ASCAP Nov 94, p 9-13
The Westermarck
trap: a possible factor in the creation
of Frankenstein
John S. Price, D.M., M.R.C.P., F.R.C.Psych.
Presented at the meeting of the International
Association for the Study of Across-Species Comparisons and Psychopathology,
Summary
Sexual inhibition between children brought up
in the same household was described by Westermarck,
and has come to be known as the "Westermarck
effect". It applies not only to
siblings but to unrelated children. When
parents expect such children to marry, we may speak of the "Westermarck trap".
This trap is depicted in the Novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley,
in which Victor Frankenstein is expected to marry a cousin reared with
him. Instead, he creates a monster which
persecutes him and murders his prospective bride before the marriage can be
consummated. It is suggested that the
plot owes something to Mary Shelley's own experience of the Westermarck
trap, follwing a childhood in which she was reared
with a step-brother. Her own personal
solution was not to create a monster but to elope with a married man (Percy Bysshe Shelley) at the age of 16. It is speculated that the sensitive age for
the Westermack effect may be different for pairs of
siblings and for adult and child.
Mark Erickson (1,2) has discussed Westermarck's hypothesis that "an innate aversion to
sexual intercourse develops among individuals who live in very close proximity
during early childhood" and he added the observation that this inhibition
of sexual bonding is accompanied by familial bonding which leads to mutually
altruistic behaviour. There are two separate parts to this hypothesis, one
relating to the parent/child relationship and the other to sibling
relationships. In the case of
parent/child, the hypothesis is relevant to the difficulties that step-parents
have with step-children: if the step-parent
enters the family after the child has passed the sensitive age, which ends
about age 6, there may be lack of familial bonding giving difficulty in getting
along together and thus to physical abuse of step-child by step-parent, and
also lack of inhibition of sexual bonding, giving rise to an increased risk of
sexual abuse of step-child by step-parent.
In the case of siblings, difficulty arises when siblings are reared
apart, and so lack the sexual inhibition, or when unrelated children are raised
together, giving a sexual inhibition when none may be intended, expected or
desired. It is this latter situation
that I should like to address in this essay.
Erickson (1) described the simpua
marriages in Taiwan, in which children are affianced in infancy, and the
prospective bride is brought to live in the boy's household at a very early
age, so that the prospective marriage partners are virtually brought up as
brother and sister. In this case, the Westermarck effect could be called the Westermarck
trap, or possibly even the Westermarck double-bind,
because through one channel of influence the parents insist that their child
mate with a certain person, but through another channel of influence (bringing
the girl to live in their home as a baby) they make it impossible (or at least
difficult) for their child to mate with that person.
I
should like to describe an example of this phenomenon which is depicted in a
novel. The novel is probably the most
sophisticated form of projective personality test, for "any character in a
novel stands for multiple aspects of the author's psychic life" (3). When much biographical information is
available about the author, there exists the possibility of comparing the
characters and events depicted in the author's work with what is known about
his or her private life. Although there
are limitations in this "single case study" approach, the richness of
detail gives something which large data collections are liable to miss.
The plot of Frankenstein
Mary Shelley started writing Frankenstein
when she was eighteen, and had returned with Shelley to
The
novel has a Chinese box or Russian doll design.
In the outer layer, a traveller Robert Walton, who is searching for a
passage to the supposed warm sea at the North Pole, describes his adventures in
a series of letters to his sister back in
Victor
Frankenstein (he relates to Robert Walton) was the son of a nobleman of
At
university Victor studies natural science, and becomes interested in the creation
of life. "He fashions a gigantic
man out of dead tissues and animates the creature with an electrical spark, but
is instantly revolted by the grotesque being he has created and wishes it were
dead" (4). He abandons the creature
and has a nervous breakdown, and then returns home when he hears that his
younger brother William has been murdered.
He discovers that his creature has committed the murder, and implicated
an innocent girl, who is executed.
