"Frankenstein" and Dis(re)membered Identity

Author(s): Eleanor Salotto

Source: The Journal of Narrative Technique , Fall, 1994, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Fall, 1994), pp.
190-211
Published by: Journal of Narrative Theory

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30225415

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 Frankenstein and Dis(re)membered
Identity
Eleanor Salotto

1. Dis(re)membering Identities and Texts

Frankenstein elucidates a story about the subject which does not correspond to
Frankenstein's intentions: the creature does not turn out as Frankenstein had
envisioned him. In making the self first through his project of creating the creature
and then through his narrative enterprise, Frankenstein fabricates a fictional other,
several steps removed from originary signification. The creature, as the excess in
identity, fractures Frankenstein's wish to create a creature in his likeness. Franken-
stein desires to re-member his identity after the death of his mother by creating the
creature; when this project fails, however, he turns to narrative to re-member his life.
The re-membering of identity and text founders; Shelley shows that attempts to
construct a composite text and subject are fictions to be dismantled. Narrative in this
text is divided among three narrators: Walton, Frankenstein, and the creature. This
diffusion of narrative voice indicates that the narrative body is not whole, incapable
of reproducing a sutured narrative about the origins of one's life. Narrative moves
from one subject to another: Frankenstein tells the story of the creature, and Walton
writes down Frankenstein's tale. The subject cannot present itself directly: it does
so through the screen of another voice, so to speak. Other voices and texts take over
and rewrite the narrative one posits of one's life. The frame narrative thus disturbs
the notion of unitary identity, on which the notion of autobiography has rested.
The coexistence of the body and narrative in Frankenstein also entails a
consideration of the feminine voice in narrative. The creature reflects a dis-
membering of Frankenstein's subjectivity; similarly, I will contend that Shelley's
fictional self in the introduction to the 1831 edition of the novel mirrors her alienated
position in narrative. The feminine subject is in the position of the creature, the
ultimate "other" in the text. In constructing an "I" that is bound to the laws of
representation (and to the displacement that results in another subject), Shelley
presents an "I" that does not correspond to a unique feminine voice. This idea sets
the stage for an understanding of her autobiographical account in the introduction:
Shelley's version of her own subjectivity depicts a figure encased in representations
of woman; simultaneously, she projects a subject that resists that placement through
the techniques of parody. Taking into account the disharmony of the subject in the

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 Frankenstein and Dis(re)membered Identity 191

main text, one can argue that the feminine subject in the introduction engenders a
fresh conception of the feminine body in narrative. It will be my contention that in
the introduction Shelley returns the look of the gaze, thereby not formulating a text
that accords with masculinist desires. She resuscitates the dead voice or body of the
traditional narrative of woman, and in its place creates a feminine voice or body that
speaks in many different voices, thereby upsetting the notion of a single feminine
identity.
A recapitulation of Lacan's mirror stage will pave the way for an understanding
of the subject, its fictions, and reconstructions in Frankenstein. As Marc Eli
Blanchard points out, "The proper autobiography ... aims at the re-creation of a
primal mirror stage" (99). This primal mirror stage involves the subject looking into
the mirror and mistakenly seeing a reflected, whole image. Frankenstein is
concerned with the story of origins, with a myth of origins that would replay a
fantasy of self-generation, which is the aim of autobiography. Looking into the
mirror, the autobiographer is seduced into thinking that the image reflects himself
or herself completely. Frankenstein achieves this desire of self-generation through
the creation of the creature, who is without "natural" origins. Ironically, however,
the creature is made up of several different body parts, subverting the idea of unique
self-generation. His other project--his narrative one--depicts Frankenstein's wish
to shore up the fractured image he sees in the mirror.
Similar to Narcissus looking at himself in the mirror, where he mistakenly thinks
that what he sees reflects his being, in "The Mirror Stage" Lacan tells us that the
infant subject misrecognizes itself by assuming that the coalesced subject image in
the mirror corresponds to the subject's "I." When Frankenstein looks into the mirror
of his image, however, he sees that the creature's

limbs were in proportion, and [he] had selected his features as beautiful.
Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of
muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and
flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed
a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the
same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his
shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. (105)

In this scene, which depicts the awakening of Frankenstein' s creature, Frankenstein

no longer can control the other in the "I." He looks into the mirror of his subjectivity
and sees a discontinuous image, which he does not want to claim as his.' The
creation scene in Frankenstein copies Lacan's mirror stage, the subject's confron-.
tation with his mirror image, but Shelley refuses to suture the split in the "I"; the
subject remains fractured. Lacan goes on to explain that the body image the child
sees in the mirror reflects back a wholeness, but underlying this wholeness is the
fragmented body, which, as he also tells us, "usually manifests itself in dreams when

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192 The Journal of Narrative Technique

the movement of the analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration

of the individual" (4).
Frankenstein startlingly shows that identity is a fiction to shore up the dismem-
berment of the "I." The creature, as the reflection of Frankenstein, reveals that
dismemberment is at the basis of subjectivity and that the mirror image fails to create
a composite image. Shelley fractures identity by underscoring the fissured and
profoundly split subject. In doing so, she uncovers the "fictionality" behind the
subject's apprehension of itself as whole in the mirror stage. Lacan explains the
subject's misrecognition in the mirror stage:

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from

insufficiency to anticipation-and which manufactures for the subject
caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phanta-
sies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality
that I shall call orthopaedic-and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour
of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the
subject's entire mental development. (4)

