The Quest for Nothing in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein Essay -- Frankens

A Quest for Nothing in Shellys Frankenstein The last chapter of bloody shame Shellys Frankenstein concludes Victor Frankensteins search for the monster. His obsession with finding the wretch leads him into the most sodding(a) territories in the world, led on with clues left by the monster itself. The penury for his quest goes beyond the desire for revenge, but is shaped over the original need for Victor to become the ideal self. The monster, in which Victor dictated his most intense hours of isolated contemplation, represents, if not the unconscious then at least an outlet and a means for the fulfillment of Victors dark pent-up wishes. Victor therefore is bent on achieving the wholeness that was ravaged immediately and for always in the formative stages of his mental growth, specifically the mirror stage.(Reed 64) In the mirror stage, the spark of knowledge, which will ultimately mark the splitting of the self, infuses the fry at the moment when the child, still in state of de pendency, identifies its reflection in the mirror. The child is then left to the mercy of the gigantic and fiendish fruition that it may never again become unified with the ideal-I, or as Jacques La stack names it, the Gestalt. The Gestalt represents the rigid structure of the messages entire mental development, an ideal mark that cannot be obtained, and the subject will only rejoin the coming-into-being of the subject asymptotically. This is to swan that at the moment when the child views its reflection in the mirror, it is doomed by eternal distance from the exemplary self, the fully functioning and accessible mind, and can only hope to arrive infinitely closer to becoming it. Lacan emphasizes that the subject must realize the impossibility of b... ...ts in nothing. Works Cited and ConsultedBloom, Harold. Mary Shellys Frankenstein. smart York Chelsea, 1987.Botting, Fred. Making monstrous. Frankenstein, criticism, theory. Manchester University Press, 1991.Boyd, Stephen. York Notes on Mary Shelleys Frankenstein. Longman York Press, 1992.Garber, Frederick. The Autonomy of the Self from Richardson to Huysmans. Princeton Princeton University Press, 1982.Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley. Her Life, her Fiction, her Monsters. Methuen. untried York, London, 1988.Marcel, Anthony J. Conscious and Unconscious Perception. Cognitive Psychology 15 (1983) 197-237Reed, Kenneth T. A Freudian Note on Shelleys Frankenstein. Literature and Psychology 19 (1969) 61-72.Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or the young Prometheus. Edited with an Introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle. Penguin books, 1992