本文試圖以情感研究之觀點重新閱讀瑪麗．雪萊(Mary Shelley)《科學怪人》(Frankenstein)中之同情論述。過往對小說的詮釋，多半預設某種相互主體模式之同情觀，筆者則以為小說中存在著另一種反相互主體模式之同情架構。主體因畏懼承受他者凝視而脫逃至任何語言使用者皆可代入之第一人稱同情論述，使語言取代視覺對等關係。小說中三位第一人稱敘事者──沃頓、法蘭柯斯坦、怪物──皆受此恥感驅策遁入語言，但不停迴旋向內的語言形成之內斂劇場卻在同情論述一再經人腹語、轉述、重複後抹消語言主體差異，在文本層次形成去主體化之同情。在此同時，後者所影射的死亡寓意卻也成為焦慮之源，小說中之兩種主要恐怖元素──男同性社交凝視恐懼及因人我不分產生之形體變異焦慮，可謂恥感擺盪於相互主體理想與去主體化同情的兩難情境下之產物。

This paper seeks to reinterpret Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from an affective viewpoint. While past readings of the novel are mostly premised upon an intersubjective model of sympathy, I contend that there exists a different mode of sympathy which is arguably anti-intersubjective. As can be witnessed in the novel’s three first-person narrators––Walton, Frankenstein, and the monster––the subject in shame may well escape into a discourse of sympathy whose linguistic subject position can in effect be filled by any other speaker who takes up the role as “I,” thus making language substitute for visual intersubjectivity. In the novel, the relayed narratives of the three characters form a movement of inward spiraling which in its turn gives rise to a theater of absorption, where sympathetic discourses, after repeated ventriloquizations and paraphrasings, come to obliterate the distinctions between linguistic subjects. This textualized, desubjectified mode of sympathy, however, also becomes the very source of anxiety due to its radical implication of death. Both of the most prominent gothic elements of the novel – shapeshifting anxiety surrounding the loss of ego boundaries and male homosocial fear of being watched––arguably arise from the same conundrum posed by the conflict between the ideal of intersubjectivity and de-subjectified sympathy.