The Monstrous Body Of The Law: Wollstonecraft vs Shelley

Abstract

The principal claim of this article is uncontroversial: that Romanticism reinvents rights. But what distinguishes this article's claim from that of countless others is that this rich and strange alchemy of reinvention stems not from that 'most wanted' of usual suspects, Rousseau (and behind him, Montesquieu,Voltaire and d' Alembert; and in the anglophone world, Locke and Hobbes). Rather this article locates rights' source elsewhere, in an alternative location, an(O)ther Romanticism, one that is often sidelined if not overlooked altogether: specifically, the feminist Romanticism of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. I shall argue that this mother-daughter duo, each exemplary of 'first' and 'second' generation Romanticism, are engaged in an intertextual debate over the nature, content and efficacy of rights discourse, and the possibilities for its reinvention. Part 2 of this article establishes the terms for this debate by arguing for a legal, specifically jurisprudential reading of Shelley's Frankenstein: a reading\nin which rights are allegorised in the figure of Frankenstein's monster, and thereby critiqued as the\n'monstrous body of the law'. Part 3 will contextualise this critique of rights, locating Frankenstein as a contrary reaction to the previous generations' overenthusiatic embrace of rights. Parts 4 and 5 will situate these two texts- Frankenstein and A Vindication of the Rights of Women - within a psychoanalytic frame, advancing the thesis that Frankenstein's monster is the 'return of the repressed' body which liberalism, during the French Revolution, first disavowed, then dispatched by regicide and finally supplanted by a disembodied rights discourse. Hijacked in the next generation by the Industrial Revolution's strong contract and property imperatives, this rights discourse was re-embodied in the early nineteenth-century around the figure of the Capitalist, whose fetish, even 'symptom' rights were (and are). Part 6 will read Frankenstein against this immediate backdrop of Capital's hegemonisation of rights discourse, arguing that Frankenstein and his monster, as creator and created, are analogous to the bourgeois-liberal and his rights. I will argue that Frankenstein offers two critiques of this relationship by enacting, through character, setting and plot, two political positions: first, the organic-conservative position, whereby rights (figured in the monster) are seen as destroyer of its creator, the ancient regime of the philosophies as much as the aristocrats (figured in both Victor Frankenstein and the De Laceys); second, the proto-Marxist position, where rights are seen as not only destroying their creator (Victor) but themselves, the created {staged in the last scene of the text where the monster sails off to certain death, accompanying the dead Frankenstein's funeral pyre). Part 7 will return to a comparative account of Wollstonecraft's and Shelley's texts, situating A Vindication of the Rights of Women and Frankenstein within the feminist problematic of rights, and arguing that the intertextual debate in which they are engaged may provide, when read holistically, a way out of the philosophical impasses which afflict rights discourse - is it universal or particular? a symptom or a solution?- as much today as it did in their day. So the stakes are high in the jurisprudential inscription of Wollstonecraft and Shelley which this article essays; indeed, the rehabilitation of an explicitly feminist legal and literary history for rights discourse promises not just a new critique but a new praxis of rights.