Title: Frankenstein
Author: Mary Shelley
Publisher: Everyman’s Library
Form: Hardcover/cloth
Pages: 231
Date of Publication: 1818*
Source: Purchased new
Dates of Reading: January 19, 2013 – January 29, 2013
The List: #67
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"Shall each man find a wife for his
bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of
affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Man! you may hate,
but beware! Your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will
fall which must ravish from you your happiness forever. Are you to be happy
while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other
passions, but revenge remains – revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food!
I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that
gazes on your misery. Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will
watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you
shall repent of the injuries you inflict." (Chapter 20)
From antiquity’s Prometheus we go to “the Modern Prometheus,”
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shelley’s
subtitle to her scary, sad, somewhat insane novel evokes the creation of man
out of clay, the disastrous consequences of overreaching our destiny, the
irresistible urge of a creation to become a creator, the frightful power of
science and civilization, the curse of the outcast, and much, much more. Larded
over this is the Christian analogue, specifically Milton’s Christianity as
dreamed up in Paradise Lost,
concerning the fall of an angel and the rise of a devil, the fall of man and
the rise of civilization; and I think the parallels between Christianity and
Greek mythology that I noted in my article on Prometheus Bound are not such a stretch.
Books upon tomes upon folios have been written about Frankenstein, and there seems paltry
little I can contribute, in a brief essay anyway, to the unraveling of its horrifying
and mysterious layers. The book is also further removed from unadulterated
critical analysis by the plethora of film and pop culture adaptations, as
society has put its stamp on the story over and over again, in an almost
200-year parade of variations on a theme.
As of this writing, I haven’t carefully watched any movie
versions of Frankenstein, but the
Halloween-ready, Karloff-cum-Munsters iconography has become pervasive enough
for me to realize that the apples have fallen quite far from the tree. The
fearsome but silly, wrathful but bumbling Frankenstein of pop culture bears
little resemblance to Shelley’s “hideous” monster, who, of course, isn’t
actually named “Frankenstein.”
Nomenclature notwithstanding, every child in America knows
what a Frankenstein is, so it can be a shock to read Shelley’s founding text
and find the monster capable of delivering speeches like the one at the
beginning of this article. Eloquent, existential, and sensitive, Shelley’s
monster has read Milton, Goethe, and Plutarch; he has observed human kindness,
but received only human fear and hatred.
I was further surprised by the monster’s creation story, or
rather, the lack thereof. How many times have movies and television shown the
creature being brought to life on a stormy night by lightning summoned by a
mighty apparatus, and sent surging through this unholy mishmash of humongous body
parts? And yet none of that appears in the book. There is certainly the
implication of lightning: a scene where a thunderstorm breathes inspiration
into our desperate scientist, Victor Frankenstein, and the allusion to noted
lightning specialist, Benjamin Franklin,
in the name “Frankenstein.” However, it is never explicitly stated that a
lightning-channeling apparatus is used to vivify the creation, nor even that
any apparatus is involved beyond Frankenstein’s “chemical instruments.” And many
people perhaps read into the book by assuming that the monster is created from portions
of cadavers, but all we hear about are unidentified “materials.”
Frankenstein himself, as he dictates his story to us,
insists that the secret of creation, the method he used to bring the monster to
life, will go to the grave with him:
I see by your eagerness and the wonder
and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of
the secret with which I am acquainted; that cannot be. (Chapter 4)
And furthermore:
Sometimes I endeavored to gain from
Frankenstein the particulars of his creature’s formation: but on this point he
was impenetrable.
“Are you mad, my friend?” said he; “or
whither does your senseless curiosity lead you? Would you also create for
yourself and the world a daemoniacal enemy? Peace, peace! learn my miseries and
do not seek to increase your own.” (Walton, In Continuation)
What a tease! Methinks the lady doth protest too much, as
Shelley really goes out of her way to justify denying the reader this juicy
morsel. But the withholding of such details was not an uncommon technique in
early science fiction, where the writers were less concerned about dreaming up
the machinations, and much more concerned with the social implications of the
nightmare scenario.
And indeed, the monster is basically your worst nightmare.
Fearless and highly intelligent, and using all that fearlessness and
intelligence to destroy your life. As I read, I imagined the creature as a
combination of a nimble sasquatch, the Incredible Hulk, and the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, though I would conjure
for this description the most terrifying iterations of each of these creatures.
I was perhaps most surprised that there is just so much moral
and formal complexity in Frankenstein.
