The narrative form that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein takes has been likened to Russian nesting dolls,[1] in that each level of narration seems to uncover yet another narrative. Though Shelley did not invent the narrative technique of the frame-story, the way in which she implements the narrative frame in Frankenstein is unique. Beth Newman describes Shelley’s approach as borrowing from narrative conventions of the prior century and “[turning] them inside out” (144). In the novel, Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the Creature each have sections of the story in which they are in control of the narrative. Robert Walton relays the story he was told by Victor Frankenstein to his sister, and Victor’s story contains the Creature’s story, which in turn involves the story of the DeLacey family. In Shelley’s novel, the narratives also converge in surprising ways, in that the Creature, who begins existing solely in Victor’s narrative, eventually makes an appearance in Walton’s narrative. The novel is in certain respects a battle of voices, each fighting to claim their place in the text and the right to tell the story. When viewed from this perspective, the framing device is inextricably linked to character agency, in that narration provides a platform to display characters’ voices.

The episode of the television series The X-Files titled “The Post-Modern Prometheus” draws heavily on Shelley’s novel, and interacts with the novel’s themes of experimentation with storytelling and voice. The episode aired during the show’s fifth season in 1997 and was written and directed by the series’ creator Chris Carter. It features an ambitious mad-scientist who creates a monster and abandons him at birth, and a sympathetic depiction of a creature who, in his isolation, strives to find companionship. Unlike Shelley’s version, however, the creature in “The Post-Modern Prometheus” claims agency not just through his command of the narrative, but through creation. In his determination to connect with others, he drugs and impregnates women while they are unconscious.

The episode of The X-Files experiments with narrative structure in similar ways as Shelley’s experimentation with narrative frames. “The Post-Modern Prometheus” is a standalone episode that does not tie into the ongoing larger plot of the series, and in its independence it is free to test storytelling boundaries. The episode takes place within the bounds of a comic book. Just as Shelley’s novel includes the perspectives of Walton, Victor, and the Creature, “The Post-Modern Prometheus” contains the perspectives of investigators Mulder and Scully, the mad-scientist, and eventually, the episode allows the monster to speak for himself and explain his behavior. Both the episode and the novel prompt the question of who has the right to tell the story of the monster. In raising this question, both the novel and the episode illuminate the gaps in narration, in regards to the voices who are lost. While narrative structure and voice work in conjunction to address the absence of the female voice in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in The X-Files episode “The Post-Modern Prometheus,” narrative structure and voice serve to keep the victims of the story silenced.

Just as the framing devices of Frankenstein allow Shelley to experiment with the boundaries of narration, in “The Post-Modern Prometheus,” the framing devices within the episode create a commentary on the manipulative nature of storytelling, and invite its audience to read the episode through the lens of a deconstruction of the truth (Kowalski 279). The episode begins with the close-up image of a collector’s issue of a comic book titled “The Great Mutato.” The cover depicts a green monster, though when a hand turns the page and opens the comic book, the episode morphs into black and white. When the camera zooms into the comic book’s first page, the illustration transforms into live action. Just like that, the episode enters into the world of the comic book. This device permits the episode to detach from the series’ established tone, which usually attempts to ground the supernatural in realistic settings. “The Post-Modern Prometheus” trades the show’s typical tone for a more fantastical one. The comic book setting, as well as the episode’s black and white aesthetic, allows the episode to experiment with tonal shifts, capturing both the eeriness and the melodrama of classic horror films such as James Whale’s 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein. Moreover, in beginning the episode in a position that is exterior to the comic book, and capturing the immersion into the world, the episode underscores the manufactured bounds within which the action takes place.

Frankenstein and the episode widely differ in their treatment of the monster’s victims. While neither give the female victims in the story a sincere platform to voice their experience in the same way as the male narrators use their voices, it appears that the authorial intentions of the two texts diverge. Several scholars have put forth their contention that the female victims of Mary Shelley’s story are silenced by design[2], a means of illustrating their silencing in society and the ways in which women become casualties of toxic masculinity. Meanwhile, The X-Files episode falls short on its treatment of women. Among the monster’s victims are a dim Jerry Springer fan who hopes her monstrous impregnation will land her a spot on the sensational talk show, and a woman who is desperate to become a mother, a desire that positions the monster’s sexual attack on her as essentially a benevolent act that gives her the child she coveted. In this callous treatment of the female victims, it is evident that the show has a rather different intention regarding its message towards the female characters.