The Lacanian subject, in a sense, seeks to uphold the fictionality of the unity he
or she sees in the mirror. But the creature in Frankenstein surfaces as the return of
the repressed: the dismembered or fragmented self that cannot be incorporated into
a fictional unity. Much like Frankenstein, the creature, too, reverses Lacan's
proposition that the subject sees a unified image in the mirror, for the creature
confronts his specular image when he narrates: "How was I terrified when I viewed
myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was
indeed I who was reflected in the mirror" (159). Instead of coalescing the frag-
mented self, the mirror here accentuates the creature's alienation from himself; the
text thus lifts the veil from the fictionality of representation that traditionally seeks
to suture identity.
Frankenstein begins his project of creating the creature by proclaiming his wish
to create a corresponding creature: He desires to "attempt the creation of being like
[him]self" (101). The Frankenstein text, however, quickly moves away from this
representational model, elucidating the failure of a one-to-one correspondence. The
text articulates the misfiring of representation by presenting its own creation scene
about multiple subjectivities and competing identities as Frankenstein brings the
creation into being. The text poses the question: how can one represent the self to
the self and have it conform to one's intentions? The creature asks the questions:
"Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?" (174),
as if to echo Frankenstein's search for the origins of life: "Whence ... did the
principle of life proceed?" (99). As Frankenstein points out, these questions become
unanswerable, since once one begins the work of self-representation, one is subject
to another text, another story, and another self.2

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 Frankenstein and Dis(re)membered Identity 193

Frankenstein's project of creating a creature in his image shows the effects of

language as it moves along the signifying chain. As Frankenstein begins the project
of self-representation, he comes face to face with the contingency of language's
effects: the created will be a stand-in, never equal to his conscious intentions. When
Frankenstein views the just-born creature, the text reveals the gap between
Frankenstein's intentions and the result. He begins his project by thinking that the
signifier can represent the signified. But the creation scene-which depicts
Frankenstein's horror at his handiwork-indicates the sliding of the signifier under
the signified. Lacan points out that Freud's work on dreams "shows us in every
possible way that the value of the image as signifier has nothing whatever to do with
its signification" (159). This distortion in the dream text and in the project of
representation demonstrates the displacement involved in self-representation. The
subject in representing himself or herself veers off in signification and produces
another subject.
The creature as the representational object symbolizes the death of presence; the
body of the creature is a hybrid text, made up of countless other bodies without any
definitive origins. In this text about self-representation, Shelley articulates the idea
that the notion of the subject is not a single one positing any one definitive meaning
or message; rather, the subject is multiple and shifting. Moreover, by having
Frankenstein reassemble the creature from dead bodies (he "collect[s] bones from
charnel houses and disturb[s] with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the
human frame" [102]), Shelley also reconstructs and reassembles a new idea of the
body. That is to say, she fashions a body without a center or origin of meaning. Thus,
the text collapses what subjectivity has meant in the Western tradition. Descartes
had posited a direct correlation between consciousness and language, thereby
strengthening the concept of a unified subject. But by producing a body without an
original unity, Shelley collapses Western logos. For by exhibiting a new notion
about the body, the text allows for a novel formulation of the "I." Descartes had
placed man at the center of the universe by virtue of his voice being continually
present to itself. A decentered body challenges Descartes' view by suggesting that
multiple voices and bodies speak the "I." Frankenstein and the creature share
paradoxically a reciprocal identity as well as an alienating one. Frankenstein
explains: "I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind and endowed
with the will and power to effect purposes of horror... nearly in the light of my own
vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave and forced to destroy all that was
dear to me" (124). This uncanny relationship between the creature and Frankenstein
reveals the notion of the "I" to be a complicated field of multiple subjectivities and
competing identities.
Dis-membering the body from a unique "I," Shelley's text demonstrates how
autobiographical narrative falls into the realm of the monstrous; according to
Claude Levesque in The Ear of the Other, in fact, "[T]o tell one's own story is to

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194 The Journal of Narrative Technique

consort with the terrifying" (72). The frightening in Frankenstein entails

Frankenstein's horror at the contingency of his existence as he creates his image and
his narrative enterprise. Just as the frame narrative precludes one unique identity,
the gaze of the creature permits a leakage in Frankenstein's identity, something that
he cannot abide. What is so frightening about the creature is that he returns the look.
Prior to his opening his eyes, he had been the object of Frankenstein's gaze, but at
the creation scene, Frankenstein sees "by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light
... the dull yellow eye of the creature open[ed]; it breathed hard, and a convulsive
motion agitated its limbs" (105). Then, Frankenstein abruptly exclaims: "How can
I explain my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with
such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form" (105). This sudden change
in Frankenstein's tone defies explanation, especially when he adds that "[the
creature's] limbs were in proportion, and [he] had selected his features as beautiful"
(105). But as the produced swiftly takes on a life of its own, the creation scene
elucidates another feature of language-that moment of lack experienced at the
subject's entry into the symbolic, when words stand in for the original object (the
mother). The eye/look in this scene represents division, or lack, which incorporates
the divorce between signifier and signified. It is the look, then, that makes apparent
the subject's division from the mother, in that the returned look suggests another
subjectivity, which marks Frankenstein's entry into the symbolic, setting up his lack
and desire.
The terror Frankenstein feels from the reciprocal gaze of the creature represents
his horror at becoming a subject. The creation scene recapitulates the origins of the
subject's entry into the symbolic where words become the stand ins for objects. The
creature would then denote the disjunction in Frankenstein's subjectivity, reflecting
his otherness, his split from the mother. Frankenstein wishes to be the originator of
his own life and the body of the creature; he wants to control the look, so to speak.
Laura Mulvey explains Freud's work on the gaze: "He associated scopophilia with
taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling, and curious gaze"
(59). While Frankenstein wishes his creation to remain under his control, the
creature, like Medusa, looks back and brings the chain of lack into play. Franken-
stein desires that the creature be the spectacle; he works for almost two years on the
forming of the creature, Frankenstein's "eyeballs starting from their sockets in
attending to the details of [his] employment" (102). He is locked in a narcissistic
gaze with. the creature. During this time of the assembling of the creature,
Frankenstein's paradoxical desire is for the creature to remain the object of the
gaze-in a sense, to be inert-and yet to come to life. This ambiguous desire reflects
both the child's accomplishment at sending the mother away himself in Freud's
elaboration of the fort/da game,3 thereby bringing her under his control, and the
child's wish to be locked in a narcissistic dyad with the mother before the advent of
language.

