Frankenstein: A Guide to Reading and Reflecting

Introduction

Introduction to the Author

Knowledge about an author’s life often sheds light on their work. There is perhaps no work of which this is truer than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And because Shelley and many within her circle kept detailed journals and letters, more intimate details of her life are known than of many other writers.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was born in London, England, in 1797, the child of two controversial social and political revolutionaries. Her father, William Godwin, was a radical political philosopher and writer. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was also a writer. As a result of Wollstonecraft’s most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, Wollstonecraft is called the mother of modern feminism.

One of the more controversial views held by Godwin and Wollstonecraft was the rejection of marriage, which they viewed as an oppressive social and political institution. Even so, when they learned Wollstonecraft was pregnant with Mary, they married; knowing that failing to do so would put their child at considerable disadvantage in their society.

Nevertheless, Mary was born into a life of great drama and trauma. Wollstonecraft’s pregnancy and delivery were extremely difficult, and eleven days after giving birth, she died of a uterine infection. Mary would only know her mother through hearing about her from others and by reading her mother’s books, over and over. Mary learned to read from her mother’s tombstone, tracing her fingers along its engraved letters during the frequent visits she made there with her father. As a teenager, she and her lover (her future husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley, held rendezvous at the gravesite. Some biographers believe it is even there that Mary and Percy consummated their relationship.

The Godwin household included five children. The eldest, Mary’s half-sister Fanny Imlay, was the product of her mother’s previous relationship with an American Revolutionary officer, Gilbert Imlay, a scoundrel who ultimately abandoned Wollstonecraft and their child, leading Wollstonecraft to two suicide attempts. Wollstonecraft’s subsequent relationship with Godwin seems to have been happy, though it was shortened by death. Godwin re-married a few years later, and Mary’s new stepmother brought her two illegitimate children, Charles and Claire Clairmont, into the family. She and Godwin had one child, William Godwin Jr. This kaleidoscope of familial and quasi-familial relationships, though difficult to track, is important for understanding Mary Shelley and her novel. Her earliest and most significant relationships were marked by uncertain and shifting boundaries, abandonment, and death. These patterns were repeated in later illicit, destructive, and incestuous relationships in her life and in Frankenstein.

Mary’s home was filled with intellectual stimulation. Godwin was a publisher in addition to being a writer, so books and reading were at the center of the family’s life. Influential authors and thinkers of the day were frequent visitors to the Godwin home. One legendary moment in Mary’s childhood occurred when she and her stepsister Claire hid behind the sofa past their bedtime, listening to Samuel Taylor Coleridge read aloud his celebrated poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This work had a significant influence on Frankenstein.

Another visitor was Percy Shelley, the young Romantic poet and philosopher. A few years earlier, Shelley had staked his first claim in what would become a scandal-ridden life by getting expelled from Oxford for promoting atheism. Shelley was naturally drawn to the radical philosophies of Godwin—as well as to all three of the young women Godwin was raising: Fanny, Mary, and Claire. All three, to varying degrees, returned his affection. Shelley was already married, but like Mary’s parents, he was an advocate of free love, which Mary, too, professed to support. Within a few months of meeting, when Mary was sixteen, she and Percy stole away to France, with Claire tagging along. Ironically, Godwin was irate and did not reconcile with the couple until they eventually married.

The three young people traipsed across Europe and England, never living in one place for long, dogged by growing debt and social disrepute, with a rapid succession of tragedies following them.

Mary became pregnant. Percy’s wife, Harriet, gave birth to the couple’s child. Then Mary’s baby, a girl born prematurely following a difficult pregnancy, exacerbated by long and arduous travels, died a couple of weeks after birth. The following year in 1816—the year in which Mary began the story that would become Frankenstein—Mary gave birth to her second child, a boy. Then, her half-sister Fanny—who had never become disentangled from Percy, and may have been in love with him—committed suicide. Months later, Percy’s estranged wife, pregnant (possibly by Percy), also killed herself. In a failed attempt to gain custody of his two children by Harriet, Percy married Mary, who was by now pregnant with the couple’s third child. Shortly afterward, in 1817, Percy insisted upon moving his pregnant wife and young son to Italy to join their friend George Gordon, Lord Byron, who had fathered a child with Mary’s stepsister Claire. In Italy, the Shelleys’ little boy and their newborn daughter contracted diseases that proved fatal. By the time Mary gave birth a fourth time, in 1819, her first three children had died. She nearly lost her own life while miscarrying a fifth child.

