Framing Frankenstein Part 1: Understanding Frame Narration

I was in college the first time I read Mary Shelley's horror story, Frankenstein. Admittedly, the only image I had of the monster was Boris Karloff’s from Universal Studio's horror hay-day, so I was surprised when the monster turned out swift, nimble, and eloquent. It was an enjoying read, but the horror elements weren't what would stick with me. Instead, it was how the work strove to appear reliable and believable. I realized this a few months later while tutoring at a high school, a student came in with a copy of Frankenstein. I picked it up with excitement (a healthy balance to her sighs) and started discussing frame narration.

Frame Narration is an interesting narrative choice because it embeds one narrative within another, it isn’t so much like a picture in a frame, but more like a painting of a painter painting a painting. We see not just the one painting, but all of them, and take all of them into consideration. So, back to narratives we have to understand each narrative within the context of the situation it’s being told, and each frame impacts the way we read the storied being framed and the frames themselves, making it possible to give a piece several different readings based on how these narratives are read and compared. Frame narratives require a different kind of reading because it forces you to think about what the two narratives have to do with one another, in terms of themes, symbols, and even the contexts in which the narratives are themselves framed.

Frame narration is kind of like gossip: one person gained information they want to pass on, but part of passing on that information is describing where that information came from. For example, you found out that a friend just got a new job and you want to tell someone else about it (or even explaining to the person who got the job how you know about it), but rather than just say “Rick got a new job teaching Driver's ed,” You say, “I was having lunch with Laura when a driver's ed car drove by and she wondered if Rick was the instructor. I said 'Rick doesn't teach Driver's ed, and Laura said, 'He does now. He just interviewed for the position. He's going to quit his night job.''”

In the first example, there is a single narrative, with Rick as the protagonist and the focus being his new job. The second involves telling a narrative about having lunch and an event triggering the other narrative. This is a simple formulation, but it's still framing the narratives.

Shelley's Frankenstein goes considerably deeper than this.

It opens with the sailor writing letters to his sister: we get a glimpse of who he is, his motivations and interests, and then, one day, a man is discovered on the ice: Victor Frankenstein. Once Frankenstein is well, he begins to impart his tale to Captain Walton, who is in turn, transcribing it. It is a tale of modern and arcane science and how his studies and a death in his family led him to try reanimating dead tissue. From these experiments, the monster is born and turned loose on the world, who then has his chance to tell his story to Victor Frankenstein, halfway through the book, which includes the tale of the disenfranchised French aristocratic family, all of which is then embedded within Victor Frankenstein's narrative. Once the monster's narration concludes, Frankenstein himself returns to his tale of science and tragedy, before the sailor becomes the primary narrator again, and because he began the narrative, he is able to end it.

This creates an interesting set of questions: Why have the sailor? Why even use these deep levels of first person narration? There are “found manuscript” narratives like The Scarlet Letter, Robinson Crusoe, or Don Quixote, and other frame narratives where the top narrative is the most important, like One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, but Frankenstein doesn't work like these, but this framing device does influence the narrative in primarily two ways: first, it actually establishes a sense of reliability, and second, it develops significant themes, but in order to understand how it does these things, it helps to know just what is going on in a frame narrative.