Frankenstein

Overview

Frankenstein is two hundred and eighty pages, published anonymously in 1818 with a preface by Percy Shelley that led many reviewers to assume he had written it. Mary Shelley was twenty when it appeared and eighteen when she began it.

The circumstances are famous and are worth getting right. In the summer of 1816, the year without a summer after the eruption of Tambora, the Shelleys were at Lake Geneva near Byron, with Byron’s doctor Polidori. Kept indoors by weeks of rain, reading German ghost stories aloud, Byron proposed that each of them write one. Mary could not think of anything for days, and then, she says, had a waking dream of a pale student kneeling beside the thing he had put together. Polidori’s contribution became The Vampyre, which founded the other great horror genre.

Her parentage matters to the book. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, who died eleven days after her birth; her father was William Godwin, the philosophical anarchist. She had eloped with Shelley at sixteen, had a daughter who died at two weeks, and was writing this at nineteen with a second infant beside her. The novel is about creation, abandonment and the obligations of parents, and it was written by someone whose own were unusual.

There are two texts. The 1818 original is rawer and gives Victor more responsibility; the 1831 revision, made after Shelley’s death and the deaths of three of her four children, adds the introduction about the ghost story and shifts Victor toward being fated rather than culpable. Courses increasingly use 1818 and say so on the cover.

What happens

The structure is three nested frames, each inside the last.

Walton. The outer layer is a series of letters from Robert Walton, an English explorer pushing toward the North Pole in search of glory and a passage, writing to his sister. He is lonely, ambitious, and says he wants a friend. His ship becomes trapped in ice and the crew sees an enormous figure driving a dog sledge across the floes, and the next day picks up a European, starved and nearly dead, who asks which way the other was going before he will come aboard.

Victor. The middle layer is that man’s story, told to Walton over several days. A comfortable Genevan childhood, an adopted cousin Elizabeth, a friend Henry Clerval. At university in Ingolstadt he becomes obsessed with the principle of life, works in secret in a room at the top of a house, collects material from charnel houses and dissecting rooms, and after two years succeeds.

And then the scene the whole novel turns on. The creature opens its eye. Victor, who has spent two years wanting exactly this, is revolted by what he has made, runs from the room, and sleeps. He wakes to find it standing over his bed, reaching toward him, and making a sound that might have been speech. He runs again, out into the street, and does not go back. The creature is a few hours old.

Victor falls ill for months, is nursed by Clerval, and tries to forget. Then news from Geneva: his youngest brother William has been strangled. He goes home, sees the creature in the mountains during a storm, and knows. A servant, Justine, is tried for the murder on the evidence of a locket found in her pocket, and hanged. Victor says nothing at the trial.

The creature. On a glacier above Chamonix the creature finds him, and the innermost frame is its own account, which occupies the middle of the novel.

It describes waking with no language and no explanation, learning to distinguish its senses, being driven out of a village with stones. It takes shelter in a lean-to against a cottage and spends a year watching the family inside through a chink: an old blind man, his son and daughter, and later an Arabian woman whom they teach French, which is how the creature learns to speak and then to read. It does chores for them secretly at night, clearing snow and leaving firewood.

It reads three books found in a bag: Plutarch, Goethe’s Werther, and Paradise Lost, which it takes to be history. It identifies with Adam, and then, noting that Adam was made beautiful and beloved of his creator, with Satan.

At last it approaches the old man, who is blind and therefore kind, and is beaten out of the house by the son when the others return. The family flees the cottage. The creature burns it down.

Its demand to Victor is specific: make me a companion of the same kind, and we will go to South America and neither of us will trouble anyone again. Victor agrees, travels to a remote Orkney island, works for months, and then, considering that the two of them might breed, tears the half-finished thing apart while the creature watches through the window. It says only that it will be with him on his wedding night.

The rest is pursuit. Clerval is killed and Victor charged with the murder. Elizabeth is killed on the wedding night, while Victor, misunderstanding the threat, is outside with a pistol waiting for an attack on himself. His father dies of grief. Victor swears revenge and follows the creature north across Russia and onto the ice, which is where Walton finds him.

The ending. Victor dies on the ship. Walton, whose crew has just forced him to turn back, finds the creature standing over the body in the cabin, mourning. It tells him that its crimes gave it no pleasure, that it is now alone with the memory of them, and that it will build a funeral pyre at the northernmost point and burn itself. It goes out of the window onto an ice raft and is lost in the dark.

How to read it

Read the 1818 text if you can, and note which one you have. The differences change the argument about responsibility.

Read the creature’s narrative slowly. It is the heart of the book, it is the most eloquent voice in it, and any reading that treats the creature as a monster has been made by skipping it.

Watch what Victor is actually guilty of. He is not punished for making the creature; he is punished, and the novel is precise about this, for running away, for staying silent while an innocent servant is hanged, and for destroying the companion he had promised.

Keep Paradise Lost in view. The epigraph is from it, the creature reads it, and the novel uses it as a frame for a question Milton did not ask: what does a creator owe a creature that did not ask to exist?

Notice the women. Every female character in the book dies or is destroyed: Victor’s mother, Justine, Elizabeth, the unfinished companion torn apart on the table. A novel by Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter about a man who creates life without a woman is doing something deliberate with that.

And note the subtitle, The Modern Prometheus. Prometheus made men from clay and stole fire for them and was punished by a god. Which of the two figures in this novel is which is not obvious.

Questions it raises

• Is Victor’s sin the creation or the abandonment? The novel gives the creature a full defence and Victor never answers it.
• The creature becomes violent after a year of solitary rejection. Does the book argue that character is made by treatment, and does that excuse the murders?
• Victor destroys the female companion partly from fear that they would breed. Was he right to?
• He watches Justine hang and says nothing. Why is that not the thing he confesses to?
• Walton turns back and survives. Is the novel against ambition, or against ambition pursued in secret?
• Mary Shelley was eighteen, had lost a child, and was the daughter of a mother who died giving birth to her. How much does that belong in a reading of the book?