He is a Sister: The Monstrous (De)Construction of the Sex/Gender

Binary in Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory

Vikki Winkler

English 498: Honours Thesis

Advisor: Dr. Jodey Castricano

March 31, 2008

If it is appropriate to define “ideology” as that which

constitutes social, cultural, and political order, then perhaps

it can be said that as a genre, the Gothic paradoxically both

challenges and reinforces the stability of these seemingly

“fixed” structures and, similarly, that it both disturbs and

reifies what one deems “normal” or “natural” in western

industrial society. In this way, the Gothic functions as both a

noun and a verb, and can be equated to Queer Theory in that it

“queers” heteronormative “truth” claims. The Gothic may appear to

stabilize the “natural” order because most novels, and now films,

end with the eradication of any “monsters” that have posed a

threat to society. However, it is the appearance of the “monster”

in the first place that gives one pause. One could argue that the

Gothic serves as the repository of all that is repudiated in

society as “abnormal,” and, in effect, becomes the binary

opposite of what western society deems intelligible and

legitimate. In general, binaries function as ideological

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absolutes and exist in pairs that are contingent on one another

for their meaning. However, one half of the pair is usually

privileged as the original, “true,” and desirable portion of the

pair, and the other half takes the position of “other,”

undesirable, and an aberration of the “original.” Therefore,

notions of what constitutes socio-cultural reality and what

constitutes the Gothic depend on this relationship of terminal

opposites. That being said, I will argue that although the Gothic

seems to perform the dual or double function of stabilizing and

destabilizing ordered systems, it ultimately becomes a

deconstructive tool that exposes western heteronormative,

taxonomic, teleological, epistemological, and theological systems

that operate discursively to construct socio-cultural “norms.”

With such a dual function in mind, I will use the Gothic through

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus as

a lens to examine the social, cultural, and political order of

Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory with the aim of deconstructing

ideologies surrounding the “natural” and the manifestation of the

Other specifically in regards to a heteronormative sex/gender

system. As a Gothic novel, The Wasp Factory queers or “gothicizes”

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the apparent stability of heteronormativity and the structure of

binary oppositions. I will argue that although the novel appears

to subvert sex/gender categories, it ultimately reinforces them

through his main character, Frank Cauldhame. Throughout the

novel, Banks shows that the “obvious” incontestability of sex and

gender as two (and only two) possibilities is an outrageous

notion because there are slippages and categorical exceptions at

every turn; Frank’s hypermasculine identity is clouded by

“female” biology. However, the novel returns to an essentialist

and/or “biology is destiny” perspective at the novel’s

conclusion.

Iain Banks’s novel, The Wasp Factory, written in 1984, grapples

in part with the longstanding essentialist-constructionist

debate: Is man/woman born or made? Banks’s main character, Frank

Cauldhame, must come to terms with being socialized as a male

even though s/he1 was born with “female” genitalia. Angus,

Frank’s father, is a renegade doctor of biochemistry who, after

his wife leaves him, decides to experiment on Frank with hormone

therapy. Angus creates a bizarre story around the mutilation of

1 The use of “s/he” and “h/er” as pronouns in reference to Frank’s character will be discussed later in the paper.

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Frank’s “male” genitalia by a dog named Saul. When Frank was

born, Angus decided not to register h/er birth. As a result,

Frank grew up without a birth certificate, National Insurance

number, or any formal documentation “to say [he was] alive or

[had] ever existed” (Banks 10). Angus Cauldhame keeps Frank in

virtual isolation partially because of the geographic location of

their home, and partially because he chooses to educate Frank

himself. Angus is Frank’s source of knowledge – in fact, because

Angus educates Frank at home, he is able to construct/manipulate

h/er understanding of the world and the body s/he inhabits. Frank

identifies as masculine, but “he” is “female.” S/he struggles

with feeling emasculated as a result of h/er apparent accident,

and commits murder three times. Frank believes that “both sexes

can do one thing specially well; women can give birth and men can

kill…[and] I consider myself an honorary man” (154). Just as

Angus experiments with the chemical construction sex/gender,

Frank experiments with the psychological construction of

masculinity and femininity. The social construction of Frank’s

body as male stands in direct opposition to h/er biological

“beginnings” and makes h/er a Gothic figure, one that

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destabilizes the “natural” binary sex/gender system, and thereby

exposes its compulsory yet arbitrary nature. Frank’s body

troubles the “bounded” sex/gender system because s/he does not

fit neatly into one of the two “intelligible” categories. H/er

body also challenges the constructed masculine and feminine

qualities that constitute “the human” because humanness is

recognizable through the binary lens of the heteronormative

sex/gender system, and therefore, “the subject, [even] the

speaking ‘I,’ is formed by virtue of having gone through such a

process of assuming a sex” (Butler Bodies 3). However, Judith

Butler writes, “perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as

culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always

already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between

sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all” (Gender 9-

10). Therefore, the novel illustrates the mimetic relationship

between the social and the biological, and shows how individuals

must reinforce the “reality” of his/her sex/gender through socio-

cultural performative acts.

Frank undergoes a rebirth, a re-naming or re-classification

of identity as the novel ends. In Frank’s final reflections s/he

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says that “our journey,” presumably the journey of life, is “part

chosen, part determined” (Banks 244). I would argue that, in

terms of sex/gender, choice is not in equal parts with

determination because “choice” only exists within the binary

sex/gender system of classification. At birth, there are two

possibilities for the basis of identity, and one possibility must

be rejected based on the intelligibility of reproductive

genitalia. Butler states that “such attributions or

interpellations [in regards to the constitution of ‘male’ and

‘female’ bodies] contribute to that field of discourse and power

that orchestrates, delimits, and sustains that which qualifies as

‘the human’…[and] of those abjected beings who do not appear

properly gendered; it is their very humanness that comes into

question” (Bodies 8). In Banks’s novel, Frank is not “properly

gendered,” but rather is gender ambiguous and therefore a fitting

subject for a gothic novel. If Frank had not uncovered h/er “true

identity,” who would Frank be? Was s/he ever really a man? Does

believing or “feeling” that you are a man/woman make you one? And

if not, what would make you a man/woman? In characteristic Gothic

form, the novel raises unsettling questions for the reader.

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However, while it appears that Banks is questioning gender norms,

social boundaries, and the arbitrary or “slippery”

characteristics that are meant to categorize men/male and

women/female, he ultimately reinscribes heteronormativity and the

sex/gender binary by having Frank (re)claim “womanhood” without

question. Why is it necessary for Frank’s sex/gender to be

“resolved” or “dissolved” into one category or the other? On the

other hand, however, the fact that Frank, as a “female,” is

capable of “essentialized” male/masculine behaviour continues to

problematize binary categorizations of sex/gender.

