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Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein*
Nov. 25th, 2011 01:52 pmI read *Frankenstein* a while back when friends were in it (most convincing chemistry between the leads ever). My sole recollection is of an endless, white Artic waste.
Having reread it, this is because the endless, frozen wastelands feature prominently. That’s where the action opens and where it concludes.
And I’d forgotten how complicated and, indeed, post-modern it it. The narrative is, at some points, at four removes. The narrator writes to his sister about what Frankenstein told him that the monster told him. How very unreliable. How consistently the novel reminds us that it is a fiction.
I was also aware of how much more I would get out of it if I did the right readings. It would make a big difference if I read the literature that the monster takes as his tools for learning - *The Sorrows of Werther*, Plutarch’s *Lives* and Milton’s *Paradise Lost*. The novel obviously draws on the burgeoning romantic movement, which I don’t know enough about.
Obviously I am meant to admire Frankenstein’s love of the natural world, but for me it’s just one more really, seriously annoying thing about him. Stop moping about on the mountains and man up! Take responsibility for your actions!
I do like the whole nature/nurture issue. Is the monster evil because he is abandoned by his creator and all the others he meets? Or is he born evil, with it shown in his figure and face?
And, a less exalted question that springs to mind, why does his brother Ernest get to survive? Does Victor just not care enough about him for the monster to bother killing him?
Finally, I am deeply moved by her personal circumstances. Her mother, the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, died as a result of her birth. She was married at sixteen, a mother at seventeen, and her daughter had died by the time she was eighteen. In her diary, she wrote: "Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived."
She turned her personal, biological tragedy into a story about a man giving birth by fire and chemistry.
Having reread it, this is because the endless, frozen wastelands feature prominently. That’s where the action opens and where it concludes.
And I’d forgotten how complicated and, indeed, post-modern it it. The narrative is, at some points, at four removes. The narrator writes to his sister about what Frankenstein told him that the monster told him. How very unreliable. How consistently the novel reminds us that it is a fiction.
I was also aware of how much more I would get out of it if I did the right readings. It would make a big difference if I read the literature that the monster takes as his tools for learning - *The Sorrows of Werther*, Plutarch’s *Lives* and Milton’s *Paradise Lost*. The novel obviously draws on the burgeoning romantic movement, which I don’t know enough about.
Obviously I am meant to admire Frankenstein’s love of the natural world, but for me it’s just one more really, seriously annoying thing about him. Stop moping about on the mountains and man up! Take responsibility for your actions!
I do like the whole nature/nurture issue. Is the monster evil because he is abandoned by his creator and all the others he meets? Or is he born evil, with it shown in his figure and face?
And, a less exalted question that springs to mind, why does his brother Ernest get to survive? Does Victor just not care enough about him for the monster to bother killing him?
Finally, I am deeply moved by her personal circumstances. Her mother, the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, died as a result of her birth. She was married at sixteen, a mother at seventeen, and her daughter had died by the time she was eighteen. In her diary, she wrote: "Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived."
She turned her personal, biological tragedy into a story about a man giving birth by fire and chemistry.
