Novelistic Sympathy in Frankenstein

Abstract In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a pivotal scene shows the monster weeping together with the Arabian Safie over the fate of Native Americans. The monster embodies an unrecognizable difference that Shelley’s novelistic model of sympathy seeks to accommodate through acts of vicarious narration, and his telling and transcription of Safie’s story are not only the structural center of the novel’s narrative levels but also the conceptual pivot of Shelley’s reformulation of sympathy. Frankenstein explicitly puts forth the genre of the novel as compensation for the impossibility of sympathetic experience. Throughout this novel, moments of narration, transcription, and transmission consistently intersect with experiences of sympathy, which produce the impetus for narrative to be both told and recorded. The shifts in perspective around which Smith centers his definition become, in Shelley’s novelistic sympathy, acts of narrative framing and novel-writing that attempt to overcome difference that defies classification.