Hypothesis Regarding Safi's Love Letters

The letters that Safie sent to Felix while the smitten young Frenchman orchestrated the prison escape of the Arabian beauty’s father are offered on two separate occasions as proof of the veracity of the concentric narratives that make up the Frankenstein.  The creature offers transcriptions of the letters as proof of his tale, and those transcriptions are then shown by Frankenstein to Walton, who accepts these letters as the ultimate proof of Frankenstein’s story. Presumably, these letters are eventually shown to Mrs. Saville, Walton’s sister, as "proof" of the entire three-tier narrative.
 
Yet these letters are notably absent from the text, leaving the reader to wonder about the content of those letters and how they could possibly establish the veracity of the creature's tale. What little information there is regarding the content of the letters is found within the creature's summary of those letters, which takes all of two paragraphs. While this information will be examined in great detail in the paper itself, for now it is sufficient to affirm that there is nothing within the letters that relates to the story of the novel.  Why then has such emphasis been provided to letters that seem inconsequential other than the fact that the three main narrators (the monster, Frankenstein, and Walton) believe the letters to be of such significance?  Or rather, what possible information could such letters offer that could be so convincing?

 The answer to this lies in another of Rousseau’s works: Julie, or the New Heloise, an epistolary novel that was originally titled Letters of Two Lovers Living in a Small Village at the Foot of the Alps. While the De Lacey cottage is located in Germany rather than the Lake Geneva area where the titular lovers in Julie live, which is also where much of Frankenstein takes place, the De Lacey’s live on the outskirts of a village in foothills of the Alps. In an introduction to Julie, Rousseau answers hypothetical objections to his work by discussing the nature of love letters:

“A letter really dictated by love, written by a lover really under the influenced by a real passion, will be tame, diffuse, prolix, unconnected, and full of repetitions: his heart, overflowing with the same sentiment, constantly returns to the same expressions, and like a natural fountain flows continuously without being exhausted. Nothing brilliant, nothing remarkable: one remembers neither the words nor phrases; there is nothing to be admired, nothing striking: yet we are moved without knowing why.  Though we are not struck with the strength of sentiment, we are touched by its truth, and our hearts, in spite of us, sympathize with the writer. “ (italics mine for emphasis)

The complaint that Rousseau is addressing in advance is that the love letters fail to meet most expectations of good writing; they are meandering, repetitious letters that make for poor reading. Rousseau’s defense, one of his favorites for any of his peculiarities, is that he is simply following the model that nature has provided him, i.e. that the letters are written in this manner because that is the nature of real love letters.

So then, Shelley playfully excluded Safie’s letters from Frankenstein because, as real love letters, they “nothing to be admired,” and aren’t really worth repeating. The creature must summarize the contents of the letters because “the sun was already far declined” and the love letters would have been “diffuse, prolix…and full of repetitions.”  In other words, the love letters were rather long-winded. This is what led the creature to helpfully condense the information verbally – but it wasn’t the information in the letters but the letters themselves that were convincing proof. This is why the creature transcribed the letters in whole, despite the poor writing style, or rather, because of the poor writing style of the letters; it was the flawed writing that affected both Frankenstein and Walton to be “touched by its truth.” Walton proclaims the letters “brought to me a greater conviction of the truth of his [Frankenstein’s] narrative than his asseverations, however earnest and connected.” Contrasting the letters to Frankenstein’s “connected” stories implies that the letters having an “unconnected” line of reasoning, in line with Rousseau’s description of a real love letter.

The position of the letters at the center of the novel gives them additional importance. In concentric narratives, also known as chiastic narratives, the center of the narrative is emphasized as a key that provides an understanding to the greater work. No, I'm not going to explain that for you.