Andrew Smith’s statement, referring to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, can also be applied to James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Both works of later-Romantic Gothic, these novels deal with the social impact of their protagonists’ ‘selfhood’, or ‘inner life’, rather than how the outward sublime influences the ‘inner self’. Instead of seeking ‘transcendence’ in sublime nature, Victor Frankenstein and Robert Wringhim aim to transcend their social and spiritual positions through, respectively, scientific and religious pursuits. In doing so, however, they are confronted with ‘another version’ of themselves in the form of a double: the Creature to Frankenstein, and Gil-Martin to Wringhim. ‘Anxiety about the
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Walton and Clerval, who share Frankenstein’s ambitious tendency to overreach, are doppelgängers of Frankenstein in the more modern, colloquial definition of the term – that of individuals who share many similarities. The Creature, on the other hand, is a doppelgänger in the sense of its folklore origin, as a ‘harbinger of death’. In a disturbing echo of maternity, Frankenstein ‘labours’ to create ‘a new species [which] would bless [him] as its creator and source’ (p. 36). His desire to transcend the boundaries of gender, procreation, and even and life and death, instead (and perhaps ironically) results in a progeny of an ominous doppelgänger, which only facilitates and catalyses his destruction. The fruition of Frankenstein’s ambitions does not offer transcendence or ‘pour a torrent of light into our dark world’ (p. 36) as he seems to have desired; instead, ‘a breathless horror and disgust filled [his] heart’ (p. 39) at the sight of the animated Creature. Constructed from death itself, the Creature adheres to the Kristevan idea that ‘[t]he corpse … is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life’. Frankenstein’s response, then, can be read as an expulsion of the abject, the literal ‘throwing off’, the abandonment, of a creation whose cadaverousness he is ‘unable to endure’ (p. 39). The implication is that natural laws of life and death cannot be transcended; indeed, the Creature rejects Frankenstein’s attempts to ‘throw him off’, haunting his creator in the very image of the folkloric
Walton and Clerval, who share Frankenstein’s ambitious tendency to overreach, are doppelgängers of Frankenstein in the more modern, colloquial definition of the term – that of individuals who share many similarities. The Creature, on the other hand, is a doppelgänger in the sense of its folklore origin, as a ‘harbinger of death’. In a disturbing echo of maternity, Frankenstein ‘labours’ to create ‘a new species [which] would bless [him] as its creator and source’ (p. 36). His desire to transcend the boundaries of gender, procreation, and even and life and death, instead (and perhaps ironically) results in a progeny of an ominous doppelgänger, which only facilitates and catalyses his destruction. The fruition of Frankenstein’s ambitions does not offer transcendence or ‘pour a torrent of light into our dark world’ (p. 36) as he seems to have desired; instead, ‘a breathless horror and disgust filled [his] heart’ (p. 39) at the sight of the animated Creature. Constructed from death itself, the Creature adheres to the Kristevan idea that ‘[t]he corpse … is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life’. Frankenstein’s response, then, can be read as an expulsion of the abject, the literal ‘throwing off’, the abandonment, of a creation whose cadaverousness he is ‘unable to endure’ (p. 39). The implication is that natural laws of life and death cannot be transcended; indeed, the Creature rejects Frankenstein’s attempts to ‘throw him off’, haunting his creator in the very image of the folkloric