Identity In Frankenstein Essay

As Victor Frankenstein gazes upon his creation, he finds that his deliberately beautiful choices in proportions, hair, and teeth are horridly overshadowed by the sheer ugliness of the monster’s skin. The “yellow skin” and “shriveled complexion” become barriers from the rest of the world. Shelley’s use of the skin as a barrier is fitting with societal convention: skin has always been an anthropological interest, a visible way of defining identity or cultural difference, sometimes a preoccupation, and in recent years, a scholarly discourse. Our obsession with skin comes from its natural role as boundary – between the psyche, the body, the self, and others. But who defines the boundaries that one’s skin represents? Who has the authority to inscribe upon the body a set of categorical identifiers? In Frankenstein’s creature’s case, the bodily

He exercises no control over the nature of his skin or, subsequently, his status. Similarly, individuals are born powerless over gender and race, inherently constrained to the arbitrary boundaries society inscribes upon their skin. Here, “inscription” is metaphorical – it is an intangible, predetermined set of rules and expectations (read “metanarrative”) pressed upon a person’s idea of a “body.” However, “inscription,” as already demonstrated by Frankenstein’s monster, need not always be metaphorical. In some cases, the physical skin itself is manipulated. This paper pinpoints where inscription as metaphor collides with literal inscription: the tattoo. Having in the past been associated with crime and deviance, tattoos often bore their own negative metanarrative. In recent decades, however, large populations of the American middle-class have disassociated tattoos and deviance, instead defining them as a means of expressing individual identity. Postmodern