The semiotic universe of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein : Peircean interpretation and the making of monstrosity

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein represents monstrosity not as inherent in the Creature’s body but as produced through interpretation and conduct. Recurrent bodily, visual, acoustic, tactile, environmental, textual and narratorial signs acquire changing force as they circulate among Victor, the Creature and Walton across embedded narrative frames. Drawing on Peircean interpretants, habit, abduction and recursive semiosis, this article examines how provisional perceptions become judgements, enter action and shape the interpretation of subsequent signs. Semiotic foreclosure is used here in a restricted sense to designate the premature stabilisation of a provisional perceptual judgment or emotional interpretant as settled moral judgment before relevant counter-signs can be tested. Close readings of animation, Plainpalais, sensory learning, reflection, the De Laceys, Montanvert, inscription, pursuit and Walton’s encounter are supplemented by a lexical audit of ‘monster’, ‘dæmon’/‘daemon’ and ‘fiend’, which shows the strongest concentration of Creature-associated moral naming in Victor’s narration after the Creature’s embedded account. The argument distinguishes Victor’s material making of the body, the social and narratorial making of monstrosity and the Creature’s later participation through chosen violence and strategic sign-making. Frankenstein emerges as a semiotic universe: a field in which recurrent signs acquire interpretive histories, enter conduct and return under altered evidential and ethical conditions.