Mary Shelley was only eighteen years old when, having eloped with the already-married Romantic poet who ultimately did make an “honest woman” of her, she took seriously the challenge of Shelley’s friend Lord Byron to write a “ghost story” and produce what was ultimately to become the most successful Gothic horror story ever published. Some discerning reviewers of the time praised the novel for its inventiveness and language: Sir Walter Scott’s review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine called the novel an “extraordinary tale, in which the author seems to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination.” Some reviews were not so kind, however, even calling the subject matter “disgusting” and “absurd.” One particular reviewer, writing in the British Critic, having become aware that the anonymous novel had been written by the daughter of novelist and political philosopher William Godwin, wrote what today would be thought an outrageous judgment of the book: “The writer of it is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.”
Wow. He actually went there. Shelley was a woman and therefore had no business writing about such alarming subject matter, so we’ll just ignore this book. And then, the irony of making such a statement concerning the daughter of the woman who had lately written A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is too delicious to ignore. The fact is, however, that Mary Shelley’s novel was popular from its first publication, and has been admired by readers and critics ever since. Frankenstein appears on the Guardian list of the 100 greatest English language novels as well as the Observer’s list of the 100 greatest world novels. It came in as number 18 on Penguin publishing’s list of 100 “must read” classics as selected by their readers, and was honored as number 9 on the BBC list of the “100 Greatest British Novels.” It’s also worth noting that on the “Greatest Books of All Time” website, an amalgamation of 375 different “Greatest Books” lists, Frankensteinis listed as number 21 among all novels written in English. And of course it appears as number 77 (alphabetically) on my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
In a nutshell, the novel tells the story of an ambitious and brilliant young scientist who discovers the means by which life may be bestowed on inanimate matter, and brings to life a creature made up of parts of cadavers and of animals. But when the creature awakens and is fearsome in aspect, the scientist recoils in horror and abandons his creature who, surviving, ultimately sets out to take revenge on his maker by murdering his friends and family, moving the scientist to resolve to track down the creature and destroy him.
Such a bald summary falls far short of giving you a taste of the experience of reading the novel. And let me just say, by the way, that this experience of reading the novel is nothing like watching the movies, except perhaps a few more recent adaptations. For one thing, the popular image of a green-skinned monster with Boris Karloff’s face is not at all what comes to mind when you first encounter the text of the tale. For another, you need to realize that “Frankenstein” is not the name of the monster, it’s the name of the scientist who created the unnamed Creature. And it is this scientist to whom Shelley refers in the subtitle to the 1818 edition of the novel: Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus—alluding to the Titan who first created man and then stole fire from the gods to give to his creations, and who was punished for his hubrisperpetually by an eagle that pecks out his liver on a daily basis.
Shelley, inspired no doubt by the epistolary novels of eighteenth-century novelists like Samuel Richardson, uses the format of letters to create a distance between the reader and the narration of the novel. The story is framed by a correspondence between Captain Robert Walker and his sister Margaret. Captain Walton is a failed writer (a fact that explains his interest in and ability to tell a lengthy story in an artful manner) who is now devoted to contributing to the sum of human scientific knowledge by exploring the north pole. He sets sail in a ship called the Archangel that becomes icebound in the Arctic ocean. While in this position, the crew see a huge man driving a dogsled across the ice, and later rescue a nearly frozen man, who admits to have been pursuing the giant with the sled. His name, he tells Walton, is Victor Frankenstein, and upon recognizing the same thirst for new scientific breakthroughs that had previously driven him as well, Frankenstein tells Walton his own story as a cautionary tale.
The next part of the tale comes from Frankenstein himself—so we have Walton’s retelling of what Frankenstein told him. Born in Switzerland with two younger brothers and a girl, Elizabeth, whom he grows to love, Victor is crushed by the death of his mother, whose last wish is that he should marry Elizabeth. Victor, hungry to understand the natural world, deals with the death of his mother by immersing himself in the study of chemistry and biology at the University of Ingolstadt. His experiments finally lead him to the discovery of a scientific method to bring life to inanimate matter, and he proceeds to create a living creature, assembled in large part from dead bodies, human and animal. When he has completed an eight-foot tall humanoid that he brings to life, Victor is so repelled by the ugliness of the Creature that he flees his laboratory. When he returns, the Creature is gone. He begins a new career at the university in Oriental languages, deliberately suppressing his memory of the creature, until he receives a letter from his father telling him of the murder of his younger brother. He heads for his family home in Switzerland, and glimpses a huge humanoid figure near Geneva, and is convinced that his Creature is the murderer. The murder, however, is blamed on the boy’s nurse, who is hanged for the crime. Victor, guilt-ridden, takes to exploring the Alps, where he comes upon the Creature.
