BOOK REVIEW

Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in “Frankenstein.”
Eileen Hunt Botting. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
Pp. xi1220.

The creature of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) may have led a solitary
life ostracized and unloved, but these days he has plenty of friends in the
countless imitations, adaptations, and interpretations he has provoked.
The present study by Eileen Hunt Botting adds to the growing body of po-
litical readings sustained by the novel in recent years, including the work
of Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and disability scholars, to a name a few
prominent types. Devoted exclusively to Frankenstein and written by a po-
litical theorist, Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child attests to the novel’s
ongoing salience. Seeking to convince her colleagues in political science
of literature’s evidentiary value, Botting makes the sort of grand case for
fiction that we literary scholars are no longer much used to making: “The
novel form allows for this sort of big and open-ended philosophical ques-
tion to be entertained by readers from a variety of temporal contexts, cul-
tural backgrounds, and political perspectives” (8).
With this philosophizing remit, Botting presents Frankenstein as a men-
tal laboratory for running a series of “thought experiments” about chil-
dren and the rights they are due. Literature, in this view, seems a good way
to experiment on humans without having to obtain IRB approval. Botting
asks that we “see the Creature for who he really was: a stateless orphan,
abandoned by family, abused by society and ignored by the law” (xi). By
casting the creature as “a giant baby” (13), his tale can be read as a parable
on the perils that lie in the abandonment and abuse of children. Dismiss-
ing the Gothic apparatus that surrounds this archetypal “monster,” Bot-

Modern Philology, volume 116, number 3. Published online October 9, 2018

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ting thus interprets the novel in didactic fashion, as a “cascade of thought

experiments . . . to rule out certain routes of conduct or action as morally
wrong or false” (15).
Many of these moral rules regarding the care of children will appear
unobjectionable, including the “rights to warmth, food, water, clothing,
shelter, care, education, family, community, and, most crucially, love” (3).
Botting finds these rights theoretically and imaginatively advanced by the
counterexample of the creature’s absolute neglect from birth. Categorizing
the novel as “speculative fiction” (8), she describes five “counterfactual sce-
narios” (8) that the novel engineers: the first, to give an example, is “What if
a man had sole parental responsibility for a child due to using science to cre-
ate him without a biological mother?” (89). From such counterfactuals in-
vented by Frankenstein, Botting derives the duties of parents and rights of
children. Victor is thus not the only scientist at work in the novel: “Shelley
modified the variables of how a parent feels toward a newborn and what
the newborn looks like in order to direct the reader’s mind to the issue
of the role of the affections in motivating the practice of parental duty to-
ward children” (12).
Botting tries rather clumsily to acknowledge Frankenstein’s literary na-
ture by invoking John Keats, repeatedly claiming that Shelley “employed
the literary technique of ‘negative capability’” (24) or “employed the
Romantic-era poetic principle of ‘negative capability’” (91). Besides the
problematic attribution of causality here and the neglect of Romanticist
scholarship, Botting reduces Keats’s phrase to the idea of ambiguity. She
thereby praises Frankenstein for its indeterminacy in contrast to philoso-
phers’ false clarities: “Shelley preferred the uncertainties of fiction to the
certainties of philosophy” (91). A contradiction ensues from Botting insist-
ing that the equivocal text of Frankenstein should serve as a clear-cut guide to
the proper care of children.
Botting’s study begins by placing Frankenstein in the context of political
thinking about children. Her first chapter examines the writing of Hobbes,
Locke, Kant, and Rousseau to show how children have been marginalized
in political thought. In response, she claims, the novel “staged a profound
critique of modern Western political theory” by highlighting the “moral
bankruptcy of justifying rights for adults on the backs of children” (34).
The second chapter focuses on how Mary Wollstonecraft diverged from
this tradition with her robust and innovative appeal to children’s moral
rights, “the very first of its kind in the history of Western political thought”
(62). Botting enumerates a set of duties (for instance, “Not to abuse chil-
dren in general” [80]) and rights found in Wollstonecraft and then squares
off the original feminist against modern political theorists and their ac-
counts of children’s rights. In this reckoning, Wollstonecraft comes out
broader minded than Botting’s own colleagues in political science.
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Chapter 3 runs the aforementioned thought experiments. Botting ar-

gues that the novel’s counterfactuals about an abandoned child, “like
any well-designed thought experiment,” are useful for “illuminating con-
ceptual distinction[s]” such as that between the “right to be loved” and
“right to share love” or that between children’s “mere survival” and their
“thriving development” (90). Botting then teases out a series of moral ob-
ligations to treat children in supportive ways. She even contends that the
novel anticipates our modern child-welfare system by prompting readers
to imagine how the creature might have been saved had there been “an
extrafamilial legal or political body that could fulfill the associate duty to
successfully assign a loving substitute for Victor” (125). In such a world,
the creature might have been entrusted to “a compassionate blind person
or couple, or even better, a school for the blind” (126).
The final chapter applies Frankenstein’s lessons to modern and future
cases: children with birth defects, those without a state, and those born
of new reproductive technologies. In each instance, the creature antici-
pates his later avatars. For instance, “like babies who are abandoned by
parents due to their facial deformities, the Creature lacks the mothering
and love that he so desperately needs to flourish” (149). Or, “the Crea-
ture becomes a symbol of all those children who migrate due to abandon-
ment, abuse, or other forms of violence at home” (154).
Due to her philosophical method, Botting universalizes children, some-
thing she explicitly refuses to do with classifications like women or hu-
mans. Even though she concedes that the creature’s status as a child is
complicated (115), she constantly naturalizes his youth. Hence, when
the creature confronts Victor, he is, in Botting’s account, a “twenty-one
month-old Creature” beseeching “his maker for the fulfillment of a ‘right’
to ‘live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being’”
(93). There is quite a disjuncture here between Botting’s categorization
of the creature as a child and the sophistication of his activity (pleading
and philosophizing). A related transposition emerges in the way Botting
repeatedly turns the creature’s claim for “sympathy” into an appeal for
“love,” effacing the philosophy of moral sentiments (Adam Smith appears
nowhere in Botting’s account of the novel) in favor of a developmentalist
narrative about the needs of children. In spite of these limitations, Mary
Shelley and the Rights of the Child, in its passion and commitments, vividly il-
lustrates Frankenstein’s continuing power, two hundred years on, to com-
ment on the pressing political issues of the day.
Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud
University of Tennessee
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