The New Annotated Frankenstein

by Mary Shelley

  “Can you wonder that such thoughts transported me with rage?16 I only wonder that at that moment, instead of venting my sensations in exclamations and agony, I did not rush among mankind, and perish in the attempt to destroy them.

  “While I was overcome by these feelings, I left the spot where I had committed the murder, and was seeking a more secluded hiding-place,17 when I perceived a woman passing near me. She was young, not indeed so beautiful as her whose portrait I held, but of an agreeable aspect, and blooming in the loveliness of youth and health. Here, I thought, is one of those whose smiles are bestowed on all but me; she shall not escape: thanks to the lessons of Felix, and the sanguinary laws of man, I have learned how to work mischief. I approached her unperceived, and placed the portrait securely in one of the folds of her dress.18

  “For some days I haunted the spot where these scenes had taken place; sometimes wishing to see you, sometimes resolved to quit the world and its miseries for ever. At length I wandered towards these mountains, and have ranged through their immense recesses, consumed by a burning passion which you alone can gratify. We may not part until you have promised to comply with my requisition. I am alone, and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects. This being you must create.”

  1. Chapter 16 in the 1831 edition.

  2. Snares or traps.

  3. That is, they spoke German.

  4. We learn by this offhand remark that Felix and Safie have married.

  5. “Patience” in the Draft, rather than “impatience,” but not corrected in future editions.

  6. It is ironic that in James Whale’s 1931 film Frankenstein, the creature is threatened with and terrified of fire, in the form of torches carried by the villagers.

  7. It must have been mentioned in the “domestic occurrences” that the creature tells us earlier were described in Victor’s notes.

  8. In the Draft, the phrase “the bitterness and horror of my feelings” was originally “the horror of my situation,” changed by Percy Shelley to “the outrages and the anguish I had endured.”

  9. That is, spring 1795.

  10. Later, the creature describes the girl as the rustic’s child.

  11. For those who revel in such details, the gun was likely a French musket of the 1763 Charleville model, used by the French in the Revolution, or a fusil de chasse (shotgun), used by French trappers in North America for hunting.

  12. “This time” appears to refer to the present, that is, the time of the interview. We may fix the date as July 1795 (recall that the incident that the creature is about to describe—the death of William—occurred in early May 1795, according to the earlier letter from Frankenstein’s father).

  13. Here, in contrast to his earlier remark about the beauty of “delicate complexions”—a judgment for which he had no apparent basis (see note 6, Volume II, Chapter IV, above)—the creature now seems to understand that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

  14. William’s response to the creature is markedly different from that of other children depicted in the various films of Frankenstein, observes Martin Tropp, in Mary Shelley’s Monster: The Story of Frankenstein (111). Beginning with Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein, screen children almost inevitably relate to the creature as a fellow innocent.

  15. The word “impregnable” is replaced with “invulnerable” in the 1831 edition.

  16. Indeed, the reader can wonder: “Out of the whole world in which to focus his sexual longing, it is astonishing, to say the least,” write Morton Kaplan and Robert Kloss, “that he should gaze with desire first on the face of Frankenstein’s mother” (“Fantasy of Paternity and the Doppelgänger: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”).

  17. The balance of this paragraph is substantially revised in the 1831 edition, to read as follows:

  I entered a barn which had appeared to me to be empty. A woman was sleeping on some straw; she was young, not indeed so beautiful as her whose portrait I held, but of an agreeable aspect, and blooming in the loveliness of youth and health. Here, I thought, is one of those whose joy-imparting smiles are bestowed on all but me. And then I bent over her and whispered, “Awake, fairest, thy lover is near—he who would give his life but to obtain one look of affection from thine eyes; my beloved, awake!”

  The sleeper stirred; a thrill of terror ran through me. Should she indeed awake, and see me, and curse me, and denounce the murderer? Thus would she assuredly act if her darkened eyes opened and she beheld me. The thought was madness; it stirred the fiend within me—not I, but she, shall suffer; the murder I have committed because I am forever robbed of all that she could give me, she shall atone. The crime had its source in her; be hers the punishment! Thanks to the lessons of Felix, and the sanguinary laws of man, I had learned now to work mischief. I bent over her, and placed the portrait securely in one of the folds of her dress. She moved again, and I fled.

  Thus the creature is depicted as less intent on murder, more as acting because of his expectation of mistreatment. However, Kaplan and Kloss, in “Fantasy of Paternity and the Doppelgänger: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” wonder at the creature’s calling himself Justine’s lover upon meeting her for the first time and deciding to punish her for a crime he commits before he even knows of her existence. These actions are only explicable if the creature is Victor’s doppelgänger and the responses those of Victor himself, they suggest.

