Frankenstein (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  What did endure was her waking nightmare: Frankenstein. First published in 1818 when she was in her late teens, the novel is her only work to remain in print since its first publication. Frankenstein has lived on as Shelley’s self-proclaimed “hideous progeny” despite efforts to take it away from her by attributing its authorship to her husband. It has survived more than a century of academic scorn and neglect, gaining a place on college syllabi only in the 1960s. It is a tale that possesses the compelling quality of the ancient mariner’s saga, a story that nearly two centuries of readers have confirmed they “cannot choose but hear.”

  “... go forth and prosper ...”

  Werewolves, vampires, witches, and warlocks have been the stuff of folklore, legend, and nightmare for centuries, yet none have so haunted the public imagination as the monster created by eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley in 1816. From the start, we have been eager to help the monster live off of the page, to interpret the tale for ourselves. Within five years of the novel’s initial publication, the first of what would eventually be more than ninety dramatizations of Frankenstein appeared onstage. Shelley herself went to see one of the thirty-seven performances of Presumption that played in London in 1823. Lumbering violently and uttering inarticulate groans, the monster attracted record numbers of theatergoers, as well as a series of protests by the London Society for the Prevention of Vice. Mary was pleased and “much amused” by Thomas Cooke’s attempts to portray the monster, and even made a favorable note about the playbill to her friend Leigh Hunt. “In the list of dramatis personae came,—by Mr. T Cooke: this nameless mode of naming the unameable [sic] is rather good,” she wrote on September 11 (Letters, vol. 1, p. 378).

  A familiar yet ever-evolving presence on the Victorian stage, the monster also haunted the pages of newspapers and journals. Political cartoonists used Shelley’s monster as the representation of the “pure evil” of Irish nationalists, labor reformers, and other favored subjects of controversy ; it was often depicted as an oversized, rough-and-ready, weapon-wielding hooligan. In Annals of the New York Stage, George Odell notes that audiences were entertained with photographic “illusions” of the monster as early as the 1870s. And the cinema was barely ten years old before the Edison Film Company presented their version of the story, with Charles Ogle portraying a long-haired, confused-looking giant. Virtually every year since that film’s appearance in 1910, another version of Frankenstein has been released somewhere in the world—though the most enduring image of the monster was the one created by Boris Karloff in James Whale’s 1931 classic. The creature’s huge, square head, oversized frame, and undersized suit jacket still inform most people’s idea of what Shelley’s monster “really” looks like.

  As strange and various as the interpretations of the creature have been, the monster has retained a surprisingly human quality. Even in its most melodramatic portrayals, its innate mortality is made apparent; whether through a certain-softness in the eyes, a wistfulness or longing in its expression, or a desperate helplessness in its movements, the creature has always come across as much more than a stock horror device. In fact, several film adaptations have avoided the use of heavy makeup and props that audiences have come to expect. Life Without a Soul ( 1915) stars a human-looking, flesh-toned monster; and in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), actor Robert De Niro, who is certainly neither ugly nor of great stature, did not wear the conventional green face paint and restored the monster’s eloquent powers of speech.

  Like Satan in Paradise Lost, Mary Shelley’s monster was given a shadowy and elusive physical presence by its creator. It moves through the story faster than the eye can follow it, descending glaciers “with greater speed than the flight of an eagle” (p. 130) or rowing “with an arrowy swiftness” (p. 150) . The blurriness of the scenes in which the monster appears allows us to create his image for ourselves and helps explain why it has inspired so many adaptations and reinterpretations. Certainly, too, both Milton’s Satan and Shelley’s creature have been made more interesting, resonant, and frightening because they have human qualities. The monster possesses familiar impulses to seek knowledge and companionship, and these pique our curiosity and awaken our sympathies. Its complex emotions, intelligence, and ability to plan vengeful tactics awaken greater fears than the stumbling and grunting of a mindless beast. A closer look at Shelley’s singular description of the monster’s features reveals its likeness to a newborn infant rather than a “fiend” or “demon”: Consider its “shrivelled complexion,” “watery eyes,” and “yellow skin [that] scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath” (p. 51) . The emotional range of De Niro’s monster, the gentle childish expression in Karloff’s eyes, even the actor Cooke’s “seeking as it were for support—his trying to grasp at the sounds he heard” (Letters, vol. 1, p. 378), suggest that we have sensed the monster’s humanity all along.

  Another trend in the way the monster has been reinterpreted is equally suggestive. Movie titles such as Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) , and Dracula Vs. Frankenstein (1971) testify to the fact that the monster has taken on the name of his creator in popular culture. In Frankenstein, the monster is called plenty of names by his creator, from at best “the accomplishment of my toils” to “wretch,” “miserable monster,” and “filthy daemon”; significantly, Victor never blesses his progeny with his own last name. Our identity of the creature as the title character does, of course, shift the focus from man to monster, reversing Shelley’s intention. Reading the book, we realize that Frankenstein‘s lack of recognizing the creature as his own—in essence, not giving the monster his name—is the monster’s root problem. Is it our instinctive human sympathy for the anonymous being that has influenced us to name him? Is it our recognition of similarities and ties between “father” and “son,” our defensiveness regarding family values? Or is it simply our interest in convenience, our compelling need to label and sort?

