Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Return of the Author

Abstract

From Wimsatt and Beardsley’s critique of the intentional fallacy and Barthes’s obituary of the author, to the more cautious, historical investigation of Foucault, the critical focus has changed over the years to the point that now the author is no longer considered a meaningful object of literary analysis. However, discussions about the role of the author persist and we continue to have recourse to the notion of authorship. The anti-humanist deauthorization in contemporary literary discourse can be rectified by turning to a renewed conception of authorship, or more precisely to the inescapable autobiographism of literary writing. In this study, I intent to demonstrate that certain literary texts resist anti-humanist deauthorization and rather invite biographical-historical criticism, by examining the recent critical history of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Since the late 70’s, the feminist intervention into a predominantly masculine critical discourse has contributed to historical shifts in decoding the meaning of Frankenstein. Today the novel is generally regarded as a powerful feminist text that articulates Shelley’s (or woman’s) experience of patriarchy, the family, and the trauma of giving birth. Despite their explicit maleness, the literary configurations of central characters (Victor Frankenstein, the Creature, Robert Walton) in the novel have been construed as allegorical signifiers of the author’s own repressed and traumatized psyche. As no author can entirely dissociate authorship from private obsessions, Shelley’s novel serves as a complex sign of a female author’s genuine exigency. The female authorship has become a crucial frame of reference for Shelley criticism, manifesting that authorship is not an ephemeral time-bound institution which succumbs to a pervasive anonymity of discourse.