  18. Note that earlier, Justine stated that she was “unable to rest or sleep.” How, then, did the creature plant the necklace on her person? This was corrected in the 1831 edition. See notes 4 and 5, Volume I, Chapter VII, above.

  CHAPTER IX.1

  THE BEING FINISHED speaking, and fixed his looks upon me in expectation of a reply. But I was bewildered, perplexed, and unable to arrange my ideas sufficiently to understand the full extent of his proposition. He continued—

  “You must create a female for me, with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being. This you alone can do; and I demand it of you as a right which you must not refuse.”2

  The latter part of his tale had kindled anew in me the anger that had died away while he narrated his peaceful life among the cottagers, and, as he said this, I could no longer suppress the rage that burned within me.

  “I do refuse it,” I replied; “and no torture shall ever extort a consent from me. You may render me the most miserable of men, but you shall never make me base in my own eyes. Shall I create another like yourself, whose joint wickedness might desolate the world.3 Begone! I have answered you; you may torture me, but I will never consent.”

  “You are in the wrong,” replied the fiend; “and, instead of threatening, I am content to reason with you. I am malicious because I am miserable; am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces, and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? You would not call it murder, if you could precipitate me into one of those ice-rifts, and destroy my frame, the work of your own hands. Shall I respect man, when he contemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and, instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union.4 Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery. I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have a care: I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart, so that you5 curse the hour of your birth.”

  A fiendish rage animated him as he said this; his face was wrinkled into contortions too horrible for human eyes to behold; but presently he calmed himself, and proceeded—

  “I intended to reason. This passion is detrimental to me; for you do not reflect that you6 are the cause of its excess. If any
being felt emotions of benevolence towards me, I should return them an hundred and an hundred fold; for that one creature’s sake, I would make peace with the whole kind! But I now indulge in dreams of bliss that cannot be realized. What I ask of you is reasonable and moderate; I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself: the gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive, and it shall content me. It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless, and free from the misery I now feel. Oh! my creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing; do not deny me my request!”

  I was moved. I shuddered when I thought of the possible consequences of my consent; but I felt that there was some justice in his argument. His tale, and the feelings he now expressed, proved him to be a creature of fine sensations; and did I not, as his maker, owe him all the portion of happiness that it was in my power to bestow? He saw my change of feeling, and continued—

  Victor Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) and the creature (Peter Boyle) entertain a crowded theater in Young Frankenstein (Gruskoff/Venture Films, 1974).

  “If you consent, neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again: I will go to the vast wilds of South America.7 My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.8 My companion will be of the same nature as myself, and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man, and will ripen our food. The picture I present to you is peaceful and human, and you must feel that you could deny it only in the wantonness of power and cruelty. Pitiless as you have been towards me, I now see compassion in your eyes: let me seize the favourable moment, and persuade you to promise what I so ardently desire.”

  “You propose,” replied I, “to fly from the habitations of man, to dwell in those wilds where the beasts of the field will be your only companions. How can you, who long for the love and sympathy of man, persevere in this exile? You will return, and again seek their kindness, and you will meet with their detestation; your evil passions will be renewed, and you will then have a companion to aid you in the task of destruction. This may not be; cease to argue the point, for I cannot consent.”

  “How inconstant are your feelings! but a moment ago you were moved by my representations, and why do you again harden yourself to my complaints? I swear to you, by the earth which I inhabit, and by you that made me, that, with the companion you bestow, I will quit the neighbourhood of man, and dwell, as it may chance, in the most savage of places. My evil passions will have fled, for I shall meet with sympathy; my life will flow quietly away, and, in my dying moments, I shall not curse my maker.”

  His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred. I tried to stifle these sensations; I thought, that as I could not sympathize with him, I had no right to withhold from him the small portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow.

  “You swear,” I said, “to be harmless; but have you not already shewn a degree of malice that should reasonably make me distrust you? May not even this be a feint that will increase your triumph by affording a wider scope for your revenge?”

  “How is this? I thought I had moved your compassion, and yet you still refuse to bestow on me the only benefit that can soften my heart, and render me harmless.9 If I have no ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion; the love of another will destroy the cause of my crimes, and I shall become a thing, of whose existence every one will be ignorant. My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to the chain of existence10 and events, from which I am now excluded.”

