“For What Crime Was I Driven from Society?” Material Bodies in Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice and Shelley’s Frankenstein

Abstract

Despite their similar themes of ravaged female bodies and voiceless women, Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) have not been considered together. Taken together, these novels dramatize the double bind that women face as material objects and thinking subjects during the nineteenth century. Applying Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theories of the chora and the abject, in addition to Jacques Lacan’s theory of the law of the father, I argue that when Hays’s central character Mary Raymond and Shelley’s creature, whom Shelley uses to provide a voice for the otherwise voiceless female characters, enter the symbolic order, they come to understand the significance of their material bodies and their lack of power. In Kristevan terms, Mary and the creature begin in the maternal chora, which they both reject. After entering the realm of the law of the father, Mary, a rape victim, and the creature, an unnatural being, understand the presence of the abject. The typical reaction to the abject is one of horror, as it threatens to break down meaning and the symbolic. While society reacts with horror, viewing Mary and the creature as monstrous, Mary and the creature themselves accept it, but, first, they undergo harrowing circumstances. Acquiring knowledge and language only constricts and fragments Mary’s and the creature’s identities. When Mary and the creature become aware of their bodies, they attempt to reject society’s confinements and transcend its boundaries. While they find transcendence when they escape in their imaginations, a place that transcends the symbolic, they are unable to transcend society’s verbal reactions to their material bodies. Their transcendence is momentary, and they ultimately fail. Despite their failure in patriarchal society, Mary and the creature return the abject to the abyss of death, which they look forward to, wherein they will leave behind the patriarchal language and the Father’s law.