85LITERATURE
2021, Vol. 18 (2), 85-100(230)
revije.ff.uni-lj.si/elope
https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.18.2.85-100
UDC: 821.111.09-31Winterson J.
Mojca Krevel
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
The Monstrous Cosmos of Jeanette Winterson’s 
Frankissstein
ABSTRACT
In her 2019 novel Frankissstein: A Love Story, Jeanette Winterson weaves an intricate trans-
temporal and trans-spatial multiplicity, the coding of which is governed by Mary Shelley’s 
Frankenstein (1818). Through the double first-person narrative of Mary Shelley and her 
21st-century reincarnation, Ry Shelley, Winterson approaches the literary phenomenon of 
Frankenstein in its entirety, seamlessly traversing and fusing the levels of the novel’s production, 
thematic and formal structuring, and reception. This paper argues that by employing the 
patchwork nature of Shelley’s monster as the principal metaphor for the creation of her 
own textual hybrid, Winterson upgrades the essentially Cartesian device of metafictional 
referencing into a bona fide world-building device that functions according to the governing 
principles of the post-Cartesian, i.e., postmodern, ontological order.
Keywords: Frankenstein, hybridity, metafiction, Postmodernity, Jeanette Winterson
Pošastni kozmos romana Frankissstein Jeannette 
Winterson
IZVLEČEK 
V letu 2019 izdanem romanu Frankissstein: A Love Story Jeannette Winterson stke umetelno 
transtemporalno in transspacialno mnoštvo, čigar skupni imenovalec je roman Frankenstein 
(1818) Mary Shelley. Skozi preplet prvoosebnih pripovedi Mary Shelley in njene sodobne 
inkarnacije Ryja Shelleyja, Jeannette Winterson tematizira literarni fenomen Frankensteina 
v njegovi totalnosti, saj gladko preči in spaja segmente s produkcijske, formalno-vsebinske 
in recepcijske ravni klasike Mary Shelley. V članku pokažem, da z uporabo principa »patch-
work«  Frankensteinove Pošasti kot podlage za stvaritev lastnega besedilnega hibrida Jean-
nette Winterson pretvori v osnovi kartezijansko metafikcijsko nanašalnost v legitimno orodje 
za gradnjo literarnih svetov, ki deluje po načelih postkartezijanskega, i.e. postmodernega 
ontološkega reda. 
Ključne besede: Frankenstein, hibridnost, metafikcija, postmoderna, Jeanette Winterson 
86 Mojca Krevel The Monstrous Cosmos of Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein
1 Introduction
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend? 
(Winterson 2019, 5) 
Connoisseurs of Shakespeare might flinch at the content of the parenthesis above. It was 
indeed after much careful consideration that I wrote “Winterson” after what those who know 
their Shakespeare surely recognize as the opening lines of “Sonnet 53”. But the two lines are 
so frequently repeated throughout Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel Frankissstein: A Love Story 
that they function as the novel’s leitmotif. Their unreferenced1 recurrence in various contexts 
seamlessly merges their message with the novel’s themes and engages the lines as the node that 
connects all the different contexts in which they appear into a whole. As the structuring of 
the novel is the focus of the present paper, the lines also neatly encompass the issues I pursue 
on these pages. 
A reference equally pertinent to the novel’s thematic and formal structuring – as well as to this 
essay – is the one suggested by its title. Frankissstein: A Love Story is a holistic tribute to Mary 
Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). Through the double first-person 
narrative of Mary Shelley and her 21st-century reincarnation Ry Shelley, Winterson weaves 
an intricate trans-temporal and trans-spatial multiplicity, the coding of which is governed 
by Shelley’s masterpiece, and particularly by the topos at its core: Frankenstein’s Monster. 
On the literal level, Winterson recreates the motif of a humanoid composite brought to 
life by scientific intervention through the lens of contemporary scientific possibilities and 
the prevailing discourses on the nature of identity and humanness (most notably, queer 
theory, transhumanism and posthumanism). One of the main protagonists, Ry Shelley, is a 
transgender physician who identifies as “not one thing. Not one gender. I live with doubleness” 
(Winterson 2019, 89). His lover Victor Stein, an artificial intelligence savant, is instrumental 
in an even more literal evocation of Shelley’s central motif. He conducts experiments with 
body parts Ry supplies from his hospital. Another prominently featured twist on the Monster 
topos are the AI-run sexbots that one of the characters develops and sells.
These tangible actualizations of the Monster motif have been duly addressed in existing 
theoretical treatments of the novel. For example, Ry’s transgender identity was succinctly 
analysed from the perspective of trans ecology by Maria Ramnehill (2020), combining 
posthumanist views on identities and bodies as bio-technological constructs with queer 
theory’s fundamental postulate of the performativity of gender. Likewise, María Estrella’s 
(2021) analysis of the novel’s representation of the fragmented body relies on current debates 
on gender identity and transhumanist biotechnological discourse. The tensions between 
posthumanist and transhumanist representations of hybridity in the novel, be they of the 
body, gender or sexuality, are featured in Julia Braga Neves’s (2020) study of Winterson’s 
modernization of Shelley’s themes and motifs. Similarly, Robin Lohmann (2020) briefly 
1 Shakespeare is never mentioned with regard to the lines, but merely hinted at once. After the lines appear in the novel 
for the second time, they are followed by a short exchange between the protagonists: “Sonnet 54, said Shelley. Sonnet 
53, I said” (Winterson 2019, 15). 
87LITERATURE
charts the doll–human relationship by evaluating the role of the sexbots in the novel, as 
well as the function of Victor Stein, from the perspective of the relation between humans 
and technology. Post- and transhumanism, AI, cryogenics and gender are the contexts that 
the novel is principally associated with. In this regard it is referenced in various studies of 
contemporary fiction (Holland 2020, 256; Ferreira 2019, 66, 69; O’Callaghan 2020, 78; 
Onega 2021, 405), and considered in most reviews of the novel. 