In the novel, Frank was born female, but masculinized by the

somewhat questionable experimental scientific genius of h/er

father. The experiment ultimately fails when Frank discovers the

“truth” about h/er birth sex; s/he is not a mutilated male but

actually a female. Banks addresses, or perhaps parodies, the

discourse of psychoanalysis by way of Frank being a “castrated”

male. By lacking a penis within this system of binaries, Frank is

paradoxically a “woman.” Johnathan Culler notes that

psychoanalysis sees women as “not the creature with a vagina but

the creature without a penis, [and] is essentially defined by

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that lack” (qtd. in Schoene-Harwood 139). The view that women are

merely degenerated men is apparent early on in the text when

Frank comments matter-of-factly, “I hate having to sit down in

the toilet all the time. With my unfortunate disability I usually

have to, as though I was a bloody woman” (Banks 14). This

quotation solidifies women’s position as both “less evolved” and

“disabled” versions of men. Ironically, Frank fights against the

“feminizing” effects of being a mutilated male when, if one were

to see this situation in Freudian terms, s/he is merely a woman

experiencing unresolved penis envy. Schoene-Harwood argues that

“[Angus’] tale of Frank’s accidental castration is designed to

disable woman, to keep her in check by inculcating in her an

awesome respect and envy of the penis” (141). Additionally, it

appears that Frank is completely subject to the “law of the

father,” which Barbara Creed describes as a “universe of shame”

(13). Frank is constantly embarrassed and humiliated by h/er

“unmanly” body. Schoene-Harwood comments that “the child’s

originally chaotic, intransigent nature is moulded into shape by

the Law of the Father…[and] Frank’s father is shown to wield

absolute power over his daughter’s understanding of the world”

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(141). However, Frank unabashedly uses the elements of the abject

body as a source of power: “Sometimes, when I have to make

precious substances such as toenail cheese or belly-button fluff,

I have to go without a shower or bath for days and days” (Banks

51). Creed notes that “images of bodily wastes threaten the

subject that is already constituted…as ‘whole and proper’” (13),

paradoxically, however, Frank utilizes the abject in order to

constitute h/erself. Creed further argues that the world of the

mother, or maternal authority, “point[s] back to a time…when

bodily wastes, while set apart from the body, were not seen as

objects of embarrassment and shame” (13). One could argue that

Frank’s character “gothicizes” or queers the “law of the father”

by incorporating the world of the mother, “a universe without

shame” (Creed 13) in regards to the abject body.

The novel’s outcome would seem to support an essentialist

point of view because Frank is not “made” into a man despite

chemical and social influence. H/er “femaleness” is simply

repressed by h/er social environment, but ultimately, h/er “true”

sex is revealed. It is impossible to ignore, however, the fact

that Frank represents h/erself as male because h/er father

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labelled h/er as such. It is reasonable to assume that the

development of an individual’s gender identity, according to

Richard Lewontin, “depends on what label is attached to him or

her as a child…thus biological differences [become] a signal for,

rather than the cause of, differentiation in social roles” (qtd.

in Wodak 4). Frank adopts a masculine persona because s/he is

identified as or named male, and is led to believe that the dog,

Saul, destroyed h/er “signalling” genitalia. It could be said

that gender, although strongly dependent on sex, paints a more

accurate picture of a person’s identity – allowing for a

continuum of characteristics rather than a binary system. If this

is so, then it is important to explore what sex and gender mean

in a society of naming.

Names are signs that carry layers of meaning like signifying

strands of a web that sprawl outward from the signified object.

The web is flexible, changeable and forever expanding, and its

structure forms the social order in which we exist. We can easily

conjure several mental and sensory associations from one single

word, and therefore we do not simply speak or hear names; we

experience them. The spelling of given names is traditionally

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gendered, or perhaps sexed, to remove ambiguity as is indicated

by the homophones Francis Leslie Cauldhame and Frances Lesley

Cauldhame, the first being the masculine form. Additionally, it

is not uncommon to hear comments like “you don’t look like a

Sue,” suggesting that “Sue” is a type and encompasses a

preconceived set of characteristics. We evaluate, situate,

demarcate and in extreme circumstances, eliminate based on the

power of names alone. Names are powerful because they are badges

of identification branding us from birth just as “male” and

“female” brand us in a heteronormative society. The very basis of

identity stems from the naming of a child’s sex: “Consider the

medical interpellation which…shifts an infant from an ‘it’ to a

‘she’ or a ‘he,’ and in that naming, the girl is ‘girled,’

brought into the domain of language and kinship through the

interpellation of gender” (Butler, Bodies 7). Throughout the paper

I have “named” Frank as “s/he” or “h/er” in an attempt to both

confuse and fuse pronouns. This action, however, could be

interpreted as merely a hyphenation of two sexes or genders that

does not remove or alleviate sexual branding, or it could be

interpreted as a hybrid construction or a “neither/nor”

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representation of sex/gender. It is my intention to

linguistically confound the “coherent” sex/gender binary and move

towards new identities or signs that leave room for

possibilities.

As mentioned briefly before, the concept of “gender” appears

to blur the distinct binary boundaries of “sex,” but it seems

impossible, however, to view gender without making reference to

individuals in terms of their masculinity and femininity. Butler

argues that “the presumption of a binary gender system implicitly

retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby

gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it” (Gender 9).

Amy Sheldon notes, “speakers of English don’t ordinarily notice

anything peculiar about expressions such as ‘the opposite sex,’

or ‘the same sex,’ since these reflect shared, cultural beliefs

that gender is about difference, if not dichotomy” (225-26).

Sheldon further writes, “critical discussions of gender theory

have pointed out the descriptive inadequacy of theorizing gender

as a dichotomy and of assuming that the categories ‘woman/girl’

and ‘man/boy’ refer to either natural or homogeneous social

categories” (226). Gender identity is so strongly linked to sex

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that it is also viewed in binary sets of characteristics. Ruth

Wodak argues:

It makes no sense…to assume that there is merely one set of

traits that generally characterizes men and thus defines

masculinity; or likewise, that there is one set of traits

for women which defines femininity…[a] unitary model of

sexual character is a familiar part of sexual ideology and

serves to reify inequality between men and women in our

society. (3)

While this may be true, Wodak does not account for the “horror”

of gender ambiguity – the un-named. Gender appears to be a fluid

social construction, or in other words, ideas about masculinity

and femininity flow on a continuum and exist as such within

individuals. Gender, primarily based on the dichotomy of sex, is

problematic because binary opposites are literally lists of

extremes that foster an “either this or that” mentality, and

leave no room for degrees. Butler also suggests that “sex” is not

a fact, but is rather discursively produced in the same way as

gender, if not by gender constructions: “gender is not to culture

as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means

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by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and

established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture, a politically

neutral surface on which culture acts” (Gender 10). Therefore,

discourses surrounding sex are “gendered” just as discourses

surrounding gender are “sexed.” Butler’s deconstruction of sex as

a “natural fact” or as “prediscursive” undermines the binary

sex/gender system as a compulsory basis for identity. The Wasp

Factory, however, perpetuates the binary sex/gender system by

having Frances Lesley Cauldhame (a character who is

“unquestionably” female by the novel’s end) close the door on

“Frank” and start again. There is no indication at the novel’s

close that Frances will continue to identify in part with

masculinity, but instead appears to reject it and embrace h/er

“femaleness” as a “natural” inescapable fact.