Mary’s life was haunted by death, and not just any kind of death, but death connected to the act of creation. Her mother died from complications giving birth to her. She saw all but one of her children die. And she almost died during her last pregnancy. Shortly after the death of her first baby, Mary recorded in her journal a dream she had that would become the central idea of Frankenstein: Dreamt 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. Then, poignantly, she adds, Awake and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day. Not in good spirits.¹

All these deaths punctuated an ongoing abusive lifestyle demanded by Percy Shelley and his friends. Percy conducted a romantic, and likely sexual, relationship with Mary’s stepsister Claire (and possibly Fanny) while Mary was carrying his children. He encouraged Mary to sleep with his best friend (it is unlikely that she did, although the two were close). The sexual promiscuity of the couple’s close friend, travel companion, and host, Lord Byron is legendary. Byron boasted of sleeping with two hundred women over his lifetime, including, many suspect, his own half-sister, who had a child rumored to have been fathered by Byron. Their lives were literally self-destructive. In 1822, Percy, age twenty-nine, drowned with two friends while on an ill-advised sailing trip. After washing ashore eleven days after the men went missing, their bodies were burned on a funeral pyre, an eerie echo of an image in the final scene of Frankenstein, written years before.

The widowed Mary returned with her son to London. She became a celebrated and prolific writer, producing many works, including several more novels, short stories, travelogues, and biographies. She grew notably more conservative as she grew older. She remained close to the only child of hers to survive into adulthood, Percy Florence Shelley, and died of a brain tumor in 1851 at the age of fifty-three. She lived to see Frankenstein become a celebrated work, even revising it substantially to reflect subtly her later, less radical views.

Background of the Work

The story of how Frankenstein came to be is almost as legendary as the novel itself, thanks to a preface Shelley wrote for her revised edition published in 1831. The edition used for this volume is the original 1818 version, which is published more rarely today. (The preface to the later edition is included as an appendix.) The differences between the two versions constitute a body of study in their own right. Although the plot remains essentially the same, the later revisions lead to some different interpretations of aspects of the novel, such as how great a role fate plays in Victor Frankenstein’s life. While the structure of the frame narrative is the same in both versions, the chapters are numbered differently (which is an important fact for anyone reading the novel with others in a classroom or book club setting). Further complicating the composition history of Frankenstein is the fact that the 1818 version was heavily edited by Percy Shelley. (The manuscript with Shelley’s markings still exists, making it possible for scholars to compare that draft with the version first published.) The existence of the different versions can be vexing for readers and critics alike, but it does offer insights into artistic processes. Even Charles Dickens—a much older and more experienced novelist—gave two endings to Great Expectations. Creating is a complicated process, and messy ambivalence about creation is one of the central themes of Frankenstein.

Frankenstein began in 1816 when Mary and Percy visited their friend Lord Byron at the villa where he was staying near Lake Geneva. This was the Year Without a Summer, when the ash-laden sky following a volcanic eruption in what is now Indonesia dimmed the warmth and light of the sun across Europe. To help pass the dreary time, the group—inspired by the ghost stories they’d been reading around the fire—challenged one another to compose their own. In the 1831 preface, Mary relays the pressure she felt from Percy to come up with a worthy story:

My husband, however, was from the first, very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the page of fame. He was for ever inciting me to obtain literary reputation, which even on my own part I cared for then, though since I have become infinitely indifferent to it. At this time he desired that I should write, not so much with the idea that I could produce any thing worthy of notice, but that he might himself judge how far I possessed the promise of better things hereafter.²

It wasn’t until some days after the challenge had been issued that an idea took shape in Mary’s mind during what she called a waking dream, resulting in the work she came to describe as her hideous progeny.³