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 Frankenstein and Dis(re)membered Identity 195

Further, prior to the creation scene, another fantasy is enacted: Frankenstein is

in control of the gaze initially; therefore, he occupies the position of the masculine
subject, who, typically in our culture, possesses the power to look and to define;
while the creature, the female in the fantasy, functions as the object of the gaze. As
numerous critics have pointed out, Frankenstein's project is a masculinist one;4 he,
along with the avatars of his profession, wishes to "penetrate into the recesses of
nature and show how she works in her hiding-places" (96). Additionally, the "most
learned philosopher had ... partially unveiled the face of Nature, but her immortal
lineaments were still a wonder and a mystery" (88) for him to discover. In these
passages, Frankenstein is the subject who will control the experiment; the creature
serves as the object of the gaze, whom Frankenstein will formulate according to his
desires. By this gendering of Frankenstein and the creature, I mean to suggest the
power relationship that the look establishes.
The female who returns the look replays in fantasy the fear of castration. Freud
explains this point when he writes: "The terror of Medusa is ... a terror linked to
the sight of something, namely, the female genitals, which confirm the existence of
human beings supposedly 'castrated' " ("Medusa's Head" 273). The creation scene
reenacts the scene of castration where the look serves to paralyze the male. The
creature is reminiscent of the Medusa, physically, for his fragmented body parts
may be seen as a representation of the lack embodied in the castrated female.
Frankenstein's description of the creature--quoted above--centers on a catalogue
of his body parts, with an emphasis on the creature's face ("lustrous" hair, "pearly"
teeth, "watery" eyes, "shrivelled" complexion). In reducing the creature to a
catalogue of body parts that do not harmonize, however, Frankenstein produces a
subjectivity that is "other" the moment it awakens into consciousness, the moment
that it looks; for as the text suggests, until the moment of its awakening the creature
is "beautiful" (105).
Frankenstein fears being controlled by the image, of being captured in the gaze
of the other: gazing at the Medusa would result in a man turning to stone. Because
the image upsets the "coherent" subjectivity that he has set up for himself,
Frankenstein tries to abjure the otherness that the creature denotes. Now that he has
finished the creation, he relates that the "beauty of the dream vanished, and
breathless horror and disgust filled [his] heart" (105). Lacan links the gaze with the
"evil eye" and witchcraft, and the passage above in which the creature gazes at
Frankenstein is significant in that it focuses on the eye of the creature and the
subsequent terror it inspires in Frankenstein. Teresa de Lauretis extends our
understanding of this gaze when she writes: "Medusa's power to cast the spell which
in many cultures is actually called the 'evil eye,' is directly represented in her
horribly 'staring eyes,' which are a constant feature of her figurative and literary
representations, while the serpents in their hair... are a variable attribute of all three
Gorgons" (110). That the creature stares back at Frankenstein signifies the split in

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196 The Journal of Narrative Technique

the "I" of Frankenstein, since it is through the creature's eyes that the "I" of
Frankenstein unravels. Immediately after the creature returns the look, Frankenstein's
narrative splinters apart hysterically, unable to contain his ambivalent feelings. The
gaze of the creature, then, represents the otherness involved in achieving a subject
position. One is always another, capable of reflecting a different subjectivity.
The frontispiece to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein5 captures the terror that the
gaze evokes in the spectator. Frankenstein has just gazed on the scene of the
awakening creature, and Frankenstein's eyes bulge as if they cannot abide the
creature's look. The frontispiece depicts an after scene of the gaze that inspires
terror and dread. Stephen Heath has explained that the returned look is "from the
place of the other," which disrupts the sense of wholeness in the subject ("Differ-
ence" 88). Additionally, for Frankenstein, to lose the power of the look means to be
subject to a series of narrative events that cannot be predicted, as will be his fate in
the text. The creature steals the look and, in doing so, usurps the power of
representation from Frankenstein. That Frankenstein's text cannot explain the
difference between what the creature looked like before his animation and after-
wards, is related to the function of Frankenstein's being claimed by the image that
he had hoped to form. This claiming represents the work of the unconscious, which
disrupts the conscious intentions of the subject.
In such fashion the text overturns Frankenstein's formulation and overturns the
division that he would like to establish between himself as the master and the
creature as the slave. By having the creature return the look, Shelley moves away
from the dialectical relationship of self and other to a more complicated understand-
ing of subject constitution that substitutes multiple subjectivities and competing
identities for the notion of a unique "I." In doing so, the text reveals that at the basis
of subjectivity, there may be competing subjectivities that cannot be categorized in
neat binary systems. By replaying a subject formulation that challenges the work of
binary subject constitution, as Lacan has elucidated, the creation scene puts in its
place a reciprocal moment when the categories of gazer/gazed upon, and masculine/
feminine, intersect and cannot be split into oppositions.
In highlighting the idea that writing does not return to definitive origins, Shelley
tackles the most important literary question of the nineteenth century: the question
of origins. At the very place where origin is supposed to originate, multiple origins
are found.6 Origin turns out to be a scene within several scenes, not reducible to one
originary moment. It is significant that Frankenstein has a dream immediately
following his creation, for the dream text overtakes the scene of creation and adds
a twist: suddenly there are two scenes of creation/origin at stake. He relates the
dream text:

I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets

of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprized, I embraced her, but as I imprinted

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 Frankenstein and Dis(re)membered Identity 197

the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her
features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my
dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the
grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel. ... by the dim and
yellow light of the moon ... I beheld the wretch-the miserable monster
whom I had created. (106)

