In her essay, “My Monster/My Self,” Barbara Johnson looks at Frankenstein and two unrelated critical texts with an emphasis on the different critiques each offer of the institution of parenthood. Johnson’s goal in the essay is to “read” the three texts “not as mere studies of the monstrousness of selfhood, . . . but as autobiographies . . . , textual dramatizations of the problems with which they deal” (242). This focus comes from three pressing contemporary issues at the time of her writing: “the question of mothering, the question of the woman writer, and the question of autobiography” (241). In related ways, these three questions and texts point to a troubling of the dominant cultural narrative, mainly a disagreement first in what mothering is expected to be or should be and secondly in how this ideal or opposition to it can be represented. In order to unpack the problems Johnson writes her essay around, it is helpful to look at two texts which deal with the origin of these problems of representation, John Fiske’s “Television Culture,” and Jacque Lacan’s “The Instance of the Letter of in the Unconscious.” Fiske’s work is relevant here for his dealing with the propensity of any cultural object to reinforce the norms of its culture, and Lacan’s, for his discussion of problems of signification inherent in language and more specifically, how language determines the idea of self and what this means for the question of autobiography.

Before handling Nancy Friday’s “My Mother/My Self” and Dorthy Dinnerstein’s “The Mermaid and the Minotaur,” Johnson explains the “autobiographical impulse” that she sees running through these works and its application to Frankenstein. While she notes that upon first hearing, the idea of reading the novel, which is in fact three male autobiographies stacked within each other, as a woman’s autobiography may sound a bit “ludicrous,” she urges that we look a bit a closer into what “motivates” the three stories within the novel. This attention to motivation is exactly what I wish to look at in Johnson’s reading of the novel and her application of Dinnerstein and Friday.

As Johnson explains, Walton, Victor, and the creature, seem to be motivated in their story-telling by the hope of persuasion, each relying “on a presupposition of resemblance between teller and addressee,” with each retelling “designed . . . so that somehow transgression can be eliminated” (243). For transgression on the part of the teller to be eliminated, he or she must through their telling “create a being like [his or her]self,” and this according to Johnson “is the autobiographical desire par excellence” (243). Thus, the motivation for autobiography seems to be vindication through the negation of difference.

Despite his using different words and referring to a different medium, this justification through the process of removing difference sounds quite similar to John Fiske’s thesis that “television broadcasts programs that are replete with potential meanings, and . . . it attempts to control and focus this meaningfulness into a more singular preferred meaning that performs the work of the dominant ideology” (1274). While this comparison may be tenuous in its implying that the “dominant ideology” has committed some iniquity for which it must atone and the lending of agency to a system of ideas, it is not a stretch to say that each culturally constructed object or narrative is autobiographical of the culture from which it originates. A narrative flowing from the dominant culture seeks to reconcile the any differences between its source and its receiver, eliminating the transgression of presenting a differing ideology.

As Fiske explains, anything we see on television “performs the work of the dominant ideology” by relaying its messages, telling its story, though “codes.” These codes and the act of coding are ubiquitous. Taking his definition almost directly from the semiologists, Fiske states that a code “is a rule-governed system of signs, whose rules and conventions are shared amongst the members of a culture, which are used to generate and circulate meanings in and for that culture” (1275) Though Fiske’s argument deals only with television, he does make a issue of pointing out that coding is a part of not only fictitious programs but also “news” programs and others that claim to be objective. For this reason, we can apply this issue of indoctrination not only to Shelly’s narrative, but also the non-fiction works Johnson works with, as well as Johnson’s essay itself.

While each of the works which Johnson deals with are autobiographical, Shelley is not the immediate subject of her autobiographical text. Friday is most explicit in displaying her writing as autobiography, using the events of her life as the main evidence to “demonstrate her thesis” (244). Dinnerstein’s work is also somewhat autobiographical as her thesis is based in some life experience and “the book was written partially in mourning for her husband,” but as Johnson notes, “the remarks are more muted” (245). In contrast to this, as Johnson points out in citing an introduction to the 1831 edition, Shelley views herself as an appendage to the text, rather than the text as a reflection of herself (244). Johnson asks us in regards to the “problem of specifically feminine autobiography . . . in a humanistic tradition in which the man is the measure of all things, how does an appendage go about telling the story of her life” (244)?