Though my consideration of Frankenstein is also concerned with hybridity, I examine the 
seemingly less tangible aspects of the Monster metaphor. The lines from Shakespeare quoted 
at the beginning of this essay (“What is your substance…”) are only one instance of a plethora 
of appropriations swarming Winterson’s narrative. These miscellaneous fragments in fact 
contribute to the narrative so prominently that they function as an integral part of the novel, 
regardless of whether one is familiar with them or not. What is this novel’s substance, then? 
whereof is it made? In my pursuit of the answer to this question, I focus primarily on the relevance 
of the transtextual2 and metafictional3 dimensions of the Monster’s patchwork metaphor 
to the novel’s organization. I argue that by employing these dimensions as the organizing 
principle of her own textual hybrid, Winterson constructs literary realities and subjects that 
conceptually comply with the governing principles of the post-Cartesian ontological order, 
most succinctly with the non-dualist categories proposed by Jean Baudrillard. Implicit in 
such structuring of the novel’s literary worlds and protagonists is a significant redefinition of 
the impact of transtextual and especially metafictional referencing. My intention is therefore 
also to establish that in Frankissstein Winterson employs metafiction as a world-building 
device that functions according to the governing principles of the present day socio-historical 
context (i.e., the times of Trump, Brexit, #MeToo, etc.), and not as a traditional tool for 
contesting the reality principle (cf. Holland 2020, 52–53; McCaffery 1976, 22; McHale 
180, 1992; Waugh 1984, 2). The novel thus provides an insight into the characteristics of the 
form and function of literature within the ontology of the current, early stage of the epoch 
succeeding the Modern Age, henceforth referred to as Postmodernity,4 and reveals the likely 
directions of the development of literature within the non-dualist paradigm(s). 
2 The Novel and Its Socio-Historical Context 
In an interview following the release of Frankissstein: A Love Story, Winterson explained that 
the novel grew out of the realization that “everything is relational, everything is about our 
interaction with something else” (Allardice 2019). Relationality is indeed the central organizing 
principle in Winterson’s most recent novel, as it is instrumental in the development of the plot, 
2 “Transtextuality” is used here in Gérard Genette’s sense of “all that sets the text in relationship, whether obvious or 
concealed, with other texts” (1997, 1).
3 My usage of the term “metafictional” relies on Currie’s definition of metafiction as “dramatis[ation of ] the boundary 
between fiction and criticism, either as illusion-breaking authorial intervention or as integrated dramatization of the 
external communication between author and reader” (2013, 4).
4 I am using “Postmodernity” cautiously, fully aware of its polysemy in the academic sphere. However, for reasons of 
practicality, I use it to refer to the initial stage of the socio-historical paradigm change which corresponds to the onset 
of the post-industrial stage of capitalism after the Second World War (cf. Kos 1995, 7–35). It is the stage that Jameson 
refers to either as Postmodernism or Postmodernity (2001, 3–6), with implications that Rodriguez Magda associates 
with Transmodernity (2011, 6–9).
88 Mojca Krevel The Monstrous Cosmos of Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein
characterisation and narrative perspective. The story begins in 1816 at Lake Geneva where Mary 
Shelley is vacationing with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, her step-sister Claire Clairmont, 
Claire’s lover Lord Byron, and his physician Polidori. The focus of Mary’s story are the events 
surrounding the genesis of Frankenstein and its aftermath, which are inextricably connected to 
her love for and relationship with Percy. As Mary’s narrative unwinds, her story merges with 
that of her novel, as well as with the life and work of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft. The 
sections of Mary Shelley’s narrative alternate with those of Ry Shelley’s story, which is set in 
2019. Ry, who used to be Mary before undergoing a partial female-to-male sex reassignment 
surgery and likes “to see at least two people I recognise” in the mirror (Winterson 2019, 89), 
begins his account with the visit of an expo on robotics in Memphis, Tennessee. There he 
meets the hostess Claire, Vanity Fair journalist Polly D., and the man he came to interview, 
Ron Lord, who runs a state-of-the-art sex-doll business – as Ron enthusiastically explains, he 
supplies his customers with “all the pleasure and none of the problems” (2019, 38). In the next 
section of his narrative, Ry attends a lecture on AI that his lover Victor Stein gives at the Royal 
Society in London. At the reception afterwards, Ry is reunited with Polly D., Ron Lord, and 
Claire, Ron’s sexbot. The remainder of Ry’s narrative revolves around Victor: their love and 
their relationship, as well as Victor’s experimental work which culminates in his attempt to 
revive the cryogenically preserved brain of his mentor I.J. Good and upload its contents to a 
robotic homunculus, “a cross between a puppet and a robot” (2019, 265).
The similarity of the names of the protagonists in both narratives (e.g., Lord Byron and Ron 
Lord, Polly D. and Polidori, Frankenstein and Stein), as well as of the central themes of love 
and (artistic) creation, suggests that Ry’s story is a contemporary variant of Mary’s. Moreover, 
the restructuring of the names and of the contexts in which love and creation are thematically 
developed signal that the protagonists of the second story are the composites of those in the 
first. The patchwork metaphor is therefore actualized on the metafictional level of referencing, 
and on the structural level of character and reality creation: the protagonists of Ry’s narrative 
are not only assembled from those in Mary’s narrative through metafictional invocation (such 
as the “reconstructed” names), their identities are in themselves hybrid. Ry is not only a man 
who used to be a woman, his body is a composite of both male and female attributes. Victor 
does not identify as gay although he is in a passionate sexual relationship with Ry: “I’m not 
gay” (Winterson 2019, 119), he says to Ry, “you don’t feel like a man to me when we make 
love” (2019, 155). Towards the end of the novel, it is suggested that Victor may have been an 
illusion or even a hallucination, as after his disappearance there are no records of his existence. 
