Visible Traces: Reading the Palimpsest in Mary Shelley's Falkner

Abstract

In this thesis, I use nonlinear understandings of the palimpsest in two distinct ways in order to explore both how Shelley constructs a palimpsestic relationship between Falkner and Frankenstein, and the ways in which this palimpsestic relationship is thematized through the interactions and identities of Falkner’s characters. In Chapter One, I use the figure of the palimpsest to uncover the untapped affective and philosophic potentiality of Frankenstein and Falkner, a potentiality that reveals itself only by considering each text as being in an intimate, unabating dance with the other. Chapter Two then ingests the figure of the palimpsest and investigates the ways that Falkner engages with what I call the embodied palimpsest of the nineteenth-century woman, whose identity constructs itself through simultaneous acts of effacement and reanimation. Through this kind of reparative reading, I aim to reclaim Falkner from its moneyspinner status and to show its layered complexities of storytelling, theme, and philosophical inquiry.