Analysis of Warren Montag’s “the ‘workshop of Filthy Creation’: A Marxist Reading of Frankenstein”

Parker Kinney

Mrs. France

English 2H

20 February 2017

Analysis of Warren Montag’s “The ‘Workshop of Filthy Creation’: A Marxist Reading of Frankenstein”

        When confronted with conflicts, our instinctual reaction is to repress the trouble for it is both easy and seemingly sensible. However this avoidance of confrontation results in the inevitable return of the conflict. This subject of repression and reemergence is explored in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein in which a young scientist by the name of Dr. Frankenstein creates a highly intelligent yet alienated monster. The primary conflict, among several other conflicts, occurs when the monster demands his creator a female companion for himself. However, Dr. Frankenstein never fulfills prompting greater tragedy for the scientist, most notably the murder of his best friend and wife committed by the dissatisfied monster. In literary scholar Warren Montag’s treatise titled “The ‘Workshop of Filthy Creation: A Marxist Reading of Frankenstein”, the author examines this pattern through a Marxist lens: a perspective concerned with socialist and dialectic theories. Furthermore, Montag argues, “the work is bound both to the literary and nonliterary discourses with which it coexists (and in relation to which alone it possesses a meaning), and to the ‘non-discursive’ social, economic, and political practices that make discourse possible” (Montag 384).

        Before initiating his argument, Montag first provides the historical context of the time in which the novel was written. The publication date falls in the second decade of the 19th century and therefore lies in between the events of the French Revolution of 1789 and the implementation of the British Reform Bill of 1832. Despite the French Revolution ending just prior to the novel’s publication in 1852, the war is “not once mentioned in Frankenstein, [it] is nevertheless alluded to” (384). Montag further establishes the date of the events by referring to the moment in which Frankenstein and Henry Clerval (the aforementioned best friend) stop in Oxford while journeying to Scotland. There, Frankenstein remarks that the events of the British Civil “’had been transacted there more a century and a half before’” (385). Not only is the time period ascertained to be in the 1790’s (in the midst of the French Revolution), but Frankenstein mentions a war that took place 150 years prior, yet oddly omits any inkling of the ongoing war. But as Montag argues, these discrepancies “are precisely what will allow us to proceed from the work to the history on which it depends and what made it possible” (385). Montag then continues by drawing the similarities of the “most developed and elaborate social and political ‘experiments’ in modern history” (385). Both movements resulted in failure due to the mobilization of the plebian population spurred by the new elites in their attempt to dethrone the old regime. However, the mobilization of the peasantry led to utter anarchy and had “unloosed elemental forces deaf to the appeals of the morality that liberated them in the first place” (386). This crisis led to the questioning of the effectiveness of the Enlightenment and its reason-oriented philosophy. After the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, England fell especially victim to this crisis especially as they “entered a crucible in the 1790s and emerged in a different form’” (386). This “crucible” alludes to the abrupt onset of the highly influential Industrial Revolution which drastically changed the social and economic landscape of England as well as other European Powers. For instance, the laboring class underwent an increased unemployment, suffering wages, and rising food prices that coincided with the prosperity of the employing class. Furthermore, the industrial revolution gave way to the appearance of the working class. The working class was particularly affected by the advent of new labor saving technologies that worsened the nation’s unemployment problem. This crisis no more apparent than when certain civil rights were suspended to suppress the growing dissatisfaction of the working class. Thus, the early 19th century “was a time when talk of the threat or hope of revolution (according to one’s perspective) was common” (387). Montag then establishes the resemblances between the monster and the proletariat (the working class). According to Montag, the monster, being comprised of a “multitude of different individuals”, parallels the working class as they are too a multitude as opposed to an individual and thus “is itself as nameless as Frankenstein’s creation” (387). Moreover, the monster is not a mere creation by Dr. Frankenstein but rather a product of science and technological innovation and hence it is an “artificial being as destructive as it is powerful” (388). This likens the attributes of the working class because of their potential destructive nature in regards to capitalism. Montag continues that the monster and the working class share in their pitiful nature as the latter suffers from severe isolation and the former from starvation and poverty.

While the monster relation’s to the proletariat is undeniable, the novel is far too complex to be “reduce[d] […] to a mere allegory” (389). Thus, Montag examines the novel from Marxist perspective thereby examining the history present outside the contents of the novel. As a result, Montag thereafter analyzes the “contradictions, discrepancies, and inconsistencies that the work displays but does not address or to resolve” (390). Frankenstein, according to Montag, had ignorantly been the subject of a destiny controlled by science. Science had lured him evermore closer to his damnation and eventual suffering all without him knowing. Frankenstein had intended to create a monster of subordination however a “ironic reversal” occurs when his creation declares him “’slave’” (390). This turn of events paired with Frankenstein’s utter ignorance embodies “one of the most fundamental myths of the Enlightenment, the notion that scientific and economic progress will continually improve the condition of the humankind” (391). Moreover, scientific progress promises freedom when in fact only delivers an entirely new form of servitude that ultimately divides our social constructs, as demonstrated by Frankenstein’s isolation from the world imposed by science. As Montag further writes, “reason is always in the process of becoming real and its realization may involve the creation of monsters or a displacing of human by the inhuman” (391). Our greatest achievements and drive for innovation may be at the expense of our premature ends. Montag thereafter recalls the scene in which Frankenstein describes the scene of his “’workshop of filthy creation’” in great detail (392). Interestingly, however, Frankenstein omits “any description or explanation of the process by which the monster is created” and therefore it is a world effects without causes (392). The novel’s general omission of technology, an aspect exceedingly central to the plot, leads Montag to declare it integral and deliberate. This is further illuminated by the unmodern world in which Frankenstein inhabits: a world in which natural beauty is seemingly omnipresent while any mention of the urban world is entirely absent. The effect as Montag argues is to “render Frankenstein’s labor as well as the product of that labor, the monster, all the more incongruous”; thus he is “the sole embodiment of the industrial in an otherwise rural world, and this is the source of his monstrousness” (394). Montag concludes by once more likening the monster to the working class as both are “an unnatural being, singular even in its collective identity, without a genealogy and belonging to no species” (394). The setting being set in a pre-modern world, furthermore, establishes there is no place for such beings in a natural world and in consequence the monster is alienated, as was the working class. Montag’s concluding statement reads “if a certain historical reality is inscribed within the work as a monster to be expelled into ‘darkness and distance’ […], the act of repression can only postpone its inevitable return (395).