The dream underscores the conflation of identities and an absence of boundaries in

the identities of Elizabeth, Frankenstein's mother, Frankenstein, and his creature.
Elizabeth is displaced by Frankenstein's mother. Then the dream ends and the
identity of the mother is superimposed onto the identity of the creature. The dream
text, in its play on multiple identities, upsets Frankenstein's wish for a one-to-one
correspondence between the creator and the created.
In fact, the dream scene forecasts displacement and centers on a scene that cannot
be directly viewed, similar to the autobiographer presenting his or her life screened
by the narrative of another life. The creation scene resembles a stage and, signifi-
cantly, it occurs in Frankenstein's bedroom. Immediately after the dream, he sees
the creature holding up the "curtain of the bed" (106). The image of the creature is
framed by a curtain, just as the creature's narrative is framed in the narratives of
Frankenstein and Walton. The framing device suggests that looking through the
mirror produces a displacement, not fully coextensive with the image viewed.
Significantly, Frankenstein is only able to see the creature because of the effects of
the "dim and yellow light of the moon" (106), recalling a mirror image, that refracts
light. He does not view the creature directly; he sees it through an intermediary, "the
light of the moon," similar to the subject looking at himself or herself in the mirror
and seeing an image. This image is not a direct one; rather, the mirror supposedly
creates the fiction of correspondence.
Frankenstein's dream ends with the image of the creature, suggesting that
Frankenstein's setting of the stage of his origins is transferred onto the creature. The
creature displaces the images of Elizabeth and Frankenstein's mother, intimating
that the backdrop of the creature's desire will supersede Frankenstein's desire, just
as the other narratives restage desire by lifting the narrative curtain onto another
scene. By having the story continually move to another character, Frankenstein
displaces subjectivity. In the center of Frankenstein's narrative, another scene is
created, the scene of the creation of the creature, and the creature will eventually
usurp Frankenstein's narrative on the mer de glace. Origin turns out to reveal several
different frames, not reducible to one moment. The dream discloses a text of many
selves, which do not stay in place and give rise to other stories that cannot be reduced
to unitary meaning.
In addition to Frankenstein's not being able to create a corresponding represen-
tation of the subject, Frankenstein shows clearly through its narrative technique that

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198 The Journal of Narrative Technique

the subject cannot present itself directly; it does so at several steps removed from
an originating voice. The frame narrative, in which Walton writes to his sister, Mrs.
Saville, contains Frankenstein's story and the tale of the creature. Embedded within
these stories are other stories, such as the narrative of the DeLaceys encased in the
creature's account. The emphasis on storytelling and the presentation of a story in
another narrative frame suggest that framing is the key device in telling of the self.
A story cannot be told directly; rather, the frame mediates, separating the self from
a direct presentation of a life story.7
Metanarrativity or the embedded story becomes a trope in Frankenstein. The
tale-within-a-tale structure demonstrates that no one "original" story exists; rather,
hybrid stories stray from the original author and the idea of unitary origins. By
scattering a central subject, metanarrativity concentrates on the disappearance of
identity.8 Frankenstein refuses to posit a unified story; rather, continual reworkings
and repiecings of stories assemble and then divide the origins of selfhood. In fact,
Shelley's text can be said to dis-member radically the autobiographical mode,
which has centered on the story of one unique "I." Challenging the "I" as the center
of identity, Frankenstein focuses on the many authorial voices that compete and
clash with one another.
Frankenstein would like, however, to position himself as the hero of his life who
rivals nature; he desires to present his narrative account as the one corrective to
Walton's ambition to discover a passage to the North Pole. Frankenstein recounts
his narrative to Walton at the end of his quest when he is about to die. Frankenstein
explains his role as moralizer when he states: " 'Unhappy man! Do you share my
madness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me; let me reveal
my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!' " (77). But his narration can also
disclose his wish to re-member his life; that is to say, he looks to narrative to sew
up the text of his life. He corrects his text in places in order to avoid a "mutilated"
one. Frankenstein turns to narrative as a substitution for the mutilated text of the
creature's body. In order to move away from the contingent horror of his fractured
existence, embodied in the creature, he creates a text that will serve to displace that
horror; he says that he has " 'lost every thing and cannot begin life anew' " (78),
but for the time of his narration he looks into the mirror of his past and tries to fashion
a coherent text. Shelley, however, rewrites Frankenstein's desire and presents a
narrative body in pieces, rather than a sewn-up one. Such a narrative body is similar
to the displacement that is a structural component of subjectivity. The more
Frankenstein tries to tell his story, the more his story is usurped by other narrators
and stories, suggesting no one story or subjectivity.
The subject in Frankenstein refers to itself by becoming another self or another
narrative. The representation of the self to the self in autobiography is founded on
a fiction, a representation. Shelley lifts the veil of the monstrosity of representation

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 Frankenstein and Dis(re)membered Identity 199

and discloses what lies underneath the sewn-up harmony of literary self-represen-
tation: precisely, a monster in that the pieces of the body do not coalesce.' After
Frankenstein creates the creature, the creature "held up the curtain of the bed; and
his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on [Frankenstein]" (106). The curtain
in this scene suggests the frame: the intermediary between representation and the
object. The frame, viewed in this way, covers over identity. This scene of self-
confrontation shows that what lies behind the curtain of self-representation is what
cannot be integrated into the "wholeness" of the subject. There will always be an
excess of meaning (embodied in the creature) that upsets the notion of a unitary
identity, thereby disturbing the notion of origins or closure. The narrative frames
decompose the unitary quality of the original; they frame the myth of origin itself.
The supplement, or the excess that subverts any attempt to fix identity, cannot be
contained by the frame.
The narrative frame, then, continually displaces the notion of a unitary subject,
as the subject in this text is susceptible to continual displacements by another story.
Talk of the subject in Frankenstein is mediated through other fictions, other
representations, pointing to the idea that the self is derivative, never original-a
copy of a copy. And telling of the self is encased in a transcription within a
transcription. By adopting this mode of self-representation, Shelley highlights the
idea that self-representation is layered with other representations. Thus, the creature
learns language by looking onto the scene of the DeLacey household through a
chink in the wall. The creature relates that Safie "was endeavouring to learn their
language; and the idea instantly occurred to me that I should make use of the same
instructions to the same end" (163). This scene of the apprehension of language
functions as another instance of the frame, in which language or the self is seen as
being mediated. Just as the self cannot be presented directly, the creature learns
language by observing another scene involving the many different layers of
language.
Walton's project of recording Frankenstein's thoughts also shows language's
displacements; he, in effect, makes a dis-membered body out of the raw pieces of
narrative: "I have resolved every night, when I am not imperatively occupied by my
duties, to record, as nearly as possible in his [Frankenstein's] own words, what he
has related during the day" (79, my emphasis). He cannot present Frankenstein's
words directly; he must record them "as nearly as possible in his own words,"
marking the fact that he does modify Frankenstein's narrative, just as Frankenstein
tampers with nature in order to make his creation. He describes his "fervent longing
to penetrate the secrets of nature" (88). Frankenstein cannot create an original body,
one that is "natural"; similarly, the Frankenstein text does not originate freely from
one source. Autobiography, in this sense, dismembers the "original" text of
subjectivity.
The framing device in the novel announces that the "I," the first person, is a role

