Frankenstein (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (35 page)

2
(p. 173) the breath had ceased: This scene was foreshadowed in Frankenstein’s nightmare following the creation of the monster that fateful November night (p. 52; see chap. V, note 2). In both instances, Victor attempts to embrace Elizabeth but discovers a corpse in his arms instead.

3
(p. 177) you know not what it is you say: Frankenstein’s last spoken words before he begins his pursuit of the monster are an echo of Jesus’ pronouncement when he is brought to Calvary to be crucified: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (the Bible, Luke 23:34, King James Version).

1
(p. 179) that now torments me: Frankenstein’s pledge for vengeance on the monster mirrors the monster’s cry for justice on page 149. The creator has also switched places with his creation and is now the pursuer instead of the pursued.

2
(p. 179) Tartary: Tatary, or Tatarstan, as it is known today, is a vast region in central and western Siberia. It is interesting to note that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, Tartary is a variant of Tartarus, the infernal abyss below Hades where Zeus hurled the Titans.

3
(p. 181) the Mediterranean: In 400 B.C. the Athenian writer Xenophon (431- 362 B.C.) led some ten thousand Greeks to safety by the sea, after the Persian rebel prince they had been supporting was defeated. See The Persian Expedition, by Xenophon, translated by Rex Warner, Middlesex, England. Penguin, 1972, pp. 177-220.

4
(p. 186) like the archangel: In describing his fall, Frankenstein compares himself with Milton’s Satan, who, in Paradise Lost, cast out of heaven, fell down to “bottomless perdition, there to dwell/In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire” (book 1, lines 47-48).

5
(p. 190) The die is cast: In Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the figures of Death and Life-in-Death cast dice for the mariner, and Life-in-Death wins (lines 195-198). When Walton agrees to turn back instead of forge on, he is saving his life but, as an ambitious man with thwarted desires, is also entering his own sort of living hell.

6
(p. 194) My heart was fashioned: As on page 88, the monster’s personal philosophy brings to mind the first line of Rousseau’s Emile. He wishes his creator had taken the advice Rousseau proffers in the third paragraph of book 1: “Cultivate and water the young plant before it dies. Its fruits will one day be your delights. Form an enclosure around your child’s soul at an early date.” See Emile; or, On Education, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, translated by Allan Bloom, New York: Basic Books, 1979, p. 38.

7
(p. 194) became my good: See Satan’s declaration in Paradise Lost: “Evil, be thou my good” (book 4, line 110).

8
(p. 195)
I am alone:
The monster is correct in assuming his situation is even worse that Satan’s; even after his fall, Satan still had the support and companionship of the throng of angels who rebelled alongside him.

9
(p. 196) this injustice: The monster’s sense of the unequal justice with which he has been served recalls Godwin’s stance on the rights of man in Political Justice: ”The rights of one man cannot clash with or be destructive of the rights of another; for this, instead of rendering the subject an important branch of truth and morality, as the advocates of the rights of man certainly understand it to be, would be to reduce it to a heap of unintelligible jargon and inconsistency” (book 2, chap. 5). See An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its
Influence
on General Virtue and Happiness, by William Godwin, edited by Raymond A. Preston, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926, p. 61.

10
(p. 197) my ashes: For a man whose troubles were instigated by harnessing the power of fire and who came to think of himself as a “blasted tree,” cremation seems an appropriate end. What is strangely haunting about Shelley’s reference to a funeral pyre is that her husband, Percy, would be cremated after his death by drowning in 1822 (recall, too, the foreshadowed death of their son William; see chap. VII, note 1). For an artistic representation of Shelley’s cremation, see Mary Shelley, by Miranda Seymour, New York: Grove Press, 2000, plate 44: The Funeral of Shelley (1889), by Louis-Edouard-Paul Fournier.

It grossed something like 12 million dollars and started a cycle of so-called boy-meets-ghoul horror films.

