Frankenstein (Novel)

What is the hold that Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, published in 1818. written two years earlier when she was 18 years old has on us? The story of its creation is fascinating enough (I know of two movies about it and several novels)--Shelley, along with her husband Percy, the writer and doctor John Polidori, and Lord Byron, were staying together in Switzerland. They had a ghost story writing contest. Mary had a dream about a scientist who creates life and is immediately regretful. Polidori, using scraps of Byron's tale of a vampire, wrote The Vampyr, the first romantic vampire novel. Thus, two of the most enduring figures in horror literature and cinema were born out of one incident.

I've read Frankenstein now at least twice, and seen many movies, almost none of which bear any resemblance to the novel (the Kenneth Branagh version comes closest). Shelley tapped into something primordial in her story--the usurpation of God by creating life. At the time, galvanism, or the use of electricity to prompt spasms of life in dead frogs, was being experimented on, which surely gave Shelley the spark (sorry for the pun) of inspiration, as did Milton's Paradise Lost and the myth of Prometheus, who created mankind in Greek myth and gave him fire (the novel was initially subtitled "The Modern Prometheus").

Beyond the lust for the power of life and death, the novel, as our many of the film adaptations, is sympathetic to the creature. Indeed, Victor Frankenstein does not give him a name, which steals from him an identity. Throughout the book he is known as "monster, wretch, demon, fiend, devil." From this reading, I really saw how much of a dick Victor Frankenstein is. He leaves his creature to run loose, where it becomes quite an intellectual (that always gave me pause--he speaks better than the man who created him) and then, when asked to create a mate, after which we will retire to South America and leave the world of humans, he is turned down flat.

Children have a fascination with famous monsters, and I think there is something of an empathy. Sure, Frankenstein's monster can be scary, but he's also pitiable, lonely, frightened, and discriminated against merely because he is ugly. The story he tells of lurking by the cottage of a family, helping them anonymously, learning the language from them, but then being rudely shunned when they finally see him, is one of the more heartbreaking in literature. No one, no one, gives the monster the slightest bit of kindness, except for the blind man in the cottage, who of course can't see him.

Therefore, Shelley's novel carries with it quite a damnation of the human tendency to shun the hideous in appearance. I don't know about others, but when the creature starts killing off those close to Victor, I was kind of rooting for him. Was it Shelley's intention to make her hero a bumbling cad? After all, when he marries Elizabeth, his longtime love, the monster tells him that he will be there on his wedding night, Victor stupidly leaves Elizabeth alone, where of course the monster kills her. Can a scientist who brings the dead to life be any stupider? And his spurning of his creation flies in the face of any sense of humanity, in that we are programmed to care for our offspring, even if they are hideous--a "face only a mother could love." Victor lacks this humanity, and is a selfish oaf.

Another aspect of the book that is interesting is the epistolary framing device--the story is told in letters by Robert Walton, a polar explorer, to his sister. He finds Victor chasing after the monster in the Arctic, and then Victor tells his story. When the monster tells his story to Victor, we thus have a twice-removed tale, which would ordinarily leave it open to many misinterpretations or flat-out untruths. But Shelley's style, the Gothic romance, allows for people to have eidetic memories.

The book is a classic only for it what it created. It was not well-reviewed, but was a smash nonetheless. The first stage version came as early as 1823, and the first film version in 1910, and they haven't stopped coming. Besides the popular Universal film series in the '30s and '40s, and the British Hammer films of the '50s and '60s, they don't stop, whether X-rated (Andy Warhol's Frankenstein), serious but campy, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, directed by Kenneth Branagh, and parody, Young Frankenstein. Frankly, the parody is the best film ever made of the Frankenstein tale, on a par with Bride of Frankenstein, which is the best of the Universal series.

The book has its problems. I read it as part of a complete collection of the works of Percy Shelley, on the off chance that he actually wrote it, or at least helped a great deal. This may be a case of simply misogyny--how could a teenage girl possibly write this--but once read it is full of the kind of language a well-educated teenage girl could write. Germaine Greer scoffs at the idea that Percy had anything to do with it, saying it's a bad novel. Granted, there are some strange passages. We spend much too time dithering over the framing of Justine, the Frankenstein's maid, over young William's death, and the backstory of the people in the cottage is completely extraneous.

The language itself is of the time--florid, with curlicues not found in today's speech. "I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch--the miserable monster whom I had created."

The monster is no less silver-tongued: "But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin." Here's an example of a father/son relationship that isn't solved by chatting about baseball.

Whatever strengths or weaknesses Shelley's book has, she was onto something. Has there been any other novel, except Bram Stoker's Dracula (the two are kind of bookends, though they were written two generations apart) that has ignited such a force in popular culture? And she was only eighteen. And maybe had some help from Percy, or maybe not.