The monster in the family: a reconsideration of frankenstein's domestic relationships

Abstract

Reading Frankenstein not as Gothic fiction but as a domestic novel, it is argued that Mary Shelley was, even at this early point in her career, concerned with the complex workings of the English middle-class family, which blurred the boundaries of gender, family, and social roles. The radical instability and multiplicity of family roles, it is argued, tempts Victor to stabilize domesticity by actually creating a relative. The creature, ironically, becomes the embodiment of the family's multivalence and its potential destruction. Moreover, the reader's and the author's relationship to the novel, developed through a multivalent narrative structure and language, recapitulates Victor's unstable relationship to family. Mary Shelley thus expresses her own concerns with language's potential failure to create meaning, with her abilities as an author, with self-definition, and with her relationships to both her family and her creation, the novel itself.