  I paused some time to reflect on all he had related, and the various arguments which he had employed. I thought of the promise of virtues which he had displayed on the opening of his existence, and the subsequent blight of all kindly feeling by the loathing and scorn which his protectors had manifested towards him. His power and threats were not omitted in my calculations: a creature who could exist in the ice caves of the glaciers, and hide himself from pursuit among the ridges of inaccessible precipices, was a being possessing faculties it would be vain to cope with. After a long pause of reflection, I concluded, that the justice due both to him and my fellow-creatures demanded of me that I should comply with his request. Turning to him, therefore, I said—

  “I consent to your demand, on your solemn oath to quit Europe for ever, and every other place in the neighbourhood of man, as soon as I shall deliver into your hands a female who will accompany you in your exile.”

  “I swear,” he cried, “by the sun, and by the blue sky of heaven,11 that if you grant my prayer, while they exist you shall never behold me again. Depart to your home, and commence your labours: I shall watch their progress with unutterable anxiety; and fear not but that when you are ready I shall appear.”

  Saying this, he suddenly quitted me, fearful, perhaps, of any change in my sentiments. I saw him descend the mountain with greater speed than the flight of an eagle, and quickly lost him among the undulations of the sea of ice.

  His tale had occupied the whole day; and the sun was upon the verge of the horizon when he departed. I knew that I ought to hasten my descent towards the valley, as I should soon be encompassed in darkness; but my heart was heavy, and my steps slow. The labour of winding among the little paths of the mountains, and fixing my feet firmly as I advanced, perplexed me, occupied as I was by the emotions which the occurrences of the day had produced. Night was far advanced, when I came to the half-way resting-place, and seated myself beside the fountain. The stars shone at intervals, as the clouds passed from over them; the dark pines rose before me, and every here and there a broken tree lay on the ground: it was a scene of wonderful solemnity, and stirred strange thoughts within me. I wept bitterly; and, clasping my hands in agony, I exclaimed, “Oh! stars, and clouds, and winds, ye are all about to mock me: if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart, depart and leave me in darkness.”

  These were wild and miserable thoughts; but I cannot describe to you how the eternal twinkling of the stars weighed upon me, and how I listened to every blast of wind, as if it were a dull ugly siroc12 on its way to consume me.

  Morning dawned before I arrived at the village of Chamounix;13 but my presence, so haggard and strange, hardly calmed the fears of my family, who had waited the whole night in anxious expectation of my return.

  The following day we returned to Geneva. The intention of my father in coming had been to divert my mind, and to restore me to my lost tranquillity; but the medicine had been fatal. And, unable to account for the excess of misery I appeared to suffer, he hastened to return home, hoping the quiet and monotony of a domestic life would by degrees alleviate my sufferings from whatsoever cause they might spring.

  For myself, I was passive in all their arrangements; and the gentle affection of my beloved Elizabeth was inadequate to draw me from the depth of my despair. The promise I had made to the dæmon weighed upon my mind, like Dante’s iron cowl on the heads of the hellish hypocrites.14 All pleasures of earth and sky passed before me like a dream, and that thought only had to me the reality of life. Can you wonder, that sometimes a kind of insanity possessed me, or that I saw continually about me a multitude of filthy animals inflicting on me incessant torture, that often extorted screams and bitter groans?

  By degrees, however, these feelings became calmed. I entered again into the every-day scene of life, if not with interest, at least with some d
egree of tranquillity.

  1. Chapter 17 in the 1831 edition.

  2. The 1831 edition adds the phrase “to concede” at the end of this sentence.

  3. Note that Frankenstein does not at this time think of the offspring of the creature and a mate—that thought only occurs to him when he is hard at work on the creation of the female being, perhaps dealing with her reproductive organs.

  4. The creature goes overboard here. There is ample evidence that humans can become accustomed to the appearance of even the most severely deformed persons if they do not fear for their safety. Witness, for example, the Victorian fascination with the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick, whose condition became celebrated and his company highly sought after. Merrick, who corresponded with many people, often ended his letters with the following poem that he adapted from a poem called “False Greatness,” by English hymn writer Isaac Watts (the first four lines were wholly Merrick’s):

  ’Tis true my form is something odd,

  But blaming me is blaming God;

  Could I create myself anew

  I would not fail in pleasing you.

  If I could reach from pole to pole

  Or grasp the ocean with a span,

  Joseph Merrick, ca. 1889.

  I would be measured by the soul;

  The mind’s the standard of the man.

  Mel Brooks’s brilliant film Young Frankenstein (1974) surely has it right when it depicts an audience eager to see the creature sing and dance in evening wear.