Frankenstein: Children, Duties, and the (In)Justice of Rights

This essay explores Mary Shelley’s contribution to the political philosophy of children’s rights and its connection to duties-based justice by establishing a dialogue between Frankenstein and The Rights of Infants (1797). A little-studied treatise by Thomas Spence, Rights of Infants advances a proto-feminist stance that is not unlike Godwin’s and Wollstonecraft’s model in that it foregrounds duties from which rights can be extrapolated. Two points made by Spence inform this reading of Frankenstein. First, Spence’s text spotlights a neglected line of thought during the French Revolution, which, contrary to social contract theory, posits the child as the paradigmatic recipient of justice and familial life as the cornerstone for deliberations on justice. Second, Spence identified acts of conquest camouflaged as a fabled, non-existent consent between people and government by social contract theorists like Hobbes and Locke. Shelley’s novel dramatizes these two points by taking infancy as the ground zero on which to think of justice, and then, incrementally exposing a logic of conquest through the concatenated deaths of William and Justine and the destruction of the inanimate female creature. The essay concludes that the novel stages a far-reaching interrogation of rights-based justice, thus extending a view of justice that has gained prominence in critiques of neoliberalism over the last half-century.