SOURCE: Recchio, Thomas E. “A Monstrous Reading of Mary Barton: Fiction as ‘Communitas.’” College Literature 23, no. 3 (October 1996): 2-22.

In the following essay, Recchio discusses the differences in interpretation of Gaskell's novel between working-class students reading it for the first time and academic literary critics.

‘As I read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read.’

(Shelley 125)

I

When Frankenstein's monster relates his history to his creator, he illustrates how reading mediates between his experience and his understanding of it. Plagued by the questions “Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?” (170), the monster looks for relevance, reassurance, guidance, and personal knowledge. Applying what he reads from myth, history, and romance (Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther) to...