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200 The Journal of Narrative Technique

to be assumed and discarded. The text produces frames, canceling the idea of
originary identity. The framing device emphasizes that a story cannot approximate
the self; mediation will be involved. Shelley posits subjecthood and then takes it
away. Thus, the text is involved in a dialectic between presenting the self and the
subsequent absenting of the self. The artificial assemblage of the body parts of the
creature signifies that body and narrative parts are productions to be put on. And
Shelley rearranges those parts to suggest a new assemblage of fictional selves
continually wandering away from origins, as the narrative moves away from a
centered text in its multiple narrators.
The epistolary form as a structural device in Frankenstein suggests the positing
and the taking away of subjectivity. In fact, the first two letters of Walton to his sister
end respectively: "If I fail, you will see me again soon, or never" (66), and
"Remember me with affection, should you never hear from me again" (70). Walton
writes of his possible death at the North Pole while he is searching for a new passage,
but the narrative proper of Frankenstein foregrounds, through its use of multiple
narratives, the possibility that one's account (in a letter) may not arrive at its
intended destination; that is to say, the destination that would provide final closure.
As part of the frame narrative, the message contained in Walton's letters is another
displaced onto the next person and story. It is appropriate that Shelley use the
epistolary form, for it demonstrates that the frame covers over the story of identity.
Further, this text lacks a composite signature; it is invaded by another subject. The
creature breaks the fictional code of the letter in that he uncannily reveals the split
in the subject, which should have remained hidden by an accepted fictionality.
Central to the idea of the letter, as Derrida has suggested, is that it may never arrive.
Derrida holds that the letter can be diverted or even destroyed by dissemination (The
Post Card 33). Significantly, throughout the text of Frankenstein, Walton never
discloses to the reader whether his sister has received any of his letters, emphasizing
that a letter, a self mediated in language, does not have access to origins or
destination.
As Shelley's text demonstrates, the letter moves on to the next signifier, and the
multiple stories indicate that the transcriptions of the self are not definitive.
Transcriptions emphasize a made personage, as the creature is, and a constructed
narrative, fabricated from other sources. The tales within tales indicate a resistance
to closure of the self and story, marking a disruption of originary identity, which
privileges closure. Embedding as a structural device shows the impossibility of
getting beyond narrative, beyond the fictions that mediate it. And, embedded in all
of the embedded stories within the text are the marks and traces of the creature's
writing as he leaves messages for Frankenstein on the barks of trees or cut in stone.

My reign is not yet over.... you live, and my power is complete. Follow
me; I seek the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery

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 Frankenstein and Dis(re)membered Identity 201

of cold and frost, to which I am impassive. You will find near this place,
if you follow not too tardily, a dead hare; eat and be refreshed. Come on,
my enemy; we have yet to wrestle for our lives, but many hard and
miserable hours must you endure until that period shall arrive. (248)

The marks and the traces the creature inscribes in the trees may serve as a metaphor
for the idea of writing as a supplement. The creature continues to narrate to
Frankenstein, in the attempt to ward off the ultimate lack, which for the creature
would be death. It is as if the creature wants to keep Frankenstein alive so that the
creature will be able to narrate his story. This lack, as we have seen, stems from a
separation from the mother's body, and in this case, Frankenstein serves as the
mother image who brought about the lack in the creature. Words stand in as the
supplements for this desire. In fact, the entire text is a supplement in that three
editions to the novel exist: the 1818 edition, the 1823 edition, and the 1831 edition,
along with Mary Shelley's introduction to the 1831 edition and the preface to the
1818 edition allegedly written by Percy Shelley. She tells us in her 1831 introduc-
tion that "As far as I can recollect, [the preface] was entirely written by him" (60).
Ellie Ragland Sullivan and Mark Bracher explicate how narration must always
move away from the symptom, "to avoid the anxiety which designates a lack" (8).
The text's obsessive focus on narration reveals the need to cover up an absence in
the subject's discourse, which is effected by the death of Frankenstein's mother.
Given the biographical circumstances of the death of Mary Wollstonecraft, it is no
accident that the text continually moves on from story to story as if to avoid the scene
of the mother's death.
Written on the body of the creature is the textual mark of what cannot be
represented. Daniel Cottom argues, however, that "What is missing in Walton's
ship, what cannot be represented, is a woman. ... The repression of women and,
specifically, of female sexuality, contributes to the novel's monstrousness" (69).
While I find his thesis provocative, what must be added to his idea is that what
cannot be represented is anyone, particularly the creature, who is described by a
series of signifiers: "daemon," "creature," "monster," "blot," and "abortion."'o
What is monstrous about the text is that the signifieds for the creature are absent, but
what is indeed more monstrous is the veil Shelley lifts to show the fiction all the
other characters maintain about their desire to shore up signifier and signified. The
creature explains his predicament: "Was I... a monster, a blot upon the earth, from
which all men fled and whom all men disowned?" (166). The word blot suggests a
scattering and an erasure of the signified. We get a trace of the creature's narrative
because it is corrected and augmented by Frankenstein, whose narrative in turn is
recorded by Walton. Through fictional autobiography, Shelley reveals the subject
to be a blot, subject to the diff6rance in representation.

