Rather than imitate someone else's method of analysis, students thus constantly had to create their own: a relationship between the structure of the text and the overarching 'construction' of Mary Shelley's/Shelley Jackson's 'monster'; a puzzling out of why some links would propel the reader to a seemingly random text blocks. The only anchoring patterns left were those the students could discover and justify for themselves. They occupied the spaces rather than, in Johnson-Eilola's phrase, "...seeing them as storehouses from which information is retrieved..." (224) As L. wrote:

"through a variety of obscure pictures and descriptive narratives, the reader begins to slowly decipher what this girl thinks, feels and comprehends, as well as who or what she is made of and how these persons are linked to her inner person or being."

For this reader, closure came when she understood fully the construction of female identity in the text. Slowly, too, is a key word here. If there was no end, there was no point in racing to the end, to be finished, which also became a source of pleasure. As one student wrote appreciatively, "Limitless things are hard to come by nowadays." The process of reading replaced the triumph of having read. Content triumphed over closure.

Choose