Frankenstein: The 1818 Text in A Book Walks Into a Bar

Feb 10, 2019 Travis rated it really liked it · review of another edition

***There will be spoilers in this review.***

Frankenstein surprised me: having never read the book or watched any of the films, I was not expecting Victor Frankenstein's creation (in popular culture usually referred to as either Frankenstein or as the monster, but the former is inaccurate and the latter pejorative, so I call him VFC) to be a lumbering, zombie-esque creature. Instead, VFC is a thoughtful, deeply sensitive, achingly lonely individual. We readers are appalled by the injustices that ***There will be spoilers in this review.***

Frankenstein surprised me: having never read the book or watched any of the films, I was not expecting Victor Frankenstein's creation (in popular culture usually referred to as either Frankenstein or as the monster, but the former is inaccurate and the latter pejorative, so I call him VFC) to be a lumbering, zombie-esque creature. Instead, VFC is a thoughtful, deeply sensitive, achingly lonely individual. We readers are appalled by the injustices that VFC suffers and the horrible treatment that he receives from humans. He does so much good--saving the life of a drowning child, helping Felix and Agatha and their father, quietly listening and reading to learn human language and to educate himself, trying to hide himself as he knows his appearance is frightful--and in the end his reward is being feared, hated, and hunted. So we understand his rage at Victor for abandoning his responsibility.

VFC is not the villain of this novel. The villain is the sniveling, wavering, cowardly Victor. As Victor himself frequently laments, he is ultimately responsible for the deaths of William (Victor's younger brother), Justine (wrongfully accused and executed for William's murder), Clerval (Victor's best friend), Elizabeth (Victor's cousin and then wife), and even of Victor's father, who seems to die of heartbreak when Elizabeth, his beloved niece dies.

Victor's narration of his story to Robert Walton aboard Walton's ship is a mix: Victor both rages against VFC and describes him constantly as a daemon, a vile and evil mistake while also lamenting his own error in creating VFC. But what Victor never does is admit his error in abandoning VFC: VFC was not created evil; the early scenes indicate that VFC is inherently good-natured but is corrupted by his experiences. Had Victor not shirked his responsibility and slowly introduced VFC into society, the novel would not have ended so tragically, with almost all of Victor's loved ones dead (except his other brother Ernest, whom Victor also seems to abandon when he pursues VFC into the Arctic, and this is particularly galling since Ernest is an orphan and further shows how weak-willed and self-centered Victor is) and with Victor himself dying and VFC presumably committing suicide.

With the constant reference's to Milton's Paradise Lost, there is little question in my mind that Mary Shelley was consciously allegorizing the primal Jewish and Christian myth but re-shaping it: Victor is God, and his initial creation, VFC, is Adam, but in Shelley's narrative, there is no original sin--no temptation by an evil serpent due to Eve's (woman's) weakness and subsequent fall. The original sin is God's turning his back on his creation. The fall is God's fault, not Adam's and certainly not Eve's. Yes, humanity bears responsibility for many of its evils, but the ultimate source of the suffering and evil of the world is God. I'm not sure if Shelley herself was an atheist, but granted that she was married to a famous atheist, Percy Shelley, she was certainly not unsympathetic to atheism, and this comes through loud and clear in the novel. Frankenstein reads for me as pre-figuring the death of a weak, tired, and flawed God; Shelley, at least in my reading, pre-figures Nietzsche in writing of the death of God and offering a caustic critique of God's own moral failings.

While I loved the themes of this novel and was moved by the plight of VFC, it is not a perfect novel. It seemed a bit over-stuffed at times, especially in describing Victor's early education and later travels throughout Europe and the British Isles. These sections caused the novel to drag a bit, but still, overall, I very much liked this novel and am glad to have finally read it. I really like that this is a novel with only one villain, Victor, and no hero other than an almost hero, VFC, who could have been great but, because of his undeniable sins, is a tragic figure. Therein lies the genius of Mary Shelley: she makes a child-murderer and a revenge killer who takes the lives of his nemesis's friends and family members a sympathetic, nearly heroic character.

Final aside: why didn't Victor just make a wife for VFC? Come on, Victor! Why did you do all that work, and then abandon it? Also, why was making a female VFC so much harder than making VFC? You had already made VFC, so you knew how to create new life, yet to make a female VFC, you had to do intensive studies and travel to England for further research. I think it is obvious that Mary Shelley had a nice laugh at the patriarchy with this aspect of the story: woman's superiority makes it much, much more difficult to create a female than a male. I like this subtle yet actually not so subtle dig at the sexism that Mary Shelley had to endure in her time. ...more

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Aug 20, 2011 Casey rated it liked it · review of another edition

I definitely understand why Frankenstein is considered a classic--it has complex themes, great visual descriptions, and poetic language:

"The cup of life was poisoned for ever; and although the sun shone upon me as upon the happy and gay of heart, I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me."

But despite all that, I really didn't care for it. The plot doesn't get going until about halfway through, when we finall ...more

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