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202 The Journal of Narrative Technique

2. The Author's Introduction to the 1831 Edition:

Dis(re)membering Identity
As we have seen in the text proper, the novel repeatedly returns to scenes of
identity, in which the notion of a discrete identity collapses. The appearance of the
double in Frankenstein signals a multiple and conflicting subjectivity. Addition-
ally, the dream sequence unfolds an identity in pieces, as evidenced by the shifts
from one subject to another. The novel's narrative structure mirrors this shifting
ground among the subjectivities of Walton, Frankenstein, and the creature, and its
obsessive focus on identity demonstrates that one's identity can never be centered
in one's body. This idea paves the way for an understanding of Shelley's introduc-
tion to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, where her text further reveals the divorce
between her "I" and the text that she writes about herself. Just as the creature in the
text plays out the excess in representation, disturbing Frankenstein's project of
composite self-representation, Shelley in her introduction features the excess of the
feminine voice not conforming to masculinist desires. She conceives thus of the
traditional feminine subject as a dead body that the introduction will reanimate into
a multiple and shifting subjectivity.
The introduction replays the novel's obsessive concern with origins. Shelley
complies with the request of the publishers of the Standard Novels series to "furnish
them with some account of the origin of the story" (55). Their request leads her to
reflect on the origins of her life, and she begins this speculation by answering the
question that so many persons had posed to her: " 'How [she], then a young girl,
came to think of and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea?' " (55). She responds
by relating a brief history of her life. But the Frankenstein story is inextricably bound
with Shelley's self-representation. The story that she relates in the introduction
focuses on the life of a woman--on how a woman is represented in discourse. In this
history Shelley presents the reader with an image of a woman looking into the mirror
of self-representation and seeing another. That is to say, two Mary Shelleys, and
possibly more, clash and compete with one another and do not coalesce into one
coherent image. On the one hand, she is "very adverse to bringing [herself] forward
in print" (55); on the other, she "bid[s her] hideous progeny to go forth and prosper"
(60). Instead of trying to find one interpretation for the introduction, as several
critics have done," it would be more productive to focus on the discontinuities (and
their implications) in the feminine subject.
A consideration of the fractured subject in the introduction sets the stage for the
subject in pieces in the main text. Significantly, Shelley, like her character
Frankenstein, has a "waking dream" in which she imagines her fictional creation,
the overreaching scientist, observing his handiwork with horror. "He sleeps; but he
is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside,
opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes"

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 Frankenstein and Dis(re)membered Identity 203

(59). The scene immediately shifts to Shelley, who opens her eyes from her waking
dream "in terror" (59). Thus, she tells us, she had "found it .... [she] had thought
ofa story" (59). The conflation of several identities here--that of Shelley and of her
fictional character--shows that identity shifts. Like Frankenstein, Shelley is haunted
by that excess in identity; she writes concerning her waking dream that she "still
could not so easily get rid of [her] hideous phantom; still it haunted [her]" (59). She
imagines herself in the same position as Frankenstein; she creates a monstrous
work, as several critics have proposed. Sidonie Smith depicts the nineteenth-
century woman overstepping her "natural" bounds: "Effectively, the woman who
would reason like universal man becomes unwomanly, a kind of monstrous creature
or lusus naturae " (15). While several critics have focused on the impropriety of the
woman author,"2 a shifting of the focus, here, to the text's concentration on
specularity and on the fear of being followed by an image that does not correspond
to "traditional" images will produce a more complex reading of the introduction.
Shelley's double follows her in her introduction; she is haunted by the secondary
status of women in her culture. "Many and long were the conversations between
Lord Byron and Shelley, to which [she] was a devout but nearly silent listener" (58).
The introduction sets up the creation myth of woman in Shelley's culture. Shelley
articulates herself being imaged by the screen of patriarchal culture, and she creates
a "monstrous" text in her introduction by conforming to the image of a proper
woman. Her scene of unendurable confrontation in which she awakes from horror,
however, may be recast into the horror of man creating woman in his image. Shelley
creates a story of origins that mirrors the status of woman in her society. Her scene
of the origins of the Frankenstein text follows another autobiographical scene
where she is the "devout but nearly silent listener" to the "conversations between
Lord Byron and Shelley" (58). The depiction of the two scenes shows conflicting
images of Mary Shelley's positioning in her society: on the one hand, she looks into
the mirror and sees a devout listener; on the other, she sees an artist creating a
"monstrous" handiwork.
As we have seen from the main text, categories break down, and what one
character demonstrates at one moment shifts ground continuously, as with the
creature's innate goodness and his subsequent reign of terror. As the main text is
concerned with representation and its non-correspondence, so the introduction
concentrates on Shelley looking into the mirror and asking the same questions that
the creature does: "Who was I? What was I?" and veering off the "traditional"
signification of the feminine subject. Shelley calls into question the notion of
categories by arguing for the shifting ground of the notion of category. Her gendered
subjectivity does not fully inhabit the gender that it approximates; it is never quite
carried out according to expectation. Like the creature in the text proper, Shelley
misses the mark of gendered sexuality (we remember that the creature is made up
of disparate pieces of bodies), in that she breaks the connection between the

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204 The Journal of Narrative Technique

represented and the representer.

