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Duplication and Duplicity: James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

One of the strengths of Romantic fiction is one of its apparent weak nesses, its failure to create rounded forms, complete and self-contained like Archibald MacLeish's mute globed fruits. This fiction is not mute but talka tive, openly mulling over choices, presenting experience not as experienced but as told. We are not permitted to live in the world of a narrative for long without being reminded that we are seeing that world through a frame, the frame of a shaping—or sometimes distorting--discourse. In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," for example, Coleridge often reminds us of the presence of the Wedding Guest, breaking the continuity of the Mariner's story to keep us aware that this is a story being told to a listener. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the monster's story of his life is embedded in his creator Frankenstein's story of his life, and these are both embedded in the letters of Captain Walton to his sister; yet the formal symmetry of Mary Shelley's "hideous progeny" cannot contain the explosive, Promethean subjectivity of its three tellers and must end "in distance and darkness." To read Wuthering Heights we must piece together the interlocking evidence given in Lockwood's commentary, in Nellie's tales of the past, in Cathy's diaries and Isabella's letters, yet the ambiguity of the ending calls our construction from the evi dence into question. Romantic fiction, precisely because it is fragmented and inconclusive, makes us re-examine our assumptions about what narrative can and cannot, should and should not do.