The origins of life and the reanimation of the dead were lively topics of scientific and metaphysical discussion at the time, and, not surprisingly, the subject came up among these friends during that stay in Geneva.⁴ In fact, Geneva was a hub for these scientific inquiries; even some of its clergymen were known for studying and participating in the electrical experiments that gave rise to these speculations.⁵ In the late eighteenth century, an Italian doctor named Luigi Galvani was said to have made a dead frog’s legs twitch with an electrical charge. Galvanism, as it came to be called, developed into a theory associated with the animation of life. The process the novel describes Victor Frankenstein using to make his creature is gruesome by any standard, but it likely seemed less so to its contemporary audience. Scientific experiments on corpses, prisoners, and living animals were commonly conducted for public viewing as both education and entertainment. (The line between the two then, as now, was not always clear.) This explains why Frankenstein—although it is clearly a horror story and a Gothic tale—is also commonly considered the first science fiction novel. While the science it draws upon might seem fantastical or even silly today, it was more believable at the time. (Such science would have seemed no less plausible at that time than some scientific developments that have come to pass, such as creating life in a test tube.)

After the Shelleys left Geneva, Mary continued to work on the story for another year from Bath, England, the same resort city where Jane Austen lived for a few years. (While Austen’s and Shelley’s circles overlapped, they do not seem to have ever met in person. Their literary, ethical, and philosophical tastes couldn’t have been more different.) Frankenstein, anonymously published on January 1, 1818, included a dedication to William Godwin, which led most to presume Percy was the author. It wasn’t until the second edition released in 1823, following a very successful stage adaptation, that Mary Shelley’s name appeared on the cover as the author.

Upon publication, Frankenstein created a shock that has continued to reverberate for two centuries. Countless adaptations, spinoffs, interpretations, and re-interpretations in virtually every medium and form, from stage to film to television to cereal, attest to its lasting hold on our imagination. Sir Walter Scott offered some of the earliest and most lavish praise, calling it an extraordinary tale told with uncommon powers of poetic imagination.⁶ Others were not as impressed. In one of its first reviews, the British Critic said it approached what is wicked and immoral⁷ and was the product of a diseased and wandering imagination. The Edinburgh Magazine, accusing it of bordering too closely on impiety, declared it was a work which, when we have read, we do not well see why it should have been written.⁸ Assuming its author to be a man, as many readers did, The Quarterly Review called the story a horrible and disgusting absurdity that makes the flesh creep. The review concluded, Our taste and our judgment alike revolt at this kind of writing because it inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners, or morality.⁹ This last point would prove problematic for many readers. It was not only the horror of the tale that was so shocking. After all, the Gothic novel had been popular for some time and was part of the tradition Shelley drew on in writing Frankenstein (which is mild in comparison to some of the most popular works in that tradition). Despite being a novel influenced by the Gothic tradition—which hearkened back to images and ideas associated with the medieval age, embracing all things mysterious, supernatural, dark, and foreboding—what was and is most unsettling about Frankenstein is not the story, but how the story is told.

Instead of a single, authoritative narrator cueing the reader on how to interpret the events, Frankenstein unfolds through several layers consisting of different voices—at times complementing, at times competing with one another—each requiring the reader to consider the events from different points of view, no voice trustworthy or knowing enough to communicate with certainty what the moral of the story is. The reader must judge. And in the case of such a surreal, complicated, and morally significant story, the weight of that burden is heavy. This points to the real genius of the novel. Mary Shelley has created a work that delights—in odd, terrifying ways—and instructs—in ways that are sometimes sideways and sometimes straight on.

This aspect of straightforward instruction, or didacticism, in the novel can be off-putting to readers today. Much of what happens occurs in the form of reported speech and extended philosophical arguments. Shelley was writing in the tradition of her father, mother, and many others who wrote philosophical or social novels, which used the vehicle of fiction to convey a political or social ideology or viewpoint. While such works usually are lesser achievements artistically, this style was much more common in fiction of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and is one stream from which the novel we have today developed.