From the cold-open of “The Post-Modern Prometheus,” the intention of prioritizing a benevolent monster over any of his female victims is clear. The show introduces the audience to a victim of the creature’s sexual assault, and the framing of the scene positions the audience to align oneself with the monster. The camera angle puts the audience in the creature’s point of view as he breaks into the woman’s house. All the audience sees of the creature are his feet, as he gazes down at them. When he looks up, the camera shows his gaze at the woman who will become his victim. It isn’t until the sound of Cher singing “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” begins to play that the camera reveals the silhouette of the monster. The music is diegetic, and the blaring of the music startles the woman. The sequence ends with the monster entering her room, and the audience gets their view of him at the same time that the startled woman does. The camera needs to cut away at the moment preceding the attack, or the audience would not be able to sympathize with the monster. Instead, the focus is on the monster’s quirks, including his adoration of Cher. Despite the monster impregnating female characters without consent, “The Post-Modern Prometheus” resists holding the creature accountable for his actions. Instead, the show depicts these crimes as comedic, treating them as farce (Mooney 98). The moments the episode does not frame are crucial to manipulating the audience’s sympathies in this regard. The episode requires careful crafting in that there are events that must remain off-screen in order to keep the possibility of forgiving the monster open in the episode’s final moments.

The episode’s mad-scientist, Dr. Pollidori (a nod to Lord Byron’s doctor, John William Polidori) is the monster’s creator, though unlike Shelley’s novel, the episode never frames Pollidori as a true agent of the narrative. By that I mean that the audience is never aligned with Pollidori as a protagonist the way that Shelley’s novel aligns the reader with Victor. There is no indication that “The Post-Modern Prometheus” attempts to tell the mad-scientist’s story. He is framed as the true monster from the moment he enters the episode. The scene preceding his entrance involves the agents tracking down the monster, The Great Mutato. In the process, they encounter an old man, who tells them, “There ain’t no monster. I’ll show you the monster you’re looking for” (“The Post-Modern Prometheus). Immediately following this dialogue, the camera cuts to Dr. Pollidori’s laboratory, indicating that the true monster is the man blinded by his own hubris. The scene introducing the doctor is filled with histrionics. As he speaks to the agents about his scientific ambitions, delivering a heavy-handed speech declaring that he will be remembered as “a visionary leader of men” (“The Post-Modern Prometheus”) for his genetic mutation experiments, thunder rumbles and lightning illuminates the background of the laboratory, amplifying the melodrama of the scene. In a town of simpletons, Dr. Pollidori stands out as intellectually superior, though he is no less cartoonish than the rest of the cast of characters.

Just as in Mary Shelley’s novel, Chris Carter’s monster has the opportunity to tell his own story in the episode. Carter’s monster is quite similar to Shelley’s in demeanor. He is depicted as sensitive and misunderstood, a creature yearning for human connection. In his speech addressing a torch-bearing mob, he reveals that Dr. Pollidori created him 25 years ago, and that Pollidori’s father raised the monster as his own son after Pollidori rejected him. The monster tells the crowd that while his physical appearance is “quite horrible to the human senses, [he has] never acted to harm another soul” (“The Post-Modern Prometheus”). The statement goes unchallenged by the townspeople, including the women who are carrying his children as a result of his sexual violations. Evidently, in the world of “The Post-Modern Prometheus,” sexual violence towards women does not classify as a harmful act. In his reading of the episode, Cary Jones addresses the episode’s use of music to manipulate a tonal shift in this scene; while the scenes centered around the townspeople contain whimsical music one might hear at a carnival, this scene contains mellow, tragic music, an indication that “the Monster might, in fact, be a sympathetic figure with human emotions” (186). It is evident from his speech that of all the characters in “The Post-Modern Prometheus,” the monster is the only one who is emotionally grounded. This fact aligns him with the series’ protagonists, Mulder and Scully. Throughout the episode, Mulder and Scully remain outsiders to the eccentric cast of characters. Though they are at times slightly heightened versions of themselves, they are far more rooted in a reality that separates them from the townspeople. In aligning the monster with the protagonists of the series, Carter insinuates that the monster should win the audience’s sympathies, despite his crimes against women.

