SOURCE: "My Monster/My Self," in Diacritics, Vol. 12, No. 2, Summer, 1982, pp. 2-10.

In the landmark essay below, Johnson presents Frankenstein not just as a complex fictionalization of Shelley's autobiography, but more explicitly as a commentary on the nature of female autobiography. "Frankenstein," Johnson contends, "can be read as the story of the experience of writing Frankenstein."

To judge from recent trends in scholarly as well as popular literature, three crucial questions can be seen to stand at the forefront of today's preoccupations: the question of mothering, the question of the woman writer, and the question of autobiography. Although these questions and current discussions of them often appear unrelated to each other, it is my intention here to explore some ways in which the three questions are profoundly interrelated, and to attempt to shed new light on each by approaching it via the others. I shall base my remarks...