The book is composed in the Russian-doll mode, for the beginning and end belong to the polar explorer, Robert Walton, and everything else is retrospect, told in the ship’s cabin. We read in Captain Walton’s letters to his sister first his own story, of seeking a paradise in the undiscovered north, and then what he heard from Frankenstein, who at one point tells Walton what he heard from the creature he brought to life. Thus, midway through the tale, the creature tells his creator the dramatic tale of a family he spied on and grew fond of, and theirs constitutes a story within a story within a story within the captain’s story in this book framed by ice.
Ice and cold are principal emblems of the book. Walton himself imagines that he will discover a marvelous country, will discover the secret of why the magnetized needles of compasses point north, may discover the Northwest Passage that would speed trade, imagines that he will benefit mankind in his willful pursuit. He is torn between ambition and empathy, between pursuing his goals to their uttermost end and saving his men’s lives by turning back. When he encounters Frankenstein, his boat is “nearly surrounded by ice, which closed in the ship on all sides, scarcely leaving her the sea room in which she floated. About two o’clock the mist cleared away, and we beheld, stretched out in every direction, vast and irregular plains of ice, which seemed to have no end.”
Ice the destroyer: cold slows things down. In freezing conditions, liquid becomes solid, and the flow and motion of even the inanimate largely stops, and, at the impossible temperature of absolute zero, atoms, molecules, entropy, would stop, and of course life would have ceased long before. Some simple animals freeze solid and then thaw, life stopped and then restarted, and creatures like polar bears and penguins have adaptations that allow them to swim in frigid waters and sleep on ice without harm, but most creatures are menaced by severe cold.
And ice the preserver: the long cores from Greenland’s ice sheet whose air bubbles contain the atmosphere of bygone millennia, the frozen remains of the past found in the far north and the high peaks. Mountaineers who die at the highest levels remain there in perpetuity, stopped at the moment of their death, blanching and desiccating a little but not decaying. Robert Macfarlane tells the story of a European woman whose mountaineer father died high in the Himalayas when she was an infant. At twenty she came to see where he died and found that he had shifted out of his grave, so that she was able to look into his frozen, preserved face and cut a lock of his hair.
It’s a realm of a certain kind of purity, unmuddled by life, by the activity of organisms that reproduce and decay, a nearly monochromatic world of white and blue and gray and black. Nothing decays in extreme cold. In 1991 the corpse of a man emerged from an Austrian-Italian glacier 5,300 years after his death, eroded and compressed, but intact down to his tattoos, weapons, and the contents of his last meals in his frozen stomach. Survivors of a deeper past, mammoths in Siberia, now appear more often in that frozen world now melting.
Cold preserves almost anything. The very word freeze is synonymous in modern English with stopping time, stopping progress, stopping a film, and if time is a river, then perhaps its water may turn to ice. This stopped and stalled time is the far north’s obdurate stability. And then there is the dramatic instability of its coastlines as they annually freeze up and melt. The arrival of the ice landlocks coastal villages and freezes ships in place until spring thaw, creates fissures in the land, turns water into a solid that could be traveled across on foot and by sled. The melt turns that solid ice into an armada of crashing, disintegrating rafts on which people and animals might be stranded, as Frankenstein was when Walton plucked him off an ice floe.
When I was eighteen, I put a map of Antarctica on the wall of my room in the fleabag residential hotel that was my home. It represented a kind of cold hope beyond suffering and passion, beyond society and personality, beyond the familiar and ordinary, a landscape for extremists. That pure far world still fascinates me, that world north or south of trees, of cities, of almost everything, seemingly even of color in those images of white expanses through which white and drab animals move, under a pale or cloudy sky, the elemental earth, the other world at the ends of the world.
Those in the temperate zone often think of the tropics as exuberant and profligate by comparison with the cautious, conservative north, but this is far from true in terms of how the arctic and antarctic regions consume their annual budget of light. The same amount of light and darkness falls on all parts of the earth, but not in the same measure. The equatorial zone portions out its annual budget of light so that days and nights are the same length, year-round. It is a sensible arrangement with little twilight or dawn and much sun directly overhead—a steady, reliable, static plan of light taken in even-size daily doses. And then there is the extravagance of places where summer hardly has darkness and winter hardly has light, as though the light were gambled away or drunk down all in one long exhilarated draught that brings on the long darkness.
Mary Shelley once wrote in her journal that her life with her poet husband was “more passing than an Italian twilight” and made this wish for their newfound tranquility: “May it be a Polar day; yet that, too, has an end.” A summer day at the Pole she must mean, prolonged into unbroken months of light. Part of the madness of Captain Walton in the novel is his description of the arctic as “the region of beauty and delight. There . . . the sun is for ever visible; its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendor.” He has described its nightless summer but not its dayless winter. That time itself is different there marks the strangeness of the north.
We use the language of temperature to describe character and emotion: warmhearted, cold shoulder, icy disposition, the heat of passion. Little more than a year after that entry about the polar sun, a few months after her husband’s sudden death by drowning, Mary Shelley herself wrote, “Have I a cold heart? God knows! But none need envy the icy region this heart encircles; and at least the tears are hot which the emotions of this cold heart forces me to shed.” She had often been called cold because she was reserved.
