Frankenstein (1818)
“It was a dreary night
of November . . .”
Given my love of the Gothic, it’s absurd that I’ve waited
until the age of 28 to read Frankenstein,
arguably the most literary, if not the most famous, of the Gothic
tales. I’m not sure what has prevented
me other than not coming across it in school.
I thought to myself that 2012 was the year I would finally do it, and
given that the actual text is surprisingly short (especially considered next to
Dracula and, more relevantly perhaps,
to Mrs Radcliffe’s romances) it was no great struggle. I wonder, though, if my hesitancy was some
instinctual fear that I would be disappointed.
Because I actually was a bit disappointed.
It’s strange to quantify this disappointment. I chose the 1818 text because I had been
informed, contrary to critical belief up until recently, that it was preferable
given it was more raw and creative a text; Shelley was nineteen, I believe,
when she began drafting it. I know the
story of its composition probably better than I know the book itself; I have
seen several film versions (who hasn’t?) and heard at least one (very faithful)
radio adaptation. Given that it has
endured far more both in critical terms and popularly than Mrs Radcliffe’s
romances, it is important for being one of the few female-authored classic
Gothic texts. I also wonder whether
having read the introduction to the Oxford edition of 1998 by Marilyn Butler, I
was led to too high of expectations:
basically, that the sum is less than the parts.
I love Dracula, and
while it’s totally unfair (and not really relevant) to compare the two, I
couldn’t help contrasting my reaction to reading the former (which was pleasure
and elation) with the latter (some frustration, some indifference, and some
interest). I feel, on the contrary, that
I should really read Shelley’s father, Godwin’s, Gothic novels in order to
understand her contribution more fully.
Shelley’s work is demonstrably different from Radcliffe’s, and no one
would presume to exchange Radcliffe’s novel(s) for Shelley’s. I like the idea that the book can work on the
folk tale level, with allusions to Cornelius Agrippa’s sorcerer’s apprentice,
and to contribute to the then-current (1818) debates on science, humanity, and
the soul.
My favorite part of the story has always been the frame
narrative, and this is something that (again, perhaps relevantly, perhaps not) Frankenstein shares with Dracula.
Walton’s journey to the Arctic, as described through letters to his
sister, is not so different in some senses from Jonathan’s letters to Mina
about visiting Romania (and vice versa).
There’s something very compelling, to me, about a stranger coming upon
the end of this tale in a dangerous, primal environment. (See Lockwood’s arrival at Wuthering Heights
for another excellent example.)
Unfortunately, Walton himself—in this version especially—is not a
likeable character, or even a particularly interesting one. Forgive me for asking too much of Mary
Shelley, but a bit more travel narrative, a bit less abstract theorizing, would
have, for me, told me a lot more about Walton as a proto-scientist/explorer and
as a person.
However, Frankenstein himself is an extremely unlikeable and
almost unsympathetic character. By the
end, I really rather wished he would hurry up and die. The problem with Frankenstein is that he
doesn’t learn from his mistakes, and that can be very frustrating to a reader;
at least, it makes it difficult for me to take him seriously. I understand that Shelley softened
Frankenstein’s character in the 1831 version, making him more religious, more
repentant, and in general less of a jerk.
I can understand why she did this (especially as the 1830s were heading
into a more sentimental Victorian age) but, even if I don’t like Frankenstein
in 1818, I admire her artistic choice to make him a bleak, unapologetic
character, more akin to Heathcliff than Rochester (though I feel none of the
attraction Frankenstein that I do to Heathcliff). Frankenstein also has a weird tendency toward
wussiness. Jonathan Harker may seem
remarkably effeminized to modern readers, but Frankenstein falls down with
illness every five seconds, seemingly, and at extremely convenient times. Despite this, his immune system is apparently
so strong that he can last a few months in the extreme conditions of the
Arctic. What gives? (See unreliable narrator, further on.)
Furthermore, I really found myself disappointed in Shelley’s
female characters. Mrs Radcliffe’s
heroines are hardly nuanced characters of realistic shading, but then Jane
Austen had died only the year before Frankenstein
was published, and it is beyond question that her female characters are
superior to Shelley’s. I have tried to
ask myself why this should be. Surely,
as a woman, Shelley would have wanted to present realistic and/or interesting
female protagonists (say what you want about Mina and Lucy in Dracula, they are at least
interesting). What prevented her? Was it plot necessity, which requires the
women in Frankenstein’s life—his dependents—to be continually victimized? Was it feminist subtext, suggesting that the
repression of women resulted in characters that, at least as far the male
narrators are concerned, are backdrop? Was
it a double-bluff resulting from the birth and post-natal depression inspiration
taken from Shelley’s own life? Was it
her youth as a writer and reliance on some conventions in her first novel? I am certainly open to suggestion. I think it is without question that Shelley
herself would have made a far more interesting heroine than Elizabeth, Victor’s
mother, Justine, and Agatha (though Zafie has the potential to be the most
interesting female character).
