Written by Mary when she was only nineteen, Frankenstein is among the most enduring icons of Romanticism, and in recent years it has attracted as much attention from critics as any text in the canon. As the only daughter of Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s ill-fated union, Mary was “nursed and fed with a love of glory. To be something great and good was the precept given me by my father.”12 Emily Sunstein dismisses as inaccurate the assumption still accepted by some that Mary received no systematic education prior to falling under the influence of Shelley. “Living with Godwin was an education; she loved leaning; he encouraged her, and gave her the background Wollstonecraft had not had and regretted having missed.”13 Years later, Jane (later Claire) Clairmont corroborated her stepsister’s account of the tenor and routine of their Godwinian education:
All the family worked hard, learning and studying: we all took the liveliest interest in the great questions of the day: common topics, gossiping, scandal, found no entrance in our circle, for we had been brought up by Mr. Godwin to think it was the greatest misfortune to be fond of the world, or worldly pleasures or of luxury or money; and that there was no greater happiness than to think well of those around us, and to delight in being useful or pleasing to them.14
Godwin described the spirit that governed Mary’s education in this way: “I am anxious that she should be brought up like a philosopher even like a Cynic. It will add greatly to the strength and worth of her character.”15 Her father’s choice of a second wife was only the first of devastating paternal rebuffs she suffered; the other was his reaction to her elopement with the older married poet, which may be seen as an effort to establish independence from Godwin’s control over her discourse.16 As the precocious child grew into a young woman and emerged as an author, her father’s texts provided the authoritative discourse with which she contended in an effort to establish her own distinctive voice. Her earliest literary efforts were, of course, published by the Juvenile Library, her stepmother’s publishing venture, and Mellor suggests that there is “a peculiar symbolic resonance” in the loss of Mary’s early writings which were “accidentally” left behind at a Parisian hotel: “Mary’s first impulse in her new life with the poet Shelley was to establish her own literary credentials, to assert her own voice, and to assume a role as his intellectual companion and equal.”17 But at least initially she merely exchanged one male tutor for another; it was only with her emergence as an author that she attained liberation from both father and husband.
While a number of candidates for Mary’s precursor text are named or cited in the novel, including those by Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe, St. Leon is the “adult” text for which Frankenstein serves as a reduction, translation, and revision. Its author combined the functions of Mary’s father and mother as well as her chief teacher and her chief literary “precursor,” and yet the most striking structural and thematic correspondences between Frankenstein and St. Leon arise from the urgency of Mary’s efforts to mediate her Godwinian education by re-writing one of its canonical texts. In a modification of the Russian linguist I. M. Lotman’s model of the “reception” and “appropriation” of adult texts by children, Michael Holquist suggests that “not only do children thus limit the scripts of the playlets their parents enact with them; they also limit the size of the cast. That is, for children all possible players in the world’s drama are reduced to the characters experienced in the family culture.”18 Barbara Johnson has written that “Frankenstein can be read as the story of the experience of writing Frankenstein,” but actually the writing of Frankenstein is about the re-writing of St. Leon.19 This accounts for the parallels between St. Leon and Frankenstein with respect to their dramatic personae. The model for St. Leon’s family is, of course, Godwin’s own deceased first wife, daughters, and stepson; and in Frankenstein Mary sustains this pattern, less as a way of exorcising an Electra complex by gender substitution (in this sense Victor and Alphonse Frankenstein can be seen as surrogates for Shelley and Godwin; Elizabeth is Fanny Imlay’s double) than as a means of completing her literary education. As such, education assumes the form, initially, of appropriating parental speech patterns and narratives. Once this step is successfully completed, the child moves on to the second stage in the process of Bildung: the articulation and creation of her own original discourse.
Bakhtin used the term “novel” to denote “whatever force is at work within a given literary system to reveal the limits and the artificial constraints of that system.” According to this view, “literary systems are comprised of canons and novelization is fundamentally anticanonical.”20 This characterization applies to both St. Leon and Frankenstein, since each work is a militantly anti-canonical, composite literary form that explores the outer boundaries of the novel’s possibilities as a genre and combines, appropriates, and fuses other narrative sub-genres, including the Gothic, travel, and sentimental fiction. Bakhtin argues that the content and images of the novel are therefore “profoundly double-voiced and double-languaged” because they “seek to objectivize the struggle with all types of internally persuasive discourse that had at one time held sway over the author.”21 One such sub-genre exhibited in Frankenstein that illustrates this process is the Bildungsroman, in which the process of intertextual dialogue has been fused with the dialectic of education.
The composition of Frankenstein may, in fact, be compared to the manner in which children learn to appropriate adult speech for themselves and the means by which a writer distinguishes their voice from those of precursors and literary authority figures. The first process is analogous to translation in that it involves assimilation, rearrangement, a certain amount of necessary distortion, and simplification of the parental discourse adopted by the child as models in developing their own voice and speech patterns. Lotman describes language acquisition as a mediating process combining translation, appropriation, and reconfiguration:
The child’s contact with the world of adults is constantly imposed on him by the subordinated position of his world in the general hierarchy of the culture of adults. However, this contact itself is possible only as an act of translation. How can such translation be accomplished? . . . [T]he child establishes a correspondence between some texts familiar and comprehensible to him in “his” language and the texts of “adults” . . . . In such a translation—of one whole text by another whole text—the child discovers an extraordinary abundance of “superfluous” words in “adult” texts. The act of translation is accompanied by a semantic reduction of the text . . . . The child reduces the semantic model obtained from [the language of adults] in such a way that translation into his own language of the texts flowing from without is possible.22
The child’s mediation of adult discourse thus may be likened to the reception of literary texts belonging to a foreign culture. In Les voix du silence (1951) André Malraux describes the process of cultural interaction in terms of a “conquest,” an “annexation,” a “possession” of the “foreign,” of that which is culturally “other,” and Bakhtin characterizes the impact of another’s discourse upon the writer as a dialectical opposition between the self and the other involving, first, the recognition of difference that is then followed by the struggle for individuation or originality:
When someone else’s ideological discourse is internally persuasive for us and acknowledged by us, entirely different possibilities open
