Matt Cardin

ENG 648

Summer 2001

Term Paper

In my study of Frankenstein, the single theme or motif that has come to dominate my attention is the quest for psychic or spiritual wholeness that weaves its way symbolically through the course of the novel. This can be seen in the oft-noted fact of the monster’s function as a spiritual double for Victor, and most especially in the pathetic love-hate relationship between the two characters that leads both to their eventual doom. In this paper I shall take up this theme and attempt to demonstrate that the novel, with its portrayal of Victor and the monster as complementary externalized components of a single unified psyche or self, makes a comment, and a rather nihilistic one at that, on the nature of the quest for spiritual wholeness in a culture divided between its intellect and what I shall be calling its "visionary powers." First, I shall examine the statements of a number of literary critics who have analyzed Frankenstein in terms of the split-self motif. Next, I shall turn to the writings of Theodore Roszak and Huston Smith for help in describing the nature of Victor Frankenstein's scientistic monomania, which will help to elicit the nature of his self-alienation, and concomitantly the nature of the monster he animates.¹ I shall argue that Victor and the monster may be read as symbols of the alienation of intellect from visionary power that Roszak and Smith view as endemic to western scientific culture. Finally, I shall show that the conclusion of the novel denies the drive for reintegration that has hitherto has been held out to the reader as the desired resolution, and thereby delivers a nihilistic message that ultimately denies the possibility of there being a healing of this alienative dichotomy, either for the characters in the novel or for western culture.

In her book-length study titled The Gothic Tradition in Fiction, Elizabeth MacAndrew gives a concise statement of the idea that is my starting point: "The monster Frankenstein creates is his spiritual mirror image" (101). This fact has long been recognized by critics, and has assumed the status of a largely unquestioned maxim in the field of Frankenstein criticism.² The idea of "doubles" or Doppelgängers was already an established convention in romantic literature by the time Mary Shelley wrote her most famous work, having been previously employed by, for example, James Hogg in Confessions of a Justified Sinner, E.T.A. Hoffman in "The Doubles," and Mary's father, William Godwin, in Caleb Williams. According to Martin Tropp, however, it would be a mistake to view Mary Shelley's use of the theme as simply an act of literary repetition. "The Doppelgänger theme in Frankenstein," he writes, "is more than the reworking of a literary tradition or the expression of Mary Shelley's personal conflicts; it is an integral part of the mythic statement of the novel, an insight that helps keep Frankenstein alive" (Tropp 47-8). Nora Crook points out that more than more than one critic has said Frankenstein may well be "the novel…about doubling, shadow selves, split personalities" (Crook 59).

Furthermore, some have contended that by having Victor's double come into being via human agency, instead of as an unmediated eruption from the unconscious, Mary Shelley put a new and significant spin on the old theme. The monster is, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, "a ‘modern’ species of shadow or Doppelgänger," because it is "deliberately created by man’s ingenuity and not a mere supernatural being or fairy-tale remnant….Where, by tradition, such beings as doubles, shadow selves, ‘imps of the perverse,’ and classic Doppelgängers….spring full grown from supernatural origins – that is, from unacknowledged recesses of the human spirit – Frankenstein’s demon is natural in origin: a manufactured nemesis (Oates 548). Terri Paul says the entire novel can be read as "an examination of [Victor’s] interior universe and the way science enables him to objectify, give a physical reality to, the product of his imagination" (Paul 50). Christopher Small goes into further detail:

The importance of Victor's double having been created through the agency of science is something we will return to at a later point, for as I have already hinted, this contains an important clue to the nature of Victor's self-alienation and the nature of his monster.

The character of the symbolic relationship between Victor and the monster has been subject to varying interpretations. Some critics have opted for an explicitly psychoanalytic approach. This can be seen in the work of Rosemary Jackson, who has analyzed the monster, and also the wider realm of the "double" motif in general, in terms of Freudian and Lacanian psychology. "At the heart of…all fantasies," she writes, "is the problem of identity, a problem given particular prominence in tales of the double." She avers that tales of the double "are driven by a desire to reverse the process of alienation which occurs in the earliest stages of human development," and says this desire "is best understood in relation to Freud’s theories of human growth, especially as elaborated by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan" (Jackson, "Narcissism and Beyond" 45). She makes a compelling case for viewing Frankenstein’s monster as both "a displaced desire [on the part of Victor] to be at one with the mother again and through her to reattain that primary narcissism of undifferentiated existence" (48), and "a fantastic example of the idea of ‘le corps morcelé,’ the body in pieces," as elaborated in Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage of infant psychological development (49). The narrative of Frankenstein, she says, is driven by "a strong desire to be unified with this 'other' side. The monster is Frankenstein's lost selves, pieces of himself from which he has been severed, and with which he seeks re-unification" (Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion 100).

Other scholars have stayed away from explicit psychoanalysis. Film and literary critic Bruce Kawin writes,

Like Jackson with her speculations about the implicit desire in tales of the double for a reversal of alienation, Kawin writes that "the quest of Frankenstein’s life is, or ought to be, to ‘reown the projection’ (in Gestalt terms), to take the monster back into himself" (196).

Along the same lines, but in contrast to Kawin’s rather soft-edged picture of the monster as Victor’s "poetic and linguistic side" or "inner child," Robert Wexelblatt has contended that "the monster can be understood as a representation of the ‘monstrous’ side of Victor Frankenstein" (Wexelblatt 110). If understood in a strictly Freudian since, this amounts to probably the simplest and cleanest of the explanations that have been offered. It portrays the monster as a kind of id-on-the-rampage, and implies a strict duality in human nature, with light and goodness on one side, opposed by darkness and evil on the other. Wexelblatt takes this explicitly Freudian tack when he characterizes Victor as representing the ego and being involved in a kind of tug-of-war between the censoring impulse of the superego, as represented by Victor's fiancée Elizabeth, and the "buried and forbidden" impulses of the id, as represented by the monster (109). Similarly, Paul makes use of the Freudian rubric when she calls the monster "Frankenstein’s double, the dark side of the scientist’s soul." She states categorically that "the monster is Frankenstein’s unconscious raging out of control, and the two fight for dominance in Frankenstein’s soul….The Monster represents the unconscious and by its very existence demonstrates the inescapable duality of man’s nature. Frankenstein turns upon some of the basic conflicts that confront its hero: whether to live in the mind or in the body, in the conscious or unconscious mind, in the world of emotion or…the world of reason" (Paul 60, 58).