Shelley uses multiple narrators, epistolary sections, lengthy passages that
read like a travelogue, a smattering of quotes from contemporary writers,
including her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose
poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
was a bedrock influence for Mary Shelley.
Often, readers express surprise that Frankenstein was written by an 18-year-old girl. But Mary Shelley
was born into great expectations, the daughter of two heralded radicals and intellectuals,
William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and surrounded all her life by the
intellectual and literary elite of Britain, as well as notable luminaries who
would visit her family from America and Europe. At the age of sixteen, she
married a bona fide poetic genius and scandalous reprobate, Percy Shelley, whose
influence she effusively credited, and whom she idolized long after his death.
If I am surprised at her as a person, it is because of what
she wrote in her 1831 introduction to a new edition of Frankenstein, thirteen difficult years after her book was first
published:
And now, once again, I bid my hideous
progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the
offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no
true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive,
and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in
this world, I shall never see more.
In 1818, when Frankenstein
was published, Shelley had already had two children, the first of whom died
shortly after birth. She grieved the recent suicide of a half-sister, and
certainly endured some guilt when Percy Shelley’s first wife, from whom Mary
had essentially stolen him, drowned herself and her unborn child. So to speak
of those as “happy days” where “death and grief were but words” perhaps speaks
to just how much she suffered afterward – the death of two more children, a
near-fatal miscarriage, the death of her husband, the decline of her health.
It is appropriate that Frankenstein
is the creation of some mix of joy and sorrow. Duality is at the heart of the
story (as it was for Robert Louis Stevenson in his later story of monster and
man, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde). The monster is born of man, man who harnesses and manipulates nature,
but ultimately cannot control it.
Through his literary education, in particular, reading Paradise Lost; through his months spent in
hiding, secretly watching the kindness and magnanimity of a poor rural family,
and the mere seconds it takes for the family to attack and hate him once he
reveals himself, the monster identifies and condemns the hypocritical duality
of humanity:
Was man, indeed, at once so powerful,
so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time
a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived
as noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest
honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on
record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than
that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how
one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and
governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased
and I turned away with disgust and loathing. (Chapter 13)
The monster is isolated despite his hunger for
companionship, and we watch his anger and self-loathing grow as his repeated
attempts at human contact are violently rebuffed:
And what was I? . . . When I looked
around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the
earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned? (Chapter 13)
Having received utter rejection when he solicits human
compassion, he orders Frankenstein, who owes him at least the chance for
happiness, to create for him a female counterpart. Though understandable, this
ambition is arrogant, as arrogant as anything his creator pursued, and when this
creative ambition is stymied, the enraged creature embraces the other part of
his duality – his ability to destroy.
And so the creature’s anguish comes back around onto
Frankenstein. When the monster ensnares him, framing him for the murder of his
best friend, Frankenstein is made to understand what it feels like to be
shunned and hated by all. To feel what his creation feels. And
though it seems that his isolation and punishment is complete with the loss of
all his loved ones, whom the monster murders one by one, agonizingly slowly, it
is not truly complete until Frankenstein, like his monster before him, finally
comes to condemn mankind as savagely as the monster did. He addresses a
magistrate, exhorting him to help him hunt down his wretched progeny:
My revenge is of no moment to you;
yet, while I allow it to be a vice, I confess that it is the devouring and only
passion of my soul. My rage is unspeakable when I reflect that the murderer,
whom I have turned loose upon society, still exists. You refuse my just demand:
I have but one resource; and I devote myself, either in my life or death, to
his destruction. . . . Man! . . . how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom! (Chapter 23)
“Man!” In one word, Frankenstein becomes his own creation,
who had earlier cried, “Man!” at Frankenstein, enraged at the heartlessness and
cruelty of humankind. Up to this point, Frankenstein has been motivated by
ambition, and then fear. Now he is a creature of “rage.” Now, finally,
Frankenstein becomes one with his monster, outcast from society, hopelessly miserable,
just as the monster wished to make him.
So it makes quite a bit of sense that the monster himself
has come to be called “Frankenstein.” The monster is like the scientist who
made him, alike in sorrow and isolation, both helpless as creatures, both
thwarted as creators.
We, too, are both Victor Frankenstein and his monster, both
creator and creature. And as Mary Shelley noted in her own life and in the
society around her, we are desperately alone, as was the monster, as was the
man.
