Mark Mossman

Department of English and Journalism
Western Illinois University
shourd@gtec.com

Introduction

 

My body is a postmodern text. I have had sixteen major surgeries in thirty years and I am about to have a kidney transplant. My left leg has been amputated and I have only four fingers on one hand. I walk with a limp, and in each step my left shoulder drops down lower than my right, which gives me an awkward, seemingly uncertain gait. My life has been in many ways a narrative typical of postmodern disability, a constant physical tooling and re-tooling, a life marked by long swings into and out of “health” and “illness,” “ability” and “disability.” As I write this I am in end stage renal failure, with about twelve percent kidney function. My body is in jeopardy, running a race to transplantation, a race against dialysis, debilitating nausea, and ultimate mortality.

 

My body is a postmodern text. I play basketball every day; I am good at tennis, racquetball; I garden, walk for miles. I look “healthy,” young, and am often mistaken for a student. My life is defined by activity, work, ambition. I write now in the evening, after a day that started with several hours of critical reading, and then included teaching two writing courses and one literary criticism and theory class, meeting individually with four freshman composition students, playing an hour of basketball, spending another hour in a contentious faculty meeting, taking a trip to the grocery store, cooking supper, and, at last, talking for a few short but meaningful minutes with my spouse before I scurried downstairs to where I currently sit working in my office in our basement.

 

My body is a postmodern text. When I sit behind a desk, looking out to my class on that first day of the semester, my students think I am a “norm.” It is rare in those first moments for students to notice my disfigurement. I usually arrive at the classroom early. I prepare, go over notes for the opening class session. I sit down. Students slowly drift in, and then finally, after taking roll and beginning the arduous process of matching names with faces, I get up and distribute the syllabus. What happens? I see surprised expressions, eyes quickly shifting away from my body, often glancing anywhere but the location, the space where disability is unexpectedly and suddenly being written. I go on and begin my introduction to the particular course, while my students hurriedly attempt to account for difference, to manage the contrast of the literal with the prescribed stereotype and the previous impression. These are the crucial moments that constitute the process of my life; these are the absolutely significant points that define the narrative of my body.

 

My body is a postmodern text. I am aware that I am constantly located in a social space, a gray area where the category of disability is manufactured. My body is deceptive, though, so I can at times escape, slip out of the net of discourses that determine the lives of so many disabled people. I am aware that I am able to have these moments because my body is so pliable in its ability to be normal and then abnormal and then normal again. I live in a space that allows perception, comprehensive awareness. I can feel the colonizing discourses of biomedical culture wash over my body like waves sweeping up onto the seashore. They recede and I am normal; they crash again and I am drowning in stereotype and imposed identity. The unique privilege of my life has been the fact that I am, figuratively, a beach, an edge of something; I know the different spheres of water and sand; I am able to live in both worlds. And as I move through these worlds, as the narrative of my life is constructed around and through me, I am aware of how I change and am changed, written and re-written by the different clusters of discourse that mark all of our lives: at the doctor’s office last week, for example, I was “ill,” a “patient”; on the basketball court later that day I was “healthy,” a “player.”

 

The goal of this paper is manifold and ambitious. My intention here is to swirl together autobiography, narrative, and critical analysis in order to simultaneously create a reading of disability, of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, and of the construction of the postmodern body. I acknowledge the irritating impossibility, the bombastic complexity of such a goal for a piece of critical writing. I recognize the likely failure of this project, although I am not going to lie: I am terribly hopeful for it. That hope is tempered by fear, coupled with the risk of it all: it is important for me to record that I write this document knowing of such matters, as I am aware of my own tenuous situation as a tenure-track, first-year assistant professor of English. I am a young professional at the beginnings of difficult career, a career that demands excellence and grinding dedication to work in the classroom, on departmental and college-wide committees, and in the chaotic arenas of published research. At the same time, I am a disabled individual who has been, in one context or another, disabled his entire life and has, therefore, acquired a range of experiences and a distinct knowledge as to what it means to negotiate exclusion and discrimination. My own self, then, presented within the framework of these words and of the autobiographical examples that follow, is at issue here, is vulnerable and open. Indeed, the way that these pressures, histories, and goals pull at each other, contradict and countermine each other in this essay is, in part, the very reason for the paper’s existence. Like the creature in Mary Shelley’s novel, and like the novel itself for Mary Shelley, this work is understood by its author to be something sewn together, hideously grotesque, monstrous, something that is most likely a powerful failure. My hope, however, is that the very fracturing agents that conflict at the core of this essay will slowly fold into each other, connect, blend together, and produce a reading, and an understanding of my own experience, that ultimately helps to define what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder have recently demanded: an authentic, developed “disabled perspective” of culture (242).