An interesting combination of the preceding views, and one that seems more subtle and nuanced than the bald assertion that the monster represents only the evil in Victor, can be seen in MacAndrew’s analysis. "The monster is Frankenstein’s double," she says, "representing not the evil side of Frankenstein only, but his whole complex spiritual state" (MacAndrew 103). In analyzing Frankenstein as "a Sentimental character lured into Faustian wrongdoing" (75), she advances the proposition that "Mary Shelley was more interested in maintaining the idea of the basic goodness of human nature, than in portraying a split personality. So Frankenstein does not split into good and evil parts. He suffers because he has become a monster. The sensitive, virtuous being that he was remains within him, half aware of its own monstrosity and helpless to change it" (103-4). This is echoed somewhat by José Monleon: "Victor and his monster…were all part of a single unit standing in a precarious equilibrium….They represented a single system in which evil and good intermingled, in which the separation of the characteristics was difficult to grasp" (Monleon 23). Regarding the inextricable combination of good and evil in Victor's character, MacAndrew writes, "Victor is not simply good-gone-bad. Mary Shelley makes him a despairing human being by symbolically projecting the evil in him onto the monstrous exterior of his creation" (MacAndrew 100). Small brings out the clearly Jungian implications of such statements when he states that the monster is the projection of Frankenstein's shadow (Small 293).

It remains to be asked what the implications of all this might be for my reading of Frankenstein as a parable about the failure of the quest for spiritual enlightenment. In preparing to answer that question, we must turn to an investigation of the nature of the psychology that made Victor, as a scientist, susceptible to such a catastrophic case of self-alienation.

"Long before the demonic possibilities of science had become clear for all to see, it was a Romantic novelist who foresaw the career of Dr. Frankenstein -- and so gave us the richest (and darkest) literary myth the culture of science has produced" (Roszak 279). So wrote the eminent culture critic and countercultural spokesperson Theodore Roszak in 1972. By 1995, his conviction that the story of Frankenstein was the richest literary myth of scientific culture had intensified to the point where he would call it the central myth of western culture itself.³ This was already implicit in his book Where the Wasteland Ends, from whence the above quotation comes. In that book, Roszak advanced a radical critique of the western scientific-technocratic world view, and of the "urban-industrial" society to which it has given rise. His argument centered around the contention that this world view is based upon a psychology of "single vision" (a term borrowed from Isaac Newton) that alienates the human intellect from its organic substratum and results in a similarly and equally alienated society and culture.

The heart of Roszak's argument is found in his diagnosis of modern western science as being founded upon a fallacious notion of "objectivity" that is ultimately pathological. "Every society," he wrote, "claims a portion of the private psyche for its own, a piece of our mind from which it fashions an orthodox consciousness adapted to what Freud called the Reality Principle. In Freud's view, the Reality Principle was the result of a latent activity called 'reality testing,' the purpose of which was to fix the frontier between objective and subjective." Freud, he pointed out, being a "confirmed nineteenth century positivist...took the objective to be nature as defined by science, the real external world of empirical fact and mechanistic determination" (74). So conceived, this view of what constitutes objective or "real" reality creates a division in the total experience of human subjectivity. The sense of human identity contracts into an "In Here" that "is ultimately felt to reside at a point inside the body...inside the head...somewhere just behind the eyes and between the ears," while everything else, including the body, is felt to be "Out There": "The body itself has become for us an alien object located Out There, the mere receptacle of our true and irrevocable identity" (93). The problem with this was that Freud "never wished to face squarely...the fact that the line we draw between the world Out There and the world In Here must be predicated on metaphysical assumptions that cannot themselves be subjected to scientific proof" (75). According to Roszak, objectivity as conceived by Freud is not really objective at all. Instead, it merely represents the selection of one set of elements out of the totality of human subjective experience upon which to concentrate the bulk of one's attention and energy.

This gives rise to two questions: why would a person, a scientist, want to perform such an exercise of consciousness? And what loss is suffered, if any, by the process of so delimiting the sense of human identity? In answer to the first question, Roszak embarks upon an intensive analysis of the history of the psychology of science. He traces the specific origin of the objectivizing impulse back to Francis Bacon, generally credited with formulating the scientific method, and says that in this man

The key to understanding Bacon's motivation, according to Roszak, is to recognize that the man desired nothing so much as power over nature. Coming on the heels of the western tradition's ancient quest for such power, a quest whose earliest inspiration is found in the Biblical injunction for humans to subdue the earth and have dominion over it (cf. Genesis 1:26-28), Bacon arrived a method of knowing that would enable people to attain this goal to a greater extent and with greater efficiency than anyone had ever thought possible. This method was, of course, the scientific method, as elaborated in Bacon's Novum Organum and elsewhere. Bacon and his disciples had discovered the great secret of what Roszak calls "power-knowledge": "break faith with the environment, establish between yourself and it the alienative dichotomy called objectivity, and you will surely gain power. Then nothing -- no sense of fellowship or personal intimacy or strong belonging -- will bar your access to the delicate mysteries of man and nature. Nothing will inhibit your ability to manipulate and exploit" (168). Bacon's genius was to recognize that there is "a kind of knowledge that grows incrementally and systematically over time, not as the result of hit-and-miss discovery or lucky accident, but as the product of a deliberate activity of the mind." The chief value of this knowledge is that it "will be capable of 'closing with nature,' of asserting power over the world. That, indeed, will serve as its validation as true knowledge." The "great Baconian dictum," Roszak says, is "that in a true natural philosophy 'human knowledge and human power meet in one.' Bacon bothers to develop no other criterion of truth than the bluntly operational one: if it works, it is true. 'Truth,' he insists, 'and utility are here the very same thing'" (149).

