Frankenstein (1818)

Mary Shelley’s book opens with a frame narration which, as it is in the form of a letter, recalls the earlier epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson (for example,

Clarissa

(1747–8)) and others. Before the book’s main chapters begin, there are four letters written by the man who records Victor Frankenstein’s account of his life, Captain Walton. These are addressed to Walton’s sister, Margaret Saville. The letters are sent by Walton as he travels nearer to the North Pole: the first three before he even meets Frankenstein, and the fourth after. The Swiss scientist Frankenstein has been led to the Arctic by the ‘monster’, the reader later learns, because his creation is ‘impassive’ to the cold. From Shelley’s point of view, the bleak Arctic represents the same sublime (but treacherous) Romantic landscape as do the Alps in poems such as her husband Percy Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ or Xanadu in Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. The frame is particularly interesting because it is written in a different form from the main narrative. Shelley chooses to use the epistolary convention of authors such as Richardson for this preface before the descriptive and digressive first-person account of Frankenstein takes over the novel. This technique itself seems to hand over the novel from one older style to another newer one, just as the narrative seems to switch between Gothic and realist conventions. After the rise of the realist novel to express the new world of mercantile capitalism and bourgeois individualism, epitomised in

Robinson Crusoe

, Gothic arose according to David Punter ‘at the stage when the bourgeoisie, having to all intents and purposes gained social power, began to try to understand the conditions and history of their own ascent … Gothic is thus a form of response to the emergence of a middle-class-dominated capitalist society’. Punter therefore positions Gothic as the flipside of realism, and the blend of the two in Shelley’s novel can certainly be viewed in terms of many oppositions in the narrative, including that between Frankenstein and his ‘monster’. Punter concludes that Gothic emerges because, with the

coming of industry, the move towards the city, the regularisation of patterns of labour in the late eighteenth century … the individual comes to see him- or herself at the mercy of forces which in fundamental ways elude understanding. Under such circumstances it is hardly surprising to find the emergence of a literature whose key motifs are paranoia, manipulation, and injustice, and whose central project is understanding the inexplicable, the taboo, the irrational. (Punter, 1996: 112)