“Monsters Worse to Come”: A Reconsideration of the Influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Upon Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God

Abstract

In a 2008 essay, Ashley Craig Lancaster has demonstrated the principal parallels and divergences between Mary Shelley’s Gothic masterpiece Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (using the 1818 edition) and Cormac McCarthy’s Southern Gothic novel Child of God (1973) in their complementary representations of Shelley’s Monster and McCarthy’s voyeur, necrophile, and murderer Lester Ballard.1 Lancaster proposes that “McCarthy combines the tradition of British Gothicism with the realism of American Gothicism to create an updated version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (132). According to Lancaster, Shelley and McCarthy’s anti-heroes are rejected by human community, denied companionship, and subjected to a “system of social othering” (133). Ultimately, “Lester becom[es] exactly what the townspeople have always thought of him as, a dangerously degenerate man” (142). Lancaster’s persuasive thesis accords with other interpretations of Child of God which maintain that “the novel seems designed ... to build sympathy for Ballard” (Lang 93; see Ellis 69–112). Notwithstanding, Lancaster overlooks several episodes that not only show the direct influence of Shelley’s work upon McCarthy’s third Appalachian novel, but also indicate McCarthy’s ambitious purpose to draw the reader into imaginative sympathy for Ballard’s plight as Shelley did for her Monster. Two passages McCarthy adapts from Shelley’s Frankenstein intimate Ballard’s moral imagination and his latent capacity for goodness and reformation. In the first passage, Shelley’s Monster delivers an extensive history of his early life to his creator Victor Frankenstein in which he recounts how he placed all his hopes upon being welcomed and socially accepted by a family of cottagers. On beholding the Monster, however, the cottagers are horrified, https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1951641