We thus see that the motivation for establishing the "alienative dichotomy" of In Here and Out There, self and other, is the desire for "power-knowledge" over the world. The history of western culture subsequent to Bacon, according to Roszak, is a history of increasing human alienation from self and world as technical expertise grows ever more stupendous through the application of the scientific method to all areas of life. Roszak points out that Bacon wanted his novum organum to apply "'not only to natural sciences but to all sciences' (specifically including ethics and politics)" and to result in "'axioms'...that apply to ethics, physics, mathematics, theology, medicine" (147). The result is the culture we see around us today, where human beings are routinely quantified in various ways, and where the actual existence of anything like "the self" or "consciousness" as sui generis phenomena has been seriously questioned by some of our most respected philosophers and scientists.

This brings us around to the second question raised earlier: what loss is incurred by the decision to view and live in the world in this way? Why is it that the closing decades of the twentieth century saw the widespread grip of a "devouring sense of alienation from nature and one's fellow man -- and from one's own essential self" that had become "the endemic anguish of advanced industrial societies" (Roszak 168)? Roszak's answer is that the crisis is linked directly to the epistemological stance that lies at the very foundation of the scientific worldview:

What is lost in the decision to contract one's sense of identity into the "subjective" world of In Here, from where one can view the "objective" world of Out There without the taint of error-prone human presence distorting the information so-gained, is precisely that human presence itself. We lose ourselves when we attempt to see the world as if we had no place in it. Scientific knowing, says Roszak, "seeks a neutral eye, an impersonal eye...in effect, the eyes of the dead wherein reality is reflected without emotional distortion" (156). The specific nature of the human aspect that is lost, says Roszak, is our "visionary powers," our ancient sense of the "Old Gnosis" by which we felt at home in the universe. "The psychic distance that separates the scientist's objectified uniformity of nature from the Oneness of the Old Gnosis is immense," he writes. "It is the distance separating St. Francis from Albert Camus' Stranger. Existentially speaking, it is all the difference between the life of one who is at home in the universe and the life of one who feels himself to be a cosmic freak" (400). Ironically, it is from people who have lived in the intensity of this ancient visionary power -- artists, musicians, poets, scientists in the old alchemical tradition like Goethe -- that "our science inherits the concept of cosmos, the meaningful whole" (398).

At this point it might be added tangentially, but perhaps not incidentally, that this subtle complicity between the old science and the new – the intellectual, reductionist, and rational new science living off the visionary capital of the alchemical, Hermetic, and mystical old science -- can be seen in the pages of Frankenstein in the form of Victor’s struggle to choose between two competing views of the universe that he sees laid out before him. The first is the view of the ancient alchemists, whose epic quest for "immortality and power," as described in the writings of Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, grips a youthful Victor with powerful visions of deep mysteries laid bare, and provides him with the first external confirmation of his seemingly inborn desire to learn "the secrets of heaven and earth" (Shelley 43). But he soon finds his interests divided between the alchemical view and the view of "modern natural philosophy." "As a child," he tells Walton,

It looks as if Victor’s entire career as a scientist might be derailed before it has even begun, due simply to the loss of a sense of inspiration, until he hears a brilliant lecture delivered by professor Waldman, his mentor at the university of Ingolstadt, who explains that the new science contains seeds of the same grand vision that drove the old. While it may seem that the new scientists have "hands…only made to dabble in dirt, and…eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible," they "have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding places. They ascend to the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows." Immediately upon hearing these words, Victor feels himself overcome by a veritable engine of passion that starts churning inside him. He asserts with renewed fervor, in a moment of Baconian hubris, that he will achieve "more, far more…: treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation" (51). One can clearly hear echoes in this of Bacon’s famous boast that he would "put nature on the rack" and force it to reveal its deepest secrets (quoted in Smith 114).

Obviously, this sets us on the road to the creation of the monster, and thus back into a consideration of the novel itself. But before we return there to examine Victor and the monster in light of Roszak’s conception of the alienation inherent in the epistemology of modern science, let us take a moment to examine more specifically the content of what is lost when we experience the self-alienation that comes from the attempt to control nature through forced "objectivity." For help in this, we shall turn to the writings of Huston Smith.

The reader will recall that Roszak designated the desire for power over the natural world as the primary motivation that led Bacon and his followers to formulate an epistemology that would rigorously remove all vestiges of the human subject from the perceived external world of nature. Roszak wrote Where the Wasteland Ends in 1972, and his argument, while still compelling (at least in this author’s opinion), might sound suspiciously "sixties-ish" to some readers, and therefore not worthy of consideration. Such readers would do well to recognize that the same type of argument has been made, and is still being made, quite forcibly by many contemporary thinkers who agree that modern science has led to a breakdown of culture. One of the most vocal, visible, and respected such persons is Huston Smith, a scholar and philosopher of religion whose longevity (his most well-known book, The World’s Religions, originally titled The Religions of Man, was first published in 1958 and is still one of the most widely used college textbooks on comparative religion) seems to be exceeded only by his prolificity.

Like Roszak, Smith views the modern science-and-technology dominated culture as pathological, and attributes our arrival at such a predicament to the same "single vision" that Roszak quoted from Blake (although Smith does not use this term). "The most pertinent way to characterize the modern ethos briefly," Smith says, "is to say that it is a blend of naturalism and control." He sees this ethos as proceeding from three related factors: a Promethean motivation, a Promethean epistemology, and a naturalistic metaphysics. The Promethean motivation is our will to power over nature. The Promethean epistemology is the Baconian way of knowing that is based upon empiricism, or the scientific method. The naturalistic metaphysics is "the view that (a) nothing that lacks a material component exists, and (b) in what does exist the physical component has the final say" (Smith 76-8, 132). In passing, the reader might note that Smith’s characterization of the modern west’s overweening motivation and epistemology as "Promethean" may be seen as constituting a superficial reference to Frankenstein, "the modern Prometheus." This recognition is not at all arbitrary in light of Roszak’s claims about the centrality of the Frankenstein myth to western culture.

