Our Weinstein Moment: Frankenstein All Over Again

By Judith McKelvey
Assistant Teaching Professor

In the early 1990’s I began writing the first chapter of my dissertation (still going?) on the persistence of the Pygmalion myth paradigm in women’s fiction. I wanted to see how novelists put their female protagonists into silenced, subservient, paralyzed situations relative to their male keepers—and how they get their female characters out of it. Invariably, I found creative agency was the authorial key to breaking out characters trapped in the old paradigm. Women became the sculptor-subject instead of posing as object for the male artist, and that change in perspective gave them the agency they needed. But the process in so many of these stories wasn’t beautiful; often, it was bloody and monstrous.

So I’ve been thinking about the Weinstein side of things for a long time. What I love about literature is how it reminds us of the threads of continuity between our moment and way back when. Mary Shelley, for example, saw the object-subject dynamic in patriarchy everywhere around her in the 19^th century, and would consider old news the Weinstein principle we seem so recently surprised to wake up to, just as many are only recently “woke” to the concept that we still need to announce Black Lives Matter. In my mind, it’s Shelley’s awareness of the link between patriarchal oppression and slavery that explains why she chose to have Dr. Frankenstein build a monstrous man out of pieced-together body parts instead of casting her monster in the form of the most comprehensive of all symbols of objectification: the female slave. The author recognized as a given the all-justifying, all-obscuring imperative of hetero male desire, so by casting her monster as male, she gave male readers a gender mirror to relate to rather than fuck. In other words, if, as I believe, Shelley hoped to inspire certain male readers to imagine the slave’s dilemma of being a living creature without clear agency and alive for the sole purpose of serving the master-creator, then she would need to bypass their tendency to fantasize about made-to-order females. But Shelley’s story nevertheless also offered a rhizomal feminist message in its echo of the Pygmalion myth storyline.

Shelley’s subtitle for her novel–The Modern Prometheus–refers to Ovid’s myth from Metamorphoses about the noble disrupter guy who hubristically steals fire from the gods and then is brutally punished for his great sacrifice. The subtitle pushes our focus onto the male perspective: poor Prometheus, getting his daily dose of liver torment; poor Doctor F., whose creature turns on him instead of thanking him. But I think Shelley’s underground inspiration was with the ancient storyline that most closely parallels her master-creator/object-brought-to-life plot–that is, the tale of Pygmalion and his magical sculpture. This is the story of a fabulously talented sculptor frustrated with having to satisfy his sexual urges with imperfect female bodies in the real world; so he creates with his own hands the perfect female form in marble—and then whines to the gods that a man of his stature should be accorded favors that go beyond the laws of mere mortals. The sculptor wanted his handmade creation to be granted life. The Pyg argument in ancient and contemporary times goes something like this: a powerful and/or talented/and/or rich male should be granted wishes in line with his almost-divine status; thus, this perfectly sculpted female form should be made available to him in the flesh, to use at will. The issue of active consent or rights of any kind on the part of the “beloved” is moot, as inert and silenced as the stitched body parts on Dr. F’s table and the marble of Pyg’s sculpture—as irrelevant, in fact, as the whole women who happened to be attached to Trump’s grabbed pussies.

What matters in this ancient Pyg myth is male desire, which is the unquestioned prerogative we are still living with, folks, in the same way that institutional racism is still with us despite our best dreaming. Weinstein’s serial sexual assaults succeeded because of the implied cultural premise that men with power must get what they want, and that’s just the way it is. Pygmalion’s rhetorical argument to the gods as relayed by Ovid uses a parallel premise: that a man of exquisite talent should by rights be able to fuck perfection. Hand-maid.

Really, that’s his argument. Don’t take my word for it–grab yourself a copy of Metamorphoses and read it for yourself.

And then read on to discover the ultimate irony: that Pygmalion gets his wish granted in a way that would fit right into contemporary Hanes pantyhose commercials, the ones where women compete with and betray other women for the prize of male attention. In the Pyg myth, it is the female goddess Aphrodite who takes pity on the poor priapic guy and turns the made-to-order marble into a living Galatea, the master-creator’s slave. Like the mad men of Hanes campaigns, Aphrodite concedes to the premise that a Big Man should own the best of everything, and that a good goddess should use whatever power she has to make sure of it. And so it is that female executives look the other way while female secretaries book the hotel rooms and female housekeepers clean up the aftermath—when they aren’t being raped as stand-ins.

Just as with Shelley’s patchwork monster lying prone on Frankenstein’s table, Ovid’s myth tells of life granted to an inanimate object—but no word about the granting of intrinsic agency. Or human rights. Galatea’s awakening is described from the Pyg’s point of view only: he recounts in purple prose how perfectly beautiful his work is when her veins begin throbbing with blood visible through the alabaster translucency of her white skin; and then there are tears of joy as the great man gets busy. Yes, Ovid offers a true happy ending in cheap massage parlor parlance—but only from the perspective of the client-master. Nowhere do you find a follow-up from the perspective of the marble object brought to life to serve the desires of the master. Presumably, horribly, by the time her eyes have adjusted to the light, Galatea is staring up at the nose-hairs of a middle-aged sculptor getting his just reward for being so excellently talented.

Imagining that disempowered, disoriented viewpoint is what Mary Shelley scares us with. She allows her trapped monster to move beyond Ovid’s silent sex slave portrayal; she gives the patchwork human a chance to express his confusion about his isolation as a recognizable other,  and his rage at having to take the consequences of unethical choices made by Dr. Big Important Scientist in the name of progress. Her 1818 masterpiece pushes the subject-object story beyond the ancient boundaries. It is about the dangers of playing with fire, yes, but also about the brutality of depriving humans of whole-body agency; and it still kicks ass in 2017. But the story of breaking free from subject-object oppression isn’t quite over. Shelley’s Frankenstein demonstrates that treating a living being as one’s owned creature doesn’t end well in the 19^th century fictional version.  History shows us that slavery and women legally defined as their husband’s property are practices more monstrous in real life than in fiction.  And the present day proves again that the metamorphosis from awareness to law, and then from law into actual equality is slow. Very slow. Deliberately Slow.

As for this Weinstein-Pyg moment, it remains to be seen who will suffer pangs of guilt and what innocent bystanders will be destroyed and whether revenge will be wreaked in the 21^st century edition of Frankenstein. What I fervently wish for right now (in case an intersectional goddess is taking wishes today) is a loud, persistent follow-up to the gasps of horror coming from all of us somehow freshly shocked by Galatea’s dilemma and the monster’s isolated rage, wondering all over again or for the first time: what did they want upon awakening? Did she have any say from inside her magically perfect body? Did either one know how to even imagine the words “No” or “Don’t shoot”? Did she feel free enough to speak? If an enslaved woman talks and there’s only her master-creator listening, is there a sound?

I love that so many of us are feeling empowered to say “Me, too” and “Black Lives Matter.” But I also hope we go beyond the Weinstein moment and listen to everyone and anyone trapped,  groped, shut down and shot up by a projected version of what someone else I don’t care how great thought we were worth. I hope we learn to keep asking: what about you? And you? And you? What does it feel like from inside your story? What does it look like? What do you dream about so as to move into being your own protagonist in your own story, to being whole instead of a hole-y receptacle for dicks and bullets? Tell me. I’m listening. The story doesn’t end with Ovid’s blithe myth, or Shelley’s destroyed monster, or Trump.

It begins now, with us, as storyteller and subject. Let’s tell it.

 

Featured image by:

Lefty Kasdaglis