 

At the outset my question is, what happens when a disabled individual writes herself? What happens when the disabled person explains and articulates, through either writing or bodily practice, disability? There has been an increasing number of theorists and researchers working in the field of disability studies who have attempted to construct answers to these kinds of questions. In doing so, what critics often discover is a need to expand the emerging field itself. For example, in commenting on the importance of scholars in the humanities working in a field dominated by the social sciences, Lennard J. Davis asserts that narratives written by individuals who are disabled constitute important voices in the workings of culture at large and need, therefore, to be understood through a humanities-centered critical approach:

 

Cultural productions are virtually the only permanent records of a society’s ideological structure. If we acknowledge that communal behaviors and thought processes have a material existence, then that existence coalesces in the intersection between the individual mind and the collective market. Nowhere can we understand this intersection better than in literary and cultural productions. (“Enabling” 248-49)

 

Davis continues: “We must examine the process by which normalcy, taken for granted by definition, is shaped into hegemonic force that requires micro-enforcement at each and every cultural, somatic, and political site in the culture…. People learn themselves through consumed cultural artifacts” (250). In the same journal publication, Mitchell and Snyder echo Davis in arguing that

 

disability study in the humanities has been critiqued for a tendency to surf amidst a sea of metaphors rather than stand on the firm ground of policy and legislative action. However, the identification of variable representational systems for approaching disability in history demonstrates in and of itself that disability operates as a socially constructed category. The more varied and variable the representation, the more fervent and exemplary disability studies scholars can make our points about the complexity of this social construction. (242)

 

In this theoretical context, writing disability is the (re)production of disability, a potent act of creation. Autobiography by a disabled person is an authentication of lived, performed experience; it is a process of making, of being able to “translate knowing into telling” (White 1). Using the last two decades of criticism and theory as a map, disabled autobiography can be traced as a postmodern, postcolonial endeavor, for when disability writing constructs the particular self-definition it is attempting to narrate, it automatically resists repressive stereotype at large and attempts to reclaim ownership of the body and the way the body is understood. In other words, writing, autobiography, the narration of an experience by a disabled person to a reader or an immediate listener, enables a marginalized voice to be heard, which in turn causes cultural practice and stereotyped roles to change. The experiences rendered in “illness narratives,” as Arthur Kleinmann has named them, work against any kind of essential universalism and instead attempt to demonstrate particularity and individuality in experience. The writing of illness and the writing of disability, and as David Morris has recently noted the two terms are often collapsed together in postmodern culture, involve new constructions of reality, new categories for the body’s performance in cultural practice. Disabled autobiography is a conscious act of becoming.

 

What disability writing constitutes, then, is an unfolding of culture so that, in addition to negative stereotype, liberatory constructs are present and available to the practice of the body, in the body’s movement through the different representational systems of general culture. Disability writing, in other words, often takes the instability inherent in the body and spins it into the articulation of a volitional mode of selfhood; writing disability becomes an empowering act of control, a deconstructive critical strategy that attempts to break down oppressive and imprisoning cultural construction. By writing disability, the performance and general representation of disability is re-centered, re-focused on the disabled subject itself, which deflects and displaces the powerful gaze of the “norm.” As one critic argues, “as self-representation, autobiography is perhaps uniquely suited to validate the experience of people with disabilities and to counter stereotypical (mis)representation” (Couser 292).

 

For example, one of the students I talked with today is orthopedically disabled. In our conference, I commented on how beautiful the weather has been, and how much I love the springtime. The student responded with a detailed explanation of just how much she hates the spring. She dreads the spring because it is a ritualistic moment in the story or text of her life: each spring she becomes newly disabled. The weather changes, and she is unable to wear clothes that help to conceal her disfigurement. Each spring, then, she confronts new stares, the feeling of awkward humiliation that is attached to being physically abnormal in a public zone where normalcy is in effect. She is undressed by those stares, by the cumulative and constant recognition of difference: she is stripped and re-written with the coming of warm weather; putting on a pair of shorts, a t-shirt, or a bathing suit equates putting on a “disability,” dressing down into abnormality.