  Our confusion of creator and created, as well as our interest in depicting the creature’s human side, indicate an unconscious acknowledgment of a common and powerful reading of Frankenstein: that the monster and his creator are two halves of the same being who together as one represent the self divided, a mind in dramatic conflict with itself. Walton notes to his sister the possibility of living a “double existence” (pp. 24—25), bringing to mind his and Frankenstein’s struggles between their creative and self-destructive energies. The monster/ creator conflation most forcefully conveys this idea of humanity’s conflicting impulses to create and destroy, to love and hate. Shelley could not have chosen a subject with more relevance to twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers than humankind’s own potential inhumanity to itself. Our ambitions have led us to the point where we, too, can accomplish what Victor did in his laboratory that dreary night in November: artificially create life. But will our plan to clone living organisms or produce life in test tubes have dire repercussions ? We build glorious temples to progress and technology, monumental structures that soar toward the heavens; and yet in a single September morning, the World Trade Center was leveled—proving once again that man is his own worst enemy.

  In Frankenstein, Shelley exhibits a remarkable ability to anticipate and develop questions and themes peculiarly relevant to her future readers, thereby ensuring its endurance for almost 200 years. To understand why and how this ability developed, we must take a closer look at her life, times, and psychological state. Certainly, Frankenstein details a fascinating experiment, introduces us to vivid characters, and takes us to gorgeous, exotic places. But this text, written by a teenager, also addresses fundamental contemporary questions regarding “otherness” and society’s superficial evaluations of character based on appearance, as well as modern concerns about parental responsibility and the harmful effects of absenteeism. Anticipating the alienation of everyday life, Robert Walton and the monster speak to those of us who now live our lives in front of screens of various kinds—computer, television, and film
. Other readers may feel stabs of recognition when confronting Victor, a perfectionist workaholic who sacrifices love and friendship in the name of ambition. Frankenstein is a nineteenth-century literary classic, but it is also fully engaged in many of the most profound philosophical, psychological, social, and spiritual questions of modern existence.

  “... the spirit of the age ...”

  The endurance of Frankenstein has much to do with the particular circumstances under which the text was written: the moment in history and place in time of its creation, as well as the particular background and preparations of its creator. In the years leading up to the story’s conception on a June evening in 1816, Europe and America experienced a profound shift in sensibility that initiated the modern era. Romanticism had its beginnings in the democratic idealism that inspired the French and American Revolutions, and in the progressive thought that brought on the industrial and scientific revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though most historians cite the movement’s end-dates as somewhere around the mid-nineteenth century, the strength and appeal of the “spirit of the age” (as identified by Percy Shelley in A Defence of Poetry) continue to affect our present political, social, and intellectual lives. Those exemplifying the spirit during Shelley’s time railed against authoritarian government, conservative morality, classical models, personal insincerity, and moderate, “safe” behavior. In the arts, Romantics brought into their work a new emphasis on individualism, personal feelings, and expression, as exemplified by Goya’s Black Paintings and Cho-pin’s Preludes; a focus on emotional, subjective response rather than the objectivity and intellect favored during the Age of Reason, which can be detected in the difference between Beethoven’s earliest and later works; a celebration of spontaneous expressive intensity, seen in Turner’s oil paintings and heard in Bellini’s operas; and a keen interest in the exotic and erotic, as in Delacroix’s scenes inspired by his North African travels.

  In Britain, the literary response to the movement was particularly intense. Starting in the second half of the eighteenth century, English writers were strongly affected by the spirit of change in France and America and envisioned nothing less than “the regeneration of the human race,” according to poet laureate Robert Southey. “That was the period of theory and enthusiasm,” wrote Mary Shelley in her unfinished biography of her father. “Man had been reigned over long by fear and law, he was now to be governed by truth and justice” (Sunstein, pp. 15-16). “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” announced William Wordsworth, who along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge would redefine the art of poetry in Lyrical Ballads (1798). Artists are often unaware of “movements” as they are happening or are hesitant to recognize their placement in a particular “era” or “period”; what distinguished British Romantic writers is their self-conscious recognition of a powerful creative force energizing themselves and fellow artists. “Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,” Keats wrote to a friend in 1816. “These, these will give the world another heart / And other pulses: hear ye not the hum / Of mighty workings?”

