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While there are only two extended analyses of the Frankenstein manuscripts (Murray; Mellor 57 — 68, 219 — 224) prior to the present one, analyses of the published text, whether the 1818 or the 1831 edition, or both, number in the hundreds. The question now arises, What are the interpretative implications of the analysis of the Last Draft that I have provided? The best way to answer this question is to review two articles which — amidst the sea of interpretation — are lent particular and quite startling support by what may

be deduced about Mary Shelley's inward-spiralling process of redrafting and revision: Marc A. Rubenstein's "'My Accursed Origin': The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein," and Joseph W. Lew's "the Deceptive Other: Mary Shelley's Critique of Orientalism in Frankenstein," an article that builds significantly on Rubenstein's.

Rubenstein argues that Frankenstein's concentric narrative arrangement implies a structural central point that is symbolically equivalent to the North Pole — the imagistic focus of Walton's quest and the approximate site of the novel's conclusion. That structural centre is the monster's rendition of Safie's account (in her letters to Felix) of her mother:

Safie's mother, Rubenstein declares, convincingly and for the first time, "is surely a cartoon, distorted but recognizable, of the author's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft" (169). The novel's hints at the Hyperborean myth of a warm polar womb are explained in terms of Mary's interest in her own conception and the tragic death of her mother following Mary's birth.

The account of Safie's mother occurs in what can be assumed to have been "Chapter 4" of Volume II of the Last Draft — that lengthy chapter towards which (according to my reconstruction of the drafting/copying/revision process) Mary had moved inwards in December 1816 (and in March 1817?); that chapter which seems to have given her particular difficulty to judge from the extant manuscript; and that chapter with which she essentially completed the drafting of Frankenstein. In other words, the theme that Rubenstein abstracts from the published text (with its spiral-like, concentric structure) — Mary's search for her own mother — was enacted by the inward-spiralling movement that characterizes the order in which she actually composed and revised her manuscript.

Although an analysis of "Safie and her unnamed father and mother, the only specifically Oriental personages within the narrative" (256), provides the climax of Joseph W. Lew's article, he devotes considerable space to Oriental elements in Frankenstein, as his projective synopsis (here abbreviated) makes clear:

Lew's argument is indebted to Edward Said, who describes the Orient as the source of one of Europe's "deepest and most recurring images of the Other" (1), and to Jacques Lacan. The Orient, the Other of Western civilization is — helped by puns on the French name for the "sea of ice" near Mont Blanc, Mer de Glace (sea mirror, mirror mother) — its self-reflection, its mirror image. Thus in the figures of Safie and her unnamed parents, "Having peeled back layer after layer, we find only the bourgeois nuclear family in Oriental drag" (282 — 283). Lew has moved on from the identification of Safie's mother with Mary's mother to the identification of Safie's father with Mary's father, William Godwin: Lew's entire argument, with its Lacanian conclusion that Frankenstein is "a hall of mirrors, a cautionary tale of a culture trapped in the mirror stage, and of the destruction that results from a way of seeing which can create only projections of Self" (283), interestingly complements mine in Frankenstein's Creation. In pursuing a broadly philosophical reading of Frankenstein, I distinguish between attempts to establish a relationship with, variously, a natural, a human, an inhuman and unnatural, and a transcendent Other, while exploring the sceptical, solipsistic undermining of all these forms of Otherness, all of which are exemplified by the monster. Lew's deceptive Oriental otherness might also be linked with this collapsing "four-fold Otherness" (Ketterer 105).[29]

