Shelley's Intentions

From what I have gathered, this week's readings focus mainly on the subject of interpretation of a text and how that interpretation both attends to and skews the intentions of the author and the perspectives of the reader. When associated with last week's readings of methods of psychoanalysis as applied to literature, this week's assignment seems to focus on how valid those interpretations can be made and if they do the literature in which they are focusing any justice.
Boris Eichenbaum in "The Theory of the 'Formal Method'" explains how the formalists wanted to split away from Symbolism and focus on the physical structuring and the composition of the literary piece in question. He states "Before the appearance of the Formalists, academic research...made use of antiquated aesthetic, psychological, and historical 'axioms' and had so lost sight of its proper subject that its very existence as a science had become illusory." (927) Much like what Wimsatt and Beardsley address in "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy", the Formalists believed that the construction of the literature itself was getting replaced by theorists' focus on what the text symbolized and not the literary structure itself. In order to create a more correct scientific observation of literature, the Formalists wanted to develop a system that took into consideration every aspect of the literary piece, from the composition of a sentence to the specific word's application and the linguistic nature of the entire work.
Like the Formalists, Wimsatt and Beardsley wanted to create a purer view of literature by removing any element of outside influence and focusing on the creative work itself. According to the Norton Anthology, they believed " if information about the author or period is relevant, it will be in the poem; if it is not realized in the poem already, then it is not relevant." (1231) In "The Intentional Fallacy" they state "The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public." (1234) In "The Affective Fallacy" they lend the same mode of thought to how people on the outside will interpret the poem. Because of emotional influence, depending on who is reading it, the poem's meaning will always be interpreted in relation to the reader and their experiences and because of that, the poem's true meaning will never be realized.
Contrary to this school of thought, Stanley Fish in "Interpreting the Variorum" believes "it is the structure of the reader's experience rather than any structures available on the page that should be the object of description." (1978) Wolfgang Iser follows in this same school of thought and takes it a step further when he describes the reader-text relationship. Iser believes that it is up to the author to control the text and by doing so, the reader will be guided by the text to come to a conclusion similar to the meaning the author was trying to communicate in the first place.
What all of these theorists agree upon, however, is that there can never be a true interpretation of any text because we are all subject to outside influence. However, people can try to come to conclusions which may heighten our understanding of the literature involved.
How does this apply to Frankenstein? Frankenstein being a work subject to multitudes of criticisms and dissections falls victim to everything that these theorists are arguing against and for. I don't think that any literary work of the magnitude of Frankenstein, when taking into consideration not just the idea (or assumed ideas) the novel conveys but also the life and background of the author, would be exempt from this type of criticism.
Against the ideas of the formalists, Frankenstein has had almost every mode of theory and historicity applied to it. From Gilbert and Gubar applying feminine emotional trauma to it and Spivak talking about it in the scope of English imperialism. To look at it from a formalist standpoint, however, I feel that a lot of what makes the novel what it is and such a topic of conversation would be to limit it to only a monster story with a lot of unneeded details. The formalist method would strip its magic away and not do justice to the intelligence that it took to create such a novel. Similarly, in applying Wimsatt and Beardsley's method to the novel, I think that all of the details mentioned within the story would lead the reader to want to delve deeper into the history and modes of thinking of the time to gain a wider perspective on what Shelley was talking about. If we didn't go outside of the text then all of Shelley's efforts to apply intertextuality to the story would be lost. I would say it was her intention that by citing other works in the story she wanted her readers to see how those works applied to her own.
If we want to talk about communicating a message, I believe that we could apply Iser's standpoint on the reader-text relationship and say that Mary Shelley communicated her views rightly because all of the detail involved in the story brings the reading audience to question human desire and the world in which we all exist.