Smith ties all of this into a neat package when he identifies four steps that lead to a given culture's understanding of what it means to be human:

To restate: what we want (in the current discussion, power over nature) leads us to formulate a way of asking questions and seeing the world (in the current discussion, empiricism, the scientific method) that in turn filters out some information and lets other information through, thus producing a world view (in the current discussion, the naturalistic world view of modern science) that contains a picture of what it means to be a human being (in the current discussion, an alienated intellect).⁴

We have already seen that Roszak believes the scientific world view excludes by its very nature a crucial part of human reality. Smith agrees, and goes on to designate some of the specific areas he sees as falling outside the scope of scientific knowing. There are four things, he says, that "science cannot get its hands on": intrinsic and normative values, purposes, ultimate and existential meanings, and quality. For the first, Smith explains, "Science can deal with instrumental values, but not intrinsic ones. It can tell us that smoking damages health, but whether health is better than somatic gratification it cannot adjudicate. Again, it can determine what people do like, but not what they should like. Opinion polls and market research are sciences, but there cannot be a science of the summum bonum." Second, science may recognize that human beings and other animals act as if they were purposeful, but by its own principles it must reduce these apparent purposes to behavioristic explanations. Smith quotes Bacon in this regard: "Teleological explanations in science are the province of theology, not science." He also quotes Jacques Monod, the twentieth-century scientist, who has stated unequivocally that "the cornerstone of scientific method is...the systematic denial that 'true' knowledge can be got at by interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes -- that is to say, of 'purposes.'" In other words, says Smith, explanations of nature that are framed in terms of "purpose" are anthropomorphic, "and anthropomorphic explanations are the opposite of scientific ones." Third, science cannot handle ultimate and existential meanings -- ultimate ones referring to questions about "the meaning of it all," and existential ones referring to the meaning of any given information, discovery, etc., for the individual person. Science "is powerless to force the human mind to find its discoveries meaningful." Fourthly, science cannot say anything about quality, which "is fundamental, for it is their qualitative components that make values, meanings, and purposes important. But qualities, being subjective, barely lend themselves to even the minimum requirement of science -- objectivity -- let alone submit to quantification." As an example, he points out the absurdity of trying to quantify the quality of happiness: "Euphrometers have been attempted, but without success, for two pains do not add up to one that is twice as painful, and half a happiness makes no sense" (111-112).

The upshot of all this is plain to see: by its most basic principles, Smith says, science excludes the values, meanings, purposes, and qualities that make life worth living. "An epistemology that aims relentlessly at control rules out the possibility of transcendence in principle," he writes (134), defining transcendence as "something superior to us by every measure of value we know and some that elude us" (114). He says that "To expect a transcendental object to appear on a viewing screen wired by an epistemology that is set for control would be tantamount to expecting color to appear on a television screen that was built for black and white" (114). One might paraphrase Yeats at this point by saying that ultimately Smith is agreeing with Yeats' famous formulation about wisdom and knowledge: in our search for greater knowledge, fueled by a desire to gain control over nature, we have lost the wisdom that is what makes life worth living and knowledge worth having. Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? It is located in the cast-off part of the human psyche: the visionary aspect, the purposeful, valuing, qualitative part that sees the world in terms of meaning. In other words, the part that modern science does not want to recognize or deal with.

Here is where the thought of Smith meets most intimately with that of Roszak, and where we find our cue to return to a direct examination of Frankenstein to see what we can draw from it in light of the above discussion. Both Smith and Roszak agree that the "relentless objectivity" or "single vision" of the modern scientific mindset omits from view the most valuable parts of the world and of human nature. Smith designates these items as intrinsic and normative values, purposes, ultimate and existential meanings, and quality. Roszak simply calls them the "visionary powers" of the human race. Either way, if we agree that Victor Frankenstein was possessed by the scientistic monomania of single vision or relentless objectivity (a point that will be substantiated below), then we can now see the enormous load of psychic baggage that went into the creation of his double. The disjecta membra of Victor Frankenstein's soul include all those things that fall outside the ken of the contracted self of the scientific world view, all those meanings and qualities and visionary powers upon whose recovery in the life of western culture Smith and Roszak have set their sights.

At this point, half of my argument concerns Victor Frankenstein and half concerns the monster. Regarding Victor, I am advocating the idea that he may be viewed as a symbol of the alienated intellect of scientific single vision, as described by Roszak and Smith. We can now see that Victor’s progress toward alienation and the ultimate splitting of himself into complementary halves can be analyzed in terms of Smith’s four-step process of motivation-epistemology-ontology-anthropology. Victor’s motivation is the Baconian lust for power over nature. Although many have analyzed his motivation in terms of the desire for knowledge, it clear that for Victor, this desire is subordinate to his will to power. We see this especially as his education progresses. Tropp brings this out in his comment about the grand speech by professor Waldman that converts Victor into an ardent proselyte of the new science: "Even though he begins by attacking the pretensions of the medieval alchemists, it soon becomes clear that Waldman is promising, if not the same secrets, the same power" (Tropp 61). In the wake of this, Victor moves on from making boasts about discovering nature’s secrets to boasting that he will conquer death. "Life and death," he says, "appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world….Pursuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption" (Shelley 55).

With his motivation being power, Victor chooses as his epistemology the approach of modern scientific method. Valdine Clemens writes that Victor’s "fascination with and subsequent rejection of alchemical studies calls attention to the rupture between the medieval and modern worlds, a break that is signaled by the scorn Bacon expressed for medieval magic and alchemy and their lack of attention to empirical reality" (Clemens 92). As we have seen, Bacon’s scorn for the Old Gnosis led him to formulate the scientific method as a means of removing from view all vestiges of the error-prone human subject. While Mary Shelley never explicitly refers to the scientific method in her novel, it is clear that Victor’s choice of the new science over the old must involve his adoption of the new scientific way of interrogating nature (putting "nature on the rack").

Armed with the scientific method and a will to power over nature, Victor soon arrives, as Smith could have predicted, at an ontology of naturalism. This is seen most clearly in his total lack of responsiveness to the horrors of the "charnel-houses" he is forced to haunt in the course of his research. He explains that he was already disinclined from superstition by his upbringing -- "In my education my father had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors" (Shelley 53) -- but it is clear that his attitude also stems from his monomania. When he relates the story of his abortive attempt to create a female, and recalls the feelings that gripped him during the creation of the original monster, he says, "During my first experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my employment; my mind was intently fixed on the consummation of my labour, and my eyes were shut to the horror of my proceedings" (139). As a result, he came to view nature through "a dead man’s eyes" (cf. Roszak 142-75). "Darkness," he says, "had no effect upon my fancy; and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm" (Shelley 53). He even admits that he resorted to the torture of living animals in his efforts to learn the secret of bestowing life. "My limbs now tremble," he says, "and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless, almost frantic, impulse, urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit" (56). Tropp recognizes the naturalism of Victor’s world view at this point when he writes, "In describing the events leading to the creation of the Monster, Mrs. Shelley shows…her preoccupation with the reflection of the motives of the creator in the things he creates. On this level, the Monster is symbolic of the mechanistic attitude behind man’s new technology; its construction out of the parts of dead corpses is a logical extension of the reductionist equation of living things with inorganic matter" (Tropp 63).

