The motif of doubles is a central feature of Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic Victorian novel Frankenstein as well as Arundhati Roy’s 1997 postcolonial Indian novel The God of Small Things. Doubling is used in the characterisation of Victor Frankenstein and his monster in Frankenstein, and of the twins Estha and Rahel in The God of Small Things. The presence of the double causes conflict and tension, where boundaries are transgressed.
In his essay The Uncanny, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud highlights Otto Rank’s concept of the “double” as uncanny. For Otto, the original function of doubling in ancient times was for the “preservation of [human] extinction” through self-recording and self-observation, but it has since evolved “from having been the assurance of immortality” to “the uncanny harbinger of death”, thus the double has become uncanny through the subversion of its original function (Freud 940). Freud expands on this idea, arguing that “the double has become an image of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons” (Freud 941). When one is confronted with an unusual yet familiar reflection of one’s self through the contact with the double, it becomes unsettling and eerie as it symbolises something repressed that has returned to haunt the self. For Freud, the human psyche is essentially double in nature, with the ‘id’ or the unconscious part of the psyche representing the irrational and primitive unknown, while the ‘ego’ or the conscious part of the psyche represents the rational, logocentric order. To Freud, it is the id that has a significantly more powerful influence over our lives, and it is a part of ourselves that is beyond our conscious control.
In A Troubled Legacy: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Inheritance of Human Rights, Diana Reese highlights the centrality of uncanny doubles in Frankenstein where dichotomies are subverted and boundaries blurred:
“Frankenstein’s staging of the nonhumanness of Shelley’s unnamed daemon contrasts with the split in the fundamental category of the ‘‘human’’ to be observed in this series of pivotal philosophical and political ‘‘doubles.’’ Shelley’s monster, that ‘‘figure of a man,’’ moves across the shifting terrain of his own indetermination at ‘‘superhuman speed’’; traversing the slash between man/citizen, reasoner/human, general/individual will.” (Reese 48-49)
In Frankenstein, doubling is used as the external representation of Frankenstein’s internal struggles within his psyche, where the monster can be viewed as a manifestation of the darker side of his consciousness, representing the Unknown. Frankenstein and the monster are uncannily similar. They are both isolated and obsessive, they both seek revenge, are self-described murderers, claim to have “fallen” from a higher destiny, claim to be the most miserable creature ever, and they even sound alike. In popular culture, Frankenstein’s identity is often conflated with that of the nameless monster he creates. This implies the deep-seated conception of the Frankenstein himself becoming just as monstrous as his monster-child.
From the beginning of the novel, the two opposing sides to Frankenstein’s personality is made clear. Robert Walton has only positive things to say about Frankenstein, he proclaims him as “divine” and a “celestial spirit,” yet ironically in the context of praise he mentions that “such a man has a double existence” (Shelley 12). Upon the first read, we would not pay much attention to this remark, but it grows in significance as we are told more about Frankenstein’s monstrous misdeeds. In Chapter Two, Frankenstein says that he was grateful for having such fortunate and happy childhood as a result of his kind, loving parents, and that this “gratitude assisted the development of filial love” (Shelley 19). He also loved his adopted sister and fiancé, Elizabeth Lavenza, who he described as “the beautiful and adored companion of all my occupations and pleasures” (Shelley 17). This loving side of his personality is constantly set in opposition to a darker side throughout the novel: in his descriptions of Elizabeth that appear to be from a loving place, there are some unmistakably unsettling undertones:
“I…looked upon Elizabeth as mine — mine to protect, love and cherish. All praises bestowed on her I received as made to a possession of my own…till death she was to be mine only.” (Shelley 18)
He believes he has the right to receive any praises bestowed on her, and repeats the word “mine” three times within the same paragraph. This clearly shows that he is possessive of her, and that he narcissistically sees her as an extension of himself. His dark side is again revealed when he talks about his hubristic ambitions, revealing an underlying thirst for power and glory. This is repeated multiple times throughout the text, with Frankenstein declaring “what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame” (Shelley 22). Frankenstein also holds a narcissistic belief that he alone deserves this power and glory: he declares that “I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret”, and later repeats that this is the “one secret which I alone possessed” (Shelley 31-32). He desires for such great power and control over nature that “a new species would bless [him] as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to [him]” (Shelley 32).
Frankenstein’s preoccupation with this ambition borders on monomania, where he ignores and loses all other human traits and virtues, turning him into almost a double of the monster he creates. He becomes fully immersed in his scientific pursuits, transgressing moral and ethical limits in his experiments, to the point that he becomes blind to all human emotions: “I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit”. He also becomes blind to the beauty of the natural landscape surrounding him: “my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature” (Shelley 33), and his experiment “swallowed up every habit of [his own] nature” (Shelley 33). He loses all his natural human qualities, physical, emotional and social, becoming almost monstrous in his mania. After the monster was supposedly born and Frankenstein abandoned it, he meets his friend Henry Clerval, who notices “a wildness in [his] eyes” (Shelley 38). This is suggestive of his growing unnatural monstrosity.
In The God of Small Things, doubling is also used in the characterisation of the twins, Estha and Rahel. A considerable amount of the narrative is portrayed from the twins’ viewpoint. The crucial events of the plot, namely the scandalous inter-caste relationship between their mother Ammu and the “untouchable” Velutha, Velutha’s murder at the hands of the police, and the drowning of their cousin Sophie Mol, are slowly made known to the reader as the twins reunite in adulthood two decades later. Throughout the book, the twins’ subjectivity is compounded, they were “physically separate, but with joint identities,” and they “thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us” (Roy 6). The twins are uncannily similar despite being of opposite genders and of different looks. When they were separated as adults, they functioned like spectres, as their identities were so conflated that without each other’s presence, they were unable to exist. I have isolated two particularly revealing paragraphs where the twins describe each other:
“It had been quiet in Estha’s head until Rahel came. But with her she had brought the sound of passing trains, and the light and shade and light and shade that falls on you if you have a window seat. The world, locked out for years, suddenly flooded in, and now Estha couldn’t hear himself for the noise. Trains. Traffic. Music. The stock market. A dam had burst and savage waters swept everything up in a swirling. Comets, violins, parades, loneliness, clouds, beards, bigots, lists, flags, earthquakes, despair were all swept up in a scrambled swirling.” (Roy 24-25)
“What Larry McCaslin saw in Rahel’s eyes was not despair at all, but a sort of enforced optimism. And a hollow where Estha’s words had been. He couldn’t be expected to understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers’ bodies.” (Roy 32)
These two paragraphs clearly tells readers of the extremity of the twins’ closeness that no outsiders would understand. At the same time, they are imbued with romantic and sexual undertones that are disturbing given that they are biologically twins. Just as in Frankenstein, these undertones would probably not be caught on the first read until the reader discovers that the twins commit incest by the end of the book. This potential for a romantic and sexual relationship transgresses boundaries of ethical lines, as well as physical boundaries. The double shows fleeting moments of union throughout The God of Small Things, creating uncanny moments that disturb and unsettle the reader. Indeed, “boundaries blur” not just through the twins’ sexual transgression but also the temporal transgressions in the twin’s narratives (Roy 4). They are perpetually haunted by tragic memories from the past. The novel starts off with regular alternations between present and past with each odd and even chapter, but in the last section it abruptly switches to solely the past.
In conclusion, both Frankenstein and The God of Small Things elucidate the horror of the uncanny double through the respective characterisation of Victor Frankenstein versus his monster, and the twins Estha and Rahel. In both texts, this happens with the transgression of boundaries.
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