Frankenstein [Original 1818 Text]

by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose – a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.

A new species would bless me as its creator and source, many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve their’s.

but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

what did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.

‘Hateful day when I received life!’ I exclaimed in agony. ‘Cursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God in pity made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and detested.’

Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.

Seek happiness in tranquillity, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.

My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy; and, when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred; it did not endure the violence of the change without torture, such as you cannot even imagine.

Evil thenceforth became my good. Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly chosen.

our inner desires to create and control. Frankenstein is a novel about creation. The creation of life. The creation of art. The creation of hate and evil. The story concerns itself not so much with the telling of a tale, as it does with exposing the interior landscapes of the human psyche; the obsessive force that drives humanity forward into what Shelley exposes as a wasteland of evil and pain. Creation is not treated lightly by Shelley. On the contrary, she attacks the very force which drives man to duplicate himself, to take control of the creative process, to “play God,” if you will.

Shelley grew up feeling neglected and alone. Shelley’s isolation and lack of what Laura P. Claridge calls “communion,” charges the pages of Frankenstein. Claridge writes, “Shelley insists that man can live only through communion with others; solitude, for her, represents death.”

The need to win approval from judgemental parents can at times compel the child toward excellence; but it can also be perverted into disastrous extremes, in which the child transforms his Promethean aspirations for success into those of overreaching and surpassing his parents at the cost of everything else.

As stated before, Mary Shelley was under great pressure to prove herself as a writer and as an artist. Her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and her husband Percy Shelley were highly accomplished literary artists. Percy Shelley was constantly after his wife to produce a work by which to make a name for herself, and to enter the literary canon. Perhaps it was this obsession that drove her. There is no emotion stronger than the emotion of need. The need for love and approval. The need to express oneself. As Victor was driven by a desire to create life, so was Shelley driven by that same desire. A desire which took only a stormy night to cultivate. A few ghost stories around the fire. A vision in the night. A mother that wasn’t there. A father that wasn’t there enough.