Frankenstein Mirror Stage Essay

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While Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has always been a popular text for psychoanalytic criticism, Haidee Kotze remarks that “Mary Shelley’s personal history has provided ample material for her novel to be read successfully in psychobiographical terms.” Precisely because there is such an abundance of psychobiographical criticism the risk is to lose focus of the text and shift to the author instead. In my independent project I plan on refocusing psychoanalytical theories such as the Oedipus complex and the Mirror stage back to the text by analysing Frankenstein’s characters. This applies particularly for the Monster and Frankenstein as father and son, respectively as mother and son.
It was substantial for me to fully understand the mirror stage before it could be applied to Frankenstein’s monster. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provided me of an extensive …show more content…
The mirror stage was traditionally used as a tool to analyse a child’s early psychological development. It therefore feels natural applying it to the monster that is in his early devopments as an “infant”, trying to find its place in the world. The mirror stage is illustrated most explicitely when the monster sees its reflection in the mirror for the first time: “how was I terrified, when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror…” It is at this precise moment that the mirror stage fails and hinders the monster’s psychological development. Normally a child would see an ideal-I in the mirror at this point. However the monster sees its own grotesque form in the mirror. He becomes an anti-Narcissus. This unreal mirror image becomes a driving force in our life, a desire to achieve a perfect self. Lacan argues that the human psyche works within three orders: The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. The early stages of our development is determined by our primal needs and
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