In order to (re)construct sex/gender as “natural,” it is

imperative that one engages in sex/gender affirming rituals.

Throughout the novel, Frank performs rituals, similar to

religious rites, that s/he has constructed in order to affirm

h/er identity: “I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my

secret catechisms. I could recite them automatically, but I tried

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to think of what they meant as I repeated them…they still make me

shiver whenever I say them, automatic or not” (Banks 157).

Frank’s ritualistic behaviour can be seen to illuminate the

ritual or performative aspect of a sex/gender system, whereby one

must “come to believe [in one’s “assumed” gender] and...perform

in the mode of belief” (Butler Gender 192). Frank’s ability to

“automatically” recite h/er “secret catechisms” can be equated

with the “naturalization” of sex/gender and its uncontested

existence as “truth.” In order to clarify the performative

aspects of sex/gender, Butler argues:

[B]ecause gender is not a fact, the various acts of

gender create the idea of gender, and without those

acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus,

a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the

tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and

sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions

is obscured by the credibility of those productions…the

construction ‘compels’ our belief in its necessity and

naturalness. (Gender 190)

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Butler shows how the constant repetition or “ritual” performance

of sex/gender creates the illusion of stable sex/gender

identities. Frank assumes a masculine gender identity, but

constantly struggles to reaffirm it by creating rituals to suit a

body that contests the possibility of becoming the “ideal” male

figure. The subtlest repetitions are reaffirming:

In the bathroom, after a piss, I went through my daily

washing ritual. First I had my shower…[then after] a

brisk rub down with a face-cloth and then a towel, I

trimmed my nails…I brushed my teeth thoroughly…Next the

shave…the shave follows a definite and predetermined

pattern; I take the same number of strokes of the same

length in the same sequence each morning. (Banks 51-52)

This quotation exemplifies a daily adherence to routine and

social practice. Sex and gender are reaffirmed in the same way;

however, affirmation and reaffirmation are fruitless in a system

that is arbitrary. Individuals circulate around the anxiety of

striving to sustain impossible norms, and therefore must

constantly constitute themselves as “credible” representatives.

Butler argues that, fundamentally, gender is a binary system

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merely based on a binary “male/female” sex system — the two are

inextricably linked. Any discourse around gender is already

“sexed” and any discourse around sex is already “gendered.” The

western world has built itself on the anatomical and

philosophical surety of “male” and “female,” and boldly wields

the metaphysical measuring stick of power and knowledge in order

to establish these categories as foundational and originary.

Butler quotes Mary Douglas in regards to the human body: “[T]he

body is a model that can stand for any bounded system. Its

boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened and

precarious” (Gender 180). The body becomes the site of political

struggle as it strains under the weight of socio-cultural

pressure to conform to “naturalized” ways of knowing and being.

Butler argues that it is repetition that can either affirm or

deny the “natural.” She suggests that “the subject is not

determined by the rules through which it is generated because

signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition

that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely

through the production of substantializing effects” (Gender 198).

Therefore, the process of repetition, either discursive or

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physical, has the effect of naturalization and empowerment. In

the novel, Frank engages in ritual sacrifice to create a boundary

between the mainland and the island that s/he inhabits. It is

h/er routine to attach various parts (mainly heads) of various

creatures to h/er “Sacrifice Poles.” To Frank, the Poles are

symbolic of a “warning system and deterrent all rolled into one…

[or a] clenched and threatening fist” (Banks 5). Mary Douglas

suggests that “separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing

transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an

inherently untidy experience” (qtd. in Butler, Gender 178). In

other words, both repetition and the exaggeration and enforcement

of arbitrary boundaries are necessary to create the “natural.”

For centuries, female bodies have been described in terms of

male bodies, if not as male bodies. Perhaps the most common link

between the evolving descriptions and characterizations of the

female body is that it has been/is lacking the component parts

that would make it complete or human, or more bluntly, male.

Thomas Laqueur cites the work of Galen, a second century

anatomist, wherein women’s reproductive organs are described as

lacking proper placement and formation due to a lack of vital

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heat: “Now just as mankind is the most perfect of all animals, so

within mankind the man is more perfect than the woman, and the

reason for his perfection is his excess of heat, for heat is

Nature’s primary instrument” (qtd. in Laqueur 28). In this

regard, women lacked the necessary “vital heat” during the

gestation period to produce a fully formed male: “those that have

the strictest searchers been, / Find women are but men turned

outside in” (qtd. in Laqueur 4). According to Laqueur, the “one-

sex model,” or the idea that the male body constituted the body

and gender differences were the result of cultural politics

and/or philosophy, permeated Western European ideology from

around the 2nd century to the 18th century. Gradually, the popular

model shifted to one where women were recognized as fundamentally

different creatures, not only physically but “in every

conceivable aspect of body…soul…and moral[ity]” (5). The

illumination of these perceived differences showed the human male

and female species as being in contrast to each other stark

opposites with little means of understanding one another and

having little or nothing in common. Also, this opposition sets up

woman as Other and essentially continues to define men as the

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original, natural or “true” sex, a stance that is gothically

voiced through Frank.

Ironically, Frank’s female body is a constant threat to h/er

masculine identity. Frank describes this tension: “[Angus]

started dosing me with male hormones, and has been ever since

[the accident]…what I’ve always thought was the stump of a penis

is really an enlarged clitoris…he has kept tampons for the last

few years, just in case my own hormones got the better of the

ones he had been pumping me with” (Banks 240). It seems that in

order to secure Frank’s “ascent” to “manhood,” Frank’s father,

Angus Cauldhame, encouraged the loathing of all things feminine

or “female.” It was imperative for Frank to develop an

unwavering, fixed notion of masculine identity, one that

perceived the feminine as opposite and distant. Frank is

completely isolated from any female influence except Mrs. Clamp

who cleans the house and delivers groceries once a week. Frank

describes her as “ancient, and sexless the way the very old and

the very young are,” and goes on to suggest, however, that “she’s

still been a woman” (51). Amongst h/er rantings of disgust, Frank

exposes the prescribed limits of sexuality. Within a

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heteronormative paradigm, the young procreative feminine body is

the epitome of sexuality, and corresponds directly to young

masculine virility. Within heteronormativity, youth is touted as

essential to sexuality; therefore, as bodies age, they appear to

lose their masculine and feminine qualities. This suggests that

these categories are manufactured to reaffirm heterosexual

procreative norms. Masculinity and femininity become categorical

voids when used to describe elderly bodies. The sex/gender system

is inadequate and exclusionary in this context. Frank does not

possess an elderly body, but s/he is relegated to a state of

comparative sexlessness by virtue of possessing a body that does

not fit procreative norms. Women repulse Frank for two reasons:

because women exist in opposition to men, and are therefore the

enemy of Frank’s masculinity, and because women are

representative of procreativity and a sexuality that are

seemingly out of reach or largely unknown to Frank. Ironically,

Frank takes an aggressive “sexist” stance.