 

What this particular student experiences every spring is a process of conflict, resistance, and liberation. Again, in the spring, with the eyes, faces, and general behavior of curious and almost always kind-hearted people, this disabled student feels her body, her self, being lifted from her, being re-shaped and re-made because of the recognition of difference and the discursive and perceptual location of abnormality. Her response, however, is to attempt to re-define herself, again to resist the imposition of “abnormality” that comes from the matrix of culture surrounding her. In articulating her anger to me and to others, in speaking of her lack of control and building up a narrative of her experiences for her audience, she gains a measure of control, takes her body back, realizes a liberation from the construct of abnormality. In this way, she can re-determine and re-write the acts of becoming through which her body must annually move; she can trigger a process of self-definition that works against the subject/object, normal/abnormal polarization of her experience. Her voice, and her body, can claim a degree of power in her ability to narrate her feelings of abnormality. She does not stop wearing the shorts, but instead embraces the perceptual process invoked when she puts them on because she knows that she can define herself, that she can become and re-become what she knows she is.

 

Thinking of this project, I asked her if she had read Frankenstein. She had not (again, though she is obviously very mature, the student is only a freshman). When I was her age I had read the book, though, and when I read Frankenstein for the first time, at eighteen, I read myself as the creature, as a body that has no place in the world, a body that, in its long twisting scars and attachable prosthetic limb, has the imprint of technology and modernist science written upon it, and seems, therefore, “unnatural.” When I read of the creature being built, made from selected parts of dead bodies, I easily read it as an enactment that mirrored my own development as a person: artificial, “fashioned” limbs and transplanted organs create the creature, the daemon; such things also construct myself. At eighteen, again my age at that first reading, I felt all of the resentment of the creature, the anger, the isolation, the loneliness. The creature was the ultimate victim of stereotyped oppression, of a disabling construction of “ugliness”; the creature’s response was to torment its author, to triumph in the end by driving its creator and the one who first names it “ugly” to a cruel death. In this way, I vaguely recognized that the creature resisted what it had become and used its disabled body, a body that was incredible and superior in strength, in its ability to experience extremes in cold and heat, to wreck the inscribing process of outside definition. Being constructed in postmodern discourse, being the person I was and am, I read the creature as “powerful” in its resistance: the creature gained power through its disempowered body; it took the imposition of “abnormality” and used it as an articulation of strength and purpose. When I read the narrative, I read these terms into my own body; I used them to explain my own life.

 

Before I move to a more critical discussion of Frankenstein, I have one more autobiographical example of this postmodern process of becoming. I love to swim. I love the sun, the exertion of a day of swimming. A few weeks ago, with a couple of days off for the Easter holiday, my spouse and I spent a long weekend in Florida. We went to a place south of Tampa, to a condo on Indian Rocks Beach. The facility has a heated pool, but I wanted to swim in the Gulf. In order to get to the beach, though, I had to leave my limb upstairs and use crutches (salt and sand sometimes damage the hydraulic knee of my leg, so I try to avoid leaving it for long stretches on a beach). As I passed by the pool on crutches and felt the stares of roughly forty sunbathing, vacationing people, and heard the questions of several small, inquisitive children, I felt deeply disabled. I called that passage, a route I would take probably eight to ten times during the trip, the running of the gauntlet. That was what it was: a painful, bruising journey that simply had to be made. In those moments, I felt vulnerable. I felt angry. I will be honest: I felt hatred. I remember telling myself, on several occasions, that “I didn’t care what they thought of me,” that “I was going to do this no matter what.” I remember trying hard not to look back at them, those innocent people, not to hear the questions, but instead to focus on the goal: the gateway to the beach and ultimately the sea. I knew that making eye contact meant imprisonment, displacement, perhaps even failure. I knew how the process worked: eye contact would equate deep inscription, the aggressive internalization of abnormality and disability, and I knew that too much of that would have meant a decision to just avoid the whole troublesome thing and not swim at all.