* * *
For my first month of this year of reading, I have
unintentionally chosen to read four books in a row that are, in some sense,
fantasies. I don’t mean “fantasy” in the genre sense (as epitomized first by
Tolkien and currently by legions of his spiritual scions), though this is what
the word has become. I am not primarily concerned with this generally
underappreciated genre, though it is peculiar that in our times, literary
esteem is typically lavished upon more realistic fiction, whereas fantasy
writers are consoled, if at all, by filthy lucre and the hopes of selling
something to Hollywood.
Yet most of humanity’s literary history has been dominated
by tales of the impossible, or at least improbable. I suppose two thousand
years is enough to transform fantastical stories about Greek gods and demons
into “literature,” so perhaps science fiction and fantasy writers of today can
hope for similar vindication from generations to come.
Perhaps the most useful label, should one be required, for Frankenstein is “romance.” Reveling in
elements of the supernatural, shrouded in mystery, and elaborating its ideas through
astonishing visions that have not and probably cannot happen, Frankenstein is the very model of the
romance as described by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who in his Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, writes
that the romance allows its author “to claim a certain latitude, both as to its
fashion and material.” And though there is a risk that the romance “may swerve
aside from the truth of the human heart, [it] has fairly a right to present
that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing
or creation.”
Frankenstein is also called “Gothic,” and Mary Shelley surely
owes a debt to the Gothic literature that was so popular at the time. In turn,
her book’s influence, direct or indirect, can be seen in many of her kindred
artistic spirits of the 19th century. The ominous atmosphere of
living nightmares is highly reminiscent of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.
There are shades of Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, as well,
in the physical and psychological isolation of Victor Frankenstein, and in his
desperate hunt to kill his massive, elusive quarry.
And of course there is Hawthorne, whose many stories of
phantasms and shattered ambitions seem to be a direct descendant of Shelley’s
vision. Frankenstein was born in a
dream, as Shelley describes in her 1831 introduction: “I saw the pale student
of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.” This is the
very archetype of many a young man who finds himself the unfortunate
protagonist of a Hawthorne story.
Furthermore, this now makes four out of four books that seem
deeply invested in exploring death in its various shades of horror. Slaughterhouse-Five is a meditation on
death. The action and ideas of the Oresteia
are pursued through the consequences of acts of murder. Though no deaths occur
in Prometheus Bound, the title
character is punished because he has saved the entire human race from death, so
mortality should be very much on the mind of the reader.
I must admit, it doesn’t take a long walk or a far throw to
touch upon death in literature. What else would an artist explore, but the
greatest of mysteries, and the deepest of sorrows? There is also love, I suppose,
but love is incidental – a happy, if confusing, accident. Death, on the other
hand, is a certainty; thus its centrality in art.
Perhaps one could say, “All art is about love and death, for
the two are irrevocably intertwined.” The Romeo
and Juliet hypothesis.
* * *
A few notes on the edition I read, published by Everyman’s Library. This is a much-storied imprint that currently exists as a series of
classic titles presented with a uniform look and style. Frankenstein is a rather lovely volume that includes such niceties
as Smyth-sewn bindings, thick, cream-colored paper, dark green buckram covers,
a silk ribbon-marker, and even a note describing the history of the
typeface. This makes for an enjoyable reading experience, though I perhaps
would have traded these luxuries for a moderately extensive set of annotations.
More troubling is the omission of Shelley’s introduction to the 1831 edition,
even though this copy uses the 1831 text.
It speaks to the experience that one wants when reading. Do
you want a clean, uninterrupted text, where you are free to read without being
distracted by outside interpretation? Perhaps a book with fine bindings,
pleasant to the touch, like the books that Mary Shelley herself might have pulled
from her parents’ estimable library? Or do you want as much knowledge as possible –
information about the author’s life and influences, critical commentary,
supplementary materials like contemporary reviews, and most relevant to me: explanations
for every now-obscure reference (without having to dash to the computer every
time)?
None of this information would have changed my reading, but
it probably would enhance it more than the physical qualities of the volume.
There is however, a trade-off – I have read books in the form of pure digital
text, with the option of looking up anything and everything online, but I find
that the reading experience on a computer or smartphone lacks the intimacy of
having all the details I want in one volume, or perhaps one volume and a
separate volume of annotations. It increases my respect for the curating
process, and really the artistry, that goes into the creation of a book,
whether physical or digital.
* * *
*I read the 1831 edition. According to Shelley, the changes
are “principally those of style. I have changed no portion of the story nor
introduced any new ideas or circumstances.” However, commentators note that the
changes suggest a growing conservatism on Shelley’s part, particularly with
respect to the characterization of Elizabeth Lavenza.
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