In this introduction to the 1831 edition, then, Shelley sews onto her body or
produces onto her body the category of the feminine. She creates a Shelley, a
fictional character, just as through the representations of Walton, Victor, and the
creature she manufactures fictional subjects who cannot present themselves di-
rectly. Too many critics have taken her at her word, equating the author of the
introduction with the "real" and definitive Mary Shelley.'3 Kaja Silverman points
out the limitations of this view when she writes: "The biographical strategy ... fails
to distinguish ... between the author 'inside' the text and the author 'outside' the
text-between authorial subjectivity and the historical author" (374). The problem
with biographical interpretations of Frankenstein (such as those advanced by
Johnson and Moers)'4 is that they fail to account for the text's suggestion that
identity is taken up by the subject only to be discarded. Additionally, Shelley
intimates that the representation of identity will always be mediated by a screen
identity. The biographical method also assumes that female writers will always
write texts that express their "true" gender. Mary Jacobus makes this point with
particular force when she writes about the biographical interpretations of Franken-
stein: "Feminist interpretations such as these have no option but to posit the woman
author as origin and her life as the primary locus of meaning" (138). The supplemen-
tal quality of Frankenstein signals, however, that there will always be a multiplicity
of persons behind the "I," and no one original "I."
What does the presentation of Shelley's life, along with the creature's, Walton's,
and Frankenstein's, disclose about origins?"5 To suggest that Shelley in the main
text writes a covert autobiography of a woman's life, as Barbara Johnson has
pointed out, in that she must write behind the cover of a mask, is an influential point
for feminism.'6 But Johnson's idea does not portray the entire story. In the
introduction Shelley repeats the origins of a woman's life to displace that origin. She
sets up identity and calls it into question, displacing and disrupting her "definitive"
place in culture. And in subverting the story of man that makes up Western culture
in the main narrative, she sets the stage for redeploying the origins of a woman's life.
The introduction, then, can serve as a way to critique the lived life of a "story."
Shelley challenges the idea of a monolithic identity; in its place, she substitutes the
identity of woman that does not stay in place.
Furthermore, Shelley writes in disguise in the introduction, showing that the first
person in narrative is assumed-she "dresses up" as a woman and writes in drag.
Judith Butler poses the question: "Does being female constitute a 'natural fact' or
a cultural performance?" (Gender Trouble x). The introduction portrays Shelley
performing the role of a woman. As the narrative proper deals with the made
personage of the creature, the introduction forecasts the construction of the feminine
body as it takes up its place in writing the feminine voice.
The introduction sounds the death knell of the possibility of definitive represen-

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 Frankenstein and Dis(re)membered Identity 205

tation of the subject to itself, which the remainder of the text illustrates. As
Frankenstein's quest for origins leads him to the discovery of a creature that does
not correspond to his intentions, the fictional subject that Shelley creates in the
introduction cannot reflect a composite representation of herself. But this is a
representation with a difference: for here Shelley challenges the notion of one fixed
inscribed woman. Her creation of the feminine subject paradoxically leads to the
dismemberment of that subject as she has traditionally been conceived. Any attempt
to create composite origins leads to a decay in that telling. Corrupting the ideal of
woman by offering a multidimensional feminine voice in the introduction, Shelley
tampers with static notions of woman. Veering from the originary meaning of
woman, she subverts the myth of the origin of woman. Given the representationality
of discourse, the subject looks into the mirror of herself and sees a fiction, which is
embedded in other stories. Shelley looks into the mirror of life stories by women and
then writes an introduction that turns out to be parody in its excess of "womanli-
ness."

The introduction provides another frame to the discourse on identity; as we have

seen, the frame permits identity to escape. Shelley writes that her introduction can
only be an "appendage to a former production" (55). The words here are suggestive:
"appendage" intimates parts that cannot coalesce into a whole and "production"
implies the manufacturing of identity; there may indeed be other productions. She
goes on to state, "I can scarcely accuse myself of a personal intrusion" (55). In her
assumption of a role, the fictional Shelley distances herself from writing like a
"monster"; she writes like a "woman."'7 In telling the fiction of herself in the
introduction, Shelley presents herself as so far removed from the monstrous, a
woman writer, that she erases herself. She makes the distinction between girl and
monster clear: "How I, then a young girl, came to think of and to dilate upon so very
hideous an idea?" (55).
Turning to Irigaray' s thoughts on woman as mimic will also suggest an alterna-
tive reading to the one that positions Shelley as simply a pawn for her husband' s and,
ultimately, patriarchal words, as Margaret Homans has suggested." Irigaray writes:

To play with mimesis is ... for a woman, to try to recover the place of
her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply
reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself-inasmuch as she is on the
side of the 'perceptible,' of 'matter'-to 'ideas,' in particular to ideas
about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to
make 'visible,' by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to
remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in
language. It also means 'to unveil' the fact that, if women are such good
mimics, it is because they are not simply resorbed in this function. They
also remain elsewhere.... (76)

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206 The Journal of Narrative Technique

I quote Irigaray at length because her idea of femininity as parodic replay suggests
an alternative way to read the character Shelley in the introduction. Shelley shows
her persona occupying its assigned gendered position in the symbolic order. But that
position does not remain stable. In fact, the subject that she produces in the
introduction is a double, the return of the repressed, which uncannily reveals
through its excessiveness what should have remained hidden. That is to say, she
creates a fictional character, herself, to mimic a mirror image of representations of
women. Her representation of herself can only be based on other representations;
thus, her autobiography is framed by the discourse of woman. She can write a
parodic depiction of a woman because she knows that the subject originates from
other stories, from fictions. Helene Cixous points out, "the origin is a masculine
myth: I always want to know where I come from" (53). Shelley, in her introduction,
wears as Stephen Heath points out in his discussion of Marlene Dietrich, "all the
accoutrements of femininity as accoutrements, does the poses as poses, gives the act
as an act" ("Joan Riviere and the Masquerade" 57). Women fictional autobiogra-
phers may be better at drag because of the many different layers of screens they wear
to represent the self. In a sense, then, Shelley understands origin to be impossible
to achieve because of the many different layers of subjectivity. She refuses to tell
any one story, thereby critiquing the notion of a unitary one.
It might seem, however, that the tale within a tale, or, in this case, Shelley's
introduction, is the mode par excellence for a woman writer because it reestablishes
her position within the patriarchal system of language. Embedding discloses that
she is screened in by the fact that language is patriarchal. Embedding herself in a tale
(of a woman's life), Shelley's narrative falls into line with that great abstract
narrative of a woman's life of deference and erasure. We recall her words about her
writing: "At this time [Percy] desired that I should write, not so much with the idea
that I could produce any thing worthy of notice, but that he might himselfjudge how
far I possessed the promise of better things hereafter" (56). But the tale within a tale
also exposes the tale to be a fiction. Shelley in her introduction demonstrates the
fictionality of a gendered position; she can put it on and take it off. She can posit her
identity as a character in the introduction, but the main text continually subverts the
notion of a definitive identity in control of its representation or its text. The novel
demonstrates that voice has always been derivative, a collection of body parts with
no definitive origins.
Shelley's text points out that monstrosity results when strict categorizations of
gender remain unchallenged. The main text critiques the masculine notion of
identity based on power and ambition. Walton writes to his sister, "But success shall
crown my endeavours. ... What can stop the determined heart and resolved will of
man?" (71-72); while Shelley in the introduction tells her audience that "[she] did
not make [her]self the heroine of [her] tales" (56). The introduction challenges the
feminine notion of identity based on passivity. Discrete notions of masculine and