The “massive outage” that his experiment caused in Manchester, “was simultaneous with a city-
wide IT meltdown. Millions of gigabytes of data wiped. Including, says Polly, Victor’s records. 
His phone is dead” (2019, 338). Claire’s identity is also liminal: she appears as a human and as 
a sexbot. When she becomes Ron’s lover, she may be either or both: “My first sexbot, really, I 
suppose, the love of my life, was called Claire. That is, I called her Claire. She’s retired now. But, 
well, to me, sitting here now, it’s like you have come back to me in human form” (2019, 239). 
The patchwork metaphor is further endorsed on the level of transtextuality, which intersperses 
the two principal narrative planes. Quotations from Shakespeare, Milton, and other poets, 
excerpts from biographies, passages from Frankenstein and scientific treatises, pamphlets, 
lyrics from pop songs, and references to contemporary and near-contemporary celebrities 
89LITERATURE
such as Benedict Cumberbatch, BB King, and Johnny Cash, are seamlessly interwoven into 
the fabric of Mary’s and Ry’s narratives. As they are mostly unreferenced and unmarked 
by inverted commas, but often italicized, they are inseparable from the passages which are 
italicized and which stylistically resemble the bona fide quotations; however, if we look for the 
origins of these passages, no other referent than Winterson can be found.5 These transtextual 
elements not only broaden the context of each narrative horizontally, they are also used to 
connect the two stories diachronically, binding them into a common context.6 
In order to assess the function and relevance of the novel’s indiscriminating fragmentarity and 
all-encompassing hybridity within the socio-historical context of its conception, circulation 
and impact, let us briefly outline the fundamental metaphysical tenets of Postmodernity, and 
their implications for the established notions of the literary subject and literary worlds. The 
interconnected, multi-dimensional narrative plateaus of Frankissstein automatically suggest 
consideration from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari’s postmodern rhizomatous 
assemblages and their inherent hybridity (2004, 381–82).7 However, since the main focus 
of this study is the novel’s structuring, which necessarily involves an enquiry into the nature 
of its fragmentarity, my analysis relies instead on the conceptual framework developed by 
Jean Baudrillard. While his key categories of hyperreality and fractal subject conceptually 
correspond to Deleuzeian heterogeneous multiplicities of postmodern realities and subjects,8 
the correspondence is established precisely by their structuring. The hyperreal and the fractal 
infer the indiscriminate assembling of fragments whose value depends on their context 
(Baudrillard 1981, 66). An obvious example of translating the Deleuzeian fungal networks 
into the Baudrilliardian digital cosmoi are the parallel worlds of the social networks such as 
Twitter and Facebook, where the same piece of information produces a plethora of different 
interpretations and realities.   
Both hyperreality and the fractal subject are precipitated by the processes inherent in 
the functioning of the post-industrial phase of capitalism, most notably globalization and 
digitalization. The rapid development and expansion of the electronic media and their gradual 
digitalization facilitated the implosion of all media into a single communication channel, 
and hence obliteration of the very concept of a medium (Kittler 1987, 102). Within such a 
framework, the reality of our sense perceptions and the comprehension of our surroundings 
are conditioned by systems of digitally coded information which refer to nothing substantial 
but merely carry the potentiality of a message. Baudrillard’s hyperreality refers precisely to 
the composites of such “miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control” 
5 Such is, for instance, the italicized third-person account of the Shelleys’ and Byron’s stay at Lake Geneva (Winterson 
2019, 5), which resembles a passage from a biography or an encyclopaedia entry. 
6 The obvious examples are the oft-repeated lines from “Sonnet 53”, or quotations from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 
which Ry refers to as “our [his and Victor’s] book” (Winterson 2019, 215). In this case, the transtextuality is 
metafictional. 
7 On Deleuze and Guattari, see Vogrinc Javoršek (2018, 103).
8 And, indeed, to the theoretical assessments of the latest paradigm shift regardless of their disciplinary provenance. Not 
only the two categories encompass the main tenets of the poststructuralist thought (cf. Krevel 2017, 123–24), they 
are also conceptually compatible with, for instance, Hayles’ definition of the posthuman subject (1999, 3), Butler’s 
notion of the performative nature of (gender) identity (1988, 519), and the fundamental premises of quantum 
physics (Krevel 2019, 92–93).
90 Mojca Krevel The Monstrous Cosmos of Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein
which, depending on their environment, may (re)produce countless versions of the real (1994, 
2). In the hyperreal paradigm, the real is thus a potential constellation of (digitally encoded) 
data, which means that all realities exist at the same time as a potentiality. Their stability 
relies on the amount and compatibility of information involved: incoming data are verified 
with regard to their compatibility with the systems of information already assimilated into 
the constellation that we perceive as the reality of our quotidian existence. An example that 
succinctly embodies and reflects this principle is, for instance, the phenomenon of fake news, 
which can sometimes have very concrete consequences.9 Due to the incessant inflow of new 
information from the environment, hyperreal realities are in constant flux; they are permeable, 
interconnectable and interchangeable: they are, namely, realities without the outside.