When the monster’s first female victim, Shaineh Berkowitz, appears in the episode following her attack, the tone is far less severe. She is treated as a daft yokel with an outlandish story, a story that makes Agent Scully roll her eyes at the victim. While Scully is famously skeptical throughout the series, the heightened tone of the episode allows Scully to display an extreme condescension towards the female victim, a condescension that would come across as grossly inappropriate in one of the show’s less experimental episodes. Though Scully is not typically outwardly rude to the victims of the crimes she investigates, the series nevertheless has a history of treating incidences of sexual assault flippantly, a pattern that leads Darren Mooney to remark that the show “struggles to properly consider the gender politics” (98) of such a premise as the one presented in this episode, which is evident in the depiction of Shaineh following her attack. In her first scene following the incident with the monster, her emotions are far from reflective of a woman who experienced the trauma of sexual assault. Instead of expressing rage towards the extreme personal violation, she focuses on insipid details, such as informing agents Mulder and Scully that her intruder ate a full jar of her peanut butter on the night of the attack. She seems more indignant that the intruder set a drink down on a table without a coaster than she does that he sexually violated her. The lighthearted treatment of sexual assault minimizes the female experience, and while Shaineh does have the space to share her story with the investigators, she is relegated to a cartoonish simpleton. The framing of the episode does not allow her story to hold any emotional weight. Instead, she is depicted as a caricature for the audience to laugh at. The only sincere, grounded emotion in the episode is reserved for the monster, whose demonization by society evokes sympathy in the episode’s audience.

The episode proceeds to draw further attention to its narrative form when it is revealed that Shaineh’s son Izzy created the comic book “The Great Mutato,” which features a monster matching the description of his mother’s attacker. While questioning Shaineh, Scully finds a copy of the comic book in the house and expresses her skepticism that the monstrous description of Shaineh’s attacker matches her son’s comic book monster. Scully’s uncertainty indicates that she believes Shaineh conflated reality with a fictitious character her son created. Her skepticism draws attention to the slippery boundaries of narrative. Furthermore, “The Great Mutato” is the comic book in which this episode takes place; the comic book Scully finds is the same comic book that the episode entered into at its start, which suggests that Izzy is the creator of the framework responsible for what the audience views. Throughout the episode, Carter does not present Izzy as a character with much agency or authority, and yet he is the creator of the framework containing the episode.

The episode’s second victim is Dr. Pollidori’s wife Elizabeth. Elizabeth shares a name with Victor Frankenstein’s love interest, and similar to Shelley’s depiction of the character Elizabeth in the novel, Dr. Pollidori’s wife is depicted as meek and deferential to men. In the scene prior to the monster’s impending attack, Elizabeth speaks to her husband about her desire for children. He dismisses her, calling children “mewling little monsters” (“The Post-Modern Prometheus”) and asks her to choose between a baby and a Nobel Prize, though the question is rhetorical. In reality, her desires are irrelevant. Highlighting Elizabeth’s desire for children and her powerlessness in her marriage positions the monster’s rape as an act of kindness. His act of violation gives her the child she was refused by the story’s villain. This problematic framing manipulates the story in that it prioritizes the male monster over his female victim.

The episode’s ending both plays with the boundaries of narrative structure and highlights the lost voices of the victims. In the end, The Great Mutato is arrested for his crimes. Despite the monster’s undisputed guilt, Mulder rejects this conclusion, stating that it “is not how the story is supposed to end” and calls attention to the story’s framing device, asking, “Where’s the writer? I want to speak to the writer” (“The Post-Modern Prometheus”). In the context of the story, the writer is Izzy, who appears just as Mulder verbalizes his request. In declaring that there is a correct ending to the story and suggesting that the narrative can be rewritten to edit the mistaken ending, Mulder communicates an awareness of existing within the frame narrative of the comic book. Newman notes that frame stories, “by giving the words of one speaker over to another, often force us to confront voice in this textual sense” (146). In this instance, this moment in the episode experiments with story structure by drawing attention to it and its ability to revise one ending and in favor of another, fantastical one. The rewritten ending shows Mulder and Scully taking The Great Mutato to a Cher concert, where the entire town is in attendance. Mulder high-fives the monster, and Cher takes the monster’s hand and asks him to dance. The refashioned ending, as Darren Mooney points out, is an “overly elaborate happy ending” (97). The rewrite is excessively implausible, and this excess suggests that Carter is drawing attention to the boundaries of fiction, and the episode’s transgression of these boundaries.