-BORIS KARLOFF, RECALLED ON HIS DEATH IN 1969

 

Steeped in literary traditions and communities, Mary Shelley was perhaps destined to write, but ironically the true legacy of Frankenstein is a visual one. The London Morning Post’s early review of Presumption (1823), the first of many plays based on Shelley’s book, noted that “the representation of this piece upon the stage is of astonishing, of enchanting, interest.”
^pp
While the novel has a strong dramatic quality, it is almost as if the monster must be seen for a real appreciation of the conceptual thrust of the story. Indeed, the decisive moment in the text occurs when Victor Frankenstein first lays eyes on the creation he has feverishly toiled on for months; he recoils in horror, his blood turns icy cold, and he runs. In the novel, the monster embodies Frankenstein’s exalted ego, shortsight edness, and folly; onstage, the monster holds the mirror to the audience. In bearing witness to the hideous visage of the monster, the audience immediately shares Frankenstein’s repulsion and understands his desire to escape.

With the advent of motion pictures, the fascination with the visuality of Frankenstein found the perfect medium. Frankenstein the novel has spawned more fihn adaptations than any other work of fiction. Cinematic history is rife with variations, sequels, and spin-offs, some of which bear little or no resemblance to the original work, with nimmakers from Thomas Edison (1910) to Andy Warhol (1974) to Kenneth Branagh (1994) offering their interpretations. Spoofs, notable for their ridiculousness, include Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein ( 19 74) . But it was James Whale’s Frankenstein of 1931 that made movie history, with Boris Karloff cast as the monster. Whale, one of the only openly gay artists working in Hollywood at the time, injects an outsider’s perspective into Shelley’s narrative. The creature that emerges from this process is a melange of the grotesque and the pathetic, and he is both terrifying and pitiable. The protruding forehead, the raised stitches running like rail ties over his ghastly flesh, and the electric nodes jutting from his neck combine to create one of the most persistent images in American iconography and indeed in human culture.

Karloff’s made-up and costumed features have given way to the undying celebrity of the monster itself (whom most people erroneously dub “Frankenstein”); not unlike the monster in Shelley’s novel, the cinematic image cast into the world no longer needs a creator. The square face and zombie posture, whether loosely based on Boris Karloff or not, are immediately recognizable to millions, many of whom have not even read the novel. This monster no longer resembles a mirror held up to the audience; rather the image becomes something to stare at and be darkly obsessed with. Frankenstein the cinematic icon is one of the most recurrent and remarkable images of the twentieth century.

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the book’s history. Following the commentaries, a series of questions seeks to filter Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

QUARTERLY REVIEW

The monster, by the easy process of listening at the window of a cottage, acquires a complete education: he learns to think, to talk, to read prose and verse; he becomes acquainted with geography, history, and natural philosophy, in short, ‘a most delicate monster.’ This credible course of study, and its very natural success, [is] brought about by a combination of circumstances almost as natural. In the aforesaid cottage, a young Frenchman employed his time in teaching an Arabian girl all these fine things, utterly unconscious that while he was

 

‘whispering soft lessons in his fair one’s ear,’

 

he was also tutoring Frankenstein’s hopeful son. The monster, however, by due diligence, becomes highly accomplished: he reads Plutarch’s Lives, Paradise Lost, Volney’s Ruin of Empires, and the Sorrows of Werter. Such were the works which constituted the Greco-Anglico-Germanico-Gallico-Arabic library of a Swabian hut, which, if not numerous, was at least miscellaneous, and reminds us, in this particular, of Lingo’s famous combination of historic characters-‘Mahamet, Heliogabalus, Wat Tyler, and Jack the Painter.‘ He learns also [to] decipher some writings which he carried off from the laboratory in which he was manufactured; by these papers he becomes acquainted with the name and residence of Frankenstein and his family, and as his education has given him so good a taste as to detest himself, he has also the good sense to detest his creator for imposing upon him such a horrible burden as conscious existence, and he therefore commences a series of bloody persecutions against the unhappy Frankenstein-he murders his infant brother, his young bride, his bosom friend; even the very nursery maids of the family are not safe from his vengeance, for he contrives that they shall be hanged for robbery and murder which he himself commits.

