by Mary Shelley
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
FRANKENSTEIN
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY was born in 1797, the only daughter of William Godwin, author of Political Justice and Caleb Williams, and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, who died a few days after her daughter’s birth.
Mary was courted by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (who was already married) in the summer of 1814. They eloped to the Continent in July. In 1816 they spent the summer with Lord Byron near Geneva, during which time Frankenstein was begun. Shelley’s wife committed suicide later that year, and he married Mary. Their two small children died in 1818 and 1819, and in 1822 Shelley himself was drowned. Mary was heartbroken, as her diaries show, and in 1823 she returned to England with her younger son. She had little money, but, largely supporting herself by writing, she managed to send her son to Harrow and Cambridge. Between 1840 and 1843 she and her son travelled abroad. In 1844 Shelley’s father died, leaving Mary in better circumstances. She died in 1851 and was buried at Bournemouth near her son’s home.
M. K. JOSEPH was Professor of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He died in 1981.
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein
OR
The Modern Prometheus
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
M. K. JOSEPH
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First published by Oxford University Press 1969
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INTRODUCTION
WHEN Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin began to write Frankenstein, she was not quite nineteen; yet none of her later novels has achieved anything like the same universal hold on the imagination. Whatever she may have owed to other novelists, particularly to her father William Godwin and to the American Charles Brockden Brown, the novel remains completely original. In spite of her errors, which are those of a novice—particularly her tendency to invent fresh improbabilities rather than to think her way through difficult passages in the story—the central idea is carried through with considerable skill and force.
The unexpected and bizarre success of the novel was due to one of those lucky accidents which, in most writers’ lives, happen only once. For two troubled and uncertain years, she had been living with Shelley. Now, in the summer of 1816, they had temporarily escaped from England and were settled in Geneva, among the splendours of lake and mountains, and in the stimulating company of Byron. The germ of Frankenstein is to be found somewhere in their wide-ranging nightly conversations, which must have covered, not only gothic terrors and galvanism and current theories on the origin of life, but also the myth of Prometheus and its significance. For Mary subtitled her story ‘the modern Prometheus’, and this is an essential clue to its meaning.1
The myth of Prometheus contained two main elements. The first, best known through the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, was the story of Prometheus pyrphoros, who had brought down fire from the sun in order to succour mankind, and whom Zeus had punished by chaining him to the Caucasus with an eagle feeding on his vitals. The second was the story of Prometheus plasticator who, in some versions, was said to have created or recreated mankind by animating a figure made of clay. This aspect of the myth, little used by the Greeks and unknown to Aeschylus or Hesiod, seems to have been more popular with the Romans.
By about the second or third century A.D., the two elements were fused together, so that the fire stolen by Prometheus was also the fire of life with which he animated his man of clay. This gave a radically new significance to the myth, which lent itself easily to Neoplatonic interpretation with Prometheus as the demiurge or deputy creator, but which could also be readily allegorized by Christians and was frequently used in the Middle Ages as a representation of the creative power of God.1 By the Renaissance, the image was a familiar one, as in Othello’s words over Desdemona:
… I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume.
Later still, Prometheus became an accepted image of the creative artist. Early in the eighteenth century a convenient and influential account of Prometheus the creator is to be found in Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks,2 which exactly suggests the central ideas and situations in Frankenstein, whether or not Mary had first-hand knowledge of the Characteristicks at the time she wrote the novel.
Before 1816 Shelley seems to have been unaware of the potent symbolic significance of the myth; it was Byron, to whom Prometheus had been a familiar figure ever since he translated a portion of Aeschylus while still a schoolboy at Harrow, who opened his eyes to its potentialities during that summer at Geneva. That it was discussed at the time can be inferred from the results: Byron’s poem, ‘Prometheus’, written in July 1
816; his Manfred, with its Promethean hero, begun in September; and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, in part a reply to Manfred, begun later in 1818.1 But Mary Shelley was first in the field with her ‘modern Prometheus’, and she alone seized on the vital significance of making Prometheus the creator rather than, as in Byron and Shelley, the suffering champion of mankind. In doing so, she linked the myth with certain current scientific theories which suggested that the ‘divine spark’ of life might be electrical or quasi-electrical in nature.
