this “shared guilt” that Gubar contends is also behind Justine’s
confession and Victor’s remorse, Elizabeth’s accusation of herself can be
seen as a reflection of the problematic nature of her fluid identity. Elizabeth
accuses herself of both the motherhood and the murder of William. She
cries out, “I have murdered my darling child!” (72). William, however,
is not her child at all. More than anything, William should be a younger
brother figure to Elizabeth, who has been adopted into the Frankenstein
family. However, at his death, Elizabeth refers to him as if he were her
own child. The relationship between Elizabeth and William, as expressed
in this statement, is an assumption of maternal authority on the part of
Elizabeth and a confirmation of the fluidity of her identity within the
Frankenstein family.
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Elizabeth’s simultaneous accusation of herself as William’s murderer,
however, speaks to the problematic elements of the space that she occupies
within the text. Her all-encompassing identity can only exist in the third
space of the ethereal with which she is connected. When confronted with
the reality of death, the physical marks of the wounds on William’s neck
(72), her identity breaks down. The nature of her identity’s plasticity
becomes detrimental, as she can no longer differentiate between herself
and the murderer.
Unlike the death of William, there is no description of the murderous
fingerprints upon Elizabeth’s neck when the creature strangles her.
Instead, her features are at first “half covered by her hair” (167) and later
covered by a “handkerchief thrown across her face and neck” (168). Her
features are hidden and, in hiding, resist identification with death and
bodily corruption. The lack of description speaks to the ethereal nature
of Elizabeth that is set apart and can not be associated with the grim
disfigurement, the absolute identification of death. The reality of death,
however, is everywhere present. Referring back to Victor’s dream, death
again functions as an intrusion of reality upon the other-worldly third
space in which Elizabeth’s identity exists. Her own death cements the
incompatibility of her fluid identity with a reality outside of the ethereal
space that she occupies, her inability to be incorporated into the symbolic
order.
The monster, however, is literally created from death and birthed
outside of the socially-sanctioned order. An embodiment, not of
the ethereal, but of the ugly, a walking corpse himself, the monster
simultaneously embodies and resists the power of the abject. Rather than
incompatibility with the symbolic order, the monster’s identity can be
seen as existing beyond it in such a way that the binary of life and death
holds no power over him. His fluid identity is allowed to exist through
the end of the novel. The monster does not die, but is “borne away by
the waves, and lost in darkness and distance” (189). This ending neither
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