A year before the summer during which she began Frankenstein, she had lost her first child, a baby girl born prematurely who lived two weeks and then died in the night, so calmly that Mary thought she was sleeping and did not try to wake her until morning. “I am no longer a mother now,” she wrote a friend. On March 19, 1815, she had written in her journal, “Dream that my little baby came to life again—that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it before the fire & it lived. Awoke and found no baby. I think about the little thing all day.” And then she dreamed of it again.
Warmth was life, but cold saved her once. A few years after the death of that first daughter, after the birth of three and death of two more children, when she nearly died from a miscarriage, far from any doctor, her husband, Percy Shelley, saved her by plunging her into a tub of ice and water and, apparently, slowing down the bleeding. Not long after, he plunged into seawater to die, going out in a sailboat with a storm approaching, leaving her a widow with one surviving child. Birth and death were never far apart in her life.
Frankenstein is often remarked upon as a novel in which a man usurps a woman’s power of creating life, which serves as a roundabout reminder that in this way women may be gods and men not, but the man at the center of her novel makes this life out of dead things and elemental forces. He confesses, “I collected bones from charnel houses and with profane fingers meddled with the secrets of the human frame.” Just as Walton imagines himself as a benefactor of mankind even while he endangers the lives of the actual men with him, so Frankenstein imagines himself as a savior. But when he brings his creature to life and then flees it, he is both a parent abandoning a child and a citizen walking away from a calamity in the making. The coldness of this novel that begins and ends in the arctic and climaxes in the great glacial landscape of the high Alps is the coldness of his heart.
Mary Shelley was only eighteen when
she began writing the novel and twenty when it was published. Some of its inspirations are well known. In 1815 a volcano, Mount Tambora, on an island in a Javanese archipelago that is now part of Indonesia, erupted. The most powerful eruption in more than 1,600 years, it killed thousands directly and tens or hundreds of thousands more through famine from the fallen ash and from the strange weather that followed. In Europe and North America, 1816 was known as the year without a summer.
Spring advanced as usual that year, and then it was as though the clock ran backward: the weather became colder instead of warmer, a dry fog covered the northeastern United States, so dimming the sun that sunspots could be seen with the naked eye, crops froze, withered, and failed, snow fell in June, there was ice on the water of lakes and rivers in July and August. In Italy the summer snow was red with ash from the volcano. There were famines. The cold itself was a sign of strangeness and disorder, a nature that had become unnatural and deadly. Mary was not of the class that starved, but she was in Switzerland where the food riots were the most intense in all Europe.
Fifteen years later she recalled, “It proved a wet, uncongenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house. Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands. I have not seen these stories since then; but their incidents are as fresh in my mind as if I had read them yesterday. ‘We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us.” The other three were the poet Byron, who didn’t write a story but did write a nightmarish poem, “Darkness”; his friend Dr. Polidori, who drafted The Vampyre, the gothic tale that begat the immortal genre of vampire stories; and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who didn’t contribute to the project.
Two summers earlier, a few months before her seventeenth birthday, after those joint visits to her mother’s grave, she had eloped with the poet. It was both the start of a great artistic alliance and a cliché from the novels of imperiled female virtue of the time: she was pretty and poor, and he was the reckless, willful, aristocratic heir to a title and a fortune. Shelley seems to have fallen in love a little with what she signified before he grasped who she was. She was a brilliant, strong-willed young woman who would be a fit intellectual companion to him, as well as an ardent, devoted partner, but to him she was first the daughter of the anarchist William Godwin and the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
Wollstonecraft had given birth once before without incident, but in giving birth to Mary Godwin Shelley contracted the infection that raged through her, ravaged her with extraordinary pain, and ended her life ten days after the birth. Her mother found death in birth; Mary Shelley herself entered the world as a killer, if an innocent, unwitting one, and lost all but one of the children she gave birth to. She launched her relationship with Shelley, maybe consummated it, on visits with him to her mother’s grave in London’s St. Pancras churchyard when she was sixteen. And then she wrote a novel that turns the story of her birth inside out, so that a man makes birth out of death.
Wollstonecraft had had her own adventures in the far north, and these too seem to have been an influence upon Frankenstein. She had gone to France to witness the French Revolution in 1792, fallen in love with a swindler, adventurer, and former soldier of the American Revolution, Gilbert Imlay, borne him a child, and been abandoned by him in quick succession. Wollstonecraft’s letters show her to be ardent, devoted, badgering, self-pitying, and incapable of giving up on a romance that had been sour longer than it had been sweet, even when Imlay established himself in London with an actress mistress and otherwise spurned her.
