In Frankenstein, the two deaths of Elizabeth and the female monster are weighed against each other and deemed equal. Although Victor is distraught at losing Elizabeth, he sees her death as the equivalent and opposite reaction to him failing to reanimate the female monster. The male monster clearly equates the two deaths as well, as his response to witnessing the destruction of his mate is to in turn destroy Victors mate. In my creative project, I wanted to explore just what it means to equate Elizabeth’s death to the female monster’s demise. At the end of the day, Elizabeth was a fully living woman, who had a future violently removed from her. The female monster, while denied her future, was never truly alive and therefore could never truly die. Her existence was purely conceptual for both Victor and his monster. They both see their two female companions as the same, stripping the very living Elizabeth of any personhood she could have held in their eyes before her death. By combining the female monster and Elizabeth into one person, I tried to compare and contrast who they were in death to show how the comparison is not very apt at all. The right-hand side of the face, made to represent the female monster, is stitched and unfinished. I used black sewing thread to stitch through my layers of scar wax to imitate two different body parts being stitched together. The eye socket is bruised and the skin is discolored and battered, as the person is in fact not alive. The lefthand side of the face, made to represent Elizabeth, is alive and whole. The only injury is the handprint bruise on her neck. Both are in a wedding nightdress and both were taken from their future spouses, but to call their fates equal objectifies Elizabeth to the status of a corpse: a literal heap of body parts. The monster's lack of a mate that he believes he is ‘owed’ is not equivalent to Elizabeth’s life.
For my first creative project relating to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, I wanted to work with the relationship between the female monster and the character of Elizabeth. Though they never meet, in fact the female monster never comes into existence at all, they are seemingly pitted against each other in death as Victor and his creation both aim to destroy what the other holds dear. The female monster ‘dies’ first. Shelley describes the following: “I thought with a sensation of madness… and, trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged. The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness, and, with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdrew” (125). After initially agreeing to the monster’s request for a companion, Victor ‘kills’ her in front of the monster's eyes. Although the female creature is but a heap of body parts at this moment in time, the monster takes this act to be one of murderous violence against his loved one. Upon leaving, the monster promises Victor that he “shall be with [him] on [his] wedding-night” (127), which Victor takes to be a threat on his own life. However, we soon learn that Elizabeth Frankenstein (née Lavenza), and not Victor, will die on her wedding night when the monster strangles her. Shelley writes that “the murderous mark of the fiend’s grasp was on her neck, and the breath had ceased to issue from her lips” (147). By the time Frankenstein begins its denouement, both female companions are dead, killed out of fear or revenge.
In Frankenstein, the two deaths of Elizabeth and the female monster are weighed against each other and deemed equal. Although Victor is distraught at losing Elizabeth, he sees her death as the equivalent and opposite reaction to him failing to reanimate the female monster. The male monster clearly equates the two deaths as well, as his response to witnessing the destruction of his mate is to in turn destroy Victors mate. In my creative project, I wanted to explore just what it means to equate Elizabeth’s death to the female monster’s demise. At the end of the day, Elizabeth was a fully living woman, who had a future violently removed from her. The female monster, while denied her future, was never truly alive and therefore could never truly die. Her existence was purely conceptual for both Victor and his monster. They both see their two female companions as the same, stripping the very living Elizabeth of any personhood she could have held in their eyes before her death. By combining the female monster and Elizabeth into one person, I tried to compare and contrast who they were in death to show how the comparison is not very apt at all. The right-hand side of the face, made to represent the female monster, is stitched and unfinished. I used black sewing thread to stitch through my layers of scar wax to imitate two different body parts being stitched together. The eye socket is bruised and the skin is discolored and battered, as the person is in fact not alive. The lefthand side of the face, made to represent Elizabeth, is alive and whole. The only injury is the handprint bruise on her neck. Both are in a wedding nightdress and both were taken from their future spouses, but to call their fates equal objectifies Elizabeth to the status of a corpse: a literal heap of body parts. The monster's lack of a mate that he believes he is ‘owed’ is not equivalent to Elizabeth’s life.
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