 

When I did get to the water, however, I was free again, my disability hidden beneath the waves. And at that point, typically, I felt a rush of emotions. I was thankful and pleased to be in the water swimming. I was embarrassed by my body’s power to cause discomfort. I was anxious about the return passage back to the condo. I was ashamed of my profound inability to resist becoming what those stares had made me into: disabled, a person who needs help–the gates opened for him, the pathways cleared–a person who needs kindness and smiles to offset the uncomfortable stares and questions.

 

Of course, as usual these feelings were almost immediately countered by another very different experience. On the first day back from that trip, I went to the dentist for a check-up. Having been out in the Florida sun, I had a tan, and as I sat down in the reclined dentist’s chair, ready to be examined, he mentioned that I looked great and had a “healthy glow.” I laughed, but what flashed across my mind was what I had actually experienced while I was getting this tan (which has now begun to peel): that is, disability, the constructions of illness. The dentist defined my body and, in turn, “me,” as being “healthy.” But just the day before at the pool I was certainly defined as “disabled.” Any nephrologist will tell you that for the last three years I have been seriously “ill.” My point here is simple: it is clear that the text of my body, which is my body, is profoundly unstable. Again and again I discover how I am both normal and abnormal, both able-bodied and healthy, and disabled and ill. As I will demonstrate, it is this profound discursive indeterminacy that defines the postmodern body and the direction that both body criticism and disability studies are taking as they develop.

 

I will end this introduction with the following description. We have a full-length mirror in our bedroom. I looked in it tonight; I looked in it with the issues of this essay in my mind, with the experiences of the past couple of weeks clicking off in my head. What I saw was a tanned, smiling face, a body clothed in casual khaki Dockers and a light blue buttoned down shirt by Structure, a body wearing comfortable brown leather shoes and tan dress socks. I then took off the shoes, the shirt. The body was different, just slightly, no longer wearing several markers of class, no longer appearing totally healthy–the left shoulder slightly deformed, again lower and smaller than the right; the body uneven, slightly misshapen. I then took off the pants, the undershirt, and then the underwear and the socks. And there I was, stripped, naked. The body had become disfigured, disabled. Scars danced across the abdomen. A prosthetic limb dominated the left side of the body, drawing the eyes to it. I turned and it was apparent that the hips turn outward, the spine curves inward. My body looked bent, odd, strange to me. I took off the limb and the transformation was complete: I had stripped into disability and disfigurement, into powerlessness and vulnerability.

 

I had changed. In the mirror I had morphed from an apparently normal, youngish, tanned person in reasonably fashionable clothing to a nakedly disfigured creature. If only my dentist could see me now, I thought.

 

The Creature as Monster

 

The first time I taught Mary Shelley’s most famous book I was in graduate school, a teaching fellow, and I was teaching my first upper-division course. The class was a junior-level survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. The students were mostly sophomore and junior English majors, and there were about fifteen of them total.

 

The first day we took up the novel was surprising, and one of the highpoints in my early teaching experience. My class loved the book, and responded well to it; they overwhelming aligned themselves with the creature. In fact, at one point in our initial discussion, several of them asked me to stop calling the creature “the monster.” They claimed that he was not a “monster”; calling it one, they said, was the whole problem.

 

When I walked out of class that afternoon I think you could describe my disposition as jubilant, very happy with the discussion, with the way the students responded. At the time, and with my own biases hovering in the background, I thought that it was only natural that the class, all of whom were young and disenfranchised by definition, could identify as readers with the scorned, lonely creature. The creature is victimized; it made sense to me then and still does now that readers familiar with any kind of powerlessness will identify with the hated and marginalized creature. In truth, I was really just happy that my students had even read the book! The fact that they had had something to say about it, that they had wanted to talk about it and develop an understanding of the world through it seemed to validate my own experience as a graduate student being trained to teach in an English Department.