The monster, however, has some method in his madness: he meets his Prometheus in the valley of Chamouny, and, in a long conversation, tells him the whole story of his adventures and his crimes, and declares that he will ‘spill more blood and become worse,’ unless Frankenstein will make (we should perhaps say build) a wife for him: the Sorrows of Werter had, it seems, given him a strange longing to find a Charlotte, of a suitable size, and it is plain that none of Eve’s daughters, not even the enormous Charlotte of the Varieties herself, would have suited this stupendous fantoccino.

January 1818

 

The novel of “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus,” is undoubtedly, as a mere story, one of the most original and complete productions of the age. We debate with ourselves in wonder as we read it, what could have been the series of thoughts, what could have been the peculiar experiences that awakened them, which conducted in the author’s mind, to the astonishing combination of motives and incidents and the startling catastrophe which compose this tale. There are perhaps some points of subordinate importance which prove that it is the Author’s first attempt. But in this judgment, which requires a very nice discrimination, we may be mistaken. For it is conducted throughout with a firm and steady hand. The interest gradually accumulates, and advances towards the conclusion with the accelerated rapidity of a rock rolled down a mountain. We are held breathless with suspense and sympathy, and the heaping up of incident on incident, and the working of passion out of passion. We cry “hold, hold, enough”—but there is yet something to come, and like the victim whose history it relates we think we can bear no more, and yet more is to be borne. Pelion is heaped on Ossa, and Ossa on Olympus. We climb Alp after Alp, until the horizon is seen, blank, vacant and limitless, and the head turns giddy, and the ground seems to fail under the feet.

This Novel thus rests its claim on being a source of powerful and profound emotion. The elementary feelings of the human mind are exposed to view, and those who are accustomed to reason deeply on their origin and tendency, will perhaps be the only persons who can sympathize to the full extent in the interest of the actions which are their result. But, founded on nature as they are, there is perhaps no reader who can endure any thing beside a new love-story, who will not feel a responsive string touched in his inmost soul. The sentiments are so affectionate and so innocent, the characters of the subordinate agents in this strange drama are clothed in the light of such a mild and gentle mind.-The pictures of domestic manners are every where of the most simple and attaching character. The pathos is irresistible and deep. Nor are the crimes and malevolence of the single Being, tho’ indeed withering and tremendous, the offspring of any unaccountable propensity to evil, but flow inevitably from certain causes fully adequate to their production. They are the children, as it were, of Necessity and Human Nature. In this the direct moral of the book consists; and it is perhaps the most important, and of the most universal application, of any moral that can be enforced by example. Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked. Requite affection with scorn;—let one being be selected, for whatever cause, as the refuse of his kind—divide him, a social being, from society, and you impose upon him the irresistible obligations-malevolence and selfishness. It is thus that, too often in society, those who are best qualified to be its benefactors and its ornaments, and branded by some accident with scorn, and changed, by neglect and solitude of heart, into a scourge and a curse.

The Being in “Frankenstein” is, no doubt, a tremendous creature. It was impossible that he should not have received among men that treatment which led to the consequences of his being a social nature. He was an abortion and an anomaly, and tho’ his mind was such as its’ first impressions formed it, affectionate and full of moral sensibility, yet the circumstances of his existence were so monstrous and uncommon, that when the consequences of them became developed in action, his original goodness was gradually turned into the fuel of an inextinguishable misanthropy and revenge. The scene between the Being and the blind de Lacey in the cottage is one of the most profound and extraordinary instances of pathos that we ever recollect. It is impossible to read this dialogue-and indeed many other situations of a somewhat similar character-without feeling the heart suspend its pulsations with wonder, and the tears stream down the cheeks! The encounter and argument between Frankenstein and the Being on the sea of ice almost approaches in effect to the expostulations of Caleb Williams with Falkland. It reminds us indeed somewhat of the style and character of that admirable writer to whom the Author has dedicated his work, and whose productions he seems to have studied. There is only one instance however in which we detect the least approach to imitation, and that is, the conduct of the incident of Frankenstein’s landing and trial in Ireland. The general character of the tale indeed resembles nothing that ever preceded it. After the death of Elisabeth, the story, like a stream which grows at once more rapid and profound as it proceeds, assumes an irresistible solemnity, and the magnificent energy and swiftness as of a tempest.