Frank unwittingly exposes the fragility of sex/gender

categories by characterizing h/er older brother, Eric, as “weak

and sensitive,” or stereotypically feminine. Eric plans to become

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a doctor but experiences a traumatizing incident while helping

out at a teaching hospital in Glasgow. He helped care for babies

and young children who were severely deformed and disabled. Frank

reveals the nature of Eric’s “unpleasant experience” on a hot

July evening:

The child he was attending to was more or less a

vegetable…[Eric] saw something, something like a

movement, barely visible on the shaved head of the

slightly smiling child…He bent closer to the skull of

the child…[and] looked round the edge of the metal

skull-cap the child wore, thought he saw something

under it, and lifted it easily from the head of the

infant…Flies had got into the ward…[and] had got

underneath the stainless steel of the child’s skull cap

and deposited eggs there…What Eric saw…was the slowly

writhing nest of fat maggots, swimming in their

combined digestive juices as they consumed the brain of

the child. (Banks 185-188)

Shortly after Eric’s “unpleasant experience,” he began drinking

and starting fights, and eventually quit school. He also began

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trying to force children to eat handfuls of worms and maggots,

and started setting fire to dogs. In response to Eric’s

“breakdown,” Frank suggests that Eric is weak, much like a woman:

Whatever disintegrated in Eric then, it was a weakness,

a fundamental flaw that a real man should not have had.

Women, I know from watching hundreds—maybe thousands—of

films and television programmes, cannot withstand

really major things happening to them; they get raped,

or their loved one dies, and they go to pieces, go

crazy and commit suicide, or just pine away until they

die. Of course, I realise that not all of them will

react that way, but obviously it’s the rule, and the

ones who don’t obey it are in the minority. (Banks 195)

Frank’s reflections are “gothically” ironic. S/he suggests that

Eric is not a “real man” because he could not cope with a

traumatic experience. Frank’s characterization of Eric and of

women illustrates the impossibility of the categories of “men”

and “women” as separate, distinct entities. In order for Eric to

be a “real man,” he must be emotionless and impenetrable. To

Frank, Eric’s “gender performance” is the antithesis of the

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masculine ideal. However, the irony lays in the fact that Frank’s

“gender performance,” in h/er own terms, is the antithesis of the

feminine ideal. In part, Frank unconsciously subverts the notion

that biology “signals” gender. Butler argues that sex and gender

are conflated because there are only two “choices” available, and

that gender is always already “sexed.” Frank and Eric exemplify,

however, that within the dichotomous construct of sex/gender,

genitalia and gender are not necessarily indicative of one

another, and that the constructs of male and female do not

account for slippages. If Eric’s behaviour demotes him from

“manhood,” can he redeem his identity, and if not, who can he be

now? If he is not a “real man,” is he a woman? It becomes clear

that sex/gender categories are “monstrous” in that they claim

fixity, but offer only ambiguity.

The Monstrous Body

David E. Musselwhite suggests that “[t]he Monster is not ‘in

itself’ monstrous, [and] there is no inherent monstrousness;

monstrousness is that which is prescribed and proscribed by the

facile categorizings of the social and cultural order” (59). The

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body is the site of social, cultural, and political construction.

Bodies are constructed, inscribed, described, raced, gendered,

appropriated, desired, and loathed. It does not seem surprising

then that in a heteronormative society, some bodies are monstrous

figures, or at least misrepresented as such. Monsters are socio-

cultural manifestations of anxiety, and therefore must be scorned

and/or eradicated. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that “[t]his

anxiety manifests itself symptomatically as a cultural

fascination with monsters—a fixation that is born of the twin

desire to name that which is difficult to apprehend and to

domesticate (and therefore disempower) that which threatens”

(viii). Cohen suggests that society harnesses its anxiety within

the figure of the monster – names it as such – and therefore

creates an identity that is seemingly distinct from “self,” or

the perception of normalcy. Once society harnesses its anxieties

in the figure of a monster, a being separate from the societal

“normal self,” it can act upon the monster and attempt to destroy

it. Destruction of the monster, however, is problematic. It

entails denying the monster’s origins, or derivation, as firmly

grounded in “normal” society’s own culture. The monster is both a

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product of society’s norms, and an embodiment of all that society

excludes to sustain itself as normal, and natural. If the monster

did not provide one half of the binary pair, the ideological

framework of norms would collapse. Because constructed norms are

dependent on constructed monstrosities, the complete eradication

of monsters is impossible. Musselwhite opposes Cohen’s assessment

of “naming the monster.” Instead, he argues:

The Monster is all that a society refuses to name,

refuses even to make nameable, not just because its

very heterogeneity, mobility, and power is a threat to

that society but, much more importantly, it is the very

flux of energy that made society possible in the first

place and as such offers the terrible promise that

other societies are possible, other knowledges, other

histories, other sexualities. (59)

As Musselwhite comments, the Monster makes visible the

possibility of “other” societies, knowledges, histories, and

sexualities. However, Musselwhite’s argument stems from the

notion of “degeneration from within” rather than a rejection of

Other as external to the self and society. If the monster is born

27

from within society or self, then it does not form a complete

opposite or binary to the “norm.” In fact, the “norm” is merely a

sublimation of “monstrosity,” and is a means of constructing

difference to reinforce hierarchical power structures.

David Punter describes Frank as a “seventeen-year-old

monster” (168), but what makes Frank monstrous? Aside from the

ambiguity of h/er sex/gender, Frank’s behaviour in regards to the

killing of animals and people creates a daunting and unsettling

character for the reader. Schoene-Harwood suggests that

“[Frank’s] sense of self is warped, virtually beyond repair…[and

s/he] appears as a manufactured, entirely fictitious creation,

obsessively overcompensating for a patriarchally inflicted lack

of natural manliness by pursuing an extremist ideal of violent

masculine perfection” (133). Schoene-Harwood attributes Frank’s

violent behaviour to h/er “lack of natural manliness,” and h/er

inability to become the “naturalized” male ideal. I would argue,

however, that Frank’s ability to kill despite h/er “femaleness”

is largely what makes h/er monstrous for the reader. Perhaps

readers are doubly shocked by the horror of the murders and

violence when they realize that Frank was born “female” because

28

western culture does not attribute such abilities and

characteristics to female bodies. The novel, therefore, creates

Frank as monster on three levels: First, s/he is presented as a

mutilated male, or someone who cannot be “tidily” categorized;

second, s/he commits heinous crimes against people and animals,

and engages in bizarre ritualistic behaviour; and third, s/he is

revealed to be female. The reader is led to believe that Frank’s

monstrosity lies in h/er “warped sense of self,” but in

actuality, Frank’s monstrosity lies in the reader’s assumptions

about h/er sex/gender.

