«Frankenstein», Mary ShelleyNearly two years of work, not a minute of responsibility

Who Frankenstein actually is

Frankenstein is not the monster. He is Victor Frankenstein, a student from Geneva who, in Ingolstadt, put together a being eight feet tall and brought it to life. The work took nearly two years. He ran away the same night, as soon as the being opened its eyes.

The book has three narrators, one inside another. Captain Walton writes letters to his sister from an Arctic expedition; in them he retells Victor’s confession; and inside that, for six chapters, the being speaks for itself. The deeper you go, the better it gets.

Mary Shelley began this novel at eighteen. The films later turned it into a story about a monster. In the book it is a story about a maker who would not answer for what he made.

What is not in the book

There is no laboratory in a castle, no assistant, no cry of “It’s alive!”. Victor’s workshop is a room at the top of an ordinary house. Lightning does strike in the novel, but an oak, not the creature: at fifteen Victor watches a tree turn into a stump and hears of electricity for the first time.

The animation itself takes one paragraph: a dreary night of November, rain on the panes, a candle nearly burnt out, a dull yellow eye opening. How exactly he did it, Victor refuses to say, and explains why: so that nobody repeats it.

He made it and went to bed

The being opened its eyes, and Victor rushed out of the room. Then, mind you, he went to bed. He woke to find the being at his bedside, one hand stretched out to him. He fled again and paced the courtyard until morning.

In the morning his friend Henry Clerval arrives. Victor finds the room empty, claps his hands for joy and goes down with a fever for several months. Not once does he go looking for the one he made. They will not speak until the mountains, and it is the creation that comes to its maker.

Fiend, thirty-five times

The being has no name: its maker never gave it one. Insults are plentiful, though. “Fiend” appears 35 times in the book, “monster” 33, “wretch” 25, “dæmon” 19.

He calls himself something else. He has read Paradise Lost, and he tells Victor he ought to have been his Adam. The whole novel is an argument about who this is, a monster or an abandoned child, and Mary Shelley does not settle it for the reader.

Six chapters worth the whole book

From chapter eleven to chapter sixteen the being tells its own story, and that is a fifth of the book. It does not grunt. It hides in a hovel beside a poor family’s cottage, watches them for months through a chink in the wall, and so learns to speak, and then to read.

Its whole education is three books it finds: Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives and The Sorrows of Werter. At night it secretly brings the family firewood. When it finally dares to come in, it is beaten with a stick. The killing starts after that, not before.

Verdict

Read it. The book is short, 75,000 words: less than half of Crime and Punishment. And it reads more sharply now than two hundred years ago: making a mind is not enough, you have to answer for it.

The films taught us to fear the creature. The novel suggests a closer look at Victor. Before he dies he examines his past conduct and does not find it blamable: he admits a duty to the being, and ranks it below his duty to mankind. One point off for him, and one more for the scenery: the Alps are beautiful, and there are a great many of them.