In the novel itself, Victor Frankenstein is understandably reluctant to reveal how he gave life to his creature; but there are clues to what Mary Shelley had in mind. In her Introduction she recalls the talk about Erasmus Darwin, who had ‘preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion’; but this sounds like an ordinary case of alleged spontaneous generation. ‘Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.’ She then goes on to describe the half-waking reverie which gave her the beginning of her story, in which ‘I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.’2 Nor is the story itself without hints: in Chapter II a discourse on electricity and magnetism—the point is more explicit in 1818—turns Frankenstein’s mind away from alchemy; and in Chapter V the ‘instruments of life’ which Frankenstein assembles before infusing the ‘spark of life’ also suggest an electrical rather than a biological process.
Frankenstein’s change of interest from alchemy to chemistry and electricity is a circumstance obviously drawn from Shelley himself; and with the mention of electricity as vitalizing force we come, as Carl Grabo has shown, to a central idea of Shelley’s which was to emerge, a little later, in the last act of Prometheus Unbound. In his eclectic synthesis of ideas drawn from Newton, Volta, Galvani, Erasmus Darwin, and Humphrey Davy (whom Mary was reading in October 1816), electricity became the divine fire, the life-principle, and the physical manifestation of spiritual love—of which Douglas Bush remarks: ‘Berkeley and Newton are met together, Plotinus and Edison have kissed each other.’ It seems likely that, during the conversations at Diodati, Mary absorbed from Shelley—and perhaps from Polidori as well—the idea of making electricity the animating force, the scientific equivalent of that divine spark which, in the myth, Prometheus had stolen from the sun.1
Frankenstein is constructed of three concentric layers, one within the other. In the outermost layer, Robert Walton, in his letters to his sister, describes his voyage towards the North Pole and his encounter with Victor Frankenstein. In the main, middle layer, Frankenstein tells Walton how he created the monster and abandoned it in disgust, how it revenged itself by murdering all those he loved and how he finally turned and pursued it. In the very centre, the monster himself describes the development of his mind after the flight from the laboratory and his bitterness when men reject him. In spite of her inexperience, Mary Shelley uses this concentric structure with considerable subtlety.
The story of Walton’s voyage to the Pole is strange but possible; it mediates by interposing a conceivable reality between us and the more strictly marvellous story of Frankenstein and his monster, which thus remains doubly insulated from everyday reality. Yet there is a parallelism of situation and a strong bond of sympathy between Walton and Frankenstein which they are quick to recognize. Walton is a solitary like Frankenstein and his obsession with the Pole answers to Frankenstein’s obsession with life. Sharing something of Frankenstein’s Faustian hybris, Walton is setting out on a process of scientific discovery at great peril to himself and others. Frankenstein’s story is, in fact, narrated as a cautionary tale which serves its purpose in the end by turning Walton back to the world of normal society. At the same time, Walton’s voyage through the Frozen Sea towards the Pole, with its conscious echoes of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, reflects that other world of the Mer de Glace at Chamonix, the setting in which the monster tells his story to Frankenstein.
At the centre of the triple structure is the story of the education of a natural man and of his dealings with his creator, which might be described (with important reservations) as a sort of Godwinian Genesis. The theme is stated plainly at the beginning of the monster’s conversation with his maker (p. 100):
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. Every where 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.
The monster is essentially benevolent; but rejection by his creator and by mankind at large has made him first a fallen Adam and then a fallen Lucifer.
In the story of his experiences there are certain improbabilities and some rather obvious contrivance—the convenient chink in the wall of De Lacey’s cottage, the providentially lost portmanteau of books, the lessons to the Arab girl Safie which also serve to provide the eavesdropping monster with a kind of crash-course in European civilization. These can be more easily forgiven if we take it that here, in the centre of the book, Mary Shelley is constructing something with the schematic character of a philosophic romance. The story of the monster’s beginnings is the story of a child, and at the same time he recapitulates the development of aboriginal man. He awakes to the world of the senses, discovers fire and searches for food. When men reject him, he discovers society by watching the De Laceys in their cottage. Having thus acquired language, from Felix’s reading of Volney he learns of human history; having learned to read, he discovers private sentiment in Werther and public virtue in Plutarch.
