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Extra-Curricular Kids: The Figure Of The Queer Child
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein And Matilda
MA Thesis Proposal
Cathy Collett
The cult of the Child permits no shrines to the queerness of boys and girls, since queerness,
for contemporary culture at large […] is understood as bringing children and childhood to an
end.
- Lee Edelman, No Future
I am curious about children; I am particularly curious about curious children. In “The
Return of the Question Child,” Britzman recalls two questions that the famed child
psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein, fielded from her own five-year-old son: “‘how do eyes stay
in?’ [and]‘how does a person’s skin come on him?’” – Such strange, even unnerving queries
reflect a child’s deeply felt desire for knowledge that he or she cannot possess, because, in
effect, the child is this knowledge, made flesh (Britzman, “Question” 5). The question “How
was I made?” can only be asked after the fact, and it is the psychic consequences of that
belatedness that forms the core problematic of my thesis, which focuses on curious
childhoods in two novels by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) and Matilda (1819). It is
difficult enough to provide children with answers for the questions Klein’s son poses; not
even Mary Shelley could tell Frankenstein’s creature how his eyes stay in or where his skin
came from. While neither Matilda nor the creature is a typical child, it is the curious child,
and in particular the curiously queer child in which I am interested.
What does it mean to identify a child as queer? What are the implications of
describing children with a term that has become so heavily infused with sexual meaning,
particularly, with homosexual meaning? In my thesis, identifying a child as queer will mean
identifying a child who visibly struggles with the difficult knowledge that all children (and all
who were once children) possess. Indeed, queerness poses for heteronormative society a level
of epistemological discomfort that renders many forms of “knowing” difficult. While there is
certainly a sexual element implied by my use of the word queer, it is not specifically
homosexual in nature, but rather queer in the sense that any sexuality in children – sexual
desire, sexual behaviour, or yearning for sexual knowledge and knowledge of one’s
reproductive origins – is outside of heteronormative understandings and expectations of life
before adulthood. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley argue that “there is currently a dominant
narrative about children: children are (and should stay) innocent of sexual desires and
intentions.” Indeed, the terms “sex” and “child” are so mutually exclusive in heteronormative
thought that any conflation of two is likely to be judged inappropriate, even perverse (Bruhm
and Hurley ix). I am willing to risk that judgment; by bringing together contemporary notions
of the Queer Kid with Klein’s concept of the “Question Child,” I will demonstrate how the
curious children in Frankenstein and Matilda are wrought with difficult knowledge,
unrequited desires, and the queerest of lives.
Difficult knowledge – a term coined by the eminent cultural theorist, Deborah
Britzman – is a key concept in my project. Difficult knowledge encompasses what children
desire to know, but do not; what children do know, but resist; and what children half know,
but cannot articulate. For Matilda and the creature, difficult knowledge both produces and is
produced by conflicted scenes of education that radically form, inform and deform their social
and psychic development. Both Matilda and the creature grow up without the guidance of a
tutor or the care of a guardian per se. While their self-constructed academic curricula consist
of texts by literary fathers, their conflicted,
extra-curricular education takes the form of exchanges with their actual fathers. In addition to
examining how Matilda and the creature’s difficult knowledge complicates these filial
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relations, I will also look at the ways in which the fathers’ difficult knowledge – the residual
traces of knowledge carried over from childhood and incarnated by their children – further
increases the conflicted nature of their respective and conjoined lives. In short, I seek to
demonstrate how the children in Frankenstein and Matilda, like the adults caught up in their
circle, both embody and possess difficult knowledge.
My first chapter will examine Matilda – a tragic novella narrated by the twenty-yearold eponymous character. While Matilda was partially educated by a private tutor, most of her
childhood education is spent reading “Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Cowper” – in effect
finding a series of paternal substitutes while never ceasing to desire a relationship with the
one father for which there is no substitute (Shelley, Matilda 158). And, as I shall argue, the
mutual infatuation between the daughter and her actual father is a form of shared difficult
knowledge that eventually destroys both. While Shelley scholars often acknowledge Matilda’s
desire for her father, it is almost always read in connection to the relationship between Shelley
and her own father, William Godwin. Despite the parallels between the Shelley’s life and
Matilda, my project will separate the author and the text by focusing exclusively on Matilda
and her relationship with her father. Even though Matilda does not meet her father until she
turns sixteen, until, that is, she has grown into sexual adulthood, she passes many hours
imagining scenes where, disguised as a boy, she sets out to find him. What does it mean for
this girl to seek her father but in the form of a son? And what a strange, queer, son she is.
These fantasies, while evoking both the childish practice of “dressing up” and the queer
practice of cross-dressing, always end with Matilda’s father exclaiming “My daughter, I love
thee” – an obvious foreshadow of the climactic scene in which her real father reveals to her
the truth of his incestuous love (Shelley, Matilda 159).
Britzman states that “the question child questions the adult’s desire and, there is no
alibi for our desires” (Britzman, “Question” 8). When Matilda and her father finally meet, the
troubled adolescent attempts to reconcile her own difficult knowledge by questioning the
desires of her father. In response to her question, “Am I the cause of your grief,” Matilda’s
father responds: “much happier it would be for you and for me if in your frantic curiosity you
tore my heart from my breast and tried to read its secrets in it as its life’s blood was dripping
from it” (Shelley, Matilda 172). The problem here lies not in Matilda’s question, but in her
father’s answer. Resisting the knowledge of his own incestuous desire for his daughter,
Matilda’s father causes Matilda to repress the knowledge of her reciprocal desire, thus
forming the secret that plagues her life and precipitates her death.