Arguably, the most famous monster is Frankenstein, or more

accurately, Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s “monstrous” creation. Mary

Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,

tells the tale of science gone awry because it operates in

opposition to “nature.” Dr. Frankenstein reminds the reader that

“[he] is not recording the vision of a madman” (35), yet one is

acutely aware that perhaps that is exactly the case. Dr.

Frankenstein reveals his “nature-opposing” genius thusly: “After

days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in

discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became

29

myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” (35).

Therefore, Dr. Frankenstein becomes capable of disrupting the

“natural” order of life and death, and is theoretically able to

construct a live human being (although arguably, “humanity” and

the “human” are assumed to be living bodies – inanimate bodies

are excluded from the realm of “humanity”) from various non-

living (both human and animal) tissues and structures. Frank’s

father, Angus, also fulfills the “mad scientist” archetype

because he disturbs the “natural” order of things by attempting

to transform his daughter into a son. Frankenstein was written

around 1817, and thus reflects anxieties surrounding the early

evolutionary meditations of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s

grandfather, whereas The Wasp Factory (1984) exposes contemporary

anxieties surrounding sex/gender ambiguity in a system of

compulsory heteronormativity.

Perhaps it is the metamorphosis or alteration of an

“original” body that creates an uncanny experience for the reader

of Banks’ novel. In Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection, Julia

Kristeva comments, “[o]n close inspection, all [horror]

literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to

30

me rooted, no matter what its socio-historical conditions might

be, on the fragile border…where identities (subject/object, etc.)

do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous,

animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject” (207). The concepts of

“origin” and “original” are reproduced by both religious and

evolutionary discourses in order, one might argue, to stabilize

western ontology. However, Kelly Hurley argues that “the

narrative of Darwinian evolution could be read as a

supernaturalist or Gothic one: evolution theory described a

bodily metamorphosis which, even though taking place over aeons

and over multiple bodies, rendered the identity of the human body

in a most basic sense – its distinctness from the ‘brute beasts’

– unstable” (56).2 Therefore, as Darwinian evolutionary theory

sought to establish the “beginnings” of humanity, it

simultaneously blurred the boundaries between human and animal

and disturbed the validity of the “human” category as distinct

and separate. Ultimately, the notion of stable body is a mirage

that, in a desire to quench our thirst for concrete knowledge,

draws us towards the miraculous promise of simplicity in the form

2 “Brute beasts” included animals and colonized peoples, and the collapse of these distinctions was horrific to the colonizers.

31

of binary oppositions and knowable, nameable, classifiable

solutions.

The act of naming or classifying is a source of power and a

means of control. Everything that Frank knows and understands

about h/er existence came from h/er father or from the media.

Angus manipulates knowledge to maintain control over Frank:

“‘What height is this table?’ [Angus] said suddenly…‘Thirty

inches,’ I told him…‘Wrong,’ he said with an eager grin. ‘Two

foot six’” (Banks 6). This exchange exemplifies the arbitrariness

of what is deemed “correct,” and applies more broadly to the

arbitrariness of what we know to be “true.” The measurements

amount to the same length, but the “truth” lies within the

difference of their linguistic (discursive) expression. Frank

must constantly negotiate and adapt h/er knowledge to suit h/er

father’s idiosyncratic knowledge set. Even though Frank is able

to invalidate some of h/er father’s claims when s/he gains access

to the library, s/he exists within Angus’ paradigm. Foucault

argues: “Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or

shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away;

power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of

32

nonegalitarian and mobile relations” (94). In this way, Angus’

merely (re)categorizes Frank as male, administers hormones, and

facilitates Frank’s socialization into masculinity through the

powerful, well-established sex/gender system.

Judith Butler states, “the naming [of a child as either a

boy or a girl] is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the

repeated inculcation of a norm” (Bodies 8). This is a critical

point in terms of Frank’s character. Frank believes s/he is

abnormal because s/he was “named” male by h/er father. The act of

naming Frank “male” confined h/er identity, or sense of self, to

the definitions associated with masculinity, however, because

Saul the dog mauled h/er genitalia, s/he was plagued by

“unmasculine” associations. It is a false authority that

reiterates Frank’s “founding interpellation” (Bodies 8), or being

named a boy, and the combined inevitable process, in Butler’s

terms, of “boying the boy” (8). Frank expresses h/er maleness

through a series of uncanny ritualistic behaviours that replace

scripted, or accepted masculine performative measures. Frank

says: “[Men] strike out, push through, thrust and take. The fact

that it is only an analogue of all this sexual terminology I am

33

capable of does not discourage me. I can feel it in my bones, in

my uncastrated genes” (154-55). Although Frank’s character is not

constructed as “genetically” male, s/he has been hormonally and

socially modified to identify with a media-constructed ideal of

“maleness” that s/he can “feel in [h/er] bones.” It would be

erroneous to discount or invalidate Frank’s perception of

h/erself because it is built on h/er experience of the world, and

despite not being biologically male, s/he identifies as one.

Alice Domurat Dreger writes: “Imagine saying that you are female

only because you have ovaries, or male only because you have

testicles—no matter what the rest of your body or experiences

were like…two French physicians writing on [this] enigmatic

problem noted in 1911, ‘the possession of a [single] sex is a

necessity of our social order” (130-131). These observations also

draw attention to the categorical power of biology as seemingly

fixed and wholly determinant of gender. Frank suggests that we

can “feel” our biology or genetics, and that we are empowered by

the surety and clarity of these dichotomous divisions. Based on

the sex/gender dichotomy, it is gothically ironic that Frank

experiences “male” biological “feelings.” Frank’s psychological

34

experience of h/er sex/gender exemplifies the power of

classifying or naming and the socio-cultural investment we make

in sex/gender categories.

