Rodas 1

Julia Miele Rodas

Everybody Loves the Monster!
(Symposium at the New York Public Library)
18 August 2011

Frankenstein’s “Monster”:
Autism and Articulation in Mary Shelley’s Novel and Beyond

As we have learned this morning, Frankenstein has been the subject of extraordinary popular

attention as a horror text, having been reinterpreted for general consumption across an astonishing

array of film and graphic media. In these modes, our common delight in Frankenstein’s creature

comes most often from the thrill of fear and disgust, and from the satisfying closure of the

monster’s death. At its very foundation, however—as has been made evident by our speakers this

afternoon—Mary Shelley’s text demonstrates at least as great an interest in political philosophy as it

does in the affective allure of the gothic tale. Shelley’s occupation with the revolutionary politics of

her historical moment is manifest throughout the novel, specifically evoking philosophical concerns

about natural rights, enfranchisement, political and social obligation, poverty, education, and what

constitutes the human. At the center of the text’s dual life—its role as a touchstone both of horror

and of revolutionary politics—is the creature.

It may come as small surprise, then, that this figure has long been an icon for those

interested in the representation of disability, arguably the nexus at which horror and politics meet.

Lennard Davis, in his foundational disability studies text, Enforcing Normalcy (1995), is among the first

to observe that Frankenstein’s creature serves as a productive model for thinking about disability

and culture. According to Davis, “We do not often think of the monster in Mary Shelley’s work as

disabled, but what else is he?” (143). Explaining the creature as “a disruption in the visual field”

(143), Davis understands the horror aspect of the monster, and by inference, the social horror of

disability, as residing in “its composite quality, which is too evocative of the fragmented body” (145).
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The creature’s skin, argues Davis, is an anxious threshold, and his fragmented body “is a zone of

repulsion” (144).

In keeping with this view of the creature as a site of horror, others have observed that the

Frankenstein film cycle participates in a continuum of disability discrimination: “from the first horror

films to modern-day renderings, physical and mental disabilities have been shown to connote

murder, violence, and danger” (Norden 113; Bogdan et al. 33). For these observers, and for others,

pity, contempt, and violence are uniquely bound together in the representation of disability.

Understood within this context, the “monster” of the Frankenstein tale, unmoored from any fixed

text and reproducing itself within an infinite cultural matrix, presents a terrifying rendition of

disability as abomination: profane, hideous, and malicious. What literature and film teach us about

disability is, as Robert Bogdan succinctly observes, “If they look bad, they are bad.” “Disability,” he

writes, “is the black hat” that marks a character as evil (vii).

More recently, however, literary theorist Mark Mossman, offers a reading of the monster

from the inside, Mossman identifying his own disabled body and his own disability experience with

that of the creature: “I felt all of the resentment of the creature, the anger, the isolation, the

loneliness. The creature was the ultimate victim of stereotyped oppression, of a disabling

construction of ‘ugliness’” (Mossman ms 7).1 But Mossman, importantly, also recognizes both the

creature and himself as unstable, postmodern subjects, simultaneously occupying positions of power

and oppression, of weakness and of strength. “In this way,” he observes,

I vaguely recognized that the creature resisted what it had become, and used its

disabled body, a body that was incredible and superior in strength, in its ability to

experience extremes in cold and heat, to wreck the inscribing process of outside

1
The present paper cites a manuscript version of this essay. For published versions, see complete
information on list of works cited.
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definition. Being constructed in postmodern discourse, being the person I was and

am, I read the creature as “powerful” in its resistance: the creature gained power

through its disempowered body; it took the imposition of “abnormality” and used it

as an articulation of strength and purpose. (Mossman ms 7-8)

For Mossman, the story of oppression and disenfranchisement is entwined inextricably with a story

of power and agency.

While disability scholarship on Frankenstein has focused primarily on the monster’s body and

appearance, it is the representation of the creature’s articulate life which is my concern here today. In

particular, the following discussion will explore the difference between the eloquent being who

emerges in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the mute or grunting monster as it is represented in

popular culture. Mimicking the exaggerated physical disfigurement and disability of the monster as it

is seen in popular film, the dumb-ness of the monster as it is understood in popular culture may thus

be understood in the context of modern debates about autism, agency, and articulation. In fact, I

would like to propose that Shelley’s careful delineation of the creature’s language and social

development resonate with the idiosyncratic quality of autistic language and social development and

that the writer’s evident concern about the creature’s having a voice and being heard are reflective of

contemporary concerns about voice and agency in autistic community.

It is widely believed that Shelley’s narrative of the creature’s emergence into language is

informed by Enlightenment theories about infant language development. The creature comes into

being, like any human infant, without language and his entire sensory experience is fused and

indefinite, his sense of self, other, and greater world without distinct boundaries or symbolic order.