 

When I read Frankenstein now, I read the text and my own sympathetic alignment with the creature in a slightly different light. More than ever, it seems that the novel demonstrates the power of cultural inscription, the way an individual comes to subjectivity through a series of aggressive cultural acts. In his anonymous review of the narrative, Percy Shelley framed the creature in a similar light, as a being who is made into a violent monster. He argues for the following concise explanation of the narrative: “Treat a person ill and he will become wicked” (Clark 307). What the creature experiences through the narrative, from its birth to its last scene with Walton, is a continued repetition of scorn, hatred, and fear, a constant construction of monstrosity. The creature learns itself in this way; it becomes “unnatural,” “abnormal,” again a monster through its consumption of “cultural artifacts” (to again cite Davis), and through the practice of everyday life. What the narrative enacts, then, is the creature’s inability to resist this overwhelming definition of itself by culture. Unlike my student described above, or myself, the creature lacks the postmodern, technologically driven ability to “dress” out of abnormality, but is instead always starkly naked, stripped, openly abnormal. In the end, the tragedy of the creature is that it can see itself as nothing but a monster. In its own self-narration at the center of the book, it claims: “when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification. Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal effects of this miserable deformity” (108). And again the creature articulates a self-understanding in terms of abnormality: “I was… endued with a figure so hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man” (115).

 

Arthur Frank tells us that “Repetition is the medium of becoming” (159). The creature is trapped in repeated social construction, is unable to cloak its disability and escape the constant repetition of “monster.” The creature attempts to resist this repetition, to become something other than the monster it is constantly being made into. There is, for example, the way it approaches the blind patriarch of the DeLacy family, attempting to lose its body and become simply a voice; and there is its ultimate utopian desire to hide from the oppressive, normalizing sight of humanity, to have a companion or a mate like itself, with whom the creature can run away and live peacefully in isolation. But again it is never anything but nakedly disabled in its “hideousness.” It can never hide with clothes or technology or self-narration or any other cloaking device other than the darkness of night. In open daylight, its disfigurement and abnormality are always present, immediate, defining.

 

Jay Clayton has argued the following point concerning the way the creature’s body works in culture:

 

Although the monster in Shelley’s novel is hideous to look at, Frankenstein himself feels more keenly the horror of the creature looking at him. In this respect, Shelley reverses the terms of monstrosity. Frankenstein cannot bear to see the eyes of his creation watching him. Indeed, the eyes themselves seem to be the most horrid organs the creature possesses. (61)

 

The passage Clayton refers to is the creature’s first act in the novel, which is narrated by Frankenstein in the following way: “He [the creature] held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed downstairs” (57). In this passage, the creature seeks unity, contact, a reception from its parent, and is instead roughly abandoned. This is the first act in the process of the creature’s development into a monster: the creature’s body, which initiates contact here by reaching out to Frankenstein, causes discomfort and anxiety in the one it confronts, the one it “fixes” its eyes upon. Terror for both Frankenstein and the creature occur most often when the creature looks back, makes eye contact, for that is the moment when construction takes place, when both bodies are written. One body, Frankenstein’s, is located in normalcy, while the other, the creature’s, is represented as the excluded “Other,” as “abnormal.” Indeed, it is Frankenstein, the creature’s physical author and the first human the creature knows, who gives the creature the first elements of his identity as a monster. Frankenstein again describes his first confrontation with the victimized creature in the following way: “I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became such a thing as even Dante could not have conceived” (57). It is when the creature is “capable,” then, when it articulates an ability, and worst of all when it looks back at the observer, that it becomes a monster. Thus, Frankenstein can further narrate his understanding of the creature with the deep horror of normalcy, of the oppressor:

 

His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. (56)

 

Rather than attaching special power to the creature through its disfigured body, however, most critics have treated the novel as Percy Shelley does in his before-mentioned review, traditionally reading the creature’s body as a representation of marginalization and victimization, of binding cultural construction. For example, one critic argues, “In Nietzschean terminology, the being’s problem is that he is so thoroughly creature [i.e., Other] he is incapable of forming his own values. He is forced to accept them ready-made from his creator and his creator’s race” (Hetherington 22). Likewise, David Hirsch highlights that first moment when Frankenstein names his creation a monster, and asserts that it “is Victor’s baptismal enslavement of [the creature] with an image, a name, an identity which this ‘monster’ will attempt to erase by manipulating those very same chains of language and image which bind him” (57). Hirsch continues:

 

By seeking inclusion into exclusive structures, [the creature] realizes that his reverent attempts to assimilate disempower him as they reinforce the exclusivity of the closed domestic circle. Asking for similar rights by stressing one’s similarity to a normal structure does little to alter the norm and demands no reciprocal conversion on the part of the one to be persuaded. (59)

 

Hirsch and other critics, in both queer studies and feminist theory, often see the creature as the problematic of marginalization, a dramatization of either femininity or homosexuality in a culture dominated by repressive patriarchy and heterosexuality. The creature fails to break out of stereotype and the repressive discourses that define it, but is instead thoroughly and completely shaped by those discourses. The creature’s body, its ugliness and abnormality, and the resulting exclusion and disability, become the ultimate symbols of practices of discrimination.