When
Victor shows evidence of depression, his father suspects that he might be
having a problem with the prospect of marriage to his foster sister, and
addresses his son as follows (p 150):
"I confess, my son, that I have always looked forward to your
marriage with our dear
Victor, perhaps not the most insightful of
fictional characters, denies any impediment to his forthcoming marriage:
"My dear father, re-assure yourself. I love my cousin tenderly and sincerely. I never saw any woman who excited, as
Then, at the top of an Alpine glacier, he meets
the monster who gives him a detailed account of his life, and how he managed to
educate himself in spite of a total absence of care from his creator. He tells Victor how everyone recoils from his
ugliness, and makes Victor pity him to such an extent that Victor agrees to his
request to create a female monster to provide a mate for him. However, having almost completed the female
creature, Victor changes his mind and destroys her. The monster promises to be with Victor and
his bride on their wedding night.
As the
wedding approaches, Victor's confidence in the match lessens: (p 191):
As the period fixed for our marriage drew
nearer, whether from cowardice or a prophetic feeling, I felt my heart sink
within me. But I concealed my feelings
by an appearance of hilarity....".
Four pages later Victor marries
He
then chases the monster across
The sibling incest theme
In the novel, Elizabeth and Victor were brought
up together in the same household from the age of four onwards, including two
of the years which are thought crucial for inducing the Westermarck
effect. In the first (1818) edition of
the novel
An
exchange of letters between brother and sister is the outer shell of the
novel. It may be significant that Mary
Shelley depicts a brother setting off far into the polar wastes in search of a
sea route to the North Pole, leaving his sister back home, thus eliminating any
possibility of sexual bonding between them; and at the same time he writes to the
sister detailed letters about his travels, demonstrating the strength of familial
bonding between them. This safe sibling
relationship in the shell of the novel contrasts with the predicament of Victor
and his foster sister, who are expected to achieve sexual consummation but fail
to do so.
How
could this sophisticated portrayal be accomplished by Mary Shelley at the age
of 18? It may be relevant that into her
own home, when she was 4, was brought her step-brother Charles Clairmont then aged about 6, and although there is no
evidence that any parental pressure was put on Mary and Charles to marry, it
may have been her own wonder at her lack of sexual attraction to Charles that
gave her an intuitive understanding of the Westermarck
effect, and her fantasies of what might happen if she were required to marry
Charles that gave her an insight into the dangers of the Westermarck
trap; and possibly that led her to
escape from the trap herself by flouting all convention and eloping with Percy Bysshe Shelley (then a married man) at the age of 16.
Frankenstein as delusion
The monster created by Frankenstein has often
been said to represent some projection of his creator's mind (3), and certainly
it would fit with this idea that the monster should represent his repressed and
projected sexuality, blocked from its natural expression by the Westermarck trap.
This would be consistent with the curious lack of pride felt by Victor
in his act of creation, and with his persistent neglect of the monster's
emotional and educational needs. It is
also consistent with the fact that the main motivation expressed by the monster
is the need for a mate, and for Victor's ambivalent response to this need. The monster never has a name, and is often
popularly known by that of his fictional creator.
In
fact, the psychiatric reader might think that, in the character of Victor
Frankenstein, the author were portraying a case of paranoid schizophrenia, were
it not for the fact that the explorer Walton, to whom the putative patient
recites his narrative, reports to his sister his meeting with the otherwise
intangible monster for a brief period on the ice. Apart from this one final contrary
indication, there is nothing to indicate the reality of the monster, who is
sometimes described in terms typical of paranoid experience; for instance (p 202):
I
was answered through the stillness of the night by a loud and fiendish
laugh. It rung on my ears long and
heavily; the
mountains re-echoed with it, and I felt as if all hell surrounded me with
mockery and laughter. Surely in that
moment I should have been possessed by frenzy, and have destroyed my miserable
existence, but that my vow was heard, and that I was reserved for
vengeance. The laughter died away; when a well-known
and abhorred voice, apparently close to my ear, addressed me in an audible
whisper - "I am satisfied:
miserable wretch! you have
determined to live, and I am satisfied."
The experiencing of the monster by Victor
Frankenstein could well have owed something to Shelley who suffered from
hallucinations (3) and who "could seldom distinguish between illusion and
reality, and told a series of wild tales, usually concerned with his wrongs and
griefs and the mysterious phantoms that pursued him, for which none of his
biographers, even the kindliest, can produce a scrap of evidence........among
the most terrifying spectres by whom Shelley claimed to have been attacked was
the famous 'Tanyrallt Assailant'. His habit of drinking laudanum may have
helped provoke these crises" (The Desire to Please by Peter Quennell, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982, p 35).