Lew has not exhausted the Oriental aspects of Frankenstein.[30] Although

he makes a careful case for Frankenstein as a response to Percy Shelley's Orientalist poem "Alastor," he only once briefly notes (256) another of Shelley's Oriental poems, Laon and Cythna: or The Revolution of the Golden City, the epic he began while Mary was working on Frankenstein.[31] Shelley's Godwinian-inspired topic is a very idealized version of the French Revolution transposed to an Oriental setting. The temporarily successful revolt, organized by a brother and sister, Laon and the revolutionary feminist Cythna (who are loosely based on the atheistically-tarred Percy and Mary crossed with her mother) is celebrated by their incestuous union. In the censored version of the poem that was published as The Revolt of Islam (1818), Laon and the orphan Cythna are merely friends, much as Mary toned down the brother-sister relationship between Elizabeth and Victor Frankenstein in the 1831 edition.[32] As for the changed title of Shelley's poem, William St Clair explains that just as "a war to drive the Turks out of Europe was a universally accepted convention of a just revolution," so "Under another old convention writers could more safely attack religion if they called it Mohammedanism. Before the French Revolution philosophers teased the censors by pretending that their books were printed in Constantinople" (432). The same conventions should be applied to the story of Safie, who "arrived from Constantinople" (p. 57; Rieger 118.8), and her Turkish father who "had [li cancelled] inhabited Paris for many years when his person became [for some cancelled] [next insert in Percy's hand] ˄for some reason which I [the monster] could not learn˄ obnoxious to the government" (p. 57; cf. Rieger 118.4 — 6) and was condemned to death; after his escape he hires a vessel to take him "to [Can cancelled] Constantinople" (p. 59 [insert passage "64" to follow page 63]; Rieger 122.2). The sympathetic treatment here, combined with the Oriental subject matter, surely goes some way to explaining why, in her letter of 5 December 1816, Mary expressed the belief that Percy "would like" her "very long" "4 Chap. of Frankenstein" (I: 22).

In Laon and Cythna the tyrants quickly recover power and the eponymous protagonists suffer the fate that Mary's monster projects for himself: they are burnt to death. In the concluding canto, however, having been resurrected, they travel by canoe with their child to "Elysian islands, bright and fortunate, / Calm dwellings of the free and happy dead" (Complete Poetical Works 262; XII.31, 4727 — 28). (Compare the discarded Elysian framework of Mary's 1819 draft, "The Fields of Fancy," a work which also features incest; it was retitled Mathilda but not published until 1959. Similarly, Lord Verney, the eponymous character who stands in for Mary in her 1826 apocalyptic novel, The Last Man, hopes in conclusion "to moor my worn skiff in a creek, shaded by spicy groves of the odorous islands of the far Indian ocean" [342].)

The "Elysian islands" which surround the Temple of the Spirit are introduced in the symbolic opening canto of Laon and Cythna. The Poet-narrator and his Lady (and the wounded serpent enfolded in her breast) are in a bark:

This is the same Hyperborea that figures in the opening of Frankenstein: the North Pole presents itself to Walton's imagination as a "region of beauty and delight" where "the sun is forever visible" (Rieger 9.16 — 17).[33]

Of course, the Chinese-box structure of Frankenstein recalls what might be viewed as an Orientalist literary model — the framed story sequence of a work like the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. As it happens, Frankenstein

makes a direct reference to an episode from that work when he describes his reaction to discovering the secret of life: "I was like the Arabian, who had been buried with the dead, and found a passage to life aided only by one glimmering and seemingly ineffectual light" (p. 66; cf. Rieger 48.5 — 8). The "Arabian" is Sinbad, and the specific allusion is to his Fourth Voyage. But in characterizing him almost anonymously as "the Arabian," Mary Shelley surely is deliberately anticipating the only figure in her novel who is similarly identified (see Rieger 122.21) — Safie.

What finally needs to be added to Lew's account can only be supplied by the Last Draft of Frankenstein. As insightful as his article is, it does contain at least one significant blind spot, something he could have avoided had he had access to that Last Draft. After reviewing the case for paralleling Mary Shelley and "Walton's silent sister, the mysterious Margaret Saville [my emphases]," Lew points out that "in French . . . 'Saville' is almost homophonous with 'Safie.' Mary Shelley, Margaret Saville, and Safie become images of one another" (282). However, the name variants in the Last Draft, Amina/Maimouna/Safie, indicate quite clearly that it is Arabic pronunciation, not French, that is primarily relevant. All three names are associated with the Prophet Muhammad.