Mary Shelley tells the story of her life most effectively as an appendage. Or in the always abstruse words of Lacan, “I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought, I think of what I am where I do not think to think” (457). If language precedes and structures our interpretation of and interactions with reality and functions similarly to dream images in their “distortions” and “transpositions” – “the sliding of the signified under the signifier” (Lacan 455) – it would seem the most effective way to short-circuit this short-circuiting would be to write with a different conscious goal in mind. If one is writing “unconsciously,” their “true” feelings and desires are going to spring up in their actions no matter what they do, why not write about something completely unrelated and invite them to show themselves?

The texts of Dinnerstein and Friday, while seeking to deal outright with the problems of the culturally dominant parenting model, being thinly veiled autobiographies, actually seem to reinforce some of the ideologies they are explicitly writing against. Returning to Johnson’s above definition of the goals of autobiography and Fiske’s conception of the function of a narrative, if the women writing these autobiographies’ ideas were formed within a culture, then not only are they trying to make us more like themselves, but they are also perpetuating the dominant culture they are apparently writing against. For example, Dinnerstein writes to reduce and reverse “the types of imbalance and injustice the prevailing asymmetry in gender relations produces” (241). Though writing in a specifically feminist mode “in her gesture of rejecting more traditional forms of scholarship,” Dinnerstein undercuts herself in her execution of this argument by “plead[ing] not for the validity but for the urgency of her message” (245). Her reliance on pathos comfortably situates her in the easily recognizable dominant-cultural role of the woman who cannot rationalize, but instead hysterically raves. Friday’s work contains a number of contradictory messages even in its short treatment by Johnson as well. The text seeks to release the mother and daughter from “the myth of maternal love” which “creates a heritage of self-rejection, anger, and duplicity . . . that both mother and daughter continue to punish themselves for never having been able to achieve” (241). But, as Johnson herself points out, the “huge book” itself may be another lie (244), as revealed in an excerpt she has chosen for the article that shows this myth of “my mother’s love and approval” (Friday, qtd. in Johnson 245) is exactly what Friday still desires.

While I cannot disagree that Frankenstein is a highly autobiographical novel, not only in relation to the characters’ stories inside, but in relation in to Shelley’s life as well, I do feel that through Shelley’s misdirection in the mode of her representation make it much more effective in terms of its critique of the questions posed at the beginning of her essay, those of mothering, the woman writer, and autobiography.

Johnson reads Victor as creating two autobiographies, one being his monster, the other being the story he tells Walton to atone for his creation of that monster (243). In the same way, Shelley created one autobiography with her writing of Frankenstein, but spurned her chance to write a second in her abstinence in the 1831 introduction. If, as Johnson says, autobiography is indeed a “tale designed to reinforce the resemblance between the teller and the listener so that somehow transgression can be eliminated,” who is the creature a story for? and what did Victor do wrong? One can conjecture that the creature is a story for his dead mother and that he believed himself guilty any number of Freudian transgressions, but the story he tells Walton is surely not the same one. Then we must ask, who Shelley’s monster is for? and what she is guilty of? Shelley’s novel is just as unprecedented as the creature inside of it, but in the same way that Shelley’s novel is truer autobiography, so is Victor’s creation of the monster. Shelley can best tell her story as an appendage, because as Lacan points out “what does man find in metonymy if not the power to circumvent the obstacles of social censure” (454).

Works Cited
Fiske, John. “Television Culture.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 2004. 1274-84. Print.

Johnson, Barbara. “My Monster/My Self.” Frankenstein. Ed. Hunter, J. Paul. New York: Norton. 1996. 241-251. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 2004. 447-61. Print.