Although Frank Cauldhame is “named,” h/er name does not

appear in any legal record, and as a result, deems h/er

essentially non-existent. S/he eventually comes to discover that

h/er name is a gendered fiction. Systems of naming and

classification result in the addition of objects into a scope of

intelligibility. Frank names things to distinguish them as

important objects: “I sat and looked at my trowel, Stoutstroke…I

stroked the long handle of the trowel, wondering if my father had

a name for that stick of his. I doubted it. He doesn’t attach the

same importance to them as I do. I know they are important”

(Banks 12-13). The parallel Frank makes between Stoutstroke and

his father’s “stick” is both humorous and telling. It reinforces

Banks’ parody of psychoanalysis in terms of penis envy, and in

the fact that h/er father “possesses” a penis and does not

“attach the same importance” to it as Frank does. In other words,

phallocentrism is unremarkable, “normal,” and goes-without-

saying; Frank is forced to acknowledge the phallus as important

35

because of h/er marginal status in relation to it. Additionally,

by naming h/er trowel, Frank infuses an inanimate object with a

power of its own: “Stoutstroke dipped and bit and sliced and dug,

building a huge triple-deck dam” (25). For Frank, naming is a

form of creation, a way of giving life and significance. In

contrast, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster remains nameless throughout

Shelley’s novel (although is more recently referred to as

Frankenstein, perhaps as a gesture towards “domestication” of the

monster or a patronymic reference), and is rather referred to as

“daemon” or “creature.” Perhaps Dr. Frankenstein does not name

his creation because he cannot bear to imbue the “monster” with

any sense of legitimacy or relationship to him.

As a male, Frank’s mutilated genitalia suggests a figure

less than a man, yet not a woman. This liminality appears to be

the source of Frank’s monstrousness, but perhaps it is the

illusion of the possibility of a coherent or unified sex/gender

that is truly monstrous. Frank’s body exists somewhere in between

the binary coded bodies – s/he is not either/or, but rather

both/and. One could argue that biological sex determines a

person’s over-arching gender identity, or that gender identity is

36

a consequence of one’s sex. However, this is a gross

oversimplification. Frank’s gender identity is based on h/er

perception of h/er biological sex. In regards to the notion of

determining one’s “true sex” within the binary sex/gender system,

Dreger argues, “every body that slid[es] through the divisions

weaken[s] those boundaries. If strict sex borders [are] to be

maintained in the culture, sex [has] to be maintained and

controlled in the surgical clinics and in the anatomy museums and

in every body” (144-145). Dreger’s argument points to the

fundamental “unnaturalness” of an otherwise “naturalized” or

“normalized” system. Butler discusses the implementation of nature

in regards to intersexed or transsexual individuals:

[T]he ‘nature’ that the endocrinologists defend…needs a

certain assistance through surgical and hormonal means,

at which point a certain nonnatural intervention in

anatomy and biology is precisely what is mandated by

nature…Malleability is, as it were, violently imposed. And naturalness is

artificially induced. (Undoing 66)

Therefore, the so-called “natural” social order must be

reinforced by artificial means in order to reconstitute “male”

37

and “female” as the original, natural, and normal categories for

human beings. Through Dreger and Butler’s insights, it becomes

apparent that notions of completeness, wholeness, and unity are

in place to regulate fictive norms. Frank’s body is not monstrous

– the social order that seeks affirmation through the

legitimizing and de-legitimizing of bodies is monstrous.

In his discussion of Frankenstein, Musselwhite suggests that

the monster is a feminine/masculine composite, which “transcends

gender” (60). I would argue, however, that the monster does not

transcend gender, but rather resides in the realm of ambiguity.

For readers of Frankenstein and The Wasp Factory, it is more uncanny

if the “monstrous” subject breaches, if only slightly, gender

norms. Butler argues that “of those abjected beings who do not

appear properly gendered; it is their very humanness that comes

into question” (Bodies 8). Therefore, for contemporary readers,

Frank’s monstrousness resides in the uncanny fact that s/he does

not express gender “correctly,” and that s/he is not aware of

h/er “proper” sexual identity. Throughout The Wasp Factory, Banks

seems to be challenging gender stereotypes by taking a

constructionist stance with his characters. At the end of the

38

novel, Banks hints at the possibility of multiple identities over

one lifetime through Frank’s narration: “Our destination is the

same in the end, but our journey – part chosen, part determined –

is different for us all, and changes even as we live and grow. I

thought one door had snicked shut behind me years ago; in fact I

was still crawling about the face. Now the door closes, and my

journey begins” (244). As the quotation suggests, it seems that

Frank’s identity is in a sort of “inter-gendered” state, possibly

waiting for h/er sexual ambiguity to be fully dissolved into one

of the possible two genders. However, is Frank waiting for

sex/gender resolution, or is the reader? Is it possible to

imagine a world of many genders or hybrid identities? In the end,

the novel returns to a dualistic biological determinism. Frank

discovers that s/he was born with female genitalia, and thus

embraces h/er “true” simplified identity. It is, however, an

uncomfortable resolution because it exposes our belief in and

adherence to a sex/gender system that is destructive of all who

seek to represent it as incontestable “truth.”

There is an important connection between nineteenth century

fears and theories of degenerationism and twentieth century fears

39

and theories regarding disability. Injury and disability can be

viewed as a sort of degeneration of the human body – less able

bodies are characterized as less human because they cannot

fulfill the constructed ideals of what constitutes the human.

When I write of disability as a social construction, I am

referring to Susan Wendell’s 1996 article “The Social

Construction of Disability” wherein she argues, “ the distinction

between the biological reality of a disability and the social

construction of a disability cannot be made sharply, because the

biological and the social are interactive in creating disability”

(23). Just as disability is partly a social construction, ability

is even more suspect in this regard. A particular form of ability

is idealized or normalized, and as a result, the western

industrial world is structured to accommodate those who most

closely reflect the able-bodied ideal, or as Wendell describes

them, “paradigm citizens.” Evolution was/is seen as a progressive

process in many instances, which left/leaves room for speculation

and anxiety about the regression of the human species.

Degeneration shows itself, in the twentieth century and today, as

a loss of identity, or more specifically, a loss of gender

40

identity. Gender ambiguity calls into question the very humanness

of the body because of its unintelligibility in a system that

appears to operate in equational terms of male/masculine and

female/feminine. In effect, a body that is not sexed or gendered

as specifically male/masculine or female/feminine is a disabled

body within the heteronormative paradigm.

In regards to intersexuality, Judith Butler asks: “what,

given the contemporary order of being, can I be?” (Undoing 58).

Butler is demonstrating the impossibility of “being” outside of

male and female, yet numerous individuals are born with

variations and combinations of male and female reproductive

organs. Why must intersexed individuals conform to an arbitrary

binary sex/gender system? We are socialized to “match” our gender

to our genitalia, and as a result, we force intersexed persons to

choose to “be” either male or female. Intersexuals are viewed as

aberrations and deviants who must be hormonally and surgically

“normalized.” In other words, they are sexually “disabled” bodies

who need “corrective surgery” in order to become intelligible

members of society. Butler argues that “naturalness is artificially

induced…in the name of normalization…[and] nature” (Undoing 66). In

41

Banks’ novel, the protagonist exposes the uncompromising nature

of sex/gender. At the end of the novel, Frank/Frances never

thinks to question the validity of claiming “I’m a woman” (241).