Āmina bint-Wahab was the mother of Muhammad; she died when he was six. Her first name is equivalent to āmina, meaning "peaceful or feeling safe," and to amina meaning "to be or feel safe." The differently pronounced Amīna (most famously the name of Solomon's wife) is the feminine of amīn meaning "honest or trustworthy," and derives from amuna meaning "to be reliable or faithful" (Baker 361). Maimouna is a transliteration of Maymŭnah, the eleventh or thirteenth (if two concubines are counted) and last surviving wife of Muhammad; she was a fifty-one-year-old widow in Mecca when Muhummad married her. Her name, bestowed on her by Muhammad and related to āmina and amīna, and to amuna and ma'mūn (meaning "reliable, trustworthy" [Baker 374]), means "auspicious" or "blessed."[34] Safie is a transliteration of Ṣafiyyah, the ninth wife of Muhammad (whose name means "praiseworthy, possessing fine qualities" [Baker 375]). Ṣafiyyah, who married him when she was eighteen (Mary was only one year older when she married Percy), was the daughter of the chief of the Jewish tribe of Bann Nadir, one of the Prophet's bitterest enemies; she was captured and converted to Islam. In describing "the works of the orientalists," which Frankenstein followed Clerval in reading, Frankenstein mentions "the smiles & [tears cancelled] ˄frowns˄ of a fair enemy" (Volume I, 99; Rieger 64.28) as a typical ingredient. Clearly, Ṣafiyyah was an historical example of such a "fair enemy" and it should be noted that Safie's complexion is "wondrously fair" (in the missing

pages 22 — 56 of Volume I of the Last Draft; Rieger 112.11).[35] Whether this imagistic connection is accidental or not, the Christian/Muslim lineage of Mary's character makes the name of the Jewish/Muslim Safiyyah/Safie a particularly appropriate choice among the names of those women linked with Muhammad. Safiyyah is Arabic for "confidante" or "bosom friend" and incorporates safa, "to be pure" (Baker 380). Lew, like presumably all readers of Frankenstein to date, assumed that "Safie" should be pronounced "Saf-ee," whereas in fact it might well be pronounced "Saf-i-yyah."

If Safie's mother and father correspond to Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and Safie to Mary herself, then Safie's lover, Felix/Muhammad, must correspond to Percy. Apparently Mary viewed Percy as a type of the Prophet. It is of interest to note that Mary read Voltaire's play Mahomet, ou le Fanatisme (1742) on 5 June 1818 (Journals I: 212), and that, in a letter dated 9 August 1830 to the publisher John Murray venturing various topics for his Family Library series, she writes: "A Friend suggested the life of Mahomet" (Letters II: 113). In the absence of that life by Mary, a reader interested in learning more about Āmina, Maymŭnah, Ṣafiyyah, and Muhummad, might well consult Martin Ling's Muhammad (1983), supplemented by al-Shati' Bint's The Wives of the Prophet (1971), and M. H. Zaid's Mothers of the Faithful (1935).

One might still wonder why, of all the names of all Muhammad's wives, Mary should have chosen Amina, Maimouna, and Safie. The answer would appear to be that the names occur (with two slight variations) in a narrative entitled "The Story of the three Calenders, Sons of Kings; and the five Ladies of Bagdad" (Weber I: 32 — 68). This tale sequence is part of "The Arabian Nights' Entertainments" which occupies most of Volume I of Henry Weber's magisterial 1812 compilation Tales of the East, a title that figures in Mary's reading list for 1815 (Journals I: 92). Volume I concludes with part of "The New Arabian Nights" (the "New Arabian Nights" that Mary records in her 1815 list was apparently the separate edition — with four fewer tales — identified by editors Feldman and Scott-Kilvert as Arabian Tales; or, A Continuation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, a 1794 translation of a 1793 French translation [Journals I: 88]). Volume II continues with the remainder of "The New Arabian Nights," "The Persian Tales," "Persian Tales of Inatulla of Delhi," and "Oriental Tales." The concluding third volume contains "Mogul Tales," "Turkish Tales," "Tartarian Tales," "Chinese Tales," "Tales of the Genii," and "The History of Abdulla, the Son of Hanif."

