弱き語り : メアリー・シェリー、『フランケンシュタイン』(1818)、あるいは自伝の歴史性

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タイトル別名
  • ヨワキ カタリ メアリー シェリー フランケンシュタイン 1818 アルイワ ジデン ノ レキシセイ
  • Weak Narratives : Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), or the Historicity of Autobiography

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説明

To aberration, murder, revenge, and incest, which constitute the main body of Gothicism, the critical attention has been paid about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. But, in contrast, another important aspect has been ignored, in spite of its sheer certainty and significance in the work. It should be noticed that the main characters, Victor Frankenstein and the monster, are genuine narrators and the readers would get to know about these unordinary events or actions through their narrations. This is where the critical significance of the work itself thrives. To interpret the narratives in the work, it is important to understand both Victor and the monster as the central cultural figures. They use the narrative strategy with intention to form some favorable relationships with listeners, but they fail because their narratives are prevented from developing by the dread which the monster physically represents. Viewed in a broad context, the consequence allegorically signifies the failure of the traditional mode of autobiography, by which authors had tried to make the common understanding about their good reputation between them and readers. Then in Romanticism, the literary genre came to be used as a means to interpret or define the identity of its author. And this modern mode of the genre is also realized in the figure of Robert Walton, the third narrator in the work, who could do nothing but find himself to be surprised at the unintelligibility of his own self. Thus through its own narratives Frankenstein shows the development, or historicity, of autobiographical genre as well as narrates the enigmatic self in the modern age.

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