Endings
Starter: first
impressions of
Shelley’s ending?
LO: to be able to
evaluate a critical
position on the ending
of the novel (AO3)
Discussion questions
• How convinced are you that Victor is a ‘revenge
hero’ from his speech? (p. 206)
• What do you make of Walton’s description of
Victor? Does his tally with our views of him from
the rest of the novel? (p. 213-221)
• How convinced are you by Shelley’s portrayal of
the creature grieving over Frankenstein’s body?
How is Walton presented here? (p.221-225)
• Do you think Victor is worthy of this elegy?
He was soon borne away by the ways, and
lost in darkness and distance. (225)
He is dead who called me into being; and
when I shall be no more, the very
remembrance of us both will speedily
vanish. (224)
To what extent is this
true? Walton has
immortalised them in
writing?
David Lodge – ‘The Art of Fiction’
• David Lodge is a prominent literary
critic, author and journalist.
• Between 1991-1992, he wrote a
column in the Independent on
Sunday exploring one technical
aspect of fiction writing per week.
• The aim was to make literary
criticism more relatable for the
general public, not just the domain
of scholars and academics.
• These were eventually expanded
into book form in 1992 and
published as ‘The Art of Fiction’.
The problem of endings – what Lodge noticed...
• Victorian novellists (slightly later than Shelley) were
pressurised by publishers and readers to provide happy
endings, detailing the futures of key characters; births,
deaths, marriages, reclaimings of fortunes and the like.
• Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey, 1817): ‘my readers [...]
will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before
them, that we are hastening together to perfect felicity’
– Austen states that an author can’t conceal when the ending
will happen because we can see how many pages are left!
• John Fowles, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969),
offers two endings, one with a mock happy ending but
with still a quarter of the novel to go.
– A similar tactic was employed by Charlotte Bronte in her novel
Villette, where despite implying that the hero of the novel is
killed in a shipwreck, she speaks of her readers, saying “Let
them picture union and a happy succeeding life” – an early
open ending...
Mary Shelley
• Lodge discusses how other novellists chose to undercut
the ‘normality’ that we expect from a novel, or the
‘comforting happy ending’.
• Shelley clearly does not give us this ‘comforting’
ending, choosing a much more open style instead, but
unlike Fowles or Bronte, she doesn’t limit the options
we can choose from.
• However, she does seem to employ a ‘double’ ending –
in the fact that she ends Frankenstein’s narrative and
then has Walton conclude the novel.
– Pair discussion: What is her aim here? How does
Frankenstein end his narrative and how does Walton end
his? What are her aims here?
Contemporary criticism of the ending
(1818)
• In ladies’ magazine ‘La Belle Assemble’:
– “Should not an author, who has a moral end in
view, point out rather that application which may
be more generally understood?”
• In ‘Monthly Review’:
– “[...]leading to no conclusion either moral or
philosophical.”
In pairs, discuss these critical viewpoints, finding
evidence to support them, and decide which
one you find most convincing.
• Shelley’s ending is deliberately ambiguous in
order to unsettle the reader.
• Shelley’s ‘double’ ending has a key narrative
function.
• The ambiguity of the ending of the novel means
there is ‘no conclusion, either moral or
philosophical’.
Write a paragraph evaluating these different viewpoints, using evidence from the
novel as support.
• The ambiguity of the ending of the novel
means there is ‘no conclusion, either moral or
philosophical’.
• To what extent do you think this is true of
Frankenstein?