Frankenstein

by Mary Shelley | Literature & Fiction | This book has not been rated.
ISBN: 0393964582 Global Overview for this book
Registered by Vasha of Ithaca, New York USA on 3/2/2009
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Journal Entry 1 by Vasha from Ithaca, New York USA on Monday, March 2, 2009
Norton Critical Edition, containing the text of the 1818 edition of the novel (it was significantly revised in 1831). This copy is one of the surplus books left over all of Ithaca NY was encouraged to read and discuss Frankenstein ("Big Read"), several years ago. Has long been on my list of things I want to get around to reading.

Journal Entry 2 by Vasha from Ithaca, New York USA on Wednesday, March 10, 2010
It’s hard for me to believe that I somehow never read this in my youth, when I devoured so many other fantastical nineteenth-century works. I’m very glad to make up the lapse now. Below, I’ve jotted down (without much order) some thoughts that occurred to me as I read.

The frame story of Frankenstein is developed a lot more than it needs to be simply in order to bring Victor Frankenstein on to the scene. Robert Walton tells us about his education, his ambitions, the character of the mariners he hires: we learn from this that he’s an adventurous dreamer fascinated by scientific discoveries, and that he’s longing to find a kindred spirit. In Victor Frankenstein he finds one; so we have Frankenstein’s first person narration told to a uniquely sympathetic listener, and at the same time Frankenstein hopes that the story of his enthusiasms and errors may prove useful to Walton. This no doubt adjusts how the reader hears the story too. But we shouldn’t take Walton’s reaction to the story to be the author’s.

Victor Frankenstein is by no means an easy character to sympathise with, frenzied as he is. How strange that his cheerful, commonsensical parents and cheerful, ordinary childhood should have produced a man of such unbounded, troublesome passions! He blames it on reading Agrippa and the alchemists, but that hardly seems sufficient. But then again, he’s living in the age of the Romantics, so maybe he’s picking up on the Zeitgeist.

Frankenstein is by no means a good scientist, neither by modern standards nor by those of his own time. Not so much that he considers any lesser goal than the creation of life itself uninteresting — others have thought big too; but rather the secretiveness and emotional madness with which he goes about his work. Collaboration, and peer confirmation, are an important part of the scientific process; by telling no one about his work, he robbed himself of a grounding, and also (fatally) made it impossible to explain what was going on later, when the creature started killing people. But even then, Frankenstein was isolated as much by his own inclination as by circumstances, feeling that the "problem" he created was his to "solve".

It’s artful of the author to have Victor Frankenstein omit all details of exactly how he made his creation; it makes sense for him to do so since he doesn’t want anyone to imitate him, but for the author’s purposes, it allows her to hint at gruesomeness that’s better left to the imagination, and to pass lightly over the most fantastical part of a story that she otherwise takes pains to make as concrete and believable as possible.

The creature’s narration of his early experiences reads like a theory of civilization, of how humankind developed from the "brute" state. We have the origin of simple technology (started by the discovery of fire, which many philosophers from antiquity on speculated to be the first step to civilization), of the "higher" emotions, of language, and even religion (or at least concerning oneself with one’s creator); the one thing lacking is society. It’s notable that all these things are taken from humans. I’ll bet someone’s written a sophisticated essay about the ideas of society developed in this novel. There also seem to be some reflections on the role of family life and marriage in this process. I know nothing of the writings of Mary Shelley’s parents, but something tells me that their influence is heard here.

The point where Frankenstein attempts to create a mate for his creature, and finally can’t bring himself to do it, is a turning point in the novel. When the creature committed his first murder, he had gone very far from his original innocence, yet he didn’t think he was beyond redemption. He turned to his creator for this. There’s a pervasive parody of Christianity in all this. Frankenstein once again proved himelf a bad creator, and now both he and the "monster" were committed to destruction.

Although a bit put off by the style, so overwritten by modern standards (and which Anne K. Mellor points out is due to Mary's husband's revisions), I nonetheless enjoyed this book and appreciated the opportunity to think about it analytically. In the next journal entry, I will briefly mention a few of the critical essays that make up the second half of this volume.

Journal Entry 3 by Vasha from Ithaca, New York USA on Friday, March 12, 2010
When it comes to reading literary criticism, I consider myself an educated layperson; I can follow many arguments, but get lost in the more "theoretical" works of deconstruction, post-colonialism, and so forth. (Let me remark in passing that I'm baffled why critics are so fond of Freud when he's been entirely superseded in actual psychological studies.) Luckily, only one essay here, that by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, went so deep into jargon and theory that I couldn't get much out of it. Susan Winnett's, though equally theoretical, was much more intelligibly written. For the most part, this was a most illuminating collection of perspectives; below, I'll mention a few that particularly stood out in my mind.

The first important critical essay in this book, Anne K. Mellor's on the differences between the 1818 and 1831 versions of this book, has persuaded me that a library should have copies of the earlier as well as the much more common later text. Mellor argues that there's a very fundamental shift in point of view between the two revisions, with the many catastrophes in Mary Shelley's life leading her to adopt a view of mechanical fatalism and to become much less sympathetic to Frankenstein's creation. Marilyn Butler tells of the decade of controversy over science that pressured Shelley into adding many passages of excuses to the text.

Mary Poovey also details Shelley's fundamental uneasiness with her mother's and husband's radicalism and her attempt to express herself in a socially-acceptable way. This was one of my favorite of the essays; I'm rather inclined to side with Poovey rather than Mellor in their argument over whether Shelley represents Nature as hostile to humankind (the former) or as punishing male transgression against the female (the latter). In his essay, too, Lawrence Lipking brings up some objections to Mellor's arguments that I definitely agree with.

George Levine has an interesting essay about attitudes toward ambition in nineteenth-century fiction. Among other things, he remarks that Walton, though very akin to Frankenstein, in the end proved "better" by refusing to kill the creature, listening with interest, and returning home, though reluctantly. There's a repeated theme in the 19th century of admiration of ambition and suspicion of those that pursue it.

One of the themes in Frankenstein that's been most famous in recent decades is that of parenthood, and the relation to Mary Shelley's own experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. One of the classic discussions of that theme, by Ellen Moers, is included here. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar expand on Moers's insights by trying to put Shelley's experiences of and attitudes to female physicality in the context of the literary tradition that was so important to her, in particular Paradise Lost.

Susan Winnett has a fascinating discussion of the relation between female sexual pleasure and narrative form; I'm sure the adjective that's automatically applied to the essay is "provocative" and I don't disagree. Lastly, Lawrence Lipking (who sounds like a great professor to take a class with) contributes a brilliant essay on Frankenstein's debt to Rousseau and on the necessary moral ambiguity of the novel, while reflecting on the unwillingness of most modern critics to acknowledge that ambiguity.

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