 

These approaches, all of which choose to focus primarily on the creature rather than its creator or the actual author of the novel, give shape and critical substance to my own reading of the book. The creature attempts to break out of this definite bind of stereotype, out of this “principle of disfiguration” (Vine 247), first when it tells its story to its maker, which in the context of this discussion appears as an autobiographical attempt to claim selfhood, to write and perform disability, and then when it makes its final demand for “a mate.” Thinking of Hirsch’s argument, it seems that both the self-narrative and the desire for a similar companion can be read as tools or strategies that the creature uses to establish some kind of normalcy for itself. A female mate, for example, would destroy the uniqueness the creature feels, would instead create a sense of sameness, a solidarity of experience, a “domestic circle.”

 

The creature’s self-narrative, which I would like to place more emphasis on here simply because it is more relevant to our discussion, likewise demonstrates the potential power and cultural force the creature possesses. As we have seen, it is when the creature becomes mobile, a potential functional and able member of society, that it becomes dangerous and needs to be, literally, turned into a monster. Power, then, which the creature achieves by simply being able to breathe and live–that is, to perform in everyday life–is immediately repressed. Power is in a measure re-achieved, however, in the creature’s narrative of itself. Again, self-narrative is a tool used by the creature to gain self-determinacy. It is an “illness narrative,” an act of becoming and re-becoming. Through self-narration the creature can, to a point, re-make itself, re-fashion and re-invent a new understanding of its self. With its story, the creature tries to resist the disabling definition of “monster” and to write itself into rhetorical normalcy, which it hopes will lead to real, if limited, acceptance in everyday cultural practice.

 

The creature does this by attempting to draw pity, a sympathy, out of its audience, and therefore some kind of recognition of sameness, some kind of inclusion. Once again, in part it works. For example, after hearing the creature’s narrative Frankenstein comments, “His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassioned him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him” (140). It is in these moments that it appears that the creature has established some kindred feeling, some sense of sameness. But, even in these moments, the creature cannot overcome its physical hideousness and the resulting sense of abnormality and otherness. Frankenstein’s next thoughts are as follows: “but when I looked upon him, and when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred” (126). The creature’s body, its “filthy mass,” is too much in the present and too radically different; it claims too much definition, and cannot be ignored or put aside. The creature’s narrative, then, is the fulfillment of a paradigm first outlined by Leonard Kriegel: “the cripple is threat and recipient of compassion, both to be damned and to be pitied–and frequently to be damned as he is pitied” (32).

 

Indeed, in the end, the only real control or power that the creature is able to achieve is not through the rhetoric of understanding or empathy, but rather through its threats and eventual acts of physical violence. It does control Frankenstein, and drives him to death. It can even claim:”‘ Remember that I have power…. You are my creator, but I am your master;–obey!'” (160). It is key to recognize that that power comes not in achieving normalcy, but in embodying deviance, the violence associated with physical abnormality. Rather than becoming a “person” or “human” through an act of language and rhetoric, the creature becomes a “master” through “monstrous” acts of violence.

 

Eleanor Salotto has written:

 

Narrative in this text is divided among three narrators: Walton, Frankenstein, and the creature. This diffusion of narrative voice indicates that the narrative body is not whole, incapable of reproducing a sutured narrative about the origins of one’s life…. The frame of narrative thus disturbs the notion of unitary identity, on which the notion of autobiography has rested. (190)

 

We have seen that autobiography is not a viable strategy in the text; it does not lead, ultimately, to empowerment for the creature. Salotto argues that it is similarly a failure for all of the characters and for the author of the text herself, Mary Shelley:

 

As we have seen… categories break down, and what one character demonstrates at one moment shifts ground continuously, as with the creature’s innate goodness and his subsequent reign of terror… the introduction concentrates on Shelley looking into the mirror and asking the same questions that the creature does: ‘Who was I? What was I?’ and veering off the ‘traditional’ signification of the feminine subject. (191)

 