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 Frankenstein and Dis(re)membered Identity 207

feminine identity mimic the status quo, and Shelley's text is at pains to disrupt
categories in order to call them into question.
Fictional autobiography depicts a scene where character cannot be directly
viewed; the self is presented through a screen in the guise, for example, of the
double, or the framing device that dilutes a discrete presentation of character. But
what happens in a feminine narrative where the female character has been viewed
and defined all too readily by her culture? Shelley appropriates the idea of not being
directly viewed and translates it into a multiple viewing of the feminine subject.
That is to say, by challenging composite notions of the "I," she shows the "I,"
particularly the feminine "I," as remaining outside the boundaries of representation.
Critiquing the feminine "unique" position in cultural discourse that creates a whole
character, Shelley writes an "I" that is alienated, and not closed; therefore, she can
reconstruct it.
One of the ways that Shelley renounces the composite notion of the "I" is through
a breaking apart of a composite narrative, which would seek to enclose the self in
time. By breaking up narrative points of time in her text, through the use of multiple
narrators, Shelley shatters a linear model of selfhood. If there can be multiple and
conflicting instants in time, revealed through the multiple narrators, then the self in
time does not remain closed, suggesting that no self can be pinned down defini-
tively. There can be no master reading of woman, or master text of her; rather,
Shelley engenders a dis-membered subject who discloses the fiction behind the
mask of unified subjectivity.

Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

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208 The Journal of Narrative Technique

NOTES

Note: I would like to thank Carol Bernstein for her insightful comments on an earl
version of this essay.

1. For a psychoanalytic reading of the double in Frankenstein, see Jackson.

2. See Cottom and Brooks for analyses of representation in Frankenstein. Brooks ar

that language is "irreparably marked by lack, by monsterism" (209), and Cotto
maintains that "In seeking to represent himself, man makes himself a monster" (60)

3. Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, explains the child's entry into the symb
stemming from the separation from the mother. He elaborates the story of a child's ga
of disappearance and return. The boy playing with a wooden reel and a piece of str
stages its disappearance by throwing it over the edge of his curtained cot. He then p
the reel back to him, thereby making it appear, all the while sayingfort and da (gone an
there). Freud interprets this game as the boy's compensating for his mother's disapp
ance by himself making objects disappear and reappear. By staging the disappearanc
and return of the objects within his reach, the boy enters the symbolic structure
language which compensates for the lack of the mother.

4. See, for example, Hindle 40 ff. and Anne Mellor.

5. A reproduction of the 1831 frontispiece also faces the title page of Anne Mellor's bo

6. David Carroll makes precisely this point in his analysis of Freud's attempt to posit
origin of an analysand's neurosis. Carroll writes: "At the very place where the origin
supposed to be, a multiplicity of origins is found: the reality of the scene, what w
perceived by the child, turns out to be not an event in itself, but a series of associat
of events, scenes within scenes" (523).

7. Beth Newman posits that frame narratives show that "a story can be cut off from its ori
in a particular speaker and tell itself in other speakers" (142), thus each story "funct
as a text, having been severed from its own origins, divested of its originating voice. T
mark of severance is the frame itself' (147).

8. Devon Hodges was the first to observe that "In Frankenstein, the unity of the subjec
subverted by the presence of multiple narrators" (157).

9. Cottom argues that "Frankenstein's monster images the monstrous nature of represe
tion" (60).

10. Chris Baldick has conducted a word-tally of the many names for the monster: " 'monster'
with 27 appearances... 'fiend' (25), followed by 'daemon' (18), 'creature' (16), 'wretch'
(15), 'devil' (8), 'being' (4) and 'ogre' (1)" (10).

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 Frankenstein and Dis(re)membered Identity 209

11. See, for example, Johnson, Mellor, and Poovey.

12. See Poovey.

13. See, for example, Barbara Johnson and Anne K. Mellor. Mellor argues: "Despite this
tradition of female authorship, Mary Shelley doubted the legitimacy of her own literary
voice, a doubt that determined her decision to speak through three male narrators" (53).
It will become clear that I disagree with Mellor's contention.

14. Moers argues for a biographical interpretation of Frankenstein; she maintains that
"Frankenstein is a birth myth" (79).

15. The standard feminist interpretation of Frankenstein is that Mary Shelley writes behind
the cover of a mask. See, for example, Anne Mellor who notes that '"The structure of the
novel builds a series of screens around her authentic voice" (57). Rather, as I have been
arguing, Shelley's text shows that no voice is authentic. The narrative frames demonstrate
that voice cannot be captured.

16. Johnson has argued that "In a humanistic tradition in which man is the measure of all
things, how does an appendage go about telling the story of her life" (58).

17. Mary Poovey makes this point. She argues: "Frankenstein calls into question, not the
social conventions that inhibit creativity, but rather the egotism that Mary Shelley
associates with the artist's monstrous self-assertion" (122).

18. Homans writes: "To carry a book is exactly what Mary Shelley does in bearing the words
of the male authors, in giving birth to a hideous progeny that is at once hook and demon"
(152).

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210 The Journal of Narrative Technique

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Blanchard, Marc Eli. "Of Cannibalism and Autobiography." Modem Language N

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Brooks, Peter. " 'Godlike Science/Unhallowed Arts': Language, Nature, and Monstrosity."
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Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
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Carroll, David. "Freud and the Myth of the Origin." New Literary History 6 (1985): 513-28.

Cixous, Helene. "Castration or Decapitation." Trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs 7 (1981): 41-55.

Cottom, Daniel. "Frankenstein and the Monster of Representation." Sub-stance 28 (1980):

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deLauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana

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Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass.
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Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W.
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. "Medusa's Head." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of

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Heath, Stephen. "Difference." Screen 19.3 (1978): 51-112.

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