As the creature puts it, “all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct. A strange

multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt at the same time; and it was,

indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses”
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(Shelley II.iii; 68).2 The creature’s pre-verbal social gestures, his attempts to connect and

communicate with others, recapitulate the indeterminate gropings of human infancy in which touch

and sign, self and other, communication and exploration are merged. Indeed, the creature’s very first

interaction with his maker might describe the motions of an ordinary infant with his parent: “his

eyes … were fixed on me. His jaws opened and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin

wrinkled his cheeks. … one hand was stretched out” (I.iv; 35). In Shelley’s script, as in literature on

infant development, such gestures are seen as interested, intelligent, and communicative, even when

they are without clear deliberation or when they are unaccompanied by conventional symbolic

language.

While the creature seems intended to represent the purity of infancy, he is also, of course,

significant as a symbolic philosophical figure, written partly in response to an ongoing discourse

about the condition of man in a state of nature. In this respect, the creature, it has been noted by a

number of scholars,3 must surely evoke that of the so-called Wild Boy of Aveyron, a supposedly

feral child taken from the French provincial woodland and brought to Paris in 1801, where he

became the subject of intense public interest, scrutiny, and debate. Dubbed “Victor” (like Shelley’s

Victor Frankenstein), the French child became a celebrity and was in demand as a guest (or exhibit),

at fashionable Parisian salons and soirees, where the subject of his education and speculation as to

his understanding and state of mind fueled the discourse of the Paris elite. Tutored by Jean Marc

Gaspard Itard, an early master of deaf education, the popular “Wild Boy” was a momentary

2
References are to the 1818 text, cited first by book and chapter numbers, followed by the page
reference in the Norton edition. See details in “works cited.”
3
A number of scholars have suggested a connection between the creature and Victor of Averyron;
for more on this connection, see: Nancy Yousef’s “The Monster in a Dark Room: Frankenstein,
Feminism, and Philosophy" and her Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy in Enlightenment
Philosophy and Romantic Literature; Emily Sunstein’s Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality; and Roger
Bartra’s The Artificial Savage: Modern Myths of the Wild Man.
 Rodas 5

sensation, a subject who, it was thought, might answer the question of what human intelligence and

affect really would be like without all the social cultivation and restriction. Victor was viewed in early

nineteenth-century intellectual circles as a living thought experiment.

While two key differences assert themselves—firstly, that Victor of Aveyron never acquired

the ability to use language in any conventional sense; and secondly, that Frankenstein’s creature

never received a social welcome anywhere—the being imagined by Mary Shelley and the figure of

the feral child nevertheless circulate around one another. Seen to exist, isolated, at the margins of a

social world, the creature and the feral child occupy an important imaginative current, suggesting not

only questions about “man in a state of nature,” but also about typical responses to perceived

differences in human affect, sociality, and cognition. For many contemporary scholars believe that

there is a connection between so-called wild children4 and what our culture presently understands as

autism. The cognitive irregularities of these feral children, their apparent unawareness of social rules

and customs, their avoidance of spoken language, their utter failure to understand or meet social

expectations have, for many, suggested the idea of autism. There has been speculation, for instance,

that Victor of Aveyron and “Peter the Wild Boy,” another well-known feral child, may have been

autistic (Lane 164; Frith 35-43; Collins 9-58). Indeed, some have surmised that autism is the most

reasonable way to explain many tales of feral children reported over the centuries (Straus 548;

Nazeer 202). While he swiftly acquires the ability to read and to speak with eloquence, and while he

is persistent in his social overtures, the being described by Shelley nevertheless continues to reflect

the symbolic condition of the feral child; he lives in the wilds of mountain and forest, or hidden in a

hovel, foraging for his food, a solitary enigma, patently unable to engage civilization on its own

terms.

4
According to Linaeus, homo ferens.
 Rodas 6

So, while many scholars read Frankenstein’s creature as an icon of physical disability, the

creature’s echoing of the figure of the feral child invites another, and perhaps a more difficult

question: If the idea of autism is bound up with the history of the feral child, and if the idea of the

feral child haunts the representation of Frankenstein’s creature, then what does the life of the

monster—both in Mary Shelley’s book and in its ubiquitous afterlife—have to say about what

happens when neurotypical man encounters a nonstandard version of the human self?

In other words, what happens if we imagine the Frankenstein story as an encounter between

neurotypical and autistic humanity? Surprisingly, the way this encounter plays out in Shelley’s novel

anticipates the cultural history of the monster that follows. For the universal response to the

creature is to reject not only his person, but also to silence his attempts at self-representation. In his

encounter with De Lacey, the creature begs that he will “not be driven from the society and

sympathy of [his] fellow creatures” (II.vii; 91), but his petition is quashed by the entrance and violent

response of De Lacey’s son Felix. When he rescues a girl from drowning and when he attempts to

kidnap Frankenstein’s brother William, the creature is prevented from making any explanation of his

actions, his attempts at speech obscured by the screams and blows of his would-be interlocutors.