  As the child of two exemplars of the Romantic spirit of reform and revolution, wife of one of the five most recognized names in Romantic poetry, friend of Byron, Hunt, Lamb, and several other representative Romantic writers, Mary was British Romanticism’s heir apparent. The most progressive currents of Romantic thought and art ran through her veins and electrified her everyday life. Her father, William Godwin, was a former minister turned atheist and radical philosopher; he preached his faith in human beings as rational creatures who did not need institutions or laws to exist peaceably, and expounded these anarchist views in such works as An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Godwin believed that man is not born evil but becomes vicious through circumstances that are usually set up by those wielding political power. The time was imminent to challenge traditional social order and “things as they are” (the original title of his novel Caleb Williams [1794]) and to set up a society of independent-thinking individuals. The effect of his writings was enormous on Mary, who eventually dedicated Frankenstein to “William Godwin, Author of Political Justice, Caleb Williams, Etc.” Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died a few days after Mary’s birth in 1797, but her spirit was very much alive in radical political circles as well as the Godwin household. (Crushed by his wife’s untimely death, Godwin published Memoirs of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798 and idealized her the next year in St. Leon.) In addition to writing Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1793) and several other texts promoting educational reform for women, Wollstonecraft published two great human rights manifestos: A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1791) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Considered the first great work of feminism, the latter document asserted that women constitute an oppressed class cutting across the standard social hierarchy; the discussion of the indignities and injustices suffered by women is rendered with real passion and articulateness. The monster’s pleas for justice in Frankenstein derive much of their eloquence and even some of their language from Wollstonecraft’s well-known work.

  Growing up in the Godwin household, Mary was granted immediate access to her parents’ radical intellectual circles. Coleridge and Wordsworth discussed their theories of poetry; the scientist Sir Humphry Davy elaborated upon his chemical experiments; Aaron Burr, vice president of the United States, visited with the Godwins and spoke of the goals of democracy. Mary was introduced to the painter Joseph Turner, the musician Muzio Clementi, and the revolutionaries Helen Maria Williams and Lady Mount Cashell. A bright child and voracious reader, she was inspired by what she heard, and she devoured an incredibly diverse selection of books. Her reading list for 1815, for example, lists seventy-six works—among them, Rousseau’s Confessions (1782), D‘Israeli’s Despotism; or, The Fall of the Jesuits (1811), Robertson’s History of America (1777), Henri-Dietrich’s Systeme de la nature (in French; 1770), and her father’s Life of Chaucer (1803). It is no wonder that the monster’s seminal reading—Milton’s Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, all three also on Mary’s 1815 list—are works spanning centuries, continents, and subject matter.

  Though Wollstonecraft and Godwin both wrote novels, their talents as fiction writers were greatly subordinate to their skills as philosophers and essayists. Mary’s reading lists indicate her interest in studying and exploring the literary arts, perhaps as her way of finding her own niche in this multitalented family. Like many young women her age, she particularly enjoyed the relatively new genre of Gothic literature: Before the age of twenty, she read Beckford’s Vathek (1787), Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Monk Lewis’s Tales of Terror (1799). As a teenager she also read Pamela (1741) and Clarissa (1747), by Samuel Richardson, and several other epistolary novels, plus a number of the novels of sentiment by Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding. Meeting Percy Shelley in 1812 intensified her interest in poetry as well; in the years preceding the writing of Frankenstein, she pored through the collected works of many of the poets she had first encountered in her father’s study.

  By the time Mary reached age eighteen, then, she was very familiar with many of the philosophic, social, scientific, political, and literary issues of Romanticism, the first modern era. Though Frankenstein exhibits some of the problems of the shotgun approach to writing a book (the subplot involving Justine’s trial for murder, an obvious nod to Godwin’s Political Justice, seems disconnected and underdeveloped, while the attempts at poetic landscape description are often drawn out), the novel successfully synthesizes much of the knowledge and “spirit of the age” that informed her existence. By combining never-before-combined ingredients from her diverse readings, Shelley broke from established tradition and even concocted a new literary recipe known today as science fiction. Clearly, her intellectual inheritance and education had well prepared her to create a work as provocative and enduring as Frankenstein.

  “... offspring of my happy
days ...”

  But the creation of Frankenstein was also a matter of amazing and irre producible timing in terms of Shelley’s personal growth. When she picked up her pen in the summer of 1816, she was carrying a formidable load of psychic baggage along with that dense body of knowledge. By Mary’s early teens, strong tensions developed in her relationships with her father and stepmother, made visible by her rebellious behavior and terrible skin rashes. Her adoration of her father placed her in competition with her stepmother, and to keep peace Godwin shipped her off to boarding schools and foster homes in Scotland. Separated from her beloved yet domineering father for months at a time, Mary developed an independent spirit and creative receptivity that enabled her to elope with a married man in her sixteenth year.

  Percy Shelley was, of course, no ordinary lover. Handsome, charismatic, brilliant, and idealistic, the poet had been a guest at her father’s house many times and was greatly esteemed by the hard-to-please Godwin. Taking cues from her father, Mary listened to Shelley’s discussions of radical politics and free love, and the pretty, auburn-haired daughter of the great philosopher captured the poet’s imagination as well. Convinced by Shelley that true love knew no law, determined to practice the unconventional social and artistic principles that had shaped her existence thus far, Mary left her father’s house a month before her seventeenth birthday. The couple lived on the road, and from hand to mouth. Neither set of parents approved of their union. They toured Europe, wrote daily, exchanged ideas with revolutionaries and progressive thinkers, and had two children within two years. They finally rested at Byron’s Villa Diodati in Switzerland for a few months in 1816.