Despite being a Romantic novel, a great deal of Frankenstein is concerned with classical virtues. Virtue is mentioned multiple times throughout, and specific virtues such as courage, patience, justice, prudence, and wisdom are addressed. The classical definition of virtue is the moderation between the vices of excess and deficiency. The novel makes clear that where there is error, it is usually one of excess or omission. This is less a theme of the work, and more a reflection of the kind of intellectual world Mary Shelley was raised in. Her mother’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a treatise overwhelmingly concerned with virtue, something that often surprises readers today.

Frankenstein, too, is full of surprises for the first-time reader. Even without having the plot spoiled, it is good to be prepared for some of these. As already mentioned, Frankenstein is in the strain of the philosophical novel. Readers expecting merely an entertaining tale of horror can expect to be confronted with big ideas and big questions.

Another surprise for those familiar with the story only through popular culture is that Frankenstein is the name of the creator (Victor Frankenstein) not the monster. Nor is Victor Frankenstein a doctor, as he is often portrayed in film adaptations, but rather an earnest young university scholar.

It might also be startling to encounter the novel’s first character, a man named Robert Walton, a figure seldom referenced in popular retellings of the story. But in some ways, Walton is the most important character in the novel. A sea adventurer seeking a new route to the North Pole, Walton is the one who retells Victor Frankenstein’s story through a series of letters to his sister, Margaret Saville. The presence of Walton and the structure of the frame narrative reflect the heavy influence of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—that poem Mary heard recited by its author in her home as a little girl. Like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Frankenstein is a frame narrative, whose outer frame is a mariner’s story of his harrowing and haunting experience at sea. The creature’s plea to Victor, Listen to my tale, not only echoes the plea of the Mariner in Rime of the Ancient Mariner but might be considered the center of the entire novel.

Walton’s letters serve as the outer frame that contains the story of Frankenstein, whose own story, in turn, contains that of the creature, whose story has at its center the story of the DeLacey family. Beginning in medias res (in the middle of things), the novel is structured so that one must keep reading to find out not only what will happen, but what occurred before the story’s opening. This frame narrative complicates not only the telling of the tale, but its interpretations, too. The effect is like watching a debate unfold: The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him (Prov. 18:17 esv).

Within these layered stories are numerous parallels that reflect upon one another. Foreshadowing, for example, is one form of parallelism. Other parallelisms are found in the relationships between the characters. Some characters act as doubles (reflecting one another), others as foils (contrasting one another), and others as alter egos (illuminating or magnifying something hidden). In some cases, a character is a doppelganger. A doppelganger (from the German words meaning double and goer) can reflect or oppose another character, as either a double or an alter ego, or do both. For example, on the surface, the creature is Frankenstein’s enemy. Yet the creature is also his creation or child. Furthermore, in magnifying Frankenstein’s desires and impulses, the creature is also Frankenstein’s alter ego, a terrifying externalization of Frankenstein’s inner desires and emotional state.

This emphasis on the emotions is one way in which Frankenstein is one of the exemplary prose works of Romantic literature. Both Mary and Percy Shelley, as well as their friend Byron, were central members of the second generation of English Romantics that followed William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. The Romantic writers and philosophers, in reaction to the rationalism and scientific certainty of the Enlightenment, emphasized mystery, intuition, emotion, uniqueness, and beauty. Frankenstein evokes all these qualities powerfully. Yet, while the novel exemplifies Romantic sensibilities, it also interrogates them. The ambivalence the novel shows toward the Romantic ideals of creativity, unbridled ambition, and emotional intensity very likely reflects the ambivalence Mary Shelley herself felt about the Romantic lifestyle her husband forced her to lead—traveling across Europe in conditions so demanding that two of her babies died, pursuing lives of sexual and marital infidelity, and severing ties with community and family in living with such reckless abandon. Rather than writing propaganda for her and her friends’ cause, Shelley offered an honest and probing examination of it.