Most of all, it is through Paradise Lost that he comes to understand himself and his situation under the double analogy of Adam and of Satan (pp. 127–9). At the same time, through the copy of Frankenstein’s journal which he has conveniently carried off in his first flight from the laboratory, he learns that his situation is yet more desperate than theirs, since he has been rejected without guilt and is utterly companionless. ‘I am malicious because I am miserable’ (p. 145); it is this that turns him against his maker and against mankind. What he demands, not unreasonably, is to be supplied with an Eve of his own hideous kind and to return to the natural life, with ‘the vast wilds of South America’ for his Eden.
Frankenstein is moved to pity; it is only when he revolts and destroys his second, half-formed creature that the monster finally becomes a fallen angel, a Satan bent on mischief, as he acknowledges at the end, over the dead body of Frankenstein. ‘Evil thenceforth became my good’. he says, again recalling Milton; ‘… the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil’ (pp. 220–1). His final suicide by burning at the North Pole will reconcile the novel’s central images of fire and ice, of life and desolation, of Promethean heat and the frosty Caucasus.
Yet Frankenstein himself is also both a fallen Adam and a fallen Lucifer: ‘…the apple was already eaten, and the angel’s arm bared to drive me from all hope’ (p. 189); ‘…like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell’ (p. 211). There is a strict parallel between the role of each in his own story, and we are drawn to complete the equation for ourselves: as the monster is to Frankenstein, so perhaps is Frankenstein to whatever power created man. The clue to the monster’s predicament—benevolence corrupted—may also be the clue to Frankenstein’s.
Frankenstein disowns but cannot free himself from his monster, which thus takes on the character of a doppelgänger or a Mr. Hyde. Their interdependence is evoked with considerable power in the last part of Frankenstein’s narrative in which Frankenstein, from being the pursued, becomes the pursuer; yet, by a sort of complicity, he is also lured on willingly by the monster across the snowbound landscape of Russia, in an atmosphere of dream and deliriu
m, towards the Frozen Sea. It is, in fact, only at the very end of the book, when Walton encounters the monster grieving over Frankenstein’s body, that we can at last be quite sure that the whole story is ‘true’ and not a madman’s hallucination. Yet the monster is, in a literal sense, a projection of Frankenstein’s mind, and an embodiment of his guilt in withdrawing from his kind and pursuing knowledge which, though not forbidden, is still dangerous. He is also a reflection of Frankenstein’s own situation, and the quotation from Paradise Lost which appeared on the original title-page—the accusing words of fallen Adam to his creator—might apply to both:
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man? did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
The implications of Mary Shelley’s ‘ghost-story’ go much further than she or any of her circle seem to have understood, though there are hints of uneasiness in Shelley’s Preface of 1817. With unassuming originality, her ‘modern Prometheus’ challenges the whole myth of Romantic titan-ism, of Shelley’s Neoplatonic apocalypse in Prometheus Unbound, and of the artist as Promethean creator. One of its themes is solitude—the solitude of one who turns his back on his kind in his obsessive pursuit of the secrets of nature. Frankenstein sins against the Godwinian ideal of social benevolence; in describing him, Mary probably had in mind the proem to Shelley’s Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, in which he described his own vigils in the charnel-house:
Like an inspired and desperate alchymist
Staking his very life on some dark hope…1
Prometheus was also an accepted metaphor of the artist, but when Mary Shelley transfers this to the scientist, the implications are radical. If Frankenstein, as scientist, is ‘the modern Prometheus’, then science too is creative; but whereas the world of art is ideal and speculative, that of science is real and inescapable. It must then take the consequences: the scientist, himself a creature, has taken on the role and burden of a creator. If Frankenstein corrupts the monster by his rejection, which is good Godwinism so far, we are left asking a question which demands another kind of answer: what has rejected and corrupted Frankenstein? And if Prometheus, in the romantic tradition, is identified with human revolt, is the monster what that revolt looks like from the other side—a pitiful botched-up creature, a ‘filthy mass that moved and talked’ (p. 147), which brings nothing but grief and destruction upon the power that made him?