Similarly, Baudrillard’s fractal subject is a “subject without other” (2011, 64), its status 
instigated by the shift of production relations indicating the beginning of the post-industrial 
phase of capitalism. Due to the unprecedented expansion of advertising after the Second 
World War, which, assisted by the fast-tracked development of media and information 
technologies, became the chief instrument of globalization, the representational function of 
the objects of consumption had steadily eclipsed their functional value to the point where they 
assumed the status of signs. Through the act of consumption, these “sign-objects” (Baudrillard 
1981, 66) – these iPhones, Versace jeans and Billie Eilish LPs – are combined into dynamic 
networks of postmodern identities. Due to their equal coding and hence universality, the sign-
objects constitute an all-embracing subject that is “fractal […], both subdivisible to infinity 
and indivisible, closed on [it]self and doomed to endless identity” (Baudrillard 2011, 64). The 
postmodern subject is therefore a multiplicity of all the potential constellations of available 
sign-objects. Within the postmodern ontological framework, what we perceive as I, as our self, 
is the variant of our identity at the moment of perception. Moreover, since the totality of sign-
objects is universally shared, meaning that individual sign-objects simultaneously participate 
in multiple systems of identity (of all those who purchased a certain product, like a Rolex 
watch, for instance), at each given moment, our identity is part of other identities, other selves. 
3 Patchworks of Frankissstein’s Realities
To move from theory back to Winterson’s novel, let us first establish whether the seeming 
compliance of Frankissstein’s narrative worlds with the fundamental metaphysical tenets of 
Postmodernity is not merely correlative but, in fact, ontological. I proceed on the assumption 
that the latter is the case if the structuring and functioning of the literary worlds in the novel 
correspond to the principles of the structuring and functioning of postmodern realities. Such 
a perspective entails that the stability – and hence realisticness – of the data constellations 
that make up Frankissstein’s literary cosmos depends on their connectivity with existing 
(“experienced”) hyperreal systems, as well as the hyperreal systems created by the (media in 
the) novel. Since the novel as a genre is also a postmodern medium, generating information 
that can potentially interfere with existing hyperreal constellations, there is no ontological 
difference between the literary or non-literary hyperreal systems.10 Each new compatible piece 
9 Among the more notorious instances of fake news is Pope Francis’ endorsement of Donald Trump for US president, 
which saw some 960,000 Facebook engagements (“Fake News” 2021).
10 Consequently, the established categories of the real and the fictional conflate into the hyperreal and are thus – as a 
91LITERATURE
of information in or from the book interferes with the existing hyperreal systems. Hence, the 
main features of such literary worlds are the permeability, connectivity and exchangeability of 
all the involved hyperreal constellations. 
One of the more obvious features of the realities in the novel is their reliance on the media 
artefacts that have already become part of our collective memory and experience, and 
thus constitute a stable foundation for the verification of new information and creation 
of alternative hyperreal constellations. These comprise existing topographic and historical 
locations, as well as a comprehensive array of (pop)cultural and literary artefacts. Ry’s story 
coincides with the late 2010s “meteoric” ascent of the transgender agendas and transgender 
visibility (Billard 2019, 165; Taylor, Haider-Markel, and Lewis 2018, 3–4). Victor and Ry 
meet while visiting the Alcor cryogenic facility headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona, where 
they are guests of Max More.11 Ron Lord ponders the opportunities Brexit offers for the 
expansion of his bot business, and worries that Claire is “a #MeToo type” (Winterson 
2019, 230). The narrative’s socio-political context is rendered, for instance, through jabs 
at President Donald Trump (“Is Donald Trump getting his brain frozen? asks Ron. Max 
explains that the brain has to be fully functioning at clinical death”) and criticism of 
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro: “[W]here do you draw the line? Murdering bastards, 
child molesters, thugs, nutters, that bloke in Brazil – Bolsonaro” (2019, 227).
The stability of the worlds in Mary’s part of the narrative relies primarily on the cultural, 
and especially literary, artefacts, that is, information on the life and times of Mary Shelley, 
and her novel Frankenstein: the text itself, its genesis, and its historical and cultural impact. 
The more one is acquainted with Frankenstein and its paratextual dimensions, the more one 
considers the worlds of Mary’s narrative as a solid hyperreal basis for further development 
and consolidation of the Mary Shelley-related notions. The hyperreal constellation of the 
topographic and historical location of Lake Geneva in 1816 is enhanced and stabilized by 
manifold biographical, epistolary, encyclopaedic and academic accounts on the circumstances 
of the conception of Frankenstein. Similarly, the Bedlam asylum, where in Winterson’s novel 
Victor is brought and where Mary eventually meets him, consolidates the credibility of 
Mary’s account of the events. The topographic and historical system of data conditioning 
the prevailing notion of the infamous Bethlem Royal Hospital12 is on the one hand upgraded 
by Winterson’s verbatim quotation of the 1725 pamphlet advertising tours of the asylum 
premises (2019, 174).13 On the other hand, the veracity of the Bedlam-related events in the 
novel is also enhanced by the compatible information from Frankenstein (Victor Frankenstein’s 
being committed to an insane asylum). Additional research of the relevance of the institution 
to Winterson’s – and Mary Shelley’s – story further reinforces Mary’s reality constellation, 
fundamental literary dialectic – rendered obsolete. Consider, for instance, the world-wide controversy following the 
publication of Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code (2003). The Vatican even appointed Cardinal Tarcisio 
Bertone as the official The Da Vinci Code debunker (Pauli 2005).
11 Max More is a renowned futurist and transhumanist philosopher, who was the president and CEO of Alcor Life 
Extension Foundation between 2011–2020.
12 Bedlam is the nickname for the oldest English hospital for mentally ill individuals. 
13 Since the citation is not marked as such, establishing that the text is, in fact, a verbatim quotation, requires further 
verification of this piece of information with regard to other constellations of data (i.e., an internet search). If one 
chooses to do so, the reliability of both Winterson’s and Mary’s account is additionally reinforced. 
