Coda

Summary

This chapter offers a new reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which argues that Shelley draws on Darwin’s, Thelwall’s, and Percy Shelley’s depictions of materialist, active speech in the novel’s portrayal of speech production. This coda makes the case that Shelley’s novel posits speech production and acquisition as a thoroughly interdisciplinary project and suggests that the Romantic concerns with physicalised models of impressive vocal power, traced throughout this book, present a new way of reading the creature’s speech as a radical act of self-governance.