Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus

The first time I read Frankenstein (read it online for free), when I was getting my BA in English, I expected it to be something similar to the cheesy old Frankenstein movies about a crazy scientist and a horrifying, murderous monster.

Much like my experience reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, however, I was pleased to find that Frankenstein is a deep, thought-provoking work about the human condition with beautifully-written prose.

The Story Behind the Story

In Mary Shelley’s introduction, she tells the story behind the story about how a young, 18-year-old girl in the 1800s came to write a terrifying tale like Frankenstein.

Shelley’s parents were both writers, and she married Percy Shelley, who she says was the real writer of the two. In the summer of 1816, Mary traveled to Switzerland with Percy Shelley, where they spent time with Lord Byron. She describes the summer as a blissful, happy time. So why would she write a tale about reanimating dead flesh? 

Well, Mary Shelley was given the task to write a story that would scare the others in their company. As it happened, Shelley and Lord Byron had a conversation about whether the nature of the principle of life could be discovered. Basically, they were talking about the origin of life and the possibility of being able to create it.

Then, Mary Shelley went to bed. That night, she dreamed about some of the horrible things that eventually became Frankenstein. She wrote down a few pages and read it to the others. Percy Shelley was enthusiastic about it and told her that she should make it into a full-length book.

Mary Shelley’s work is quite impressive for an 18-year-old, but she mentions that Percy Shelly helped to shape her novice attempt into the story we read today.

The Story Within the Story

The scene narrative is told by the main character, Victor Frankenstein, who recounts his woeful tale to Captain Walton. Captain Walton had been longing for friendship, and had found all the other passengers on the boat to be uninteresting and uneducated. Then, he finds Frankenstein, who seems so interesting, educated, delicate, and full of emotion. During the Romantic period, these qualities were highly prized.

Education and Natural Philosophy

Victor Frankenstein’s family was very distinguished and affluent. They adopt an orphan girl named Elizabeth as they travel, bringing her back to their home in Switzerland. You might remember, Mary Shelley is in Switzerland at the time that she’s writing this book. 

This is what the main character says about his childhood:

“My temper was sometimes violent, and my passions vehement; but by some law in my temperature they were turned not towards childish pursuits but to an eager desire to learn, and not to learn all things indiscriminately.”

 There is a proclivity in Frankenstein, the creator, towards violence and giving way to his passions. This is foreshadowing of what is to come, and the kind of creature he will create.

But Frankenstein says these violent passions are turned towards his studies, for:

“it was the secrets of Heaven and Earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things, or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my enquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.”

Frankenstein is bent on discovering the secrets of creation. He feels he can discover these through the emerging physical sciences. Frankenstein recounts his education and the philosophers that he follows: he reads Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus.

Paracelsus was a wandering physician and medical doctor who looked down on the medical scholarship in the 1500s. In his travels through Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and the Northern parts of Africa, he sought to discover secrets about alchemy and the forces of nature. He sought natural remedies and attacked harmful medical practices in his day.

Albertus Magnus was a thinker during the Middle Ages who studied logic, psychology, metaphysics, meteorology, mineralogy, and zoology. He sought out some of the properties of living things, and that is why I assume he is mentioned here (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/albert-great/).

Victor Frankenstein becomes interested in studying these thinkers and the origin of life. It is worth noting that the philosophers he follows are known for doing their own work and study outside of the confines of popular scientific opinion and theory.

Then, something terrible happens in Frankenstein’s happy story: his mother dies, and everything changes. Frankenstein returns to his philosophical pursuits with a new feverish curiosity: could something be given life?

“whence I often asked myself, did the principle of Life proceed? It was a bold question and one which has ever been considered as a mystery; yo what’s how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our enquiries. I resolved the circumstances in my mind, and determined thenceforth to fly myself more particularly to those branches of natural philosophy which relate to physiology.”

Frankenstein attacks this new passion for study and becomes obsessed with figuring out whether he can give life to something. You know where the story is going.

Romantic Sensibilities

I get so frustrated with Victor Frankenstein! He has to be one of the most irritating protagonists. And yet, he embodies the ideals of the Romantic era, being of an overly-sensitive and emotionally-driven temperament.

Frankenstein creates the Creature, then faints and gets a fever. He actually faints quite often. He focuses on his nerves and mental health, completely ignoring the reality of the creature he just created. He only thinks about himself and his feelings. He is full of self-pity and shame. 

“Oh, how I suffer more than those that my creature murdered, and those accused of the murder the creatures commits!”

