FRANKENSTEIN

Biography of Mary Shelley

It was apparent that the life of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was going to be
out of step with the ordinary from the moment of her birth on August 30,
1797. She had both unorthodox parents and an orthodox family structure:
her father, William Godwin, was a celebrated philosopher and historian who
had briefly been a Calvinist minister. A cold, remote man who overate grossly
and borrowed money from anyone who would give him a loan, he had little
time for anything but his philosophical endeavors. This intellectual single-
mindedness was somewhat modulated by his passion for Mary
Wollstonecraft. With the possible exception of William Blake, Wollstonecraft
was the most influential of the Enlightenment radicals. Having declared
herself independent at the age of twenty-one, she ran a school with her
sisters and was the respected friend of the philosopher Samuel Johnson.
While in France, she had an affair with an army captain, which ended in the
birth of her first daughter, Fanny. After the soldier abandoned her and the
child, she returned to England and attempted suicide. Happily or unhappily,
she failed, and began writing in a variety of genres. It was her revolutionary
feminist writings, however, that won her lasting fame.

The first meeting between Godwin and Wollstonecraft took place at a dinner
party at Godwin's home. Drawn to each other by virtue of their shared
philosophical beliefs, the two began an affair begun in the autumn of 1796.
When Mary discovered that she was pregnant, the couple decided to marry
in order to legitimate both of Mary's children. The couple, however, in
adherence to their enlightened views, continued to live and work
independently. The pair remained devoted to each other, and Godwin was
devastated when Wollstonecraft died shortly after the birth of their daughter,
Mary. Although he was fond of his daughters, the task of raising them alone
proved too much for Godwin, and he immediately set about finding a second
wife. His proposal to Maria Reveley, who would later become Mary's best
friend, was rejected.

He later married Mary Jane Clairmont, the first woman to respond to his
overtures. This second wife proved to be a cruel, shallow woman who
neglected Fanny and Mary in favor of her own children. Mary (who was so
lively that her father had nicknamed her Mercury) was frequently whipped
for impertinence; rebellion came naturally to the headstrong Mary, and she
refused to be subdued. Though the girls were given lessons in domesticity
(cooking, cleaning, and other wifely duties) Mary could not feign interest in
such pursuits: she would simply take up a book and let the dinner burn. Her
father was the most important person in her life, and his favor meant
everything to her. She excelled in her lessons and could hold her own in adult
conversation often with the great minds of her time from a remarkably early
age. Around the age of eight, she began reading the writings of her mother.
By the time she was ten, she had memorized every word of them.

Mary spent hours at her mother's grave, reading or eating meals when the
atmosphere at home was particularly bad. This habit continued well into her
teens, when she was sent to live at Ramsgate with a Miss Petman. This move
was prompted by Mary's frailty and inability to concentrate at home. From
Ramsgate, she journeyed to Scotland to stay with Baxter, a close friend of
her father's. Living with the Baxters was the happiest time that Mary had
thereto known. When she returned to London a year later, she had grown
into a woman. She became closer to her father than ever before, and the two
engaged in constant philosophical debate. This served, predictably, to
augment her stepmother's hatred.

The poet Percy Shelley, a devoted follower and friend of William Godwin's,
began spending a great deal of time in the Godwin home. Although he was
married, his presence made an immediate impression on Mary, who began to
read poetry at his inducement. Shelley's genuine admiration for the works of
Mary's mother earned him her trust she invited him to accompany her on her
visits to her mother's grave, and the two became inseparable. Their
intellectual kinship was passionately felt by both of them, and they rapidly
fell in love. Godwin was furious at this development, and immediately barred
the poet from his home. The couple, however, refused to be separated and
began a clandestine correspondence. With the help of Mary's stepsister, they
were able to elope.

Setting up housekeeping in London was expensive, and money was very

tight for the newly married pair. Relations between them were somewhat
strained: Shelley's first wife Harriet belatedly bore him a son, and his good
friend Thomas Hogg became enamored of Mary. To make matters worse,
Mary became pregnant; the child, a daughter, died shortly after birth. Mary
fell into an acute depression.

Having conceived a dislike for London (perhaps as a result of their

misfortunes), the couple began traveling: in the English countryside, in
France, and elsewhere. Mary was writing profusely, and published
Frankenstein in 1818. No one could have predicted the extent of the book's
popularity: it would remain the most widely read English novel for three
decades. Although it was maliciously rumored that Percy Shelley was the
book's true author, Mary was catapulted to the forefront of the struggle for
recognition then being waged by woman writers.

