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places the monster within any sort of structured identity nor destroys
him. Rather, the “darkness and distance” merely obscure and dissolve
his form. Ultimately the monster retains his fluid identity to the end,
unable to be integrated into or dismantled by any symbolic order or fixed
representation. His final blurring into the background marks the success
of the third space created by his ugliness in fostering a hybridity that is
able to resist both the abject and the binary of life and death.
The construction of third spaces in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
complicates and enhances traditional readings of identity and
monstrosity in the text. Through viewing Elizabeth’s other-worldliness
and the monster’s ugliness as spaces in which identity becomes fluid,
both characters can be seen to share in Halberstam’s hybrid concept of
monstrosity. While the introduction of the abject in Victor Frankenstein’s
dream initiates the incompatibility of Elizabeth’s identity with the
symbolic order, the scene simultaneously asserts the monster’s resistance
to and authority over signification. Problematized and broken down, the
ethereal third space of Elizabeth’s identity can not exist when confronted
with the reality of a life/death binary. The monster, on the other hand,
simultaneously composed of and resisting the abject, maintains an
unfixed identity that persists to the end, his “boundless grandeur” merely
becoming shrouded in darkness.
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Notes
1
Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1.4 (1976): 875-893. Web. JSTOR.
12 Dec. 2011.
2
The Frankenstein monster is frequently viewed as a character unassimilated into the
symbolic order. See Collings, David. “The Monster and the Maternal Thins: Mary
Shelley’s Critique of Ideology.” Frankenstein. Ed. Johanna M. Smith. Boston: Bedford
Books of St. Martin’s Press, 2000. 280-294. Print.
3
The Lacanian Order is composed of three parts: the Real, the Imaginary, and the
Symbolic. While the real can never be attained, it is what we always strive for and can
never attain once we have been initiated into language. The Imaginary order is both
narcissistic and idealized; within the imaginary, the “I” is composed of the perceived self
as reflected in another. Finally, the symbolic order initiates the self into the established
social order that is built upon commonly accepted signs and language. See Felluga,
Dino. “Lacan, the Structure of the Psyche.” Introductory Guide to Literary Theory: <
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/psychoanalysis/lacanstructure.html>
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