ENGL202 AB/AD - Handout
Main Texts: Shelley - Frankenstein (1818)
Letters
(A) - want of friendship (II, 10) ; (IV, 16)
(B) - compassion for a stranger: W realizes suffering and consoles (IV, 15)
[connection] Book of Job
(C) - double address: to reader “pay attention!” (IV, 17)
Volume I
Note: C1 begins again with theme of friends.
(D) - mirroring being ’s situation: learning (26)
(E) - description of being - beautiful (35)
(F) - framing experience of justice/law (51)
(G) - justice?! “confession of Justine” (55-7)
[connection] Book of Job
Volume II
(H) - justice and civilization / nature (61-4) >> (67) >> sanguinary laws of man (97)
(I)** - being speaks! account of being’s experience of life (65+)
(J) - De Lacy’s: bare life in nature; being empathizes; poverty, altruism, speech/language (74-7) / (85)
(K)* - literary education of being; state of man (80)
[connection] Pico, Hobbes, Rousseau
(L) - lamentation/rage of the being at his alienation (95)
(M) - being’s desire for sympathy and community; relation to virtue (99, 100)
Volume III
(N) - Victor doubts being’s sincerity; no empathy (114)
(O) - Victor refused reason an empathy, being adopts a vengeful sense of justice (116)
(P) – being’s final reflections, remorse; empathy and understanding (153-6) http://staff.washington.edu/schenold/engl202/engl202_notes_5.doc
11.02.06 (Week 5)

ENGL202 AB/AD - Handout
III . Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Empathic Imagination
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is both formally and thematically an ontological experiment. Both the design of the text and its themes work to draw the reader to specific events of the imagination which produce the effect of our becoming aware of our own interpretive perspective. The story, itself a narrative about creation, creates for the reader a structure of relationships which encourage an empathic logic in their imagining.
Shelley’s novel consists of an intricate weave of letters and first-person narratives that resists any attempts to remain idle in our thinking about the situations presented. Without a central voice the reader is left to work with the various narratives and their configurations, remaining in the tensions generated by the conflicts and connections they stage. Although the opening letters might produce a sense of voyeurism in readers, Shelley draws them in with moments which function simultaneously as a connection within the fictive ontology of the story and to the reader. For example, in the final letter to Mrs. Saville which opens up to the beginning of
Frankenstein’s narrative Walton reproduces Frankenstein’s preemptive warning to him:
I do not know that the relation of my misfortunes will be useful to you, yet, if you are inclined, listen to my tale. I believe that the strange incidents connected with it will afford a view of nature, which may enlarge your faculties and understanding. You will hear of powers and occurrences, such as you have been accustomed to believe impossible: but I do not doubt that my tale conveys in its series internal evidence of the truth of events of which it is composed.
(17)
Functioning much like Cervantes’s direct address to the “Idle reader,” this passage serves to connect and frame the reader’s engagement with the events that follow. This moment in the text can be read as Shelley’s attempt to open up the novel to the reader in a metafictional moment that foregrounds an imperative to enter it, to read with “sympathy” as Walton finally comments.
Walton’s beginning letters to his sister about exploration, loneliness and desire for friendship also work to thematically frame the readings of both Frankenstein and the Being’s characters’ narratives. The arrival of Frankenstein and his restoration by Walton sets up a logic of relationships that will be challenged later by Frankenstein’s treatment of the Being. What is essential to note is that while
Walton “benevolently restored” the stranger to life, the framing theme of loneliness and his subsequent reflections that “[Frankenstein] must have been a noble creature in his better days, being even now in wreck so attractive and amiable” (15) suggest that appearance conditions his relation. After some conversation he even describes him as “so gentle and so wise,” remarking that “his mind is so cultivated, and when he speaks, although his words are culled with the choicest art, yet they flow with rapidity and unparalleled eloquence” (16). These reflections will be in stark contrast to Frankenstein’s first encounter with the Being, when he remarks that he is
“unable to endure the aspect of the being” (34) [emphasis added]. This is reinforced later when the words of the Being—his narrative plea for another to exchange
“those sympathies necessary for [his] being” (98)—capture Frankenstein’s imagination and inspire compassion, yet he reconsiders based on his appearance as an object: “when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sicken ed, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred” (99).
As the novel proceeds we find that the Being becomes both gentle and wise, and speaks with eloquence; yet Frankenstein is shown to be dismissive of the Being’s humanity in the face of his appearance. Although he listens to the Being’s own tale, he refuses to submit to the empathic logic which it demands. Readers are forced to experience the imaginative event of inhabiting the perspective of the Being, which constitutes the center of the novel. It is instructive that the education of the Being (in contrast to Frankenstein) mainly consists of imaginative efforts, interpreting the life of the rural family, mostly their relations, and their readings, summarizing his relationship as intimate co nnection: “when they were unhappy, I felt depressed; when they rejoiced, I sympathized in their joys” (75).
His approach to the family is also marked by his imaginative efforts to relate, to form relations : “I formed in my imagination a thousand pictures of presenting myself to them, and their reception of me. I imagined they would be disgusted, until, by my gentle demeanour and conciliating words, I should first win their favour, and afterwards their love” (77). The Being also learns about himself through
“reading” others, through the social interplay of his imagination.
The verbal struggle Shelley stages at the end of Vol. II between Frankenstein and the Being over the request for a companion is important because it reinforces thematically the demands on the imagination that the situation inspires. That Frankenstein is “moved by [the Being’s] representations” (his poetic appeals), yet is “hardened” by the Being as when considered as an object before him underscores the emphasis on an imaginative, dynamic relation. This failure of an empathic imagination in Frankenstein is mirrored in
Walton who curses the Being despite, too, having listened to the Being’s story (although secondhand). The Being’s story, taken as events, was an object for contemplation for Wa lton as well, and although his deeds of violence are reprehensible according to Walton’s sense of justice, Shelley has configured her narrative in such a way that the reader’s response pivots on their own imaginative work, which is laid bare in its comparison with Walton and Frankenstein. The ontological structure of the narrative provides a possibility for reflection on our own procedures of interpretation.
Shelley’s
Frankenstein exemplifies an important mode of ontological experimentation, which consists in the assembling and configuring of perspectives, requiring imaginative effort on the part of the reader to negotiate the spaces for reflection the text opens up.
As discussed above, the emphasis in Shelley’s novel’s experiment is to exemplify the problem of the empathic imagination, which seems to be only discernible as an effect of a procedure, and in the case of a text, a procedure of reading. What the novel does best via its experimentation is not, of course, to communicate a clear ethical code, a didactic function, but rather as an exemplification of a problem for thought that can only be negotiated in the experience of it. Insofar as we come to the text in search of a teleological closure,
Shelley disappoints; yet she disappoints this possible desire by design, seeking to put us into the tensions – both perceptual and ethical
– that are represented. Yet, to say that Shelley’s design is simply a deployment of “ontological gaps,” as McHale describes, to be closed by the reader’s imagination is to miss part of what it offers, which is an opportunity for the reader to experience their own procedures of interpretation, their own acts of reading. http://staff.washington.edu/schenold/engl202/engl202_notes_5.doc
11.02.06 (Week 5)