Building on my discussion of the difficult knowledge of desire in Matilda, the second
chapter of my thesis will discuss how Frankenstein stages and explores the child’s difficult
knowledge of whence he came: an instance, precisely, of that impossible question, “how does a
person’s skin come on him”? Although Nancy Yousef claims that “the creature’s miserable
frame embodies the omission of infancy and childhood from Frankenstein’s conception,” I view
the creature as a queer version of Klein’s “question child” (Yousef “Monster” 189). Britzman
suggests that the question “what can I make because I was made?” is what fuels the “question
child’s” curiosity of how its body was created and how that body stays together (Britzman,
“Question” 5). The child’s desire to “make” can be translated into a desire for reproduction –
another site of difficult knowledge since reproduction is inextricably tied to sex – and sex is a
particularly difficult area of childhood knowledge. In Frankenstein, the knowledge of
reproduction is problematic for both Frankenstein and the creature: Frankenstein creates life
without heterosexual intercourse and the creature is forced to live the consequences of his
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creator/father’s reproductive experiment. This queer form of childbearing creates no end of
difficult knowledge for the creature, whose ultimate desire for a female partner to mate with is
seen in sharp contrast to Frankenstein’s desire to create life asexually and thus in the absence of
women. The separation of the child and heterosexual sex in Frankenstein is particularly
fascinating given Lee Edelman’s theory that the child “marks the fetishistic fixation of
heteronormativity” (21) and that “Queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the
children’ (3). What is signified by Frankenstein’s ultimate quest to destroy the creature he so
queerly created?
Both Matilda and the creature are curious children; as Britzman states, “the child’s
curiosity determines the curriculum,” and this curriculum often fails because of “our
resistance to what curiosity signals” (Britzman “Question” 4). While in Frankenstein and
Matilda, the adult’s resistance is ostensibly to the child’s curiosity, I will argue that it is as
much a resistance to their own curiosity –curiosity that has remained unsatisfied since their
childhoods. In significantly different ways, cultural theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Lee Edelman, and Bruhm and Hurley, have discussed the queer roles that children play and
the difficult knowledge that these roles create for children and adults alike. Their archive has
mostly been twentieth-century texts, whereas my thesis will bring their curiosity about curious
children to bear on two Romantic novels. With the Graduate Studies Committee's approval, I
will pursue my project under the supervision of Dr. David L. Clark, whose work drew me to
McMaster in the first place, and with whom I have consulted closely in the composition of
this proposal.
Preliminary Bibliography
Barber, Stephen M., and David L. Clark. "Introduction." Regarding Sedgwick. Eds. Stephen
M. Barber and David L. Clark. New York: Routledge, 2002.
---, eds. Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory. New York:
Routledge, 2002.
Britzman, Deborah P. Novel Education: Psychoanalytic Studies of Learning and Not
Learning. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006.
---. "The Return of "the Question Child": Reading Ma Vie En Rose through Melanie Klein".
Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Arts. September30 2006.
<http://www.ademyanalyticarts.org/britzman.htm >.
---. "Theory Kindergarten." Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical
Theory. Eds. Stephen M. Barber and David L. Clark. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Brown, Marshall. "Frankenstein: A Child's Tale." Novel 36.2 (2003): 145-75.
Bruhm, Steven, and Natasha Hurley, eds. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004.
---. "Introduction." Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Eds. Steven Bruhm and
Natasha Hurley. Minnesota: U of Minneapolis P, 2004.
Claridge, Laura. "Parent-Child Tensions in Frankenstein: The Search for Communion."
Studies in the Novel 17.1 (1985): 14-26.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2004.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage
Books, 1990.
Freud, Sigmund. "Infantile Sexuality." Trans. A. A. Brill. Three Contributions to the Theory
of Sex. New York: Dover, 2001.
---. "The Transformations of Puberty." Trans. A. A. Brill. Three Contributions to the Theory
of Sex. New York: Dover, 2001.
Gillingham, Lauren. "Romancing Experience: The Seduction of Mary Shelley's Matilda."
Studies in Romanticism 42.2 (2003): 251-69.
Joseph, Gerhard. "Frankenstein's Dream: The Child as Father of the Monster." Hartford
Studies in Literature 7 (1975): 97-115.
Kincaid, James. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. New York:
Routledge, 1992.
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Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative." The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001.
Nitchie, “Mary Shelley’s Matilda: An Unpublished Story and Its Biographical Significance.”
Studies in Philology 40 (1943):447-62
Rajan, Tilottama. "Introduction." Valperga. Ed. Tilottama Rajan. Peterborough: Broadview,
1998.
---. "Mary Shelley's Mathilda: Melancholy and the Political Economy of Romanticism."
Studies in the Novel 26.2 (1994): 43.
---. The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.
Rieder, John. "The Motif of the Fecal Child in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." Gothic Studies
3.1 (2001): 34-31.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men. New York: University of Columbia Press, 1985.
---. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkley: University of California Press, 1990.
---. "How to Bring Your Kids up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys." Curiouser: On the
Queerness of Children. Eds. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley. Minnesota: U of
Minneapolis P, 2004.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Eds. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. 2 ed. Peterborough:
Broadview, 1999.
---. The Last Man. Ed. Anne Ruth McWhir. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1996.
---. "Matilda." Mary and Maria / Matilda. Ed. Janet Todd. London: Penguin Books, 1991.
---. Valperga. Ed. Tilottama Rajan. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1998.
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. "Growing Sideways, or Versions of the Queer Child: The Ghost, the
Homosexual, the Freudian, the Innocent, and the Interval of Animal." Curiouser: On
the Queerness of Children. Eds. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Yousef, Nancy. "The Monster in a Dark Room: Frankenstein, Feminism, and Philosophy."
Modern Language Quarterly 63.2 (2002): 197-226.
---. "Savage or Solitary? The Wild Child and Rousseau's Man of Nature." Journal of the
History of Ideas 62.2 (2001): 245-63.