Themes of the Work

The most obvious theme of the novel is the one named in its subtitle: the modern Prometheus. In Greek mythology, the immortal Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and gave it to humanity along with various useful skills and arts. For this act, Zeus punished Prometheus by binding him to a mountain where, for eternity, his liver would be eaten by an eagle, regenerated, and eaten again. In the version of the myth told by Ovid in Metamorphoses, Prometheus is also credited with making human beings in the divine image from clay. This myth of creation and transgression of divine will was a favorite theme among the Romantics (Percy Shelley published his own version of it in an 1812 poem titled Prometheus Unbound), and it is clear that the themes of this ancient myth are revisited in Shelley’s modern retelling. One reason Frankenstein has achieved a mythical status is that it draws from one of the most fascinating archetypes in human history.

Origin is, of course, a foundational theme within Christianity. One of the most influential retellings of the Genesis account is John Milton’s Paradise Lost. This work is central in the novel, not only for the role it plays in the creature’s life, but also because Shelley includes three lines from the epic poem on the title page:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me Mand, did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me?

These lines are taken from Book X of Paradise Lost and are spoken by Adam to God in anguish after his fall. Frankenstein’s creature, in his misery, demands likewise from his creator an answer to this question.

The theological and philosophical problems in both origin stories (the Promethean legend and the story of creation found in Genesis and imaginatively retold by Milton) are magnified in Frankenstein. Milton famously says in the opening of Paradise Lost that the purpose of the poem is to justify the ways of God to man. Such a defense—one which attempts to explain the goodness of a God who allows evil—is called a theodicy.

However, in Frankenstein, the emphasis shifts from defense of God’s ways to accusations against such godly power. This power seen in the ambitious pursuits of Victor Frankenstein, Robert Walton, and the creature himself is called into question by the narrative. The Romantic writers, in reading Paradise Lost, saw Satan, rather than Christ, as the most heroic character. Many modern readers have followed their lead because the modern culture we share with the Romantics values the kind of determination, autonomy, and ambition Milton describes Satan as possessing. These are the qualities that characterize Victor Frankenstein as well. Questioning the goodness of God isn’t new, but it is an idea that gained traction among the Romantics. Within a merely humanistic understanding, the creator is wrong to make a creation that never asks to be born. According to such thinking, that creator bears a weight of guilt greater even than his fallen creation. Absent an understanding of a creator God who is perfect in character and deeds, this assumption of guilt on the part of the creator makes sense. In this way, Victor Frankenstein exemplifies the Byronic hero (named after the Shelleys’ friend): a guilt-laden, alienated, brooding figure haunted by mysterious guilt.

This kind of mysterious, existential guilt, one for which there seems to be no means of absolution is part of the modern condition. The ancient world (including the one depicted in the Bible) had rituals, priests, and sacrifices by which both individuals and communities could be cleansed of guilt. In modernity, however, when individual autonomy is king, each person is his or her own moral agent, bearing the weight of one’s own choices—and the consequences of those choices, too. The modern novel—from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and beyond—examines the growing burden of individual moral agency. Victor Frankenstein’s originating deed, and the guilt that comes with it, in this modern world finds no expiation.

His guilt is the result of unbridled ambition, another central theme of the work and a preoccupation of many Romantic thinkers. As the story unfolds, the central event of the story—Victor’s creation of the monster, and the ambition behind it—is presented from various angles. Victor, along with Walton, expresses the desire to discover forbidden knowledge, to advance human accomplishment, and even to wield power over life. Yet, the perspective of the creature, as well as the outcome of events, challenges us to weigh the consequences of an ambition that knows no limits. Much is lost in the blind pursuit of even a noble goal. Yet, it is not clear whether Victor’s goal was noble or ignoble in the first place.

Victor’s name and the names of most of the characters are in themselves significant. Many of the characters’ names convey symbolic meanings that help illuminate meaning in the story. Is Victor victorious in the end? Victor’s childhood friend Henry’s last name, Clerval, means clarity or light. Justine, the name of the Frankenstein family’s servant, means just and is linked to justice (which turns out to be ironic). The De Lacey family’s pleasant-sounding surname suggests the idyllic life they lead. Felix De Lacey’s first name means happiness, and his sister Agatha’s name means goodness. Safie is a variation of Sophia which means wisdom. And intriguingly, Mary Walton Saville, Robert Walton’s sister and the recipient of his letters, shares initials with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. And perhaps the most powerful symbol related to the names of the characters in the novel is that the monster goes