Textual Healing, or Death by a Thousand Edits?

Again this week, as before, I saw a number of possible ways to bring these articles into dialogue with Shelley’s Frankenstein. Certainly the idea of boundaries and their connection with identity are fertile ground for such a dialogue, as is the question of the significance of place, but of this week’s reading the article most obviously applicable to a novel best known for its hulking creature composed of cut, spliced, and galvanized bodily tissues is, of course, Adam Smyth’s “Shreds of Holinesse.” However, rather than dissect [sorry] the scenes of Victor Frankenstein’s construction of his creature from materials collected from “the unhallowed damps of the grave,” “charnel houses,” and the “dissection room and the slaughterhouse,” I want to think about the cutting discussed in Smyth’s piece in relation to the cutting and [re]construction of Frankenstein itself (36, 37).

I have been working from the Oxford World Classics edition of the 1818 text, but with this question in mind I have also consulted the Norton Critical Edition of the better-known (because more widely read and adapted), heavily revised 1831 version. This edition offers, especially in its appendices of secondary materials (themselves an example of the modern analogue to such a practice), a great deal of fodder for a discussion of cutting and textual collage. Here is reprinted Mary Shelley’s introduction to the 1831 Third Edition of Frankenstein, in which she describes even the first writing of the novel as a sort of intellectual act of cutting and pasting: “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself” (NCE 167). She credits a series of conversations, experiences, and dreams for serving as the germ of the story, and she speaks of her imagination as a separate entity, “gifting” her the “successive images” that “arose in [her] mind” and which she stitched together to form the novel (168).  Acknowledging with a wink the parallel between her creative process and Frankenstein’s, she adds, “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper” (168).

Also included in the Norton Critical Edition appendices is an essay by Anne Mellor that discusses the “critically significant differences” between the 1818 and 1831 texts of Frankenstein (204). Mellor is Team 1818, all the way. That text, she says, has “greater internal philosophical coherence,” is “closest to the author[‘s] original conceptions,” and is “more convincingly related to [its] historical contexts” (205). Mellor goes on to outline the pressures (both internal and external) under which Shelley made many of the revisions, and she finds that only the first published text “presents a stable and coherent conception of the character of Victor Frankenstein and of Mary Shelley’s political and moral ideology” (211). The later edition, on the other hand, shifts the blame from personal choices to fate—or, as Mellor puts it, in the later version “Shelley replaces her earlier organic conception of nature with a mechanistic one” (210). Mellor particularly laments that the availability of the 1831 text at a much lower price makes it much more commonly assigned, with the result that today’s students most often engage with a Frankenstein that has morphed quite a bit from its earlier form. I would extend this idea to acknowledge also that many “readers” are exposed only to the pop-culture afterlives of the novel, most of which have been “cut” from the 1831 revision. Smyth’s idea that “snipping away text creates meaning”—especially if we consider that statement to also imply the converse (side note: do we?)—highlights the significance of this selective exposure (454).

A discussion of textual “cutting” by consumers of texts after their initial publication could be fruitfully expanded to address the subject of adaptation and its powerful potential to create meanings anew from a widely-known text like Frankenstein (thus turning its consumers into producers). However, applying the idea to the process of revision by the text’s original author is fascinating for the way it reveals the limitations of such power, even when performed from a position of ostensible author-ity. As Mellor points out, “current text-editing theory and practice no longer assume that the author’s final word is definitive, [and so] we cannot [privilege] the final edition for that reason alone” (NCE 204). As in Smyth’s extended metaphor of the botanical practice of pruning, this sort of cutting allows for the growth of something new, something that expands and transforms what was there before, and—perhaps more importantly—does so to some extent independently of the intentions of the cutter.