The document analyzes the narrative structure of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein,' highlighting its epistolary format and exploration of dual genres: the feminine epistolary novel and the masculine explorer's journal. It emphasizes how the novel subverts traditional conventions, portraying flawed characters and failures instead of celebrating heroic achievements, ultimately challenging Enlightenment ideals. The analysis also notes the gothic elements that further complicate distinctions between hero and villain, suggesting that monstrosity is a product of human action rather than external forces.

1. NARRATIVE STRUCTURE IN
FRANKENSTEIN

2. FRANKENSTEIN
 Frankenstein opens with letters from an
explorer, Robert Walton, to his sister.
 The Explorer is stuck on his ship in the ice of
the North Pole.

3. LAYERS OF STORIES IN FRANKENSTEIN
Robert Walton’s
NarrativeVictor’s Story
Creature’s
Story

4. FRAME NARRATIVE
A fusion of two respected 18th
century genres
 epistolary novel, a traditionally
feminine genre
 explorer’s journal, a
traditionally masculine genre
and an archetypal
enlightenment genre

5. FRAME NARRATIVE
Functions:
 provide a frame of verisimilitude to an
improbable tale
 It SEEMS more true
 It is VERY familiar and
conventional: it was told…
 Ancient Mariner
 Ozymandias

6. EPISTOLARY NOVEL
 A Novel written as a series of documents
 Letters
 Diary entries
 Newspaper clippings
 Blogs
 Emails

7. EPISTOLARY NOVEL CONVENTIONS
 Reveal inner life: individual psychological
struggles
 Growth to knowledge and virtue

8. IDEOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS
 Reassure readers of the capacity of
individual to combat the temptations of evil
and grow towards virtue

9. FRANKENSTEIN SUBVERTS THE
EPISTOLARY NOVEL
 Male narrator
 No growth: fails to resists temptations; learns
nothing

10. EXPLORER’S JOURNAL CONVENTIONS
 Protagonist : heroic scientist-explorer
 Quest structure – pursuit and achievement
of a goal (c.f. the hero’s journey)
 Encounters with strange lands, creatures
and beings
 Increased understanding of the world and
humanity

11. EXPLORER’S JOURNAL
Ideological functions
 celebrate the quest for knowledge and the
power of reason
 celebrate human achievement - illustrate
man’s increasing mastery of his world
(archetypal embodiment of enlightenment
ideologies)

12. Frankenstein subverts the conventions and
ideologies of the Explorer’s Journal genre
• Heroic protagonist exposed as flawed:
narcissistic etc
• Quest ends in failure – reveals human
limitations, rather than celebrating
achievements
• Protagonist learns nothing from
experiences and encounters
NB: Gulliver’s Travels

13. Further subverts the Explorer’s Journal by
embedding within it a disreputable genre – a
gothic tale.
Foregrounds the importance of the
Explorer’s Journal genre’s neglect of the:
 irrational
 inexplicable
 supernatural

14. VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN’S GOTHIC TALE
Gothic conventions
 Emphasis on the irrational and fantastic
 Emphasis on emotion rather than reason
Challenge to enlightenment values

15.  Setting: relics of past corrupt society or
wilds of nature
 Protagonist: innocent, often virginal, victim
 Villain: supernatural figure or authoritarian
patriarchal figure representative of past,
corrupt regime
 Narrative structure: triumph over the
monstrous

16. IDEOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS
 Acknowledge the existence of the monstrous
 Reassure readers that the monstrous can be
defeated or controlled

17. FRANKENSTEIN SUBVERTS THESE
CONVENTIONS AND IDEOLOGIES
 Setting: locates monstrosity in everyday
world: bourgeois domestic sphere
 Protagonist: is victim and villain/monster
 Ironically, victim of own villainy

18.  The monstrous a product of human action:
external diabolical agency replaced by
internal human agency
 The evil patriarch is an archetypal
enlightenment bourgeois figure
 Villain is victim and hero

19.  Blurs boundaries between victim, villain and
hero and human/non-human
 The monstrous not defeated or controlled