Devastated and suicidal, though tenderly devoted to her daughter Fanny and eager to win back Imlay’s love, Wollstonecraft set out for Scandinavia to locate his stolen merchant ship with its load of silver he’d had smuggled out of France, through the English naval blockade. It was a daring adventure, particularly for a woman with a small child (and French nursemaid) in tow, in remote lands where few spoke English. She confronted the dishonest captain in Norway and pursued the case with various authorities, but never recovered the silver or got recompense. What she brought back instead was a more precious load of observations, analyses, and emotions, first drafted in letters to Imlay, then recast as a travel narrative, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
The slender volume mingled mournful personal expression and brief evocative descriptions of the terrain with headlong social and political critiques of the comparatively democratic, but to her eyes backward, cultures she encountered. Wollstonecraft spoke of death, of melancholy, of abandonment, of injustice, and more, taxing her distant lover with his sins again and again in letters that were better at establishing her neediness than winning him back. She made another suicide attempt when she returned, jumping into the Thames on a rainy night, only to be pulled out again. But her book was a great success.
The poet Robert Southey wrote of Wollstonecraft, “She has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow, with a northern moonlight.” She may have written the book to win back Imlay with a demonstration of her fine mind and strong feeling, but at this she failed. However, the middle-aged William Godwin wrote, “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.” He did fall in love and begat upon her Mary Godwin Shelley, who is thereby, in some sense, the fruit of a match made by a book on northernness, distance, and grief.
Godwin liked married life enough to try it again after Wollstonecraft died of birth, this time with a vehement, unintellectual woman who brought two illegitimate children to the ménage of Godwin, his daughter, and his stepdaughter Fanny Imlay. A son, Mary’s half-brother, was born when she was six. This household of two adults and five children, no two of whom had the same pair of parents, struggled on, her father writing children’s books under an assumed name and working as a bookseller himself. Not quite a wicked stepmother, the new Mrs. Godwin was nevertheless unsympathetic and perhaps hostile. One of Mary’s childhood memories was being dragged by this stepmother out from under the parlor sofa where she had hidden to hear Samuel Taylor Coleridge recite his “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in 1806, a decade before she began her novel.
That poem of sin, accursed wandering, and its memorable scenes of icebergs sailing by, calving and cracking, may be another of the inspirations for her first novel, and wanderers and outcasts were fixtures in Romantic writing, from Wordsworth’s displaced peasants to novels about the Wandering Jew. But despite the exotic settings, much of Frankenstein seems to be made direct out of the material of Mary’s own life, even as Frankenstein’s creature is made out of human remains. Her father had once advocated free love but cut off Mary when she ran off with Shelley. This parent who disowns a child is one version of the irresponsible, distancing inventor that is her Victor Frankenstein.
And Shelley himself is another. Frankenstein is likewise a firstborn son, likewise educated in old alchemical and magical branches and new electrical and medical branches of science. Shelley’s willfulness, his pursuit of his destiny and his pleasures no matter the cost to others, is also an attribute of Frankenstein, who again and again distances himself from the family he claims to love. Early in the book, her protagonist himself proclaims that no man should allow his pursuit to “interfere with his tranquility and his domestic affections,” and similar arguments crop up elsewhere in the book. But Frankenstein shatters those things and travels far in lonely pursuit of his aims.
Young, poor, and female in an age where women had almost no power, Mary assumed the status of an omniscient giant in her book, describing the world on her own terms, depicting her own vision of a world gone wrong, and writing a masterpiece that would dwarf all the works of the Romantic poets in the directness of its impact on the collective imagination. The cinematic version has become so familiar that “Frankenstein” has become the oft-invoked byword for reckless, irresponsible science, an
d the template for a thousand imitations. It is the rare story that becomes, like a myth or fairy tale, part of the necessary furnishings of the imagination and shorthand for an aspect of the human condition. It is the progenitor of a whole genre of books and movies with mad scientists and has inspired the occasional masterpiece, such as the exquisitely melancholy Spanish film The Spirit of the Beehive.
In that burst of inspiration in the wintry summer of 1816, Mary Shelley drew ideas from the conversations of Byron and Shelley about the principles of life, electricity, and other developing scientific matters; from the horror stories they were all telling and reading and the macabre often invoked by Shelley; from a certain spirit of fearless ambition—and the milieu seems to have supercharged her. Certainly, she never again wrote anything so close to a myth in its power. But it is still her own creation, her immortal child. Frankenstein assembles a superhumanly powerful abomination but she composed an undying work of art.
In bringing the creature to life, the medical student becomes three things that echo one another: a parent, an artist, and a god; three kinds of makers. The responsibility of the creator to his creation is the overarching question in this book that is sometimes also about our responsibility to each other, about the empathy and engagement that might prevent such solitary experimenting, such willful individualism. It’s a conservative book at heart, not in favor of conventional mores but of the ties of obligation and affection over individual pursuits, and in that too is a veiled reproach of her husband, the willful, restless, and often selfish poet.
Frankenstein brought fascination and dedication to the making of the creature and little forethought to its actual existence. He made it; he was frightened and repulsed; he ran. His moral weakness, his irresponsibility, is what sets everything in motion, that and the deeply human emotions of the creature who wants fellowship, love, and understanding, and receives rejection. That hideous creature is all too human and particularly adolescent, with an adolescent’s furious sense of justice. The novel prefigures not only debates about scientific responsibility, but also liberal arguments that blame environment and upbringing for bad behavior. “I am malicious because I am miserable. You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph,” says the creature, blaming his parent for his crimes.
The Faraway Nearby Page 4