Thus, when Shelley writes the narrative, and the introduction to the 1831 edition, she writes herself, just as each of her characters, especially the creature, attempt to write themselves when they in turn write their own stories. All of them, all of the narratives, are not quite successful; they all lack the ultimate self-definition that they attempt to achieve. What this says for our purposes here is that narrative is used as a tool, a technology, that is intended to be a vehicle to freedom, self-definition, and self-expression. Again, the problem that this novel demonstrates is that such technology–perhaps all technology–fails. The monster, for example, tries to un-monster itself with its personal narrative. Because narrative fails, the creature’s ability to resist stereotype and construct a new, more “human” identity likewise fails. It is always victim, always resisting the powerful inscription it feels on its body, but never able to avoid the snares of abnormality that trap it and direct its every move. The creature’s body is trapped in a kind of profound disability, is transformed into a violent monster and lacks any power to stop this transformation from taking place. It tries to narrate itself out of that construction; it attempts to become something else. It fails.

 

The Postmodern Body

 

It seems that we now have a deep contradiction working in this paper. The first section establishes how, through autobiography, the disabled individual can narrate herself into a kind of ability, how the instability of the discourses that presently define the body leads ultimately to possible constructs of freedom and re-self-definition. The next section of the essay then undermines that notion in its assertion that the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is unable to narrate itself into ability and normalcy; the creature attempts to narrate itself out of the disfigurement that defines it as “monster” and excludes it from normal practice, and it is of course unable to do this. What is the solution to this paradox? The answer is postmodernity, or the condition where, according to Donna Haraway, there is “agency… without defended subjects” (3).

 

I want to refer again to the class in which I first taught Frankenstein. In that class the students aligned themselves with the creature, and more importantly refused to recognize the creature as “monstrous.” If I recall correctly, the students in that class looked like many of the classes I have taught during my eight years of teaching experience. Body piercings, tattoos, dyed hair, extremes in baggy and tight clothing–all are characteristics of our students today. Notions of individuality, self-expression, and freedom dominate the self-presentations of our students. Indeed, with the abundance of research on the teaching of writing and literature out there these days, it is no surprise to me that when I teach my writing and literature sections, the work that requires personal narration and experience from my students is always the best, the most rewarding and the most productive writing and speaking. It has been demonstrated time and time again that teaching writing is linked with teaching empowerment, self-exploration and discovery, personal relationships, and the ability to have a voice in the functioning of our culture.

 

But again as we have just seen, narrative, self-writing, and self-presentation or performance are the very tools that fail the creature. I think the answer here is that in the contemporary West there are simply more tools to work with, more experiences to augment narration and the process of self-becoming: today the creature could have plastic surgery, for example, or use its size and strength to play a professional sport, or use its intellect to manage itself into financial and cultural power. Put simply, not only are the times a-changin’, the times have already changed. Postmodernism has unhinged the hegemony of culture and stereotype, and has allowed for the development and availability of liberatory constructs and discursive practices that lead to freedom. Indeed, the dynamic of postmodern cultural practice is to center such marginalized subjectivities, to hear voices now that before were not heard. A disabled perspective of culture, then, is now available, possible, likely.

 

In my own research, I know that I am reading more and more autobiographical narratives written by disabled authors offering a variety of perspectives on their experience; and in my everyday life, I am seeing more and more disabled people claiming power in the functioning of culture, resisting stereotype, and re-making the ways in which their bodies are understood by others. A good example here is Sean Elliott, the professional basketball player. Sean Elliott is a transplanted body, a body that is surrounded by images of abnormality and “unnaturalness.” He now plays a sport dominated in the eighties and early nineties by images of perfection, ideal normalcy–when one thinks of professional basketball, one thinks of Michael Jordan’s athletic body, a body that is often cited by multiple intelligence theorists to be a kind of kinesthetic “genius.” Elliott’s play, though, his ability on the court, wrecks the polarization of normal and abnormal that the marketing of Jordan’s body seems to establish. Elliott is able to be both extremes of the pole: he is ill and healthy; he is a body that is unnatural and a body that is strikingly natural. He is impaired and disabled and neither all at the same time. He is postmodern. Sean Elliott does not only “look back” at or make eye contact with the defining practices of culture and the stares of millions of people; he redefines himself in those moments, and he succeeds in the re-definition by making himself a viable option for the three-point shot, by being a professional player. When millions of people see him playing basketball on television, what they see is disability becoming ability, again a wrecking of the whole polarization of able- and disabled-body experience. The dichotomy is destroyed because Sean Elliott, a transplanted, reconstructed person–in addition to the transplant, both of his knees have been rebuilt–is able to play the most glamorous, most promoted, and most marketed sport in recorded history. Every night he is in an arena of perfect bodies. His body works, claims the same perfection, without any loss of what he actually is: a transplant patient, a medically maintained body, a professional athlete, a great three-point shooter.

