Othered by Design: Marginalization and the Literary Self in Frankenstein

This thesis explores how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein stages the marginalization and identity construction of the monster through embodiment, language, and literature. Drawing on Judith Halberstam’s theory of the Gothic body, Judith Butler’s concept of performativity, and Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection, it argues that the monster functions as a cultural text onto which fears of science, race, and bodily disruption are inscribed. Methodologically, the study uses close reading and intertextual analysis, with particular attention to the monster’s engagement with Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Plutarch’s Lives. These works enable what is here termed a “literary self”: a subjectivity constructed through acts of reading but rendered unstable by social rejection. The analysis demonstrates that the monster’s tragedy lies not in innate monstrosity but in cultural illegibility, revealing how Frankenstein critiques Enlightenment humanism while anticipating posthuman debates on identity and the boundaries of the human.