The concept of the voyeuristic viewpoint competes, in eighteenth‐century historiography, with a multi‐perspectival approach to history. This article places Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the context of the historiography of Edward Gibbon and William Godwin, arguing that the novel challenges eighteenth‐century historiographical methods that base truth values on visual perception. Frankenstein underscores, instead, the hierarchical superiority of words over visual evidence, and represents blindness as a condition that encourages rationality. Shelley characterizes this distrust of sight through extensive uses of the “gothic gaze” – an oppressive, stigmatizing, disciplinary look that is implicated in the definition of normalcy, in social relationships, in moral and legal culpability, and in narrative authority.
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