ABSTRACT
As disability studies has moved from a critique of the medical model to a social or even cultural model, so some are now moving to a reconsideration of bodily experience(s) as sites of knowledge that demand recognition. Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein; or the New Prometheus offers a relevant meditation on corporeal singularity. Taken in tandem with eighteenth-century theories of sympathetic bodily resonance and twentieth-century object relations theorizing of the self as formed in a body-to-body relation (replete with aggression, projection, grief and reparative compensation), Frankenstein invites us to explore the variability of the human – and even beyond. Shelley’s novel contributes to an account of embodied experience as at the heart of “em-selving” a coherent psychological, relational and corporeal self. Shelley’s novel makes visible the refusal on the part of human characters inside the story to recognize creature as a human-like subject, while inviting the reader to perform that failed recognition and thus psychoanalytic reparation. In the creature’s solitary spectral existence, readers may recognize their own moments of failed recognition, even of one’s self. Embodiment may be a particular condition of complete solitude, but it is also an opportunity for sympathy, recognition and perhaps reparation.