Tragically, Percy Shelley drowned in a shipwreck in 1822. Though Mary was

devastated, she remained dedicated to her son, Percy Florence. She spent
the remainder of her life championing her husband's neglected poetry, and
was eventually successful in forcing its publication. Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley died in her sleep at age fifty-four.

About Frankenstein
The early nineteenth century was not a good time to be a female writer --
particularly if one was audacious enough to be a female novelist.
Contemporary beliefs held that no one would be willing to read the work of a
woman; the fantastic success of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein
served to thoroughly disprove this theory.

Frankenstein established Shelley as a woman of letters when such a thing

was believed to be a contradiction in terms; only the reputation of Madame
de Stael surpassed Shelley’s in Europe. De Stael, however, was more famous
for continuing to publish her works despite the fact that the Emperor
Napoleon had explicitly forbade her to do so, rather than for the quality of
the works themselves.

Though Frankenstein is now customarily classified as a horror story (albeit

the first and purest of its kind), it is interesting to note that Shelley's
contemporaries regarded it as a serious novel of ideas. It served as an
illustration of many of the tenets of William Godwin's philosophy, and did
more to promote his ideas than his own work ever did. The novel does not,
however, subscribe to all of Godwin's precepts. It stands in explicit opposition
to the idea that man can achieve perfection -- in fact, it argues that any
attempt to attain perfection will ultimately end in ruin.

Frankenstein is part of the Gothic movement in literature, a form that was

only just becoming popular in England at the time of its publication. The
Gothic mode was a reaction against the humanistic, rationalist literature of
The Age of Reason; one might say it was ushered in by the death of Keats,
the English author with whom Romanticism is perhaps most closely
associated. Frankenstein might be seen as a compromise between the Gothic
approach and the Romantic one: it addresses serious philosophical subjects
in a fantastical manner. Though it confronts recognizable human problems, it
can hardly be said to take place in a recognizably natural world. Some critics
have suggested that this tension between Gothic and Romantic literary
modes echoes the philosophical tension that existed between herself and her
husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

As the prejudice against women writers was quite strong, Shelley determined
to publish the first edition anonymously. Despite this fact, the novel's
unprecedented success paved the way for some of the most prominent
women writers of the nineteenth century, including George Eliot, George
Sand, and the Bronte sisters. All of them owed Mary a tremendous literary
debt. Without the pioneering work of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, a great
many female authors might never have taken up their pens; they might
never have felt free to exhibit dark imagination, nor to engage in
philosophical reflection. Without her, and the women whose work she made
possible, English literature would be unquestionably the poorer.

Summary
Robert Walton, an English adventurer, undertakes an expedition to the North
Pole. While on this expedition (which has been a lifelong dream of his),
Walton corresponds with his sister by letter. Amid the ice floes, Walton and
his crew find an extremely weary man traveling by dogsled. The man is near
death, and they determine to take him aboard. Once the mysterious traveler
has somewhat recovered from his weakness, Robert Walton begins to talk to
him. The two strike up a friendship (Walton is very lonely and has long
desired a close companion). The man is desolate, and for a long while will not
talk about why he is traversing the Arctic alone. After becoming more
comfortable with Walton, he decides to tell him his long-concealed story.

The speaker is Victor Frankenstein, for whom the book is named. He will be
the narrator for the bulk of the novel. Born into a wealthy Swiss family, Victor
enjoyed an idyllic, peaceful childhood. His parents were kind, marvelous
people; they are presented as shining examples of the goodness of the
human spirit. His father, Alphonse, fell in love with his wife, Caroline, when
her father, a dear friend of his, passed away. Alphonse took the young
orphan under his care, and as time passed they fell in love. He provides for
his wife in grand style. Out of gratitude for her own good fortune, Caroline is
extremely altruistic. She frequently visits the poor who live in her part of the
Italian countryside. One day she chances upon the home of a family who has
a beautiful foster daughter. Her name is Elizabeth Lavenza. Though they are
kind, the poverty of Elizabeth’s foster parents makes caring for her a
financial burden. Caroline falls in love with the lovely girl on sight, and
adopts her into the Frankenstein family. She is close in age to Victor, and
becomes the central, most beloved part of his childhood. Elizabeth is Victor’s
most cherished companion. Their parents encourage the children to be close
in every imaginable way  as cousins, as brother and sister, and, in the
future, as husband and wife.