S/he does not even consider the possibility of “being” something

or someone other than man/male or woman/female, but what other

“choices” are there?

When one first reads The Wasp Factory, perhaps initially we are

able to psychologically justify Frank’s disturbing and malicious

actions because of h/er “accident,” and perceive h/er as a unique

or rare case an angry young man lashing out in reaction to a

“freak” emasculation. Frank h/erself attempts to justify h/er

actions in these terms: “I believe that I decided if I could

never become a man, I – the unmanned – would out-man those around

me, and so I became the killer…Perhaps I murdered for revenge in

each case…through the only potency at my command” (242-43). We

are awed and horrified by h/er self-serving rationalizations

regarding the “special talents” inherent to each sex: “women can

give birth and men can kill” (154), but in the end we find an

ironic twist in that all along a woman does the killing. The

reader is led into an essentialist trap at this point. Is this

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unsettling because Frank’s ideologies about men and women are not

that far off from our own? Is it the raw “truth” in the mouth of

a “madwo/man” that makes it uncanny? Perhaps Frank is merely

reflecting the culturally-driven and media-enforced generalized

stereotypes that we adamantly resist acknowledging in ourselves,

but force on others as a means of quick, thoughtless, time-saving

identification. Bank’s novel “works” because we subscribe, on

some level, to sex/gender stereotypes.

The misogynistic attitudes and gender stereotypes that run

rampant throughout Frank’s narrative gothicize or queer the

reading of the novel. Again, the novel “works” because the reader

is aware or knowledgeable of the claims and accusations Frank

makes. Frank openly discusses the fact that he views women as one

of h/er “greatest enemies” and claims that s/he hates them

because “they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men

and are nothing compared to them” (50). In the process of

“lessening – perhaps removing entirely – the influence of the

female” (240), Angus fosters Frank’s development of an extremely

negative, but not unfamiliar, attitude towards women. Frank views

women as uncanny creatures, or creatures to be feared and hated.

43

In another sense, Frank completely rejects the feminine in order

to bolster h/er own damaged masculinity. Butler comments that

“the subject, the speaking ‘I,’ is formed by virtue of having

gone through such a process of assuming a sex…[this process]

enables certain sexed identifications and forecloses and/or

disavows other identifications” (Bodies 3). In this way, Frank

excludes and rejects any characteristics s/he perceives as

feminine either in h/erself or in others. For example, s/he says

of h/er brother that “[Eric] cried like a girl” (43), and

“whatever disintegrated in Eric then, it was a weakness, a

fundamental flaw that a real man should not have had” (195).

Frank also notes that in order for women to be strong or valuable

they must have “more man in their character than most” (195).

Interestingly, s/he recognizes a gender continuum, one where

individuals possess both stereotypically masculine (strong,

emotionless, rational) and feminine (weak, emotional, irrational)

characteristics, but degrades the feminine: “I suspect that Eric

was the victim of a self with just a little too much woman in it”

(195). Frank’s misogynistic attitude is a reminder of the two-sex

model, which defines women in terms of men, and therefore

44

portrays the female as a flawed or under-developed creature. The

misogynistic attitude Banks attaches to Frank’s character, who is

biologically female, is ironic and perhaps verging on satirical,

but it is soberly reflective of the self-loathing females

experience in a society where males have historically constituted

the ideal.

The Gothic Lens: Visibility and “Looking”

Early in the novel, Frank watches Officer Diggs cross the

bridge from the mainland to the island. Frank is nestled amongst

the dunes on the island and thinks to h/erself, “He didn’t see

me, because I was too well hidden” (Banks 2). This line is

particularly significant because it hints at the obscurity of

Frank’s sex/gender. Frank is not only hidden from the public eye,

but also from the distinguishing characteristics of the

masculine/feminine sex/gender system. Frank does not fit neatly

into either category and is therefore unintelligible, hidden, or

impossible to “see” in a western socio-cultural framework or

context. Sex/gender categories are constructed to simplify the

western worldview. Bodies are divided “neatly” into procreative

45

pairs in order to give the appearance of clear, perceptible,

infallible norms. Sally Haslanger comments:

[O]ur everyday framework for thinking about human

beings is structured by the assumptions that there are

two (and only two) sexes, and that every human is

either a male or a female…Intersexed bodies are

eclipsed in our everyday framework…Whose interests are

served, if anyone’s by the intersexed being ignored in

the dominant conceptual framework? (17)

Visibility is often associated with “truth.” If we cannot “see”

something conceptually or physically, then it becomes a fallacy

that is either dismissed or ignored. Butler argues:

“Physical features” appear to be in some sense there on

the far side of language, unmarked by a social system…

[however], features gain social meaning and unification

through their articulation…As both discursive and

perceptual, ‘sex’ denotes an historically contingent

epistemic regime, a language that forms perception by

forcibly shaping the interrelationships through which

physical bodies are perceived. (Gender 155)

46

Frank’s body challenges the binary sex/gender system in that it

is discursively and physically imperceptible. Most bodies do not

fit entirely into either the masculine or the feminine. The

psychological, emotional, and physical traits attributed to one

gender or the other are fluid and changeable, and exist on a

continuum rather than in a fixed pair; however, we generally

dismiss those things that do not cohere the simplistic binary

vision of masculinity and femininity.

Frank is subject to the same western socio-cultural

conceptual framework as those persons who fit more tightly into

the constructed norms. Frank’s frustration, anger, and confusion

are the result of h/er inability to become the idyllic male

figure: “I want to look dark and menacing; the way I ought to

look, the way I should look, the way I might have looked if I

hadn’t had my little accident” (Banks 19-20). Monique Wittig

suggests that “what we believe to be a physical and direct

perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an

‘imaginary formation,’ which reinterprets physical features…

through the network of relationships in which they are perceived”

(qtd. in Butler, Gender 155). Therefore, Frank’s “condition” of

47

physical being, or lack of a hyper-masculine physique, is

attributed to an accident, a disfiguring accident that leaves

h/er in a seemingly sexless state. However, Frank’s “condition”

reflects a larger socio-cultural issue that discursively coerces

individuals to strive for the ideal masculine or feminine

procreative body. Frank’s desire to be “dark and menacing” also

points to the changeability of ideal body types and to the

variability of individual idealism. Foucault argues that “where

there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather

consequently, this resistance is never in a position of

exteriority in relation to power” (History 95). Therefore, Frank’s

resistance lies in the fact that s/he does not fulfill the

imagined ideal male body, and yet s/he somehow exists inside the

realm of masculinity. At the same time, Frank’s desire to fulfill

the ideal places h/er simultaneously in a position of resistance

and reinforcement.