The result of all this is that, as Roszak and Smith would have predicted, Victor becomes alienated from himself as his sense of identity contracts into the stunted "In Here" of the dichotomous modern scientific consciousness. Paul writes that Victor "lives too much in his mind and not enough in the world....Frankenstein is a character curiously lacking in physical substance and vitality. He is all mind and no body." As in the analysis offered by Roszak, she recognizes that this decision to identify purely with the intellect leads Victor to an experience of alienation not only from himself, but from other people and the natural world, too: "Frankenstein is an alienated figure, cut off from his own humanity as well as that of the people around him....[He] is alienated from society and human companionship....Because he lives almost exclusively in the mind, Frankenstein is alienated from nature" (Paul 52-4). Maggie Kilgour, in a discussion of the figure of the scientist in Romantic thought in general and Frankenstein in particular, writes,

These relationships include everyone and everything that Victor has ever held dear. In his youth, he says, "if I was ever overcome by ennui, the sight of what is beautiful in nature, or the study of what is excellent and sublime in the productions of man, could always interest my heart, and communicate elasticity to my spirit" (Shelley 136). But the pursuit of his goal destroys this peaceful sense of harmony with nature and other people. During the exceptionally beautiful summer season that unfolds around him while he is engrossed in his project of creation, he is unable to pay attention either to nature or other people (56). After the deed is done and he falls into a black despair, he finds that he is now lost within himself. "I shunned the face of man," he says, "all sound of joy or complacency was torture to me; solitude was my only consolation -- deep, dark, deathlike solitude" (83). He is even unable to accept the affection offered him by Elizabeth when she tries to comfort him (Shelley 85-6). Later, when he is about to undertake the creation of a female, the crisis is increased. "I saw an insurmountable barrier placed between me and my fellow men," he says. The only one who is able to surmount the barrier is Victor’s dear friend Henry Clerval, in whom Victor says he "saw the image of my former self" (135). But Clerval is murdered by the monster, and Victor’s complete isolation is sealed. Let us recall what Roszak said about the secret of "power-knowledge": "break faith with the environment, establish between yourself and it the alienative dichotomy called objectivity, and you will surely gain power. Then nothing -- no sense of fellowship or personal intimacy or strong belonging -- will bar your access to the delicate mysteries of man and nature. Nothing will inhibit your ability to manipulate and exploit" (Roszak 168). Now, having accepted the Baconian bargain of power in exchange for breaking faith with the environment, Victor discovers the shattering result: that he has become "a blasted tree…a miserable spectacle of wretched humanity, pitiable to others, intolerable to myself" (Shelley 136).

And what of the monster? If Victor is embodied intellect, miserable in his self-imposed exile from the rest of the universe, then what components are active in the monster that characterize his consciousness and nature? Earlier in the paper I mentioned the significance of the fact that the monster is the result not of a spontaneous eruption from the unconscious, but of rational scientific experimentation. We are now in a position to see why this is so significant. Victor, let it be repeated, is embodied intellect, the "In Here" of scientific knowing. As his double, the monster is his complementary opposite, which means that the monster serves as nothing other than the repository for all of Victor's discarded visionary powers as elaborated by Smith and Roszak.

The importance of seeing the monster not simply as Victor’s "dark side," but as symbolic of Victor’s "whole complex spiritual state" (MacAndrew 103), is now apparent. As complements, the two halves are indeed different from each other, but the monster is far from being embodied evil. I have already quoted Kawin as saying that the monster is Frankenstein's "poetic and linguistic side" (Kawin 196). Other readers have similarly noticed the monster’s visionary nature, or at least the fact that he is not all monstrous an evil. David Ketterer writes, "The usual conclusion, that the monster represents the destructive and diabolical nature of Frankenstein's overweaning [sic] intellectual ambition does not square with the actual presentation of the monster as a noble savage, an innocent more sinned against than sinning" (Ketterer 57). Wexelblatt, whom I quoted earlier as calling the monster the representation of Victor’s monstrous side, applies the Nietzschean categories of Apollonian and Dionysian to the matter, and says that the monster represents Dionysus, the passionate aspect of human nature as opposed to the rational Apollonian side. In the current discussion, it is important to recall that for Nietzsche, despite the fact that Apollo was the god of art and music, it was Dionysus who represented the creative energies -- i.e. the visionary aspect of life -- that constitute the vitality of an individual or culture. On another note, Crook reminds us that "Feminist criticism of the last twenty-five years has directed attention to Frankenstein as ‘female gothic,’ revealing a specifically female unconscious" (Crook 59). In the novel, the unconscious is symbolized by, of course, the monster, and this characterization of him as feminine falls right in line with the decision to view him as symbolizing the visionary aspect of human nature, for one of the most important qualities of these visionary powers is that they are categorically feminine, as analyzed by Roszak and Smith and countless others. They are the dark, earthy, "irrational" wisdom of the Mother Goddess as opposed to the light-filled, cerebral, rational knowledge of the Father God. They are the soft, yielding fluidity of the feminine Yin as opposed to the hard unyielding masculinity of Yang. And while is may seem strange to be equating the monster with both Nietzsche’s ecstatic Dionysus and the softness of femininity, we may call to mind to things: first, that the "irrational" exuberance of Dionysus corresponds to the "irrational" emotion and intuition of the feminine; and second, that such seeming contradictions are inherent in the nature of visionary wisdom, which, so it is said, transcends the traditional wisdom of "either-or."