92 Mojca Krevel The Monstrous Cosmos of Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein
as one soon learns that Shelley’s mother visited Bedlam when preparing her novel Maria; 
or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798). Seeking additional information on Mr. Wakefield, the 
psychologist who treats Victor Frankenstein in Winterson’s novel, also enhances the veracity 
of the Bedlam-related events.14 Bedlam is thus a stable topographic hyperreal system that 
can verify large amounts of potentially compatible data. It is so stable, in fact, that when it is 
mentioned again in Ry’s story after Victor’s disappearance (2019, 340), the reference – this 
time both topographic as well as metafictional (i.e., referring to Mary’s narrative) – connects 
the two narrative planes and establishes the potentiality of Victor disappearing from Ry’s to 
Mary’s world. This, in turn, further enhances the stability and veracity of Mary’s world. 
Other cultural artefacts, be they literary or otherwise, function in a similar way. Their presence 
in the collective memory provides them with a high level of stability, while their circulation 
in the mediasphere assigns them the status of data that participate in the formation of 
alternative constellations. Quotations from Frankenstein, lines by Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe 
Shelley and others, the almost verbatim transcription of the Wikipedia entry on I.J. Good 
as well as of several paragraphs from Sebag-Montefiore’s Enigma: The Battle for the Code,15 
etc., all unreferenced (but italicized), contribute significantly to the stability of the worlds 
in the novel. For instance, recognizing what Mary is reading to her husband Percy as actual 
paragraphs from Frankenstein increases the veracity of her literary reality. The metafictional 
impact of the quotation is perfectly compatible with both the reference to an 1803 book 
on galvanism16 that appears a few pages earlier, and with the recurring opening lines of 
Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 53” – together they form a stable foundation for the constellation 
of the literary worlds of Mary’s narrative. When the lines of “Sonnet 53” reappear in Ry’s 
narrative, they connect the two narrative planes and enhance their compatibility. 
The novel’s narratives also prominently feature topographic, historical and cultural loci that 
have no hyperreal referents and are therefore mediated by the novel. These novel-generated 
spaces are highly compatible with the systems of data that have already become part of 
our experiential “realities”, which ensures their stability and veracity. For instance, Victor 
describes the location of his secret lab in Manchester as “[t]he tunnels and bunkers […] built 
in the 1950s with money from NATO. […] Down below there are generators, fuel tanks, 
food supplies, dormitories, even a local pub” (164). According to the available information 
there is indeed an underground network of tunnels under Manchester, which was last used 
by the military during the Second World War and only recently opened to the public. This 
corroborates the information on Victor’s secret lab, and the veracity of the 1950s-looking pub 
next to the lab, where Ry’s party waits for Victor to finish his experiment.
14 Edward Wakefield significantly contributed to the improvement of the inmate care in British mental institutions after 
1815 by publishing reports on the dreadful conditions he observed in the Bethlem hospital during his 1814 and 1815 
visits (Wikipedia 2021).
15 Sebag-Montefiore’s book is about the breaking of the German Enigma code (2004). The mathematician I.J. Good 
was a member of the team, led by Alan Turing, that deciphered the code.
16 Galvani’s An Account of the late improvements in Galvanism with a series of curious and interesting experiments 
performed before the Commissioners of the French National Institute, and Repeated Lately in the Anatomical Theatres 
of London. To which is added an appendix, containing the author’s experiments conducted on the body of a malefactor 
executed at Newgate (Winterson 2019, 14).
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Likewise, the potentiality of Mary’s conversation with Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace at 
a party thrown by Charles Babbage is increased significantly by the compatibility of the 
event with the constellations that are already part of our hyperreality. Ada Lovelace was a 
mathematician who worked with Babbage on the development of a protocomputer called 
the Analytical Engine. She is also credited with writing the first computer algorithm. Thus, 
her discussion on an artificial mind with Mary, the author of Frankenstein and one of her 
father’s friends, at Babbages’ party may not have been verified (yet), but it is certainly not 
an impossibility. Similarly, the italicized accounts of the Shelleys’ vacation at Lake Geneva 
in 1816 and of the events on the night of the famous ghost-story contest, the description 
of Shelley’s burial, biographical data on Mary Wollstonecraft, etc. – although they have no 
exact hyperreal referents – function like the bona fide citations because they are coded in the 
same way. They are information generated by the medium of the novel, and their veracity 
depends on their connectivity with existing hyperreal constellations. If anything, these 
“fake quotations” somewhat cheekily celebrate the implosion of the real/fictional binary, 
and endorse the fundamental postmodern premise, namely, that hyperreality is a totality of 
equally coded data without an outside. 
The obvious consequences of equal coding are permeability, connectivity and interchangeability 
of all the potential realities. The entanglement of Mary’s, Ry’s and the reader’s worlds, as well 
as of the worlds on the transtextual plane, is therefore the necessary consequence of the same 
coding of those worlds, which allows them to connect at the points of their compatibility. 
The more such nodes, the denser is the entanglement of the realities involved, and the greater 
their stability. The paradigmatic instance of such connectivity and permeability of the worlds 
in the novel is Victor’s seamless circulation in and among them. He first appears as a vision 
at the beginning of Mary’s narrative, as “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside 
the thing he had put together” (Winterson 2019, 21). Winterson’s description of the vision 
is a verbatim quotation from Shelley’s preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein (1996, 
172), and it is precisely the metafictional impact of the description that establishes Victor 
as the node that connects Shelley’s and Winterson’s (literary) worlds. Moreover, the name 
Victor binds the character with Percy Bysshe Shelley, who used it as a pseudonym in his 
early work (Bieri 2005, 39). Victor reappears in both roles – that of a scientist and that of 
the narrator’s lover – in Ry’s narrative, ensuring further entanglement of the worlds involved 
and hence their greater stability.17 We encounter Victor next in Bedlam, where he is brought 
after following his Monster to the North Pole, and where Mary eventually meets him. The 
ubiquitous presence of Victor in the novel’s worlds, the nature of his work in both Mary’s 
and Ry’s narratives and the dense network of (metafictional) references surrounding him at 
this point already combine to the degree where the stability of the system produces the effect 
of veracity for the reader. The source of Victor-related information – Mary’s or Ry’s accounts, 
the (pseudo) metafictional references, the dreams, the visions, internet searches, etc. – is 
trivial to this effect since all data are coded in the same way (language), mediated through the 
same channel, and thus qualitatively equal. They incorporate themselves into the hyperreal 
constellations of our postmodern quotidian according to the principles of permeability, 
connectivity and interchangeability, and produce the effect of realisticness. 