Through Frank’s haunting narration, Banks uses blatant

sex/gender stereotypes out of their “gendered” context. First,

Frank describes h/er father as having a “delicate face, like a

woman’s” (5), and after charging Eric with crying “like a girl,”

48

he goes on to describe him as being “sentimental” and “sensitive”

(43). By describing “men” with stereotypically feminine

descriptors, Frank intends to be insulting, but instead s/he

unknowingly exposes the impossibility of “tidy” sex/gender

classification. At the end of the novel Frank, as Frances,

recognizes that s/he will never be an “attractive” woman (241).

Although it is a subtle statement, it is virulently encoded with

stereotypical thought. It implies that attractiveness is a

primary concern for women, but was of little importance to Frank

when s/he thought s/he was a man. Frank strives to be the closest

thing to the masculine ideal: “the killer, a small image of the

ruthless soldier-hero almost all [that he’d] ever seen or read…

pay strict homage to” (243). Also, s/he says that if s/he had not

been castrated, s/he might have been “a tall slim man, strong and

determined…making his way in the world, assured and purposeful”

(57). All of these comments reinforce men as a type, “the harder

sex” (154), virtually invincible and commanding, opposite to

women, and simply better. They also reinforce the fact that

masculinity is based solely on the penis. Frank admits that these

ideas stem from what s/he has seen (on TV) and read, but s/he

49

seems ultimately unaware that h/er schemas are based largely on

the manufactured ideals of unrealistic extremes, and that these

representations are designed to keep us dissatisfied with

ourselves so we will consume and acquire products that bring us

temporarily closer to the ideal. Frank immerses h/erself in war

games, weaponry, and ritual in order to “masculinize” h/erself by

association, and in order gain credibility and legitimacy as

“male.” Butler argues that “gender is not a fact, the various

acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts,

there would be no gender at all” (Gender 190). Again, repetition is

the legitimizing force within the binary sex/gender system.

Conclusions

The Gothic, both as a verb and a noun, functions to “queer”

socio-cultural norms, and therefore undermines the validity of

the norms in the first place. Frank’s body queers the concept of

gender as dual fixed entities, and somehow exists in a liminal

space where definition and classification are problematic or

almost impossible. The Gothic bends, flexes, and reacts to socio-

cultural norms, but never dissolves into them because the Gothic

50

subject will not be easily incorporated within that system of

knowledge. Just as Michel Foucault seeks to uncover “the way sex

is ‘put into discourse’…[by way of] the ‘polymorphous techniques

of power’” (History 11), I have examined the ways in which the

body, or its representation in the Gothic, symbolizes these power

structures, and yet betrays the ideal “ordered” body through its

noncompliance, while at the same time illustrating that all

bodies are “ordered” within a “naturalized” heteronormative

system.

The Gothic genre is notorious for testing borders and

beliefs, and addresses the subjects or objects of cultural

anxiety. We fear the unknown, so perhaps being unable to identify

an individual as either male or female is, in Freud’s terms,

unheimlich, and therefore disconcerting. Banks forces the reader

to re-examine the entire novel because the end reveals Frank to

be female instead of male. This information drives a re-reading

of key points in order to place the narration in a new context.

Because the character “changes” sex (perhaps a metaphorical sex-

change?), the meaning shifts and we must struggle to comprehend

what that denotes and connotes. We are unnerved by the fact that

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we are not able to categorize Frank beyond that of “monster,” and

thereby attach a preconceived web of sex/gender schemas to h/er.

It seems that whoever or whatever is perceptibly unintelligible

in Gothic fiction, becomes the monster. Frank is unintelligible

in a dichotomous sex/gender society, so we must therefore

disregard the ambiguously “sexed” because they are beyond clear

comprehension, or eradicate the ambiguity through the violent

imposition of the “natural” (Butler, Undoing 66). Perhaps that is

why Banks ends the novel conservatively – leaving the reader to

believe that Frank will embrace femininity and reject masculinity

– because there cannot be a satisfying resolution in the

possibility of a person living as both genders, or somewhere in

between. It is also possible, however, that Banks is satirizing

the sex/gender system by having Frank claim: “I am a woman.”

Perhaps readers are meant to reject the simplistic ending that

they are given, and recognize complexities and ambiguities that

the sex/gender system must ignore in all bodies in order to

establish itself as an inherent and “natural” way to divide and

socialize them.

52

Frankenstein’s creature is both life in death and death in

life, and Frank is both man in woman and woman in man. This

blending of binaries, however, is not enough. The ability to be

two or “double” leads to the possibility of multiple simultaneous

ways of knowing and being. The heteronormative sex/gender system

regulates and defines bodies in ways that are limited by

male/masculine and female/feminine. Rosi Braidotti suggests the

possibility of a shift away from definitions of sex/gender that

are contingent on binary-coded meaning:

[T]he subject of feminism is not Woman as the

complementary and specular other of man but rather a

complex and multi-layered embodied subject who has

taken her distance from the institution of femininity.

‘She’ no longer coincides with the disempowered

reflection of a dominant subject who casts his

masculinity in a universalistic posture. She, in fact,

may no longer be a she, but the subject of quite

another story: a subject-in-process, a mutant, the

other of the Other, a post-Woman embodied subject cast

53

in female morphology who has already undergone an

essential metamorphosis. (11-12)

Braidotti argues for the possibility of transformation within a

heteronormative system. She suggests that starting from a binary

standpoint does not limit the possible outcomes. Braidotti has

re-classified the subject of feminism as “she” who exists in

multiple and changeable forms.

It seems that rather than an experiencing an empowering

metamorphosis, Frank undergoes a transmogrification, or a “change

often with grotesque or humorous effect” (“Transmogrify”). Banks

sets out to throw the ideologies surrounding gender norms out of

balance, but really just creates a “seventeen-year-old monster”

(Punter 168), or a human aberration who is doomed to isolation

and/or societal ridicule. Banks does not successfully question or

challenge the binary gender system, but re-situates Frank within

it. Frank is doomed to suffer on the fringes because s/he is

neither a “credible” male nor an “acceptable” female, but Banks

forges ahead and ends the novel on a falsely positive note: “Now

the door closes, and my journey begins” (244). Frank seems oddly

eager to live as a woman and turn h/er back on everything s/he

54

was socialized to believe. The message is unsettlingly clear:

conformity and close adherence to idealized sex/gender norms is

the key to happiness and an identity, which is free from

ambiguity. However, why does a person’s “reality” come down to

sex/gender? How has sex/gender become the starting place for

social, cultural, and discursive practices? In regards to the

novel’s end, it would seem that the only thing missing is a scene

where Frank, now a fully feminized Frances, runs across the

bridge to the mainland, dress blowing in the wind, into the arms

of the welcoming townspeople.

55

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