It is easy to see this union of opposites in Mary Shelley’s portrayal of the monster. He is capable of both exceptional tenderness and exceptional cruelty. He is transported to the heights of ecstatic philosophical contemplation by the reading of Plutarch and Milton, and he is sunk to the depths of satanic rage by his utter exclusion from the world of human affections. He unhesitatingly plunges into a river to rescue a drowning girl, but then later mercilessly strangles Victor’s young brother William. He sets himself the goal of destroying Victor by destroying all that Victor loves, but then he leaves food behind to keep Victor alive, and he weeps over Victor’s corpse. By his nature as the visionary aspect of Victor’s soul, he is susceptible to these contradictory behaviors if he is not properly recognized and honored. In commenting on the spiritual alienation of the modern west, Roszak recognizes this connection between the denial of the visionary powers and the way they express themselves. "Let us be honest enough," he writes, "to confront our culture in its entirety and ask: is it merely coincidence that, in the midst of so much technological mastery and economic abundance, our art and thought continue to project a nihilistic imagery unparalleled in human history? Are we to believe there is not a connection between these facts?" (Roszak 379). The visionary powers will have their say whether or not they are consciously honored. If they are repressed or cut off via the decision to view the world from a position of Baconian "objectivity," they will appear as murderous monsters.

As noted earlier, Small designates the monster as Victor’s "shadow" in the Jungian sense, and we can take this as the ultimate word on the matter. Tropp quotes a Jungian psychologist’s description of the shadow as containing not just "bad" aspects of the personality but good ones, "normal instincts and creative qualities" (Tropp 48). For Jung, the shadow was a function of psychological wholeness. While it may appear threatening and evil to the ego that creates it by repressing qualities in the self that are perceived as undesirable, just as the monster appears hideous and evil in the eyes of Victor and a society that does not want to contend with the inevitable alienative aspect of scientific psychology, in fact the shadow is the complement of the ego, without which the ego has no solidity or ultimate sense of meaning. Likewise, for Victor there can be no sense of wholeness without the reincorporation of his visionary aspect into himself. Lacking that, he remains a blasted tree, and with this recognition we come to the final point of my paper.

I have analyzed Frankenstein as the story of Victor Frankenstein’s being seduced by the lure of the will to power over nature, resulting in his experiencing a split with his visionary side and creating a separate autonomous being who embodies this visionary aspect of his self. Roszak has called Frankenstein the central myth of western culture. Smith has identified the ethos of the modern west as being founded upon Promethean principles. If these assessments are accurate, then it is surely reasonable to view Victor and the monster as representing fundamental forces at work not just in Mary Shelley’s novel, but in western culture itself. "For a thousand people familiar with the story of Victor creating his monster from selected cadaver spares and endowing them with new life," writes Brian Aldiss, "only to shrink back in horror from his own creation, not one will have read Mary Shelley’s original novel. This suggests something of the power of infiltration of this first great myth of the industrial age" (Aldiss 23, emphasis added). "Frankenstein lives on, in popular imagination, detached from its origins, as part of the folk-lore of modern man," writes Small (14). It "has become one of the central myths of post-Romantic culture, both through literary and film texts" (Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion 101). Victor Frankenstein is "a near-allegorical figure," writes Oates (552). She calls the novel itself "a parable for our time, an enduring prophecy" (553).

But what, exactly, does it prophesy? If a parable is construed as a story with a metaphorical meaning, often a moral one, then what is the parabolic meaning of Frankenstein?

In the terms that I have set in this paper, Frankenstein is a parable about the failure of the Romantic quest for enlightenment in an age of scientific rationality. Stated another way, it is about the demonic power of science to prevent the fulfillment of the eternal spiritual quest. For there can be no doubt, I think, that the ultimate message of the novel is one of despair. When Victor dies in the arctic waste, a ruined and despairing man, and when the monster weeps over his creator and his own transition from benevolent spirit to murderous fiend, and then vanishes "in darkness and distance" into the arctic night to immolate himself, there is no redemption to be had for anybody. Recall that Crook identified Frankenstein as possibly the arch-novel about doubles and shadow selves (Crook 59), and then recall Jackson’s assertion that the novel is driven by "a strong desire to be unified with this 'other' side. The monster is Frankenstein's lost selves, pieces of himself from which he has been severed, and with which he seeks re-unification" (Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion 100). That is precisely the function of doubles, she says: "The double signifies a desire to be re-united with a lost center of personality....Frankenstein, as a subject, is driven by a desire for unity with another, by a desire for his life to have absolute significance" (108, 101). Kawin says "the quest of Frankenstein’s life is, or ought to be, to ‘reown the projection’ (in Gestalt terms), to take the monster back into himself" (196). Employing a psychological scheme that sees the human psyche as divided into three selves, the "higher self," "conscious self," and "basic self," with Victor representing the conscious self and the monster the basic self, Kawin calls the novel "a parable of the conscious self's absolute need for the basic self and of the tragedy that attends an irresponsible rejection of the innocent, creative, poetic, angry, emotional, sexual, hungry, and vulnerable being inside even the most disciplined person. Shelley's underlying vision here is of a drive toward personal wholeness, of the integration of creativity and compassion, industry and spirit" (197-8, 199).

Let us further recall that the theme of doubles and their quest for wholeness in reunion is ancient, if we are to believe Jung. In Man and His Symbols, Jung delineates four cycles of the hero myth, the last of which involves twins who are united in the mother’s womb, separated at birth, and then embark on a life mission to be reunited with each other in order to form a whole being (Jung 103, 106). There is thus a pre-existing mythic pattern that leads us to desire Victor and the creature to be reunited. But in the face of all this longing, which is simply the longing to attain spiritual wholeness, the novel denies us any fulfillment. Victor "never successfully reconciles these opposing forces within himself and become an integrated man" (Paul 58). "Frankenstein," writes Jackson, employing her Freudian/Lacanian analytical grid, "suggests that there can be no satisfactory resolution of the conflict between the Ideal ego and the fragmented, protean selves outside its formation. It is an open-ended work, leaving in tension various parts of the psyche" ("Narcissism and Beyond" 51). In the words of Oates, the novel emerges as "a remarkably acute diagnosis of the lethal nature of denial -- denial of responsibility for one’s actions, denial of the shadow-self locked within consciousness" (Oates 553). As "one of the central myths behind post-Romantic culture," Frankenstein "lies behind modern fantasy, as an influence and inspiration, but also as in index of the loss registered through the fantastic" (Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion 101).