17 The connection between Mary’s and Ry’s worlds is made explicit upon Ry’s and Victor’s first encounter: “Have we 
met? And the strange, split-second other-world answer is yes. No, I say” (Winterson 2019, 107). 
94 Mojca Krevel The Monstrous Cosmos of Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein
4 Patchworks of Frankissstein’s Subject 
By analogy with Baudrillard’s concept of the postmodern subject, the postmodern literary 
subject is a dynamic multiplicity of potential constellations of sign-objects. Since equal 
coding is inherent in their status, any act of individuation (i.e., the integration of sign-objects 
into an identity) relies on a commonly-shared reservoir of these “personal characteristics”. 
Consequently, there is no ontological difference between literary or any other identity – 
all potential identities in the fractal paradigm are comprised from qualitatively equal 
components and coded in the same way. Literary character creation is therefore paradigmatic 
of the formation of any self, which abolishes the divide between those who are real (non-
literary), and those who are (literary) fiction, and creates the option of being both at the same 
time (like, for instance, our Facebook self and our non-virtual self ).
The cast of Frankissstein is teeming with historical personalities and contemporary public 
figures, and one of the two main plots is even narrated by a prominent historical personage, 
Mary Shelley. In the course of her narrative we are privy to her dreams, visions, fears, regrets, 
opinions and moments of intimacy with her husband. With her, we endure the misogyny of 
Byron and the ruthless technicism of Polidori, puzzle over the quirkiness of Claire Clairmont, 
cherish the brilliance of Ada Lovelace, and are in equal measure fascinated and appalled by 
the genius and the egotism of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Similarly, we are guided through the 
Bedlam subplot by the first-person account of Dr Wakefield. Since all the protagonists in 
Mary Shelley’s narrative are well-known historical personages, we automatically assign the 
slightly less known Edward Wakefield the status of a real-life personality, or we established his 
existence or veracity through additional research. In his part of the narrative, we are introduced 
to Mary Shelley from his perspective, and, more importantly, to Victor Frankenstein, at 
which point the three protagonists – two historical personages and a famous literary character 
– inhabit the same ontological plane. Due to their status of cultural artefacts in contemporary 
societies, the three circulate the mediasphere as systems of data, each stable, but all highly 
interconnectable because of the same coding and the presence in common (Frankenstein-
related) hyperreal systems. 
Explicitly identified as a variant of Mary (Winterson 2019, 83), the narrator of the other plot, 
Ry, is simultaneously a literary and non-literary figure, in the sense that he is a character in 
Winterson’s novel, and a facet of a historical “real” figure. The compatibility of his identity 
system with that of Mary’s enhances his (non-literary) veracity, while his metafictional 
status imbues this veracity with literariness. When meeting Max More, he also shares the 
ontological plane with a real-life celebrity. As their meeting constructively contributes to 
the development of the story, Max More’s identity, too, is simultaneously literary and non-
literary. Perhaps the most telling example of the qualitative equivalency of the protagonists – 
historical, literary and otherwise – are the two “Author’s note[s].” The one in Mary’s narrative 
states that “THIS IS THE MOST PROFOUND THING CLAIRE HAS SAID IN HER 
LIFE” (2019, 133), and the one in Ry’s claims “THIS IS THE MOST PROFOUND 
THING RON HAS EVER SAID” (2019, 226). Both comments enhance the validity of 
Claire’s and Ron’s statements, although there is no indication who the Author commenting 
on the statements may be: it could be Winterson, Mary, or Ry. Since in the fractal paradigm 
95LITERATURE
they are all identity variants of the same subject, the Author may also comprise all of them. 
Winterson’s constant relativization of the narrative roles and perspectives in the novel indeed 
seems to suggest just that: “I was my own disguise” (2019, 17), Mary asserts at the beginning 
of her narrative, referring to her childhood immersions into the characters and worlds of her 
own invention. The essentially composite nature of the authorial I is also proposed by her 
husband’s comment “[W]hat if we are the story we invent?” (2019, 55), by Ry’s wondering 
“Is [Victor] the teller? Am I the tale?” (2019, 189), and Victor’s musing in Bedlam a few pages 
later “I do not know if I am the teller or the tale” (2019, 196). 
Not only do these statements relativize the literary and non-literary status of the novel’s 
protagonists, hence blurring the line between the traditional notions of real and fictional, they 
also imply the effects that the shift to the fractal paradigm has on the established categories 
of narrative agency. Because their structuring in the fractal paradigm relies on the common 
fund of signs for individuation, the traditional participants in the literary act (the author, 
narrator, character, reader) conflate into a dynamic and thoroughly permeable multiplicity of 
the literary subject. Within this multiplicity, the literary character is an identity variant of the 
narrator who is an identity variant of the author as inferred by and assimilated into the identity 
variant of the reader. In other words, within the framework of fractal literary subjectivity, each 
narrative agent is involved in the manifold identities that constitute that subject. 
In Frankissstein, the merging of narrative agents is induced on the formal level by the absence 
of focalization markers. Because there are no punctuation marks that would delineate direct 
speech, mark a quotation or change of speaker – unless the speaker is directly named, which 
is rare – the agent of the narrative I is often impossible to establish.18 Considering the reliance 
of this novel on Shelley’s Frankenstein, the multiplication of the narrative I’s, which blurs 
the distinctions between the traditional narrative agents, is hardly coincidental, as it evokes 
the serial first-person accounts in the framed narratives of Shelley’s masterpiece. From that 
perspective, the effect of fractality and ensuing postmodern realisticness is ensured precisely 
by Frankissstein’s metafictional dimension.