We know that Shelley put in considerable work on the novel in the year
before its publication.
Parent/child incest
Previous psychiatric commentaries on Frankenstein
have pointed to suggestions of parent/child incest (4). Mary Shelley's second novel Mathilda (sometimes spelt Matilda) is largely
concerned with an incestuous father/daughter relationship. This was written while her husband was
writing The Cenci which deals with the same
theme. Myers (4) claims that
"Mary's father was seductive with her and obviously was desirous of
moulding her in the image of his lost wife" and he points out the
difficult relationship she had with her step-mother who blamed her for her
"Oedipal interaction with her father".
Mary's
Shelley's mother died shortly after her birth, and Mary was in the habit of
spending much time sitting by her mother's grave and reading her mother's
published works; her inclusion of
Shelley into this ritual contributed to their courtship. Myers (4) discusses previous analyses that
identified "the monster as the guilt-provoking child of Victor's wished
for incestuous union with his mother".
This speculation is based partly on Victor's dream:
I thought I saw
This passage, which gives an idea of the
"gothic" flavour of the novel, could also be used to support the
sibling incest theory;
the switching of his prospective bride into his mother may
represent a dream warning that
Did the Victorian nanny abolish the Westermarck effect?
Erickson's suggestion that surrogate parenting may
weaken the Westermarck effect could account for the
repression of all sexuality among the English upper classes in Victorian
times. The extensive use of wet nurses
and nannies could have led to such an epidemic of parent/child incest that
desperate repressive measures would have been required to prevent it. If the resulting sublimation led to the
spread of the
A testable hypothesis
A single literary case study such as this
cannot be used to test a hypothesis but it can serve to generate one. In fact the expanded Westermarck
hypothesis presented by Erickson (1) contains no less than six hypotheses in
one: the development of familial bonding
and inhibition of sexual bonding by child towards parent, by parent towards
child, and by one sibling towards another.
The factors responsible for these different effects, and, in particular,
the ages during which they are developed, may not be the same. In the case of Mary Shelley, a step-mother
and a step-brother came into her household when she was aged four. She appears to have developed inhibition of
sexual bonding with the step-brother but not to have developed familial bonding
with the step-mother. We can postulate
that her experience reflects the generality, and that the inhibition of sexual
bonding (together with the facilitation of familial bonding) between parents
and children is completed when the child is aged four, whereas the same
processes between siblings continues until the age of six or more (and may
possibly not start until the age of four).
This hypothesis is capable of refutation or confirmation by the study of
larger samples.
REFERENCES
1.
Erickson MT: Rethinking Oedipus: an evolutionary perspective of incest
avoidance. Am J Psychiatry 1993; 150:411-416.
2.
Erickson MT: Rethinking rethinking
Oedipus. Am J
Psychiatry 1994; 151:297-8.
3. Baudry FD: Problems in the application of psychoanalysis to
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. International Journal of Psychoanalytic
Psychotherapy 1982/3; 9:647-656.
4. Myers
WA: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Creativity and the psychology of the
exception. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 1982/3;
9:625-645.
Other sources
Mary Shelley by Muriel Spark.
The Letters of May Wollstonecraft
Shelley. Volume 1: A Part of the Elect. Edited by Betty T. Bennett.
Westermarck E. The history of
human marriage, vols 1-3.
Feldman PR & Scott-Kilvert
D (eds) The journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844. Vol 1: 1814-1822.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley;
Footnote 1. This change was made in response to editorial
pressure (3), which shows that the editor was concerned about the incestuous
aspect of the relationship between Victor and Elizabeth, ostensibly not because
they were reared in the same household, but because they were cousins.
Footnote 2. In the context of this sympathetic, and,
indeed, astute paternal reaction to the appearance of melancholy in a child, it
is poignant that when she was later attacked by melancholy herself, following
the death of her infant son, Mary Shelley's father wrote to her:
"...do not put the miserable delusion on yourself, to think there
is something fine, and beautiful, and delicate, in giving yourself up, and
agreeing to be nothing. Remember too,
though at first your nearest connections may pity you in this state, yet that
when they see you fixed in selfishness and ill humour, and regardless of the
happiness of everyone else, they will finally cease to love you, and scarcely
learn to endure you....".