New York Times, celebrating 200th birthday of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” nearly a year late, fails to mention Victor Frankenstein’s multiple personality

The book was published in January 1818, not October, but I guess the Times thought of it in connection with Halloween: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/arts/frankenstein-at-200.html

April 7, 2015

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: What is Victor Frankenstein’s Mental Illness? Why Doesn’t the Creature Have a Name? A Multiple Personality Story.

How did Victor Frankenstein construct a man eight feet tall? Did he have eight-foot-tall cadavers to get body parts? And why would a creature who was so superbly constructed—he had a superior brain, since, after a few years of self-education, he was speaking with all the erudition of his creator; not to mention the creature’s superhuman running speed—why would he be constructed with an appearance that was ugly? And since ugliness was the basis of his social rejection (which was what turned him from good to evil), why wasn’t plastic surgery the relatively easy, obvious solution?

The reason that the story doesn’t make sense is that Victor is an unreliable narrator. He is unreliable because, as the reader is repeatedly told, Victor is mentally ill. For example, after his creature first comes alive, Victor has a “nervous fever, which confined me for several months…The form of the monster on whom I had bestowed existence was for ever before my eyes, and I raved incessantly concerning him” (1, p. 39). For several months! And Victor has “nervous fevers” and other emotional disturbances recurrently, throughout the novel.

Indeed, the novel is so repetitive and consistent on the theme of Victor’s mental instability that the author, at the end of the novel, is obliged to have the creature appear after Victor dies, just to show that, after all, the story was “real.” Otherwise, the reader would have thought that Victor was just crazy, and might have closed the book feeling cheated.

Of course, once you acknowledge Victor’s mental illness, the question is diagnosis. And since murders were committed that Victor honestly doesn’t remember doing, and the alternate personality who committed them is described, the diagnosis is multiple personality.

An interesting feature of this novel is that the creature has no name. And since naming is such a common, natural thing to do with any creature (a pet, etc.), the creature in this novel has often, erroneously, been given a name, “Frankenstein.” (However, if the creature is an alternate identity of Victor Frankenstein, calling the creature “Frankenstein” is actually an insight, not an error.) But the fact is, in the novel, the creature has no name.

So it is worth noting: in multiple personality, alternate identities who have no name are common.

1. Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by J. Paul Hunter. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.