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While a strong tradition has virtually revolutionized the reading of "Frankenstein", giving the work's feminine subject new visibility and centrality, this approach has simultaneously obscured access to the text's theatrical display of masculinity. Yet an understanding of the deployment of the male body (in the novel and in the cultural construction of Mary Shelley) might challenge current understandings of both the gendering of "Frankenstein" and "Frankenstein"'s place in gendering of literary history. The spectacle of masculinity haunts late-nineteenth-century Shelleyan iconography and informs the gendered narratives that shape such influential studies as James Rieger's twentieth-century textual and biographical reconstructions of "Frankenstein" and its author. Given this history, a feminist critique can profit from a reading of "Frankenstein"'s insistent exhibition of masculinity, for the male spectacle unfixes gender hierarchies, illuminating the fractures and contraditions underlying masculine authority. |