Victor’s childhood years pass with astonishing speed. Two more

sons, William and Ernest, are born into the family. At this time, the elder
Frankensteins decide to stop their constant traveling: the family finally
settles in Geneva. Though Victor is something of a loner, he does have one
dear friend: Henry Clerval, from whom he is inseparable. The two have
utterly different ambitions: Victor has developed a passion for science, while
Henry longs to study the history of human struggle and endeavor.
Eventually, Victor’s parents decide it is time for him to begin his university
studies at Ingolstadt. Before his departure, Victor’s mother passes away. On
her deathbed, she tells Victor and Elizabeth that it is her greatest desire to
see the two of them married. Victor leaves for university, still in mourning for
his mother and troubled by this separation from his loved ones.

Meanwhile, in Geneva, life goes on. Because Caroline was so generous,

Elizabeth learns to be gracious as well. When she is old enough to know her
mind, she extends housing and love to a young girl named Justine, whose
mother dislikes her and wishes to be rid of her. Though Justine is a servant in
the Frankenstein household, Elizabeth, Ernest and William regard her as a
sister.

At Ingolstadt, Victor’s passion for science increases exponentially. He falls

into the hands of Waldeman, a chemistry professor, who excites in him
ambition and the desire to achieve fame and distinction in the field of natural
philosophy. Thus begins the mania that will end in destroying Victor’s life.
Victor spends day and night in his laboratory. He develops a consuming
interest in the life principle (that is, the force which imparts life to a human
being). This interest develops into an unnatural obsession, and Victor
undertakes to create a human being out of pieces of the dead. He haunts
cemeteries and charnel houses. He tells no one of this work, and years pass
without his visiting home. Finally, his work is completed: one night, the
yellow eyes of the creature finally open to stare at Victor. When Victor
beholds the monstrous form of his creation (who is of a gargantuan size and
a grotesque ugliness), he is horror-stricken. He flees his laboratory and seeks
solace in the night. When he returns to his rooms, the creature has
disappeared.
Henry joins Victor at school, and the two begin to pursue the study of
languages and poetry. Victor has no desire to ever return to the natural
philosophy that once ruled his life. He feels ill whenever he thinks of the
monster he created. Victor and Clerval spend every available moment
together in study and play; two years pass.

Then, a letter from Elizabeth arrives, bearing tragic news. Victor’s younger
brother, William, has been murdered in the countryside near the
Frankenstein estate. On his way back to Geneva, Victor is seized by an
unnamable fear. Upon arriving at his village, he staggers through the
countryside in the middle of a lightning storm, wracked with grief at the loss
of his brother. Suddenly, he sees a figure, far too colossal to be that of a
man, illuminated in a flash of lightning: he instantly recognizes it as his
grotesque creation. At that moment, he realizes that the monster is his
brother’s murderer.

Upon speaking to his family the next morning, Victor learns that Justine (his
family’s trusted maidservant and friend) has been accused of William’s
murder. William was wearing an antique locket at the time of his death; this
bauble was found in Justine’s dress the morning after the murder. Victor
knows she has been framed, but cannot bring himself to say so: his tale will
be dismissed as the ranting of a madman. The family refuses to believe that
Justine is guilty. Elizabeth, especially, is heartbroken at the wrongful
imprisonment of her cherished friend. Though Elizabeth speaks eloquently of
Justine’s goodness at her trial, she is found guilty and condemned to death.
Justine gracefully accepts her fate. In the aftermath of the double tragedy,
the Frankenstein family remains in a state of stupefied grief.

While on a solitary hike in the mountains, Victor comes face to face with the
creature, who proceeds to narrate what has became of him since he fled
Victor’s laboratory. After wandering great distances and suffering immense
cold and hunger, the monster sought shelter in an abandoned hovel. His
refuge adjoined the cottage of an exiled French family: by observing them,
the monster acquired language, as well as an extensive knowledge of the
ways of humanity. He was greatly aided in this by the reading of three books
recovered from a satchel in the snow: Milton’s Paradise Lost,
Goethe’s Sorrows of Werter, and a volume of Plutarch’s Lives. The monster
speaks with great eloquence and cultivation as a result of his limited but
admirable education.

He developed a deep love for the noble (if impoverished) French family, and
finally made an overture of friendship. Having already learned that his
hideous appearance inspires fear and disgust, he spoke first to the family’s
elderly patriarch: this honorable old gentleman’s blindness rendered him
able to recognize the monster’s sincerity and refinement (irrespective of his
appearance). The other members of the family returned unexpectedly,
however, and drove the creature from the cottage with stones.

