Starting with the polemic about Frankenstein's (1818) authorship, I develop an analysis that includes it in a cultural history of subjectivity. The book is an example of the early gothic, probably the first book of science fiction, but it also takes part in a lineage of novels that explore the experience of being haunted by a phantom, a memory, a monster. I try to reconstitute that experience in historical and social psychological terms to comprehend the relations between desire, norms, and cultural conventions in the emergence of compulsory heterosexuality.
Frankenstein; History of Subjectivity; Male Homosocial Desire; Compulsory Heterosexuality; Fear; Violence