The novel is a watery place, it obscures vision and reason as it falls from the sky in a thunderstorm while Dr. Frankenstein brings his monster to life. It's daunting as a vast ocean, isolating the creator from his creation. It's potentially lethal when the little girl the monster saves nearly drowns.
Water is a conduit for moving characters and a conveyor of meaning. It invokes the sublime, and is unconfined, and unowned. And yet the men in the novel transgress it, explore it, and seek to wield it at will. Hence, the Dr. placing the ocean between him and his creation.
According to Ann McClintock in Imperial Leather, the ideological feminization of the Earth is a discursive construction used to explain and justify male exploration and eventual colonization of both land and water. The ocean becomes a "virginal" landscape, vast, beautiful, and “fertile,” available to be filled, conquered, mapped, and subdued by masculine explorers.
Exploration yields a loss of boundary for the explorer who craves stability and security. The feminization of the land and water is a compensatory measure to reinstitute security and power. In this context, feminine characterizations of water become intelligible as a facilitation of a patriarchal ideology fueling the ability to colonize and "subdue" resources required for survival, and expel all those rendered "other."
The California Oroville and Michigan dam failures are a physical example of a loss of boundary and security. Its a failure of an ideological system of containment and control.
In addition to the dam disasters, the degradation of the Colorado river, and those communities most impacted by loss of water south of the border in Mexico are the lethal consequences of us creating and not tending to our monster.
Instead of water crossing manufactured boundaries and drying up within others, sometimes those boundaries cross into water when pipelines burst and contaminate water tables and lead pipes erode (by use of already polluted water) and further poison the water and its consumers.
Despite all of this, we continue to remove water from the commons and place the resource in the hands of for-profit private companies in an extended effort to regulate, manipulate, and possess.
The Dakota Access Pipeline and Flint Michigan's water crisis are current examples of water corporatization and privatization that has cost residents their land, homes, savings, and, in some cases, lives.
Anticipating the future requires looking into the past.
Let's take a brief look at Bolivia's water wars, beginning circa 1997
In 1997, the World Bank pressured Bolivia privatize their water resources in order to render themselves eligible for foreign aid. A multinational company was conveniently introduced and a centuries old system ensuring water a public commodity and locally engineered to be made available to everyone despite peripheral locations, was replaced with increasingly limited access to water and exponentially higher water rates and imposed tariffs.
The Betchel Corporation's reign didn't last long
In the city of Cochabamba, indigenous communities revolted, leading to a declaration of martial law against them by their own government which was working to preserve the multinational company's contract. Eventually, however, the people won and expelled the Betchel Corporation. They reinstated and refurbished public water systems and returned water rights to the commons.
"The communities of Cochabamba rejected the concepts of ‘individual private ownership’ and of ‘state public ownership’ in favor of what they described as ‘communal public ownership.’ This type of ownership does not depend on the state but on the people directly, nor does it belong to one individual, but to the entire community. According to Anibal Quijano, this form of anti-capitalist ownership, operating on reciprocity, equality and solidarity, has widespread and deep roots in Latin America. Community organisations are ‘not islands in the sea of the urban world dominated by capital. They are part of the sea that, in turn, modulates and controls the logic of capital'" - Tom Murray "Creating the Commons: on the meaning of Bolivia’s water wars"
Dr. Frankenstein never imagines he would lose control of his creation so quickly. Immediately after its animation his security is lost. Frankenstein's monster never entered the public sphere but managed to take from it, in the form of human life. In the case of Bolivia, the monster of private, multinational companies deliberately worked outside that sphere in order to extract from it, water and life alike.
Above: Orkneys isles in Scotland where Victor travels to isolate himself in order to produce a companion for his monster.
Left: The Arctic where the book begins and ends.
Below: Ireland where Henry's body washes up on shore.
In the novel, water is unpredictable and never functions in exactly the way Victor needs it to. It never fully isolates nor it does provide security or boundary. Even in Geneva where the waters are seemingly tame, something devastating is submerged just below the surface, foreshadowing a devastating end. All the monster does is exploit this vulnerability.
In the same way, our failing water infrastructure is highlighting a devastating flaw in our ideology, one that will produce a future in which the manicured aerial images of manufactured water-ways will give way to the sublimity of the rising oceans, of flooded cities, and expanding arid landscapes.
At which point, not even the wealthiest multinational company will survive unscathed.
Credits:
Created with an image by lindaparton - "City of Flint Water Plant "