The monster was full of sorrow, and cursed his creator and his own
hideousness. He therefore determined to revenge himself upon Frankenstein,
whose whereabouts he had discovered from the laboratory notebooks. Upon
his arrival in Geneva, the creature encountered William, whose unspoiled
boyish beauty greatly attracted him. The monster, longing for
companionship, asked William to come away with him, in the hopes that the
boy’s youthful innocence would cause him to forgive the monster his
ugliness. Instead, William struggled and called the monster a number of cruel
names; upon learning that the boy was related to Victor, he strangled him in
a vengeful fury. Drawn to the beauty of the locket, he took it, and fled to a
nearby barn.

There, he found Justine, who had fallen into an exhausted sleep after
searching all day and all night for William. The monster’s heart was rent by
her angelic loveliness, and he found himself full of longing for her. Suddenly,
he was gripped by the agonizing realization that he would never know love.
He tucked the locket into the folds of Justine’s dress in an attempt to seek
revenge on all withholding womankind.

The monster concludes his tale by denouncing Victor for his abandonment;
he demands that Victor construct a female mate for him, so that he may no
longer be so utterly alone. If Victor complies with this rather reasonable
request, he promises to leave human society forever. Though he has a brief
crisis of conscience, Victor agrees to the task in order to save his remaining
loved ones.

He journeys to England with Clerval to learn new scientific techniques that

will aid him in his hateful task. Once he has acquired the necessary data, he
retreats to a dark corner of Scotland, promising to return to Henry when the
job is done. Victor is nearly halfway through the work of creation when he is
suddenly seized by fear. Apprehensive that the creature and his mistress will
spawn yet more monsters, and thus destroy humanity, he tears the new
woman to bits before the monster’s very eyes. The creature emits a tortured
scream. He leaves Victor with a single, most ominous promise: that he shall
be with him on his wedding night.
Victor takes a small rowboat out into the center of a vast Scottish lake; there,
he throws the new woman’s tattered remains overboard. He falls into an
exhausted sleep, and drifts for an entire day upon the open water. When he
finally washes ashore, he is immediately seized and charged with murder. A
bewildered Victor is taken into a dingy little room and shown the body of his
beloved Henry, murdered at the creature’s hands. This brings on a fever of
delirium that lasts for months. His father comes to escort him home, and
Victor is eventually cleared of all charges.

At home in Geneva, the family begins planning the marriage of Elizabeth and
Victor. On their wedding night, Elizabeth is strangled to death in the conjugal
bed. Upon hearing the news, Victor’s father takes to his bed, where he
promptly dies of grief.

Having lost everyone he has ever loved, Victor determines to spend the rest
of his life pursuing the creature. This is precisely what the creature himself
wants: now, Frankenstein will be as wretched and bereft as he is. For some
time, the creator pursues his creation; he had chased him as far as the Arctic
Circle when Walton rescued him. Though he cautions the sea captain against
excessive ambition and curiosity, he contradictorily encourages the sailors to
continue on their doomed voyage, though it will mean certain death. His
reason: for glory, and for human knowledge. Finally, he is no longer able to
struggle against his illness, and dies peacefully in his sleep. At the moment
of his death, the creature appears: he mourns all that he has done, but
maintains that he could not have done otherwise, given the magnitude of his
suffering. He then flees, vowing that he will build for himself a funeral pyre
and throw his despised form upon the flames.

Characters
Victor Frankenstein

He is the main character, a man driven by ambition and scientific curiosity.

His quest for absolute knowledge and power will eventually end in his own
ruin.

Elizabeth Lavenza

Victor’s bride. Elizabeth is presented as being angelically good and

incomparably beauty: she represents ideal womanhood and its promises of
love and comfort.
Caroline

Victor’s mother; a paradigm of motherly concern and generosity. Her death

provides the catalyst for Victor’s desire to transcend death. It is her last wish
that Victor and Elizabeth be married.

Alphonse

Victor’s father; yet another shining example of kindness and selflessness. His
happiness depends on the happiness of his children. If they fail, he does as
well; thus, their deaths prefigure his own.

William

The youngest son of the Frankenstein family. His death at the hands of the
monster renders him a symbol of lost and violated innocence.

Henry Clerval

Victor’s best friend since childhood. Fascinated with the history of mankind,
he is Victor’s intellectual opposite. He, too, will be murdered by the monster;
he is perhaps a symbol of the destruction of Victor’s own goodness and
potential.

Justine

Though a servant in the Frankenstein household, she is more like a sister to

Victor and Elizabeth. She is executed for William’s murder, and thus becomes
yet another martyr to lost virtue and innocence.