Frankenstein’s frame structure likewise draws attention to form and raises questions regarding the reliability of narration. In Victor’s narrative, he often draws attention to his story’s form by expressing an awareness of his audience. On occasion, he addresses his listener’s eagerness to hear his tale. For example, in one instance he assures Walton that “the wonder and hope with your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted” (Shelley 33). In another instance, he states, “I forget that I am moralizing in the most interesting part of my tale; and your looks remind me to proceed” (Shelley 36). In these asides communicating an acknowledgment of his audience, Victor reminds the reader of the novel’s established frame, while he savors the experience of having a captive audience. This quality of playing to an audience is present in all three of the primary narrative frames, though to different means. In Victor’s case, his engagement with his audience is linked to his ego, as it reads as his savoring of the power he finds in narration.

Likewise, Walton also uses language that indicates that he is performing for his audience. Before the novel transitions from Walton’s narrative to Victor’s story, Walton tells his sister that the transcription of Victor’s story “will doubtless afford you the greatest pleasure: but to me, who know him, and who hear it from his own lips, with what interest and sympathy shall I read it in some future day!” (Shelley 17). There is an articulation of the joy of stories in his sentiment to his sister. And while Walton does communicate an awareness of his audience, he does not intrude upon the central story of Victor and the Creature by overpowering their narratives (Dunn 412). He does not insert moments of personal reflection that indicate that he is undergoing a grand personal transformation. His evolution is minor, and he does not distract the reader with his personal journey towards growth.

The importance of successfully commanding narration in Frankenstein is evident in the attention paid to the Creature’s journey towards the learning of language. When detailing his journey towards speech and literacy, he describes the frustration he experienced without the ability to articulate himself. He tells Victor, “No distinct ideas crossed my mind” (Shelley 76) in his early existence without speech. The statement indicates that language is required to engage with free thought, and that the Creature understands that ideas are an element that is essential to human life, otherwise he would not feel deprived without them. He goes on to describe his struggle, stating, “Sometimes I tried to imitate the pleasant songs of the birds, but was unable. Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth, inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again” (Shelley 76). His initial failed attempts to find his own voice speak to the challenges of developing a voice of authority. From this excerpt, it is difficult not to view the Creature’s experience as parallel for the experience of women in society at the time of Shelley’s writing, in that the options were largely limited in developing their own voices. The Creature’s reaction to his inarticulate voice elevates the importance of commanding one’s voice. In learning to articulate himself, the Creature gains agency and is allowed to share his story. He learns to navigate language and present his experience persuasively. His skillful oration indicates that he understands how to implement language for an end, finding the power in storytelling.

When the Creature takes command of the narrative, he communicates yet another embedded narrative, which is his longing to connect with the members of the DeLacey family. In the Creature’s story of the DeLacey family, he expresses a sentimental understanding of human connection. In witnessing the blind man and his daughter Agatha share a moment of tenderness, the Creature describes feeling “a mixture of pain and pleasure, such as [he] had never before experienced, either from hunger or cold, warmth or food” (Shelley 80). The affection he sees elicits feelings that exceed beyond the realm of needs. In awakening his desires beyond the requirements to sustain life, the Creature captures a turning point in his narrative. The desire to connect is what inspires his dedication to learn how to communicate. He states, “although I eagerly longed to discover myself to the cottagers, I ought not to make the attempt until I had first become master of their language” (Shelley 84). He understands language as the bridge to connection, and views it as his one hope for the family’s acceptance of him despite his physical appearance. The Creature is “the one narrator who attempts to reach inward and connect himself intimately with the story he tells” (Dunn 414). Through his story of the DeLacey family, the Creature describes his verbal awakening and the motivations behind his language development. The Creature’s education is one of concrete knowledge of language, but it is also an education of human relationships.