This sense of loss is devastating. "The novel," Wexelblatt writes, "shows us a gradual tearing away of all other relationships, ties, affections, until, in the midst of frigid and inhuman landscapes, the two sides pursue each other in a frantic fable of revenge and the ultimate disintegration of personality" (Wexelblatt 110). As a parable of the west's centuries-long journey through the psychic and physical landscape of alienated spiritual vision, this disintegration of personality is not just personal, but cultural. On this level, Mary Shelley seems to be telling us that the rift between intellect and visionary self that has been opened up by the scientific mindset can never be healed. As the wife of Percy Shelley and the compatriot of Byron and others, Mary Shelley lived right in the heart of English romanticism. She knew as well as anybody the desire for spiritual enlightenment that glowed like a hot coal at the center of the Romantic sensibility. Byron with his poems about transcending the world of sense and matter and finding a realm of pure beauty, Shelley with his Platonic idealism, Wordsworth with his conviction that we are all born "trailing clouds of immortality," and especially Blake with his visionary idea about "the marriage of heaven and hell" -- all these and more formed the central part of the intellectual and spiritual milieu in which she lived and wrote. In the midst of it all, the blatantly nihilistic message of Frankenstein is all the more apparent, and all the more appalling. Roger Shattuck calls Frankenstein a "remarkable fiction that flies in the face of the Romantic and utopian themes that spawned it." Victor’s ruin, he says, is "no Fortunate Fall. No one can redeem the destruction Frankenstein has left behind him" (Shattuck 98, 99). Oates writes that as the novel nears its conclusion, it "begins to read as an antiromance, a merciless critique of Romantic attitudes" (Oates 552). The attitudes she names specifically are not utopian or spiritual. They are "sorrow, misery, self-loathing, despair, paralysis." But she is speaking of these qualities in Victor, and in the scheme I am proposing here, where Victor symbolizes the alienated intellect of the modern west, a critique of these attitudes amounts to a critique of the vestigial remnants in Victor's personality of the Romantic longing for transcendence which he had betrayed.

In a very strong statement of the position I am advancing about the function of Frankenstein, Jackson quotes Robert Hume as saying, "Almost schematically, Mary Shelley’s novel reverses and denies the Romantic quest for gnosis." Jackson comments, "A vast gap is opened up between knowledge (as scientific investigation and rational inquiry) and gnosis (a knowledge of ultimate truths, a kind of spiritual wisdom)." If the monster and Victor can be said to have attained any kind of reunion at all, Jackson says it is "only through their undifferentiation in death. They can never become one, separation remaining the condition of having a ‘human’ identity….Dualism is not resolved at the end but is re-located in a final darkness." In this way, she says, "Gothic inverts romance structures like the quest motif, which it twists into a circular journey to nowhere, ending in the same darkness with which it opened, remaining unenlightened. Frankenstein marks the establishment of a tradition of disenchanted, secular fantasies, becoming increasingly grotesque and horrific" (Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion 100-101).

At this point, we might reasonably ask what would be the alternative to this situation. What might Victor have done that would avert the tragedy, that might even have led him to spiritual fulfillment? Oddly, the answer may be found in a figure of speech that he himself utters. At the point in his narrative when he describes how Elizabeth fell into a black despair after the deaths of William and Justine, Victor comments, "The first of those sorrows which are sent to wean us from the earth, had visited her, and its dimming influence quenched her dearest smiles" (Shelley 84-5). It is the greatest of the book's many ironies that Victor cannot recognize in his own statement the path that he could have taken to find healing and fulfillment. One of the oldest spiritual themes in the world, perhaps the oldest, is the necessity of suffering for salvation. In Christianity this is seen in the crucifixion of Christ, and the idea of the "dark night of the soul," and the doctrine of the felix culpa, the "fortunate fall" that sets in motion the plan of humanity's redemption through Christ. In Buddhism is it seen in the first of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, which is simply that "All life is suffering." Buddhists of all stripes agree that this suffering as necessary and good, for without it, none of us would ever feel the need to transcend our unenlightened state. A contemporary spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, states the matter this way, in terms of the suffering that arises from striving for some worldly goal in the future (which for our purpose we might conceive as Victor's quest to conquer death):

I do not need to quote names and page numbers to point out that a flood of critics have recognized that one of the functions of the monster as Victor's double is to take away all that Victor loves. The monster himself explicitly states this as his mission when Victor refuses to create a mate for him. Above, I quoted Shattuck as saying that Victor's ruin can in no way be construed as a fortunate fall. While I agree with him, it is at least possible to see, in light of Tolle's words, how it could have been a fortunate fall, if Victor had decided to let the sorrows wean him from the earth and show him the way to transcendence and spiritual fulfillment. He might have decided to endure the sufferings as his dark night of the soul, and on the other side he would have found that he had become whole again. Small has recognized this possibility, too, and I shall give him the final word on the matter, which he frames in terms of the Christian idea of forgiveness: "In the last situation, when metaphor vanishes, it is not possible to reject [the monster], for he is no longer separate, he is quite simply ourselves. When by his agency, which is ours, we are bereft of everything, we will forgive him for being us as he will forgive us for trying to deny it; by which, merged with each other, we may ask to be forgiven" (Small 331).

Not all readers agree that the conclusion of Frankenstein is steeped in utter despair. Kawin, for instance, sees in Walton the symbol of the integration that eludes Frankenstein and his monster. "One could add up Frankenstein and the Monster," he writes, "and have something resembling an integrated person: a figure who would in fact resemble Walton, who is an overreacher with both scientific and poetic interests." Although "this synthesis would add to the figure of Walton...the element of tragic experience," it would also seem to hint that the novel contains at least a trace of the satisfaction that I am claiming it denies the reader. We might note, though, that Steven Glickman, Kawin's student at the University of Colorado, writes that while Kawin's idea seems plausible, the novel leaves the reader to "do the math" for him or herself (Glickman 127-8). And of course there is no guarantee that everyone will see this or agree with it. On a more insidious note, Glickman considers the triple-framing device of Frankenstein's narrative structure (something about which I have said nothing in this paper so far), and says that "multiple framing suggest [sic] to me an outward trajectory, a movement from within the Chinese-box structure out beyond the text to its reader" (123). He quotes Peter Brooks as saying that the text of the novel "contaminates us with a residue of meaning that cannot be explained or rationalized, but is passed on as affect, as taint" (124; from Brooks' essay "'Godlike Science/Unhallowed Arts': Language, Nature, and Monstrosity," in The Endurance of Frankenstein). In light of what I have proposed in this paper, the "affective taint" that Frankenstein may pass on to its reader will have a powerful effect indeed, since it will be confirming to the modern reader, living perhaps in the midst of the spiritually alienated west, that the situation is beyond repair.

