The story of the events that led Mary Shelley to write her Frankenstein story is now almost as well known as the plot itself. The tale began to take shape in 1816 as a result of ghost-story-telling sessions held among Mary; her husband, British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; and the self-exiled British poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, when the Shelleys lived in Switzerland.
After several days lacking inspiration, Shelley had her now famous “waking dream,” which she described in a preface to the novel’s third edition in 1831. In part, she wrote, “What terrified me will terrify others, and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.”
The work and its monster-hero became such a popular subject for film and stage, in serious, comedic, and parodic productions, that many acquaint themselves with Victor Frankenstein’s monster long before encountering it in Shelley’s book. Many first-time readers discover with a shock that the monster remains unnamed, with his creator bearing the Frankenstein moniker. A second, stronger shock may occur when readers realize that the monster, in great contrast to the bumbling, murderous, wild-eyed, grunting, crazy-stitched object of film, proves the most rational and also the most eloquent of any of the novel’s characters.
The basic plot of the novel remains powerful in its simplicity. Most of it appears in flashback, as a defeated, guilt-ridden Victor Frankenstein relates on his deathbed his tale of horror to a ship’s captain, Robert Walton, the first of the novel’s three narrators. He writes letters that relate his contact with Frankenstein, who hunted his human creation in the Arctic, where Walton and his crew found him. The letters advance the novel’s strongest theme, that of the conflict between science and poetry, or art.
While Frankenstein, once a young Swiss premedical student studying in Geneva, represents science, his beloved cousin Elizabeth Lavenza, who loves poetry, and best friend Henry Clerval, an aficionado of romance and chivalry whose surname describes his clarity of vision, represent art. As the story unfolds, readers learn that Frankenstein sought to create a composite human being from dead body parts. He reasons that those who have died might be restored if the secret to life can be found. Thus his focus is not at first on the generation of life but rather on regeneration.
In what becomes a madness to reach his goal, he isolates himself from Elizabeth and Henry, ignoring their pleas that he abandon the ungodly project that comes to obsess him. Dismayed by the creature, Frankenstein allows him to escape and eventually pursues him after the monster murders several members of Frankenstein’s family, including his beloved younger brother William, which leads to the execution of the Frankenstein family’s maid, an innocent unjustly accused of William’s murder. Frankenstein himself acts as the second narrator, his tale appearing within Walton’s own, while the monster’s third narration appears within Frankenstein’s own.
Shelley’s sophisticated structure emphasized the close connection of points of view and touched on many concerns of her era. At a time when the theory of evolution added to an ongoing debate over the nature and center of life, as well as to a prevailing argument regarding the value of science over religion, the monster’s existence personified the public’s greatest fears. Not only were his physical acts of violence frightening but also the cause of those acts, his rejection due to his “difference” by all humans he comes into contact with except for a blind man, leading astute readers to question in which being the true monstrous nature lurked.
The monster was not “born” hating others; his hate was taught him by people who refused to see beyond his external appearance to the brilliant warm nature existing just below its surface. While science might be expected to lack compassion, the same could not be said of religion, which should have prepared the public to be more accepting. That the monster possesses a quick intellect and a natural warmth and goodness that is corrupted only by his exposure to humans remains an indictment of shallow social values and a rigid class structure.
Timely political concerns surface as the monster hears lessons from Volney’s Ruins of Empire that relate to the correct division of property and the inherent conflict between the rich and the poor.
The ironic death of Frankenstein, indirectly caused by the life he created, remains part of a cautionary tale that bears just as strong a message against humans acting outside rational boundaries two centuries after Shelley wrote her novel. At its simplest, it is a rebuke of fathers who refuse to take responsibility for their children. At its most complicated, it represents all the ideals of Romanticism and the conflicts inherent to everyday life that continue to haunt the human condition.
Because Mary Shelley became one of the few women of her age to gain eventual fame from her publication, originally published anonymously, feminist critics and others who study women’s literature have continued to study Frankenstein with great interest. Although Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote the most important feminist work prior to the 19th century, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and strongly advocated women’s independence, Shelley did not create well-rounded female characters in her book.
Critics explain this by noting she shaped the women surrounding Victor Frankenstein realistically in order to demonstrate the lack of power for women of her age. They also see the monster himself as representative of women, with his marginalization and control by the book’s male protagonist. That he achieves a modicum of intellectual and physical independence, and must move beyond civic law to do so, may represent the fate of women who refused to conform to patriarchy’s strict control.
Shelley’s emphasis of freedom of the imagination through art, while strongly Romanticist in nature, also relates to one of the few types of freedom available to women, who often had to participate in the arts secretly. Like the monster that had no name, Mary Shelley herself remained officially nameless as the author of her classic for five years, until her name appeared in the 1823 second edition. Believing that Percy Bysshe Shelley had written the novel, Sir Walter Scott wrote of it in a review for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 20 March/1 April, 1818 edition:
Upon the whole, the work impresses us with a high idea of the author’s original genius and happy power of expression. We shall be delighted to hear that he has aspired to the paullo majorica; and, in the meantime, congratulate our readers upon a novel which excites new reflections and untried sources of emotion. If Gray’s definition of Paradise, to lie on a couch, namely, and read new novels, come any thing near truth, no small praise is due to him, who, like the author of Frankenstein, has enlarged the sphere of that fascinating enjoyment.
Bibliography
Jump, Harriet Devine, ed. Women’s Writing of the Romantic Period, 1789–1836: An Anthology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.
Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Stillinger, Jack. Introduction to Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996, vii–xi.
Categories: British Literature, Horror Novels, Literature, Novel Analysis
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