 

Lennard J. Davis has written that, “When we think of bodies, in a society where the concept of the norm is operative, then people with disabilities will be thought of as deviants” (“Normalcy” 13). Though many, if not all scholars working in the field of disability studies will disagree, I am arguing in the end here that we can now foresee the moment when postmodern culture pushes into a realm where disabled bodies are, literally, no longer disabled. By establishing a disabled perspective of culture, the notion of disability itself radically changes, is perhaps lost, for a fully articulated disabled perspective seems to reach beyond disability and into an entirely different conceptual and cultural space for all bodies. Already, advances in technology blur the traditional lines between ability and disability as they blur the boundary between “the natural” and “the artifical.” The very notion of normalcy/abnormality, an “able body” and a “disabled body,” seems to be breaking down; the “norm” is eroding, and certainly attachments of social deviance are no longer relevant in a cultural environment where those images are embraced.

 

I have already demonstrated here how my own body is often able, with the technology of modernist and postmodernist medicine, to float into spheres of traditional normalcy, zones from which I would have been excluded just two decades ago. According to Jay Clayton and Donna Harraway, most people living today have such technologically dependent, equalized, postmodern bodies, bodies that are, to use Harraway’s phrase, “cyborgs.” Clayton writes,

 

Think of how one’s character has been reshaped by the total integration of technology with the body. Many people would be different beings without the glasses or contact lenses that let them see. How would one’s self-conception and behavior be changed without the availability of contraception (one form of which can be permanently implanted in women’s bodies)? What about mood-altering drugs such as Prozac or body-altering drugs such as steroids and estrogen? For that matter, what about the far older technology of vaccination? In terms of more interventionist procedures, think of people whose lives have been transformed by pacemakers, prosthetic limbs, sex-change operations, cosmetic surgery, and more. (65-66)

 

With Sean Elliott’s comeback, it is now widely apparent that the transplanted body too has this same indeterminacy inscribed upon it, built inside of it. The suggestion is, I think, that the person, any person, is a system of organs, almost all of which can be either replaced or relocated, depending on the immediate need. In this light, the body itself seems to break down as an absolute posit of selfhood and determinacy. What emerges is a sense of possibility. What emerges is the postmodern body.

 

Works Cited

 

• Clark, D. L. Shelley’s Prose. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1954.
• Clayton, Jay. “Concealed Circuits: Frankenstein’s Monster, the Medusa, and the Cyborg.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 15.4 (1996): 53-69.
• Couser, G. Thomas. “Disability and Autobiography: Enabling Discourse.” Disability Studies Quarterly 17.4 (1997): 292-296.
• Davis, Lennard J. “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century.” The Disability Studies Reader. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York: Routledge, 1997. 9-28.
• —. “Enabling Texts.” Disability Studies Quarterly 17.4 (1997): 248-251.
• Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
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• Hetherington, Naomi. “Creator and Created in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” The Keats-Shelley Review 11 (1997): 1-39.
• Hirsch, David. “De-Familiarizations, De-Monstrations.” Pre/Text 13 (Fall/Winter 1992): 53-67.
• Kleinman, Arthur. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books, 1989.
• Kriegel, Leonard. “The Cripple in Literature.” Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images. Ed. Alan Gartner and Tom Joe. New York: Praeger, 1987. 31-46.
• Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. “Exploring Foundations: Languages of Disability, Identity, and Culture.” Disability Studies Quarterly 17.4 (1997): 241-247.
• Morris, David. Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.
• Salotto, Eleanor. “Frankenstein and Dis(re)membered Identity.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 24 (Fall 1994): 190-211.
• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed. Maurice Handle. New York: Penguin, 1983.
• Vine, Steven. “Filthy Types: Frankenstein, Figuration, Femininity.” Critical Survey 8 (1996): 246-58.
• White, Hayden. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” On Narrative. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. 1-24.