The Creature’s ability to eloquently tell the story of the DeLacey family is imperative to the novel as a whole, because it is this awakening of humanity that situates him as a sympathetic character. In her article “Novelistic Sympathy in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Jeanne M. Britton asserts that “by insisting on sympathy’s auditory component, Shelley redefines sympathy as intrinsically narrative” (14). The Creature’s narration stands out amongst the other men’s for its reflection and sentimentality. For example, when he describes his realization of the harm he caused the poverty-stricken DeLacey family by eating their food, he expresses his remorse and informs Victor that he altered his behavior in response, not wanting to cause the family harm. Then, he goes on to describe the quiet ways he would assist the family, such as gathering wood for their fire. In articulating his thought process and chronicling his gradual understanding of social bonds, as well as his ability to process his mistakes and correct his behavior accordingly, the Creature crafts a narrative that depicts him as more human than his human creator.

With the three men’s narratives at the forefront, it may appear that Frankenstein lacks fully developed female characters or women who take agency over the narrative. Despite the centrality of the male characters in the story, several scholars have asserted that the text is indeed a feminist text. Mary Poovey suggested that the novel mirrors Shelley’s personal struggle to negotiate her femininity with her ambition, stating that the joint depiction of Victor and his monster “elevates feminine helplessness to the stature of myth” (142). In their groundbreaking text The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar view Frankenstein as implementing “Romantic modes and manners to enact subversively feminist reinterpretations of Paradise Lost” (220). Gilbert and Gubar view the novel as a palimpsest, in that it allows Shelley to mask female concerns “within male-devised genres and conventions” (220). These feminist readings suggest that Shelley wrote the novel with intentions of communicating the complexities of women’s role in a male-dominated society.

In Frankenstein, the layers of narration allow for a struggle to claim one’s voice, but they also highlight the female characters whose voices are lost. In the case of Justine, voice plays a crucial role in her fate, because it is her inability to articulately defend herself against the allegations that she murdered William Frankenstein that ultimately results in her death. When testifying before the court, Justine states that she has “no power of explaining” (Shelley 59) how William’s picture of his mother wound up in her pocket and says that she is “only left to conjecture” (Shelley 59) that someone planted it there. Justine’s uncertainty prevents her from forming an alternative story that would exonerate her. Justine’s inability to stitch together a clean narrative explaining her innocence “exacerbates the incoherence of her story, for coherence depends on the very self-consistency that her voice, like the story it tries to tell, lacks” (Newman 149-50). When defending herself, Justine’s voice is described as “audible although variable” (Shelley 58), a description that implies a weakness and unsteadiness that Justine cannot overcome. Justine is not an agent of the narrative; she does not exhibit the ability to navigate around a story the way the novel’s male narrators do. Criscillia Benford notes that “the creature uses narrative to rewrite the social meaning of Justine’s identity – transforming her in the eyes of her community from a loyal servant to a murderous “monster” of ingratitude (329). The incident of Justine’s sentencing demonstrates the Creature’s superior ability to craft a plausible narrative of Justine’s supposed guilt, a skill that leads to her ultimate fate.

Other than Justine, Elizabeth is the other primary female figure in the novel. Shelley uses Elizabeth to comment on the trappings of domesticity. Victor notes that following his mother’s death, Elizabeth “felt that the most imperious duty, of rendering her uncle and cousins happy, had devolved upon her. She consoled me, amused her uncle, instructed my brothers” (Shelley 27). In other words, her duty became serving the men around her as she assumed the position as the family’s new matriarch. Victor goes on to say that he “never beheld her so enchanting as at this time, when she was continually endeavoring to contribute to the happiness of others, entirely forgetful of herself” (Shelley 27). From this statement, it appears Victor finds Elizabeth most charming when she dissolves into the background, putting herself aside. This sentiment encapsulates Elizabeth’s role in the novel: she is largely blank. Shelley depicts her as angelic and passive, moral without complexity. She remains one-dimensional throughout the text, with her sole purpose seemingly being to serve Victor and the men in the Frankenstein family. Her journey is towards becoming domesticated, though it is a failed venture. In depicting the most prominent female character in her novel as excessively angelic and fairly vacant beyond her admiration for the man she is betrothed to, Shelley draws further attention to the repression of women and effectively “push[es] against a patriarchal form that privileges male identity and speech and victimizes even obedient women” (Hodges 162). In replicating the trope and working within its bounds, she sheds light on the problem of female representation.