The common ontological provenance of the narrative agents is also clearly exposed on the 
level of content. Not only do all the participants in the novel appear in various roles in 
relation to the narrative, they often occupy multiple positions of narrative agency at the same 
time. Mary Shelley, for instance, is simultaneously the narrator of her part of the story in 
Frankissstein, and the author of Frankenstein, whose genesis her story recounts and whose parts 
are quoted or referred to throughout Winterson’s novel. Moreover, these references appoint 
Mary as the author of Frankissstein as well, thus rendering her ontologically indistinguishable 
from Winterson. Their shared authorial status is corroborated by the absence of quotation 
18 For instance, one of the sections in the novel opens with the definition of the words “artificial” and “intelligence”, 
followed directly by “Intelligence is chasing me but I’m beating it so far” (Winterson 2019, 143). Similarly, at the 
very end of the book, Mary is considering the possibility of reviving Shelley by means of the Analytical Engine, and 
gradually merging with Ry in the process:
I feed the punch-card into the machine and what comes out is Shelley.
Mary! He says.
(Victor! Is that you?)
I turn round. In the crowd. Over there. Is that him? (Winterson 2019, 344)
96 Mojca Krevel The Monstrous Cosmos of Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein
marks or any other (reliable) indication of referentiality, and made explicit in the first 
Author’s note discussed above. Mary is also a character in Winterson’s novel, and when she 
meets Victor in Bedlam her ontological status is one of a character in her own novel and a 
character in Winterson’s book, which means that there is no qualitative difference between 
the metafictional and the non-metafictional dimension.19 Metafictional elements thus have 
the same ontological status as other (systems of) media-generated data, which enables them 
to productively participate in the formation of identity. Mary also appears in the role of the 
reader and interpreter of Frankenstein (Winterson 2019, 140–41), of Coleridge’s, Shelley’s 
and Shakespeare’s poetry, and a biography of and works by her mother. 
Ry, too, performs – often simultaneously – a number of functions in the narrative. As a 
modernized version of Mary, he occupies the same positions in the narrative as she does. The 
entanglement of their identities, implicit in the metafictional invocations of Mary’s narrative 
in Ry’s story, is actually made explicit on the last page of the novel, where the two are revealed 
as a single trans-temporal and trans-spatial entity (Winterson 2019, 344). This, in turn, 
means that Ry’s agency in his narrative also applies to Mary’s in hers. In his plot, Ry takes 
on the function of the narrator of his story, of the character in his story and in Winterson’s 
novel, and of the reader of Frankenstein. In the second Author’s note (also discussed above), 
he also assumes the position of the author of both Winterson’s novel and of his narrative. His 
narrative persona is therefore just as stable as Mary’s or Winterson’s, although he is technically 
a metafictional composite, like Shelley’s Monster an entity composed from disparate, yet 
compatible parts.
Victor’s identity is also inherently metafictional. All of his identity variants in the text are 
composites of transtextual and metafictional references to Shelley’s novel and her biography. 
Nevertheless, like Mary and Ry, he occupies and combines several subject positions in the 
text. He is, most obviously, a character in Winterson’s Frankissstein, where he inhabits multiple 
spatial and temporal narrative planes. He is a character in Ry’s story, a character in the novel 
that Mary is writing and a character in Mary’s story. When he is brought to Bedlam, his 
character is a multiplicity of three identity variants at once: that of a character in Mary Shelley’s 
novel, a character in Mary’s story and a character in Winterson’s novel. His composite status 
is also acknowledged in the letter Dr Wakefield is writing to Mary after Victor’s disappearance 
from Bedlam: “Further to your visit, the man who calls himself Victor Frankenstein, a character 
in your excellent novel, has . . .” (Winterson 2019, 305).20 Victor also appears in the role of the 
author of the journal that Dr Wakefield is reading, and the narrator of the story conveyed in the 
journal. As the content of the journal corresponds to Victor’s journal entries in Frankenstein, 
his authorial status is ontologically equal to Mary’s, and hence to Ry’s and Winterson’s. Like 
Mary, he is the creator of the Monster, and as Mary’s creation, he is, admittedly, the Monster 
as well: “[Mary] said, Those words are spoken not by Victor Frankenstein, but by his creature. 
[Frankenstein answered,] We are the same, the same” (2019, 215). Through this explicit 
19 Another instance of Mary simultaneously occupying the roles of author, narrator and character in her and Winterson’s 
novel is her vision of the Monster at the beginning of her narrative (2019, 5).
20 The text is italicized in the original, which suggests the possible historical existence of the letter (especially since both 
Wakefield and Mary Shelley are historical personages) and hence of the actual historical existence of Victor. The 
implied metafictionality thus enhances the veracity of Victor’s existence.    
97LITERATURE
identification with the Monster, the ontological status of the Monster is revealed as identical to 
that of all the other narrative agents in Winterson’s novel. Moreover, this qualitative sameness 
is established precisely because the structuring principle that conditions the ontology of the 
Monster is paradigmatic of Winterson’s use of transtextual and metafictional elements as signs 
that combine into the patchworks of her creation. 