The implication of guilt in furthering Frankenstein’s vain
projects is interesting, more so in this 1818 version, where his father is
implicated more and Inglostadt marginally less.
It is interesting to me, moreover, that Inglostadt can be so much to
blame in the first place; the amount of freedom Frankenstein is given might be
a subtle class criticism on the (decadent) aristocrat’s carefree manipulation
of the world around him, damn the consequences (then again, it might not, given
that Frankenstein was modelled at least in part on her husband, Percy). Another disappointment for me was the lack of
description concerning the way Frankenstein brought his creature to life. To someone used to the step-by-step,
journal-recorded detail of Dracula, and
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde, Frankenstein’s generalizations are frustrating. “After days and nights of incredible labour
and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay,
more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless
matter.” Frankenstein seeks knowledge
for knowledge’s sake; he does not seek immortality/reanimation to save a loved
one, for example. (I love the way that
the Jekyll & Hyde musical felt it
had to make Jekyll’s quest the result of his vow to save his father from
madness after having been committed to a mental asylum; what a 20th
century way of giving a framework of psychology to a Jekyll who, in the book,
is rather a nasty character on his own.)
Frankenstein’s description of the Creature, too, is disappointingly
vague (though, I suppose this allows the Creature to assume anyone’s nightmare
shape and to stand in for any number of bogeymen). It is also difficult to believe that, until
the deed was done, Frankenstein had a mental block and could not see that this
sewn-together corpse he was putting together was not, indeed, a beautiful object.
(Though, in the context of The
Monk, I suppose the whole thing could stand in as a metaphor for sexual
gratification.)
Nevertheless, as a completely unreliable narrator,
Frankenstein’s conception of and reaction to the entirety of the novel comes
into question. By his own admission,
almost all of his own story could be a lie, an exaggeration, or a
half-truth. The only “proof” we have is
of Walton’s letters, presumably discovered after his death; if we choose to
disbelief even Walton’s story, we have one massive deception, which is really
interesting to contemplate. I have read
criticism before that suggests the Crew of Light fabricated the whole of their
“evidence” against Dracula and that the king of vampires could be construed,
through careful reading of the “facts” of the text, as the victim. Frankenstein
could be entirely a parable constructed by a delirious Walton with no
corroboration needed from the crew, if he doesn’t survive the trip, that
is.
The most satisfying and startling section of the book is
when the Creature is allowed to tell his own story. The confrontation on the glacier is the prose
equivalent of Friederich’s paintings of the sublime. This section is amazingly creative; can you
imagine in 1818 being asked to dream up how a fully-formed semi-human would
describe birth and infancy? (In a sense,
Shelley had a blueprint in Milton, to whom she owes an acknowledged debt; Eve’s
first thoughts and actions in Paradise
Lost are fascinating.) The Creature
experiences sensations without recognizing how they are generated; in short, a
sensory overload overwhelms him. His
birth has been a hard one, and his upbringing lonely, confusing, unpleasant,
and overpowering. Only a reader with a
heart of stone could fail to empathize with the Creature and, in my opinion,
even in the 19th century surely would have looked beyond the
superficial abnormalities and accepted him as better than his creator (or am I
being unnecessarily generous?).
The incidents with the DeLaceys are the most “tale-like” of
the novel and follow the most closely on from Rousseau and Walpole himself;
nevertheless, they are there for satirical purposes and soon shatter in a
devastating (and highly dramatic/cinematic) way. It’s strange that the reader’s hope is
raised, in a half self-revulsed manner, that Frankenstein will consent to make
the Creature a mate. (Surely
Frankenstein’s fear that the world will get populated by mini-monsters is
unfounded, unless the Creature has the same miraculous powers of insemination
that Edward Cullen does.) The Creature’s
anguished confessions of complete wretchedness after the death of Frankenstein
are, again, one of the most masterful sections of the book. His decision to throw himself on a funeral
byre is both incredibly sad and somehow intensely poetic. “Am I to be thought the only criminal, when
all human kind sinned against me? Why do
you not hate Felix, who drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought
to destroy the saviour of his child?
Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings? I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an
abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.” This put me very much in mind of the narrator
of Phantom of the Opera’s
(considerably less grandiose) speech about Erik wishing only to be loved for
himself. (Has anyone ever speculated on Shelley’s influence on Leroux?)
Perhaps it will be necessary for me to think on and revisit Frankenstein before I can regard it as
highly as I regard Dracula.
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