The five ladies of Bagdad in "The Story of the three Calenders" (who are the ladies' guests) are sisters; they share the same father but three of them had one mother and the remaining two another. No doubt this narrative made an impression on Mary because of the parallels with her own family situation. Godwin had two wives and five children; he was father to two of them and stepfather to the other three. In the story sequence, of the three sisters

born to one of the mothers, one is named Zobeide and the other two (who as punishment for being jealous of Zobeide's projected marriage to a prince have been transformed into dogs — two black bitches) are unnamed (like the monster in Frankenstein). The jealousy of the black bitches suggests a parallel with Claire Clairmont's jealousy of Mary's relationship with Percy. The two sisters born to the other mother are named Amine and Safie. In an embedded story, a princess is "possessed by Genie Maimoun, son of Dimdim, who is in love with her" (Weber I: 47). Maimoun is the masculine form of Maimouna or Maymŭnah. Mary would have been struck by the name Maimoun because of its English language homonym: May moon. "Maië" was one of Percy's affectionate nicknames for Mary (Journals I: 80; Sunstein 96), and the moon (which is associated with the monster in Frankenstein) an agreed-upon symbol for her (Journals II: 434 n2; Dunn 226 — 227, 261, 274; Sunstein 194).[36] Thus the choice of the name Maimouna further corroborates the case for identifying Safie with Mary. The intricately interwoven narrative sequence includes six separately titled stories: "The History of the First Calender, a King's Son," "The Story of the Second Calender, a King's Son," "The Story of the envious Man, and of him that he envied" (this being a story within the Second Calender's story which underlines the envy/jealousy theme and includes the three page 47 references to Maimoun), "The Story of Zobeide," and "The Story of Amine." It might well have been as a result of the impact of the last story that Mary first alighted on the name Amina. Appropriately enough, Safie's tale is not related in "The Story of the three Calenders."

The second volume of Tales of the East includes "The History of the Birth of Mahomet" (Weber II: 616 — 631), among the "Oriental Tales." In this four-tale sequence, the yet-to-be-born Mahomet selects one Zesbet to be his mother and renames her "Aminta" (Weber II: 630), a corruption of Amina. A daughter takes on the new identity of a mother; and Mahomet, as the source of the name of that new identity, seeks to incestuously sire himself (his "real" father in fact died before he was born). To the extent that the monster is Frankenstein's double, Frankenstein too might be said to incestuously sire himself. The name "Zesbet" has elements in common with the name "Elizabeth" and may have been a source. Whether it was or not, the relationship between Zesbet and Aminta, like that between Elizabeth and Amina/Safie (or that between Elizabeth and Frankenstein's mother) is that of daughter and mother. The alternates Maimouna and Safie (Safiyyah) add the role of wife. To complete the gamut of archetypal female roles, it is only necessary to evoke that of the whore. This Mary Shelley does with her sometime choice (previously noted) of the name "Myrtella" for Elizabeth. As my appendix below reveals, "Myrtella" derives from the name of a mistress and courtesan. These archetypal identities are all dependent on the

complex procreative, erotic, and/or loving possibilities of sex. In usurping the procreative aspect of sex (thereby freeing the female from biological role determinism?), Frankenstein tragically (and unnecessarily?) denies the erotic and the loving aspects.

This analysis of altered character names (among other matters) has taken us a considerable distance into new areas of fact and of interpretation. Clearly, the Last Draft — and Fair Copy fragments — of Frankenstein have much to teach us about that novel's composition and interpretation beyond the matter of Percy Shelley's input. In fact, few literary manuscripts are quite so revealing. A new stage of Frankenstein scholarship will be initiated by their study.