Frankenstein complains after the first murder has been committed. His younger brother William was killed, and a beloved maid in the family’s house is on trial for the murder. ONLY Frankenstein knows that the creature exists, and he puts two and two together and realizes the creature killed William. 

Does he tell anyone about the creature? No.

Does he help the maid in any way? NO.

And yet, he says he suffers more than his strangled younger brother and the maid who is found guilty and put to death. Really? 

The Virtue of the Creator and the Created

One interesting connection is if you compare the speech and narrative of Frankenstein and his monster:

After the deaths of William and then Justine, Victor Frankenstein says his heart is still full of virtue, even though he created the Creature who has now become murderous.

“I had begun life with benevolent intentions, and thirsted for the moment when I should put them in practice and make myself useful to my fellow beings. Now all was blasted: instead of that serenity of conscience which allowed me to look back on the past with self-satisfaction, and from thence to gather promise of new hopes, I was seized by remorse and the sense of guilt, which hurried me away to a hell of intense tortures, such as no language can describe.”

Frankenstein sees the virtue in his motivations for his experiment, for he only wanted to discover the origin of life to contribute to the corpus of scientific discovery. But his actions haunt him, as his virtuous intention led to him committing a deed of darkness.

Frankenstein flees into the wilderness to find tranquility, and the Creature appears to him.

The Creature is the most interesting part of the story to me. I sympathize with the monster because he didn’t ask to be created, and he just wants love and acceptance. 

And the creature is actually really intelligent. He’s more intelligent and virtuous than all the people who assail him throughout the book (well, at first anyway).

The creature makes a plea to his creator:

“I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

Frankenstein, who is the only who can and should understand his creation, replies:

“Begone! I will not hear you. There can be no community between you and me; we are enemies. Begone, or let us try our strength in a fight, in which one must fall.”

It is interesting that Frankenstein immediately denies any connection between him and the creature. He fails to see that both he and the creature have committed a heinous act while holding virtue on a pedestal. He doesn’t realize that, like his child, his creature has learned from him, and that Frankenstein shirked his duties as creator and father to the creature by abhorring the Creature from the start. Even now, Frankenstein would send the Creature away and refuse to understand the other.

But Frankenstein is forced to listen to the creature’s story.

The creature has learned how to speak and read from hiding out and spying on a family. He listened to them teaching each other and thinks:

“These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased and I turned away with disgust and loathing.”

The creature wonders what he is, what he was created for, and who will speak with him. He longs for companionship, and he envies Adam, who gets a special companion created just for him:

“But Paradise Lost excited different and far deeper emotions. I read it, as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true history. It moved every feeling of wonder and awe that the picture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting. I often referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.”

The creature is tortured by what he is. When all people do is to turn away from him in horror or try to attack him, he learns violence, fear, and anger. He learns about the world as an infant does, and what he learns is that people will try to attack him and kill him. He got defensive at first, but eventually, he becomes murderous and filled with hate. His sole purpose becomes to punish his creator for making him. 

The creature doesn’t want to die, but he longs for companionship and cannot have it. Then, he fixes on another solution: his creator can create a female companion for him (an Eve to his Adam). If Frankenstein does, the creature promises to leave him and his family alone.

Lessons on Life and the Human Condition

I don’t want to give away the ending, but I think the “lesson” of the tale is clear: beware of trying to play God. Also, don’t create a monster from dead flesh and leave it to learn about the world on its own. An important life lesson to keep in mind 😉

This tale also raises some interesting questions about the nature and origin of life:

• Are we simply animate flesh walking around, with fleshy computers in our brains that can be turned on with enough electricity?
• Is virtue an important part of our being?
• Is there a little bit of a devil and an angel in each of us, or are some of us simply created to be one or the other?
• What horrible things do we create which haunt our footsteps like a harbinger of our doom?
• What fateful deeds have we done in the dark eat away at us, bringing death and darkness, instead of the light and hope we longed for? And what is our escape from those?

As a Christian, I answer these questions with theology, built on ideas from the Bible. I believe we were created by God, to rule over the rest of his creation in a just and loving manner, living by the laws he has given us.

Virtue is a byproduct of living within the bounds of this created order, and it hearkens back to the creator.

We were created with a free will, and therefore the capacity to do good or evil. After the first sin, humans have been bent towards evil (evil begets evil kind of thing), yet we still have the ability to imitate our creator and do good.

I think sin and our misdeeds haunt us, and the only hope is that something outside of ourselves, something good and pure, can make us right again. I believe that Good is Jesus.

Those are some of my reflections and answers to those questions.

What are your thoughts?