The only seemingly successful presence of domesticity in the novel occurs on the periphery of the novel with Walton’s sister, Mrs. Saville, though the details of her domestic situation remain off the page and her voice remains silent. The content of the novel “makes domestic tranquility an unattainable ideal, a state that can never, in the world it represents, be achieved” (Newman 158). In Victor’s narrative, he describes his youth surrounded by his mother and father, Elizabeth, Ernest, and William, stating “Such was our domestic circle, from which care and pain seemed for ever banished” (Shelley 25). Of course, it only seemed to offer protection from pain. It would soon crumble, first with the matriarch’s death, and later, William and Elizabeth would meet their end at the Creature’s hand. With the catastrophic demise of domestic spaces and relationships in Frankenstein, Shelley offers a transgressive image of traditional notions of domestication.

Ultimately, both Frankenstein and “The Post-Modern Prometheus” use form to communicate an awareness of performative storytelling. In addressing narrative technique, both texts interact with the manipulative aspect of storytelling, as well as confronting the possibilities for deconstructing the truth in storytelling. In providing platforms for voices, the narrative techniques in these texts leave noticeable gaps in the voices who remain suppressed. But while Shelley uses the suppression of the female voice to mirror the subjugated female in patriarchal society and draw attention to the gaps of their silence, The X-Files episode reduces the female victims to punchlines, suppressing them without a greater purpose.

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

“The Post-Modern Prometheus.” The X-Files. Fox, 30 Nov. 1997.

Benford, Criscillia. “Listen to My Tale”: Multilevel Structure, Narrative Sense Making, and the Inassimilable in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Narrative, vol. 18, no. 3, Oct. 2010, pp. 324-346. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/login.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3daph%26AN%3d52849324%26site%3dehost-live%26scope%3dsite. Accessed 15 April 2018.

Britton, Jeanne M. “Novelistic Sympathy in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein.’” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 48, no. 1, 2009, pp. 3–22. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25602177. Accessed 12 April 2018.

Dunn, Richard J. “Narrative Distance in “Frankenstein.”” Studies in the Novel, vol. 6, no. 4, 1974, http://www.jstor.org.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/stable/29531685. Accessed 15 April 2018.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and The Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 213-237.

Hodges, Devon. “Frankenstein and the Feminine Subversion of the Novel.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 2, no. 2, 1983, pp. 155-164. http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/hodges.html. Accessed 2 May 2018.

Jones, Cary. “Postmodern Voices: The X-Files And Subjective Storytelling.” The X-Files and Literature: Unweaving the Story, Unraveling the Lie to Find the Truth. 2007, pp 174-193.

Kowalski, Dean A. The Philosophy of “The X-Files.” University Press of Kentucky, 2009.

Mooney, Darren. Opening “The X-Files:” A Critical History of the Original Series. McFarland, 2017.

Newman, Beth. “Narratives of Seduction and the Seductions of Narrative: The Frame Structure of Frankenstein.” ELH, vol. 53, no. 1, 1986, pp. 141-163. ProQuest, https://search-proquest-com.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/docview/53237670?accountid=9840, doi:http://dx.doi.org.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/10.2307/2873151. Accessed 15 April 2018.

Poovey, Mary. “My Hideous Progency: The Lady and the Monster.” The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 114-142. http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/poovey.html. Accessed 2 May 2018.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Edited by Susan J. Wolfson, Longman Cultural Edition, 2007.

 

Notes

[1] Criscillia Benford explores the metaphor of the novel’s form as a Russian nesting doll in her essay “’Listen to My Tale’: Multilevel Structure, Narrative Sense Making, and the Inassimilable in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”

[2] Among the most influential feminist readings of Shelley’s novel are Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, which I will draw upon later in this essay.