With his maker, the creature argues logically and persuasively for his natural rights:

You, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties

only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare

you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you

and the rest of mankind. (II.ii; 65)

But Frankenstein, likewise, declines to allow the creature any voice, saying, simply, “I will not hear

you” (II.ii; 66). Over and over, the creature endeavors to be heard, despite his apparent difference;

but again and again, the social response is to run away, to block out the being’s persuasive language
 Rodas 7

with shouts and screams, to drive him away so that he cannot speak, or, even, as with his maker, to

actively resist listening.

No doubt, what the creature describes as his “deformity” plays some role in the resistance he

meets (II.iv; 76), but some scholars have observed that the profound social aversion which the

creature encounters cannot be explained entirely by his appearance (Davis 145; Pollin 102). It seems

that in addition to his visible disfigurement, the creature also fails to fit into some greater social

mechanism. Like the feral children who served in some part as an inspiration for his character, or

like the autistic children whom Hans Asperger describes as “having a paucity of facial and gestural

expression” or “peculiarities of eye gaze” (69, 68), the creature faces a social aversion that is

inexplicable in its intensity. And this aversion, in turn, actively works not only to deny the creature a

place in the human family, but also to deny him a voice in his own self representation.

When we watch Boris Karloff’s monster—moaning, grunting, and stumbling—in the 1931

Universal Pictures classic, what we see is a logical extension not of the way the monster is

represented in Shelley’s text, but of the ways in which the other characters in that text respond to

him. Shelley’s narrative offers the gift of interiority; she makes room for the creature to tell his own

story from his own point of view. But for those characters who come upon the creature during the

course of the novel, his interiority is unimaginable, impossible. For them, the creature is not a

“being” as Percy Shelley calls him (12), but a voiceless monster, the precursor of Karloff’s

incarnation, without personhood, without a sense of self, his articulation reduced to nonverbal

groaning and his intelligence effaced by overwhelming social incompetence. The afterlife of the

creature in popular culture, stripped of the novel’s first-person narrative, allows little room for

motives or explanations and almost no room at all for the monster’s viewpoint. Without the

creature’s voice, what later Frankenstein narratives have lost is the disability rights political

perspective implicitly honored by Mary Shelley: “Nothing about us without us.”

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For autism studies, the politics of voice in the ongoing cultural narrative of Frankenstein is

particularly compelling, since the question of how autism speaks, and who speaks for autism, are

hotly contested in present-day autism debates. On one side are charitable organizations which have

raised substantial funds for medical research, but which have often depicted autism in deeply

prejudicial ways. Driven by parent-based leadership and member support, the conventional strength

of these organizations has enabled them to disseminate a representation of autism that critics argue

is fueled by “fear, pity and prejudice, presenting Autistic adults and children not as full human

beings but as burdens on society that must be eliminated as soon as possible” (“Letter to the

Sponsors, Donors and Supporters of Autism Speaks”). One particularly horrifying Autism Speaks

fundraising video, for instance, portrayed autism in explicitly monstrous terms:

I am autism. … I know where you live. … I work faster than pediatric AIDS, cancer,

and diabetes combined. … if you’re happily married, I will make sure that your

marriage fails. Your money will fall into my hands, and I will bankrupt you for my

own self-gain. I don’t sleep, so I make sure you don’t either. … You have no cure for

me. Your scientists don’t have the resources, and I relish their desperation. … I am

autism. I have no interest in right or wrong. I derive great pleasure out of your

loneliness. I will fight to take away your hope. I will plot to rob you of your children

and your dreams. … (ASAN New England)5

On the other side of this debate are grass-roots autism communities, self-advocacy groups, and

individual autistic advocates who, like Shelley’s creature, struggle to assert an independent voice and

to claim the terms of representation. Autistic self-advocate, Bev Harp, and her colleagues have

conducted an empirical study demonstrating that major media, charitable organizations, and parent-

5
Videos of this advertisement have been removed from You Tube and are no longer readily
available. This text was taken from a transcription of and critical response to the original
advertisement posted online by ASAN New England.
 Rodas 9

run groups promote an infantilized picture of autism, fostering the notion that autistic people do not

and cannot speak for themselves (Stevenson et al). A video by Amanda Baggs, “In My Language,”

asserting her own autistic voice, argues that autistic language is often dismissed because it does not

fit conventional patterns. The appointment of Ari Ne’man, founder of the Autistic Self Advocacy

Network (ASAN), to the National Council on Disability, was blocked for months as traditional

charitable organizations like Autism Speaks protested President Obama’s choice. An organization

called Rethinking Autism, an alliance of autists and autism advocates, has summed up this silencing

gesture neatly in an online awareness and advocacy campaign.

