Abstract
In this paper, I examine the miseducation that exclusionary punishment initiates through the significance of gender in the novel Frankenstein. I focus on the minor character of Justine and place her story at the center, as a major account of exclusionary punishment and miseducation in literature. I highlight Shelley’s story about Justine—in its philosophical and educational importance—as a tale about the significance of gender, exclusionary punishment, and miseducation. Justine’s exclusionary punishment is notable in that she is a young girl punished for the crimes of a man and his murderous creation. While Frankenstein and his creature feel themselves to be monstrous at times, Justine is made to be a monster as she is excluded and punished for the crimes of a man. As a result, she nearly begins to believe herself to be monstrous. This is her miseducation as she internalizes her own oppression and is excluded from belonging to human community. Justine’s story both reminds and cautions us that we make our own monsters. The making of Justine into a monster exposes exclusionary punishment as a false education—a miseducation. She is easily neglected through her youth, gender, and femininity as her story is couched within the toiling masculinity of Frankenstein and his creature. Through Justine, I claim that exclusionary punishment is miseducative as evidenced through the gendered experience of being educated to be more woman than person, more gender than human.
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Notes
I am grateful to the reviewers of this paper who helped push for this important development on the significance of gender and for nurturing the move of centering Justine and telling a different story.
I am grateful to the mentorship of an early reader who reminded me that in a text based on correspondence, “letters do things” and subsequently pushed me to question what Elizabeth’s letter enacts and signifies in relation to Justine.
For a semiotic understanding of monster, the term monster comes from the Latin monstrare which means “to demonstrate,” “to reveal,” or “to teach.” In an etymological sense, a monster is already something of education insofar as it signifies a demonstration. The term demonstrative from demonstratif means the “showing or making manifest the truth or existence (of something)” (Online Etymology Dictionary). In this sense, monster is a demonstrative revealing that prompts a certain form of existence. There is also the more theological monster from the Latin monstrum meaning “divine omen,” as a warning from a God or gods. For instance, “A warning suggests that there is something one could do. By doing such, it stimulates… it summons choices to be made… The initial sign, then, warns of the catastrophe, but the disaster produces victims who … in effect, become signs, carrying… disaster wherever they go. They become, in other words, monsters. Monsters of disaster are special kinds of divine warning. They are harbingers of things we do not want to face… and we fear that they will bring such events upon us by coming to us” (Gordon and Gordon 2016). In this way, a monster is not necessarily a physical entity insomuch as it is a cautionary revealing.
It is useful here to refer to Nietzsche’s understanding of punishment as the desire to cause suffering insofar as it functions “to make suffer was in the highest degree pleasurable, to the extent that the injured party exchanged for the loss he had sustained… that of making suffer—a genuine festival… To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle… Without cruelty there is no festival… in punishment there is so much that is festive!” (Nietzsche, 2000a, b, 501-503).
Importantly, the demeaning and oppressive power over women becomes a “double jeopardy” for women of color (Bartky, 1990, 91–2).
For instance, Biesta claims, “The means we use in education—our teaching styles, the ways in which we try to promote certain ways of doing and being—are not neutral with regard to the ends but potentially also teach something to students. Punishment is a good example of this as we may well have strong evidence about the effectiveness of some forms of punishment, and we may even have come to the value-judgement that with regard to the use of punishment in a particular situation the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Yet still we may decide not to use punishment as it would teach children ‘that it is appropriate or permissible in the last resort to enforce one’s will or get one’s own way by the exercise of violence’ (Carr 2006, p. 249)… These points show that values are not simply an element of educational practices, but that they are actually constitutive of such practices” (Biesta 2010).
For example, restraint and seclusion, in-school suspension, out-of-school suspension, expulsion with educational services, expulsion without educational services, expulsion under zero tolerance policies, referral to law enforcement, and transfer to alternative school are permissible forms of punishment within educational institutions. Furthermore, racialized students (predominantly Black students) and students with disabilities are disproportionately disciplined at higher rates (U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, (2016)).
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The author received mentorship on the paper from Dr. Sam Rocha, Dr. Amy Shuffelton, and Dr. Cara Furman.
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Frattura, A. Mary Shelley’s Justine and the Monstrous Miseducation of Exclusionary Punishment. Stud Philos Educ 41, 669–685 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-022-09854-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-022-09854-4