The Feminist Monster in the Classroom

I see that I’m not the only one of us most drawn to Nancy Armstrong’s “Gender Must Be Defended” this week. Several of the concepts she lays out in this article offer compelling points of entry in terms of thinking about classroom strategies for teaching Frankenstein to undergraduate students—and I’m not just saying so because Armstrong explicitly references the novel! Frankenstein deals somewhat directly with more conventional issues of gender but also features prominently another hierarchical binary—that of human individual and nonhuman individual—that gives both Foucault’s biopolitical model and [the rest of] Armstrong’s article a lot to work with.

Armstrong discusses how her work has applied to the 19^th-century novel Foucault’s claims that the “modern individual” comes about through policing the “asocial instincts and abnormal impulses” that threaten its “claim to normative individuality” (530). In this model, individual identity comes about as the product of self-construction through relative to other individuals and society as a whole. This offers a framework for understanding a great deal of the Creature’s confessional narrative as a self-constructing process that goes beyond a boilerplate coming-of-age or even Foucault’s “reappearance… of the past of [the human] race” (qtd. in Armstrong, 536). This in turn opens up the possibility of considering the Creature’s embodiment of the “modern individual” as a construct defined and indeed constituted by social forces (and all that without having to assign Foucault to undergraduate students!)

Armstrong’s brief discussion of Frankenstein in this article engages with the contradictions played out in the person of the Creature: he is “all too human, and still paradoxically different in his lack of individuality from all other human beings” (536). She describes the Creature both as a participant in and as a bodily site of “contradictory and yet interdependent ways of being human,” which is a pretty solid analogue of conventional views of gender (536). I would point this out to students as a jumping off point and attempt to allow/encourage a challenge to those conventional views of gender to semi-organically arise from the discussion.

Hoping that such a discussion was fruitful and eye-opening, I would try to ground the abstractions in concrete textual moments. Armstrong notes, for example, that the Creature is necessarily excluded from a series of in-groups over the course of his own story. Pointing this out, I might encourage students to develop a conceptual map of those bounded social zones, finding specific examples in the text and describing how those boundaries are delineated (and policed) in the novel. From the starting point of Armstrong’s explication of how such in/out categories function as analogues to a gender binary, and considering Foucault’s ideas about how gender functions as a disciplinary mechanism, I might ask students to read these points in the text closely with that structure in mind. Several examples, especially the points at which the Creature actually breaches the boundary and causes harm to Victor’s loved ones, would also merit discussion in terms of biopower and Armstrong's sketching out of the ideal of masculine sovereignty.

I would hope that these explorations would lead to a deeper understanding of the primary text, of course. I would also hope that the exercise left students with a sense of having successfully collected and practiced with some new intellectual tools for reading and interpreting literature--and possibly even desiring to read some theory (*jazz hands?*). However, I would especially hope that the discussion of hierarchical binaries beyond the conventional gender binary would equip [condition] the students to feel comfortable thinking in explicitly, avowedly feminist terms despite the seemingly pervasive trend among young people of hostility toward classical feminism.