Now Shelley turns to the “monster” himself to continue the narrative, so we are presented with Captain Walton telling us the story of Victor Frankenstein telling us the story of the Creature telling his story. The Creature relates how he was driven to wander alone in the wilderness because human beings feared and loathed him on sight. He speaks of finding an abandoned building connected to the cottage home of a family, which he could observe unseen. He speaks of having an affection for this family and learning to speak and write by his constant observance of them. He finds a sack of books (including Milton’s Paradise Lost) in the woods and learns to read. Finally, he tries to approach the family, but they are terrified of him and drive him off, and he has now given up all hope of living among humans. Coming to Geneva in search of his Creator, the Creature had come upon Victor’s brother and killed him. Demanding his right as a living creature to seek his own happiness, he now wants Victor to create for him a female companion, promising to disappear with her somewhere beyond human civilization. Victor agrees, amid threats against other members of Victor’s family if he refuses.
When Victor resumes the narrative in his own voice, he relates his beginning to work on the companion Creature after traveling to Orkney, Scotland, and of the suspicion that the Creature had followed him and is watching him. As he works, Victor begins to have second thoughts. Perhaps the female Creature will loathe the original Creature as much a humans do. Perhaps she will be even worse than the original Creature. Perhaps the two will mate and produce a race of evil Creature bent on destroying humankind. So Victor abandons his efforts and destroys the unfinished female. The Creature, who has witnessed this, tries to convince, then to force Frankenstein to resume work. When Victor refuses, the Creature leaves with the threat that “I will be with you on your wedding night,” Victor having finally set a date to marry Elizabeth.
Anything from here on would definitely be a “spoiler,” so I’ll stop the summary here. Let me just say that the book does conclude with the narrative returning to Captain Walton, who relates that the last thing he heard from Victor was an exhortation to look for “happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition.”
This last warning underscores one of Shelley’s major themes in the novel: science has a responsibility to develop or create things that are of benefit to the human race or to the natural world, and must be extremely cautious in initiating processes or developments that will destroy. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should do it. The twentieth century abounds with examples that might be debated, including the development of nuclear or biological weapons. The novel is in some ways a condemnation of hubris as powerful as any classical play, or in the story of Prometheus himself..
But I think readers of the novel will take this issue much further. My own chief takeaway from the actions of Victor is the disheartening failure of the scientist to take any responsibility at all for his creation: he gives life to his Creature and then abandons it, essentially letting it loose in the world without guidance, to let it fend for itself. He never even gives it a name, but always refers to it as the “creature” or the “monster.” I made this, he as good as says, it’s alive. But it’s kind of ugly so I’ll just go away and ignore it. Does one give birth to a child and then abandon it? What kind of moral cowardice is this?
Many readers (as well as the Creature himself, who finds a copy of the poem and learns to read it) have remarked the use made by Shelley of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The epigraph to the first edition of the novel (1818), reading as if a question from the Creature himself, comes from Milton’s epic:
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me? (X.743-45)
The Creature is compared to Milton’s Adam here and in the body of the novel: Frankenstein has usurped the role of God and has created life, a new Adam. If this Adam “falls,” it is because he
has had no guidance or direction from his Creator. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, the Creature asks his Creator for a female companion, but that comes to naught. Playing God backfires on Victor, since having usurped God’s role, he is unable to play it in any appropriate way. Once rejected by his Creator, the Creature owes much more to the figure of Satan in Milton’s epic, who having been cast out of heaven devotes himself to bringing about the opposite of God’s plans, adopting evil as his good. The Creature devotes himself to killing Victor’s family solely to make him grieve. The Creature says himself that, having read Milton, he can empathize with the figure of Satan. Most conspicuously, he says a one point “I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so, the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.” There are even direct echoes of Milton’s language throughout the novel as, for example, when the Creature leaves behind the burnt cottage in which the family lived whom he had longed to befriend, he directly echoes the last lines of Milton’s epic, as Adam and Eve make their way out of Paradise: “And now, with the world before me, whither should I bend my steps?”
It has been suggested that the influence of her husband Percy was chiefly responsible for these Miltonic allusions, even that he edited the text of the first edition and chose to include them himself. It’s true that in her journals Mary talks of Percy reading Paradise Lost aloud to her during the time she was working on the novel, but the novel is hers. If she chose to include the language of the epic in her own work, the most likely explanation is that she saw the parallels between the two texts—involving the creation of life (Milton’s Adam) as well as the rejection of one’s own creation (Milton’s Satan)—and used these allusions to underscore these themes in her novel. But while Milton sought to “justify the ways of God to men,” Shelley’s story does much to condemn the ways of creator to Creature—to express, that is, “sympathy for the devil.”
The way the story has been passed down to contemporary audiences has been colored especially by James Whale’s 1931 film adaptation so that, while the “mad scientist” is seen to be at fault for his hubris and overreaching, the Monster is frightening, hideous, and merciless. Nowhere is he Shelley’s articulate scholar, or little more than a dumb beast. This and other such adaptations take us far from Shelley’s intent. To see her true purposes, you just have to read the book. You’ll be glad you did.