The Creature / The Monster

The work of Frankenstein’s hands, the creature is his double, his persecutor,
and his victim. The lives of him and his creator are inextricably entwined.

Robert Walton
The reader’s representative in the novel, he is the person to whom Victor
relates his story. He has much in common with Victor: ambition, drive, and
the desire for glory.

De Lacey

The head of the household observed by the creature, de Lacey has been
robbed of his fortunes as a result of his own kindness. His blindness makes
him capable of recognizing the creature’s sincerity and goodness despite his
hideous appearance.

Felix

The son of de Lacey, he is devoted to his family and his mistress, Safie.
Though noble, he drives the creature from the family cottage with stones. He
thereby symbolizes one of the basic flaws in the human character: the hatred
of difference.

Agatha

The daughter of De Lacey, she is an example of selfless womanhood, caring

for her brother and her father despite their poverty and her own sadness.

Safie

The betrothed of Felix. She is presented as exotically beautiful, and is racially

fetishized for her Turkishness. The de Lacey family wishes to marry her to
Felix and convert her to Christianity.

Themes
Literary Reflexivity

The text of Frankenstein itself symbolizes many of the same themes that its
contents symbolize. For example: Frankenstein’s monster is a creature
created by imbuing various old body parts with a new life; similarly, Shelley’s
texts include direct quotes and references to many older poems and literary
works. The text therefore acts as a composite image of many older stories
with “new life” breathed into them, just like the monster.
Creation

The text is virtually obsessed with creation events: Frankenstein creates the
monster out of dead tissue; the monster conceives of himself by reading
about the creation of Adam in Paradise Lost; the monster asks for
Frankenstein to create a mate for him; what’s more, three different levels of
narrative are actually created: the letters that R. Walton sends his sister,
telling of his time sailing to the North Pole; the story that Frankenstein tells
Walton, embedded in the letters; and the story that Frankenstein’s monster
tells Frankenstein of his youth, embedded in Frankenstein’s story. The text as
a whole, in this way, can be seen as a continual exploration of what is means
to create something.

Responsibility

One of the ways in which the text explores the creation event is by posing
the question of what responsibility, if any, the creator bears to the created.
Frankenstein shuns his monster almost immediately after creating him. The
monster attributes blame to Frankenstein for this, and puts the onus on
Frankenstein to right his wrongs by creating a mate for the monster. When
Frankenstein refuses, the monster punishes him; Frankenstein ultimately
comes to believe that it is his duty to kill the monster. The two feel bound to
each other by the creation event, and it is this bond that, by the account of
Frankenstein and the monster, establishes culpability on the part of the
creator for the outcome of the created.

Causal Dependency

The structure of blame in the novel focuses on particular events that are
supposed to have completely altered the trajectory of the future – that is,
events that were necessary for broad swaths of future events to have
obtained. So, for example, Frankenstein doubts that he would have
undertaken the creation of Frankenstein if his father had not scoffed at his
son’s interest in alchemy and the like (Volume I, Chapter 1). Similarly, the
monster blames his creator’s neglect and deformed craftsmanship for his
own bad lot in life (Volume II, Chapter 7). The reader is thereby invited to
question whether this is actually a fair appraisal of causal relation and
responsibility.

Promethean Hubris
The alternative title of Frankenstein is The Modern Prometheus, and the story
is true to this moniker: in Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the
gods and gave it to humanity; he was subsequently bound and punished
eternally for his crimes. Similarly, Frankenstein discovered how to give life to
things – a power thought divine – and is subsequently punished by the
endless tragedy delivered unto him by his creation.

Isolation

Isolation manifests both macrocosmically and microcosmically in the novel.

The framing narrative is set on a ship sailing to the North Pole, arguably the
most isolated point on the globe; more microcosmically, Frankenstein
isolates himself from the rest of society by creating life, thereby giving
himself a unique status to which no one else can relate; his monster is more
directly isolated, because he is the only one of his kind.

Natural Law

The novel poses a question of where the line is drawn between what we can
do and what we ought to do. It is shown to be scientifically possible for
Frankenstein to create a living being out of dead tissue; yet there is an odd
sense of paradox here: though the act seems wholly unnatural, is it not the
case that it is natural by virtue of the fact that it can be done? The notion of
scientific progress might suggest that Frankenstein was right to create such a
being and conduct this research out of interest in expanding humanity’s
knowledge and mastery over the world; yet the horrific consequences of the
experiments suggest that he might be the case that he never should have
gone down the path of creating life by himself. This moral puzzle is one of
the main issues the novel invites the reader to explore.