From a scientific standpoint as well as a literary one, there are those who do not think the situation is as hopeless as Mary Shelley has made it out to be. Chet Raymo, a physicist and astronomer, and also a popular writer about scientific matters for laypeople, has written about the scientific objectivity that Roszak so deplores, and has seen nothing inherently wrong with it. He says that many modern scientists were influenced by the positivist philosophers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Recalling Bacon's disdain for alchemy, he writes, "We were weary of the seemingly endless squabbles of metaphysicians and dreamed of objectivity, even if it meant focusing our attention on the small part of human experience that is amenable to logical analysis. We sought clarity at the cost of completeness" (Raymo 170). He acknowledges that scientific objectivity does indeed involve an incomplete view of the human self. "Science dreams of objectivity," he says, "even if it means focusing on that limited part of human experience that is amenable to logical analysis. It is willing to temporarily suppress part of what it means to be human in order to gather to itself more reliable knowledge of the nonhuman world" (54). In words that are strikingly reminiscent of Roszak's, and that recall at once both the position Roszak advances and the one he critiques, Raymo writes,

But he readily acknowledges that "A diet of purely objective knowledge is oppressive" (230). He sees art and science as complementary, not competing (perhaps in the way that I have portrayed Victor and the monster as complementary halves of a single self). "Art and science are each sublime activities of the human mind," he writes. "We are less than human without either....The scientist who does not allow herself to be spiritually empowered by art is the poorer for it. And the artist who dismisses science has closed himself off from half of the human adventure" (54, 55).

I have devoted so much space to quoting Raymo simply to reinforce that from the scientific quarter itself, there are voices that would call Roszak's, Smith's, and Mary Shelley's positions absurd. Raymo himself appears to be a man possessed of a deep spiritual consciousness, as witnessed by the book from which I am quoting, Skeptics and True Believers: The Exhilarating Connection Between Science and Religion, in which he succeeds in his goal of making the connection named in the title seem exhilarating. The book is an eloquent testimony of one scientist's desire to honor both sides of his nature. It is not my place to agree or disagree with him, although I might point out that Roszak would find much to argue with in his statements, especially in the idea that science provides "more reliable knowledge of the nonhuman world." As we have seen, Roszak would deny the desirability of viewing things in terms of a "nonhuman world" at all, and he would argue that a harmonious relationship between scientific knowledge, conceived explicitly in terms of the "In Here-Out There" dichotomy, and the visionary side of human nature, is infinitely more difficult to achieve than Raymo has made it appear, if indeed it is achievable at all.

Ultimately, my point is that this issue is central to the relationship western culture has had with itself for the past two centuries, and we can find in Frankenstein a parable about what it means to commit ourselves to the quest for power over nature through scientific objectivity. One does not have to agree with Mary Shelley's dire prognosis any more than one has to agree with Roszak, Raymo, or anybody else I have quoted. But I do think that we cannot afford to ignore "the first great myth of the industrial age," "the central myth of western culture," and I suspect that in the future, as we in western culture continue our journey through the dark night of psychic alienation in the urban-industrial technological landscape we have created, we may find ourselves turning more and more to it, in the form of further critical studies and additional literary and cinematic reworkings, as a subject for entertainment and reflection, and even guidance. I am inclined to think that this is as it should be, for as MacAndrew has said, "Gothic fiction symbolizes the unresolvable, shifting, but perpetual paradox of human nature. Until the human condition changes, we will find such fantasies to embody the dilemma of our existence, to face us with it, so that we, too, may face the dark" (MacAndrew 250).

Endnotes

1 "Scientism" in this paper is understood as Huston Smith has defined it: "the drawing of conclusions from science that do not logically follow" (Smith 110). back

2 "Although Frankenstein is far from being an overt allegory, there appears to be a growing consensus amongst critics that, from a certain point of view, the monster should be regarded as Frankenstein's double, 'something out of self' in the monster's phrase. This insight was first recorded by Muriel Spark in 1951 and subsequently amplified by others." David Ketterer. Frankenstein's Creation. ELS Monograph Series No. 16. Victoria, British Columbia, Canada: University of Victoria, 1979, p. 56. back

3 Cf. the statement to this effect on the back cover flap of Roszak's novel The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (1995). In the years since his groundbreaking work in The Making of Counterculture (1969) and Where the Wasteland Ends (1972), the exploration of the Frankenstein myth and its place in western scientific culture seems to have emerged as a central part of Roszak's life work, in conjunction with his radical ecological concerns. Cf. one of his most recent books at the time of this writing, The Gendered Atom (1999), in which he "examine[s] the science of today through a close, insightful reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and feminist psychology," and of which he has said, "It seemed to me that, in a certain sense, [Mary Shelley] was the first feminist psychologist, that she had an insight into science, which had no precedent, nobody had ever seen things this way before, recognizing the underlying sexual politics of modern science. That seemed to me so important an insight as part of feminist psychology, that I decided to start with her and thread my understanding of western science along the lines of this classic, gothic fable." From "Puritanical Physics: Theodore Roszak attacks sexual stereotypes dominating today's scientific community." Interview with Theodore Roszak. Grace Online: Life from a Spiritual Perspective. April 5, 2000. <http://www.gracecathedral.org/enrichment/interviews/int_20000405.shtml> July 19, 2001. back

4 It might be of interest here to note Smith's characterization of what might constitute this process in the other direction, fueled by what he calls "the perennial philosophy," or what Roszak would call the "Old Gnosis": motivation: participation; epistemology: intuitive discernment; ontology: transcendence; anthropology: fulfillment (Smith 144). back