[Run Rethinking Autism video clip here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWnDPpfpLmM]

The contemporary debate over autistic voice may thus be seen as a reflection of the contest for

recognition and self-representation at work in the larger Frankenstein narrative. On one side, the

disapproving, disappointed parent, rejecting his creation, insisting on its monstrous nature, and

carrying popular opinion with him; on the other, the idiosyncratic offspring, vying for a chance to

speak for himself and to have his gifts acknowledged and accepted.6

When Mary Shelley penned her gothic fantasy of oppression and disenfranchisement, she

may have been thinking of the rights of man in the political terms of her own historical moment, but

the monster she launched into being continues to evolve and develop, constantly taking on renewed

political meaning.

Long a valued member of the disability community, the creature also makes a very

persuasive autism advocate.

6
As Ari Ne’eman has put it, “It is our belief that the traditional priorities of autism advocacy, which
focus on eliminating the autism spectrum rather than pursuing quality of life, communication, and
inclusion for all autistic people, need to be reset.”
 Rodas 10

Works Cited

ASAN New England. “Autism Speaks, but What is it Saying? An Analysis of Autism Speaks’ ‘I Am

Autism’ PSA.” ASAN New England. Blogger.com, 27 Sep 2009. Web. 15 Aug 2011.

<http://asannewengland.blogspot.com/2009/09/autism-speaks-but-what-is-it-

saying.html>

Asperger, Hans. “‘Autistic Psychopathy’ in Childhood.” Autism and Asperger Syndrome. Ed. Uta

Frith. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991. 37-92. Print.

Baggs, Amanda. “In My Language.” You Tube, 14 Jan 2007. Video. 15 Aug 2011.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc>

Bartra, Roger. The Artificial Savage: Modern Myths of the Wild Man. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 1997. Print.

Bogdan, Robert, Biklen, Douglas, Shapiro, A. and Spelkoman, D. “The Disabled: Media's

Monster.” Social Policy. 13.2 (1982): 32-35. Print.

Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1988. Print.

Collins, Paul. Not Even Wrong: A Father’s Journey into the Lost History of Autism. New York, NY:

Bloomsbury, 2005. Print.

Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995. Print.

Frith, Uta. Autism: Explaining the Enigma. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2003. Print.

Gartner, Alan, and Tom Joe. Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images. New York: Praeger, 1987. Print

Karloff, Boris, perf. Frankenstein. Dir. James Whale. Universal Pictures, 1931. Film.

Lane, Harlan L. The Wild Boy of Aveyron. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. Print.
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“Letter to the Sponsors, Donors and Supporters of Autism Speaks.” ASAN Autistic Self Advocacy

Network. 7 Oct 2009. Web. 15 Aug 2011.

<http://www.autisticadvocacy.org/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=61>

Mossman, Mark. “Acts of Becoming: Autobiography, Frankenstein, and the Postmodern

Body.” Postmodern Culture. 11.3 (2001). Print. (Also in Harold Bloom’s Mary Shelley's

Frankenstein. New York: Chelsea House, 2007. 167-84. Print.)7

Nazeer, Kamran. Send in the Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury

Pub, 2006. Print.

Ne’eman, Ari. “The Future (And The Past) Of Autism Advocacy, Or Why The ASA's Magazine,

The Advocate, Wouldn't Publish This Piece.” DSQ: Disability Studies Quarterly (special issue:

“Autism and the Concept of Neurodiversity”) 30.1 (2010). 2010. Web. 16 Aug 2011.

<http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/1059/1244>

Norden, Martin F. The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. New Brunswick,

N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Print.

Pollin, Burton R. “Philosophical and Literary Sources of Frankenstein.” Comparative Literature. 17.2

(1965): 97-108. Print.

Rethinking Autism. “Autism Support Group.” You Tube, 25 March 2011. Video. 15 Aug 2011.

Shelley, Mary W. Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Responses, Modern Criticism.

Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Print.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “On Frankenstein.” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Ed. Harold Bloom. New

York: Chelsea House, 2004. 11-13. Print.

7
See footnote one.
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Stevenson, Jennifer L., Bev Harp, and Morton Ann Gernsbacher. “Infantilizing Autism.” DSQ:

Disability Studies Quarterly (special issue: “Disability and Rhetoric”) 31.3 (summer 2011).

2011. Web. 16 Aug 2011. <http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/1675/1596>

Straus, Joseph N. “Autism as Culture.” The Disability Studies Reader. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. 3rd

edition. New York: Routledge, 2010. 535-59. Print.

Sunstein, Emily W. Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1991. Print.

Yousef, Nancy. Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy in Enlightenment Philosophy and Romantic

Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Print.

Yousef, Nancy. “The Monster in a Dark Room: Frankenstein, Feminism, and Philosophy.” MLQ:

Modern Language Quarterly. 63.2 (2002): 197-226. Print.