Schizophrenia, Doppelgängers, Victor Frankenstein and Dory Seif

Having spent some time reading Frankenstein recently, I have had Frankenstein on the brain. Although there is plenty of textual evidence for this not being the case, I certainly entertained the theory that Victor Frankenstein was the monster; that he had committed all or most of the acts attributed to his creation. Although he may simply be a typical Romantic character (when will Timothée Chalamet play this role), his constant emotionalism and nearly endless minor yet debilitating nervous illnesses and other periods of seeming self-delusion and inability to reason effectively suggest serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia.

Mary Shelley’s book is full of doubles; many characters seem to have a light/dark partner—Victor and the creature, Henry and Victor, Elizabeth and Justine—and then there is the frame story (Walton’s) and the frame within the frame, in which Walton recounts Victor’s recounting of the creature’s tale, a recursive possibly psychological in-growth that starts to look like dissociative identify disorder. As I say, the text doesn’t completely support this reading but it doesn’t completely not support it, either.

I was thinking about this is the context of the latest season of Search Party, season four of which debuted on HBO Max recently (with a final block of episodes coming later this week). The show has been admirably all-over-the-place in its run, first as a clever metaphorical quarter-life crisis mystery comedy, then as a procedural thriller, then as a zany courtroom dramedy and now as psychological horror, while still being weirdly hilarious in a way that undercuts its purported seriousness. But if the show as a whole continues to function as a comic examination of quarter-life melodrama, what are we to make of all the twists and turns, which have taken us far beyond its original somewhat realism-adjacent scenario?

Could it be that, perhaps like Victor Frankenstein’s Romantic ravings, Dory Seif’s situation is actually (if there can be said to be an “actually”) a fantasy of her own mind’s creation? More to the point, whatever it turns out to “be” in the end, could we not understand it in this way?

After all, it doesn’t necessarily matter if the text seems, in some ways, to contradict this reading—we can still understand it as such. I have a feeling there is a name for this interpretation—it’s not that, in the story, it’s “all in her mind,” but rather that the story is what it is, but works better as a metaphor for the experience of the subconscious mind under certain circumstances.