Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus

I often seem to be in two minds about the books I read. ‘Frankenstein’ is, unfortunately, not the exception.

The novel opens favourably: the use of a (for want of a better turn of phrase) random guy sending letters to his sister is off-putting a good way. I had approached the novel with some agitation about what I would encounter, so reading some nice letters about travelling in Russia was pleasing. On a literary level, however, it was an excellent device: the gorgeous romantic imagery and elsewhere loving, conversational tone of the letters is juxtaposed by the introduction of Victor Frankenstein’s story, as from there, the mood is bleak, bleak, bleak.

That’s not to say that it wasn’t enjoyable. I really loved the first part of Victor’s story, as he recounted his almost Faustian lust for knowledge and achievement. Shelley’s inclusion of his interest in dated philosophers such as Paracelsus created an excellent feeling of naivety that caught me off guard: pop culture had me believing that Professor Frankenstein was old, deranged and prone to laughing maniacally; in fact, he is far more interesting: he is a guilty tragedy who eternally laments his creation of the monster and tries to put things right. This inner struggle is at the heart of the novel, for me: the escalation of the monster’s crimes sends Frankenstein into deeper and deeper despair, which reaches its climax in the monster’s ultimatum: create a female partner for him, or face the death of his family.

I have to take a little break here to discuss the character of the monster. When I began the section of the novel where the creature retells his history, I encountered a problem: how does this newly-created being know anything? How did it know that shade offers respite from heat? How did it know that it should eat to feed itself? How can it have rational thoughts, if it was indeed created and immediately let loose into the wild? I don’t know much about the development of babies, but I’m quite sure that a ‘newborn’ would not know how to do very much at all. I appeased myself by saying that the monster was not a newborn, that it must have been created with a knowledge of basic things – but then the author spent several pages recounting the creature learning how to speak.

Hm. Paradoxical.

This was the biggest problem with the novel, for me. It has been hailed as the precursor to science fiction, but in my eyes it fails on the physiological front, and succeeds on the characterisation and theme. Take the monster, for example: it tells a story of its inception as a peaceful, rational being and its descent into spite from its treatment by humans, but the beauty of the passage is that neither Victor nor the reader knows how much to believe: the monster’s later actions would suggest that it is cold and heartless, and indeed Victor states that it employs ruses to get what it wants. The question is then raised: is the monster rational and vengeful, or a demon that is only rational to be calculating? Furthermore, is Victor’s view of the monster clouded by his own experience of it?

I don’t actually have the answer to any of those questions, so I’ll just summarise: ‘Frankenstein’ has been evidently touched by the zeitgeist; with its frequent citations of nature as a calming, benevolent influence, Romanticism flows through it as much as the Faustian thirst for knowledge. It has many good points, namely the humanity of Victor’s character, the ambiguity of the monster’s, the excellent Romantic descriptions and the clever structure of stories within stories. It is let done by the logistics of its ‘science fiction’ core, in my opinion – it feels like the creation and history of the monster was not as thought out as it should have been. Finally, this book is incredibly depressing. I mentioned earlier that the explorer’s tone juxtaposes with that of Victor’s: from the moment his story begins, the reader sinks in his despair at the creation of the monster, the death of his family, the inability of a future moment of happiness. Of course the mood is understandable in such a novel, but I’m left in some doubt as to whether it is excusable.