As cultural and literary artefacts, the signs that make up the identity variants of the protagonists 
in Winterson’s novel belong to the totality of signs that constitute the (potential) identities 
of the postmodern fractal subject. Through the act of reading, these signs and the (literary) 
identity variants they form are evaluated with regard to the systems of readers’ identities. The 
stability and the ensuing veracity of the mediated (literary) constellations therefore depend 
on the readers’ familiarity with Frankenstein’s metacontexts, and on their respective systems 
of identity. This means that it is, in fact, the readers of the novel that establish the function(s) 
of and the relationships among the participants in the narrative act. The reader’s agency is 
hence indistinguishable from the author’s and the narrator’s, as well as the characters’, since 
in the fractal paradigm characters personify the variants of the authorial identity. The last 
conversation between Mary and Ada Lovelace, which prompts Victor’s resurrection as a totality 
of his historical and literary incarnations at the very end of the novel, seems to suggest just that: 
[I]f we could re-present ourselves in a language that the Analytical Engine could read, 
then it could read us. 
Read us back to life? I said. 
Why not? she said. (Winterson 2019, 344) 
5 Conclusion
The proposition of being “read” back to life by the “Analytical Engine” conveniently aligns 
with the vantage point of this study – namely, the appraisal or assessment of the seeming 
compliance of the distinctly patchworked structuring of Winterson’s 2019 novel Frankissstein 
with the fundamental metaphysical tenets of Postmodernity, i.e., the concepts of hyperreality 
and fractal subject. Implicit in Baudrillard’s conceptualization of these categories is, in fact, 
the representation of everything in a language that Ada Lovelace’s Analytical Engine – that is, 
a computer – can read. Namely, due to the processes of globalisation and digitalisation, the 
experiential horizon of postmodern individuals relies on digitally coded data, which combine 
into systems of perceived reality and identity. Equal coding of all data eradicates the concept 
of the medium (i.e., the notion of the digital as opposed to non-digital), and attributes the 
same ontological status to all the potential systems these data can create, be they the ongoing 
global pandemic or Winterson’s Frankissstein. In the postmodern paradigm all realities and 
identities are completely permeable, interchangeable and interconnectable, which renders 
the concepts of the outside and otherness obsolete. In order to comply with the metaphysical 
premises of Postmodernity, the identities and realities in Winterson’s novel should therefore 
be read to life (in the same way) as the people and events that shape our quotidian experience.
As a forthright homage to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Winterson’s Frankissstein not only 
recreates the main protagonists and thematic concerns of Shelley’s masterpiece, but does so 
98 Mojca Krevel The Monstrous Cosmos of Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein
by employing Shelley’s central topos of the Monster as the governing structural principle. 
The quintessential patchworkness of the Monster, literally actualized in the hybrid identities 
of the main protagonists, is most prominently at work in the dense network of transtextual 
and metafictional references. This is why in my assessment of the ontological status of 
Frankissstein special attention was paid to the role of the novel’s transtextual and especially 
metafictional dimensions. Contrary to their traditional uses, in this novel transtextual and 
metafictional elements do not undermine the unity of the ontological order with their 
fundamental otherness; rather, they seem to productively participate in the creation of literary 
realities and literary subject. This is only possible if these elements are coded in the same 
way as the environment into which they are placed. Therefore, to function productively, 
transtextual and metafictional references should have the same ontological status as data (i.e., 
sign-objects) that participate in the formation of postmodern realities and identities.
The analysis of the novel’s literary worlds presented here confirmed that the construction of 
reality in Frankissstein endorses the principles of hyperreality creation since in the process 
of reading literary worlds assemble as hyperreal constellations of mediated data. In this 
respect, transtextual and metafictional references exhibit the same properties and operate 
in the same way as other cultural artefacts, as well as existing topographic and historical 
loci. The ontological sameness of the data participating in the creation of the worlds in the 
novel is also evident in the distinct permeability, interchangeability and interconnectivity of 
these worlds, as well as in the homogeneity of literary and non-literary realities. The analysis 
of the novel’s literary protagonists similarly determined that the identities actualized in the 
process of reading correspond to the fractal organisation of postmodern subjectivity. Namely, 
all the literary agents in Frankissstein are revealed as identity variants of a single subject, 
which assemble from compatible mediated data (“sign-objects”) into thoroughly permeable, 
interchangeable and interconnectable systems. In this case as well, metafictional references 
seamlessly combine with evocations of historical personages and pop culture figures into 
narrative agents that defy classification according to both their role in the narrative and their 
ontological provenance. 
The findings of the analysis suggest that Winterson’s Frankissstein indeed complies with 
the metaphysical tenets of the present day socio-historical setting. The novel can therefore 
be considered an instance of a rather modest assembly of literary works that not only 
comment on the postmodern condition but are an intrinsic part of its ontology. The text’s 
postmodern provenance is arguably the most acutely signalled by the radical shift in the 
function and impact of transtextuality and especially metafiction. Metafictional references 
in Frankissstein behave as Baudrillard’s sign-objects, which means they are coded in the same 
way as other mediated data that participate in the creation of realities within the hyperreal 
paradigm. Metafiction is therefore no longer a device that would interfere with the concept 
of (literary) realism either in terms of its disqualification (cf. Jameson 2013, 6)21 or dialectical 
confirmation (Holland 2020, 37, 56, 67; Slocombe 2010, 240–41). On the contrary, as 
21 Jameson’s dialectical explanation of realism maintains that realism relies on the disbanding of the old narrative modes 
which are inherent in it. Holland (2020, 51) observes that Jameson’s definition essentially implies that “the new mode 
renders the older mode metafictive by rendering it visible and scrutable.”
99LITERATURE
sign-objects, metafictional elements productively participate in the formation of realities and 
identities, and hence precede the real. 
Winterson’s Frankissstein thus – as behoves its fractal status – simultaneously conceives and 
reflects the cosmos, in which realities and individuals not only can be, but are, in fact, read 
to life. And in this dynamic multiplicity of infinite interpretations that we call our world, the 
answer to any query about the substance can only be: “you in every blessed shape we know” 
(Shakespeare 1993, 884; Winterson 2019, 15).
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the financial support received from the Slovenian Research Agency 
(research core funding No. P6-0265).
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