For my second creative project on Frankenstein, I wanted to explore the concept of Victor Frankenstein as ‘mother’ to his creation. We had been discussing this quite a bit in class as well. In the text, Frankenstein first attempts to emulate motherhood and secondly attempts to discard the responsibilities of motherhood by leaving his creation to die. Both of these choices have disastrous consequences for Victor and those around him. Victor describes his process of creating the monster as such: “I had worked hard for nearly two years… For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation” (38). Victor almost emulates a perverted version of the cycle of literal motherhood: giving up body autonomy, rest, and health in the name of your creation. He loves the concept of his child, his creation. He is willing to sacrifice a lot of his life’s pleasures in pursuit of it. However, once his creation is born, he instantly rejects it. He instead notes that “the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (38). Once he achieves his goal of anatomical motherhood, he instantly is disgusted by it. He finds his child to be wretched and ugly. Moreover, he has the intense feeling that the creature should not exist. The creature, on the other hand, searches desperately for a parental figure in a world that gives him none. The only person close enough to a mother, Victor, runs from and shuns him.
In my photo, Victor looks rather dejectedly down at his swaddled creation, a literal representation of a mother and newborn baby. Victor feels no joy or love towards the thing he so desperately wanted to be a mother to. My Victor wears a veil, covering his face and twisting the types of acts associated with life and death. Where there is typically joy at a birth and grief at a death, Victor here is in a state of mourning at the birth of his child. He hides behind a veil and does not want to face the child head on. The veil can also be interpreted as a wedding veil, as Victor’s possible wedding to Elizabeth looms near. By portraying Victor as a literal mother, I tried to envision the complexities Victor was facing due to his creation. He is incapable of removing his attachment to it, he will always be the creatures mother whether he likes it or not. At the same time, he does not embody the title of mother in anything other than his role in creation. He does not nurture nor guide his creation at all. I believe my depiction of Victor softened him ever so slightly compared to the original text. My Victor is disgusted, but not hysterical, at the sight of his child. Whereas Shelley portrays Victor as desperately trying to escape motherhood, my Victor at least seems to have come to terms with the link between him and his creation. The setting of my photograph is inside the Victoria and Albert museum in London, England. It is inside a historical recreation of a late 1700s/early 1800s ballroom. As Frankenstein was written and set in different ends of this time period, I chose it as my backdrop.