Frames Within Frames
One of the most intriguing elements of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the style in which each narrative is presented. In the novel there are more than five separate narratives, each more or less related to the overall plot of the novel. Currently I have only read twenty-one chapters, but I’ve been able to pick up a number of interconnections between the distinct narratives, as well as between Frankenstein and other literary works.
As I mentioned in my last post, the whole of the novel is framed within the letters of Robert Walton to his sister. Upon further reading, I’ve found that within the narrative framed by Robert Walton’s letters is another narrative, describing the experiences of Frankenstein’s creation. Within the creature’s narrative, the creature tells his own story, as well as the story of a family he watches.
The interconnectivity of each narrative can be interpreted in the context of Mary Shelley’s metaphor of literature, represented by Frankenstein’s creation. In this consideration, it can be inferred that Shelley is referencing the relationships between written works, and the accumulating of recurring ideas through literature.
In any written text, there is no such thing as a completely original idea. As Sven Birkerts said in The Gutenberg Elegies, “the writer does not create the unknown and unforeseen whole cloth out of nothing.” In order words, every time someone writes something, they are reusing ideas that have been around for immeasurable amounts of time, but rearranging them into a new creation. Each of the frames in Frankenstein can be seen as a new work, but in addition to being an independent work, each frame accumulates the ideas within it. Shelley further exemplifies this idea by incorporating other works, such as Percy Shelley’s “Mutability”, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Rather than creating new ideas, Mary Shelley deliberately used established ideas, for the purpose of demonstrating the interconnectivity of text.
great point in linking this to the idea of originality. the hypertext novel “Patchwork Girl” develops your idea in its rewriting of Frankenstein (we will be looking at it later in the term).