Frankenstein's creature is, without doubt, an essential player in the outcome of Shelley's story. For this reason, it is logical and arguably necessary to question his anonymous status throughout the novel. He is described as many things: a "monster", a "miserable", and a "thing that even Dante could not have received", but he nevertheless remains officially anonymous. Alone, feared, at best a social pariah, the monster is clearly in conflict with the rest of society, but more specifically, the fact that the Creature has no name highlights an additional, more fundamental conflict with language itself. even. The defining aspect of the Creature is its struggle to find its identity in a society that abhors it, but due to the constraints created by the linguistics of society, its identity is nothing more than a lack of identity, a void where a sense of wholeness could have been found. .Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay As the creature becomes increasingly aware of itself as a separate and distinct entity, it becomes subject to a set of socially and linguistically influenced metaphors and representations. which attempt to situate him in relation to the social order and, in return, to classify him as an individual. But the space between the creature's subjective identification and its real intentions is even more important. The charade that language imagines the “self” to be is at best “an illusory construct rife with imagined identifications with a false sense of wholeness or unity.” He desperately longs to engage positively with the world, to find companionship and arguably even love, but he owes to language the unwavering denial of these desires. Furthermore, there is a space between what the Creature seems to desire (wickedness and destruction) and his true desire, which is to restore a Lacanian union with his creator, Dr. Frankenstein, so that he can exist as an undifferentiated form. of the force of which it is the origin and channels the unusually unknowable “Real” of Lacan. At first, I looked back, unable to believe that it was really me reflected in the mirror. I became fully convinced that I was in fact the monster that I am. The creature's awareness of his physical self is the genesis of his ultimate demise – and arguably that of Justine, William and Dr. Frankenstein. According to Lacan's theory of the "mirror stage", the Creature undergoes a drama "whose internal thrust is precipitated by insufficiency" and therefore assumes the "armor" of an identity whose contours shape its development throughout. of history. . When he discovers the “divine science” of language as revealed to him through the French family and its “articulated sounds”, he is profoundly transformed. As has already been established, language transcends the realm of speech, and its "words" carry a weight that we, as participants in its project, could never quite anticipate. This is where the difficulty lies: once the Creature is introduced into the family and into its language, it is incarcerated by the imprudence of linguistic civilization. Although he is at first "unable to believe" the reflection, he has no choice but to embrace what he calls "the monster that I am", to accept a socially constructed symbol for lack of other choice. Lacan borrows and slightly modifies Freud's idea of ​​the Oedipal complex, essentially arguing that the human desire to reconcile the hollow, linguistic, and fragmented self is measured by an Oedipal struggle with the images and cultural norms imposed bylanguage. The Creature addresses the same issue, an issue that often manifests itself in its relationship with the French family in the countryside. Resting in the “movement of the Creature along a chain of desired objects…which can never be converted into the object of desire,” the family embodies one part of a series of battles that the creature wages – and continually loses – ​​to recover everything. What's interesting, however, is that the family only accentuates its lack of unity. When he visits the family in the hope of convincing them, only to "escape unnoticed into his hovel... overcome by pain and anguish", he realizes that "like Adam", he does not is “apparently united by no connection with any other existing being.” » Here we understand, as readers, that the sense of self-unified identity he seeks has been replaced by an identity defined more by what is not there than by what is; the family is only involved in discovering her true identity by revealing how unreachable she truly is. Discouraged and unthinkably alone, the Creature migrates further towards Lacan's Symbolic Order. Like Addie Bundren in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (a melancholic and despondent woman contemplating her identity), he is forced to reckon with the disorder of language, a play of signifiers and signified objects, which has come to mean only absence of what he seeks to discover in himself. Both having been "violated and then reestablished by the violation" created by language, which alienates those who participate in it, they are at the same time endowed with a feeling of unity because their being is defined by this very violation. think of its name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a container, and I watched it liquefy and flow in like cold molasses flowing from the darkness into the container , until the pot remains full and still: a meaningful form deeply lifeless like an empty doorframe; and then I realized that I had forgotten the name of the pot. Addie, lying in the dark next to her husband, is surprised by the ineffectiveness of words, of "profoundly lifeless" symbols, whose meaning loses its legitimacy, to the point that we forget their names. Addie is more willing to accept her Lacanian destiny and the flaws of language: “I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that this word was like the others: just a form to fill a gap” — that the Creature, who insists that Dr. Frankenstein “comply with his requisition” as a wife, “a companion of the same species, and of the same defects. »Nevertheless, both characters are equally powerless in attempting to grasp prelinguistic identities. Addie has learned that we cannot “attain” anything on this earth “until we forget the words,” and the Creature soon discovers that in response to her question “What was I?” Language can only respond “with groans.” I, the miserable and abandoned one, am an abortion. Perhaps the most powerful moment in the novel, it is an image of the Creature standing darkly over the newly deceased body of Dr. Frankenstein. At his lowest point, he is confronted in the most absolute way with the reality of his distance from “Reality”. Having been a “slave to language” since its “jaws first opened…while a smile wrinkled its cheeks,” the creature is, if examined closely, freed from linguistic slavery. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a custom article now from our expert editors. Get a Custom Essay Now that his source, his imagined identity, is literally dead, he no longer has to deal with his separation. In this sense, it was indeed aborted, purged of.1987.