Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

Technodemons of the Digital Self 215ized reaffirmations of individuality and self-possession that motivate andmobilize these contradictions.” 51The making of the monster is suggestive of various significant types ofactivity: scientific invention, industrial production, artistic or divine creation,and the maternal act of giving birth. The unconscious character of thisactivity is prominent:Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among theunhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animatethe lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance;but then a resistless, and almost frantic, impulse urged meforward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit.It was indeed but a passing trance, that only made me feel with renewedacuteness so soon as, the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, Ihad returned to my old habits. 52The reasons behind this “unnatural stimulus” are nowhere clearlystated, but Victor links it in retrospect with emotions and desires gettingout of control.A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peacefulmind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity.I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception tothis rule. 53Victor’s momentary lapse as a controlled man of reason, his “trance,”brings out the monster; and as the creature awakens, Victor is horrified andescapes into sleep. 54 Victor’s waking trance is aimed at realising the dream ofa “new species” that would bless him as its “creator and source”; this is replacedby restless dreams of his fiancée, Elizabeth, transformed in his armsinto the corpse of his dead mother. 55 The intellectual isolation of the romanticindividual is here ambivalently related to love, desire and body – all thesesymbolised in relation to women. Many scholars have interpreted the relationshipbetween Victor and his monster under the doppelganger motif;there is an uncanny connection between the unnamed creature and its crea-51 Ibid., 145.52 F, 54.53 F, 55-6.54 The whole novel is explicitly linked to a trance-like state between sleep and consciousmind. Mary Shelley relates the starting impulse of Frankenstein in her introduction[1831] as follows: “When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I besaid to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successiveimages that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.”(F, 9.) – One is also reminded of a famous etching by Goya: “The sleep of Reason producesmonsters” (Los Caprichos, plate 43, 1799). The Sleep of Reason by Derek Jarrett(1988) relates the religious impulses and imagery in the nineteenth century British literatureto (Victorian) society and culture.55F, 54, 58.