ヴィクターの諸変奏 : メアリー・シェリー、『フランケンシュタイン』(1818)と自伝の反復

概要

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Why did Victor Frankenstein create the monster? Why did he do such and such after the creation? These are the difficult questions with which many readers of Frankenstein have struggled, so their solutions are consequently various. This critical confusion can be attributed to the autobiographic narratives by Victor himself. In the work he narrates his own past three Times. The problem is that those narratives respectively represent different figures of the narrator, which means he has no definite image concerning his "self" or that the self is too fundamentally enigmatic to be understood by himself. This is the reason why each critic has shown different characteristics of "the truth" of the creator. Also, this characteristic of Victor's narrative has something to do with the contemporary development of autobiographic genre and Mary Shelley, who revised the work in later time. Some Romantics tried to define their own selves repeatedly by writing of his past in vain as was seen in Victor's case. Shelley's revision effectively contributed to maintaining the enigmatic self of Victor because she explained away the creator as led by his own destiny and she did not give readers any more clues to comprehend his behavior which had been depicted in the first edition.
2004-03-31