by Mary Shelley
“After the murder of Clerval, I returned to Switzerland, heart-broken and overcome. I pitied Frankenstein; my pity amounted to horror: I abhorred myself. But when I discovered that he, the author at once of my existence and of its unspeakable torments, dared to hope for happiness; that while he accumulated wretchedness and despair upon me, he sought his own enjoyment in feelings and passions from the indulgence of which I was for ever barred, then impotent envy and bitter indignation filled me with an insatiable thirst for vengeance. I recollected my threat, and resolved that it should be accomplished. I knew that I was preparing for myself a deadly torture; but I was the slave, not the master of an impulse, which I detested, yet could not disobey. Yet when she died!—nay, then I was not miserable. I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil thenceforth became my good. Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly chosen. The completion of my demoniacal design became an insatiable passion. And now it is ended; there is my last victim!”
I was at first touched by the expressions of his misery; yet when I called to mind what Frankenstein had said of his powers of eloquence and persuasion, and when I again cast my eyes on the lifeless form of my friend, indignation was re-kindled within me. “Wretch!” I said, “it is well that you come here to whine over the desolation that you have made. You throw a torch into a pile of buildings, and when they are consumed you sit among the ruins, and lament the fall. Hypocritical fiend! if he whom you mourn still lived, still would he be the object, again would he become the prey of your accursed vengeance. It is not pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your malignity is withdrawn from your power.”
“Oh, it is not thus—not thus,” interrupted the being; “yet such must be the impression conveyed to you by what appears to be the purport of my actions. Yet I seek not a fellow-feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now, that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone, while my sufferings shall endure: when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings, who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of bringing forth. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now vice has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No crime, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I call over the frightful catalogue of my deeds, I cannot believe that I am he whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendant visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am quite alone.
“You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and his misfortunes. But, in the detail which he gave you of them, he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured, wasting in impotent passions. For whilst I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were for ever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me? Why do you not hate Felix, who drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.
“But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived, and long for the moment when they will meet my eyes, when it will haunt my thoughts, no more.
“Fear not that I shall be the instrument of future mischief. My work is nearly complete. Neither your’s nor any man’s death is needed to consummate the series of my being, and accomplish that which must be done; but it requires my own. Do not think that I shall be slow to perform this sacrifice. I shall quit your vessel on the ice-raft which brought me hither, and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been. I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense, will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness. Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer, and heard the rustling of the leaves and the chirping of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes, and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?
“Farewell! I leave you, and in you the last of human kind whom these eyes will ever behold. Farewell, Frankenstein! If thou wert yet alive, and yet cherished a desire of revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than in my destruction. But it was not so; thou didst seek my extinction, that I might not cause greater wretchedness; and if yet, in some mode unknown to me, thou hast not yet ceased to think and feel, thou desirest not my life for my own misery. Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine; for the bitter sting of remorse may not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them for ever.
“But soon,” he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.”
He sprung from the cabin-window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.
THE END.
How to Read Frankenstein
Frankenstein is a novel that can be read and analyzed from many points of view: biographical, formalist, psychoanalytical, feminist, Marxist, deconstructionist, new historical—to name a few. Here, I suggest that we are best served by reading the novel in two ways: as a conflation of the three basic Western myths about the dangerous consequences of the pursuit of knowledge, and as a doppelgänger novel that stresses the interconnections among the characters. Both of these “readings” may be extended to the many film adaptations of the novel.
Two of the Western myths about the dangers of the pursuit of knowledge are readily apparent in the novel: the Monster’s reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost takes us to the Genesis myth and the punishment of man for defying God’s prohibition against eating from the Tree of Knowledge; and the subtitle of the novel, “The Modern Prometheus,” and the many uses of Promethean “fire” in the text remind us that Prometheus was punished for stealing fire or knowledge from Zeus and giving it
to man. The third myth did not become explicit in the novel until Mary Shelley revised her text for the 1831 edition and alluded to Plato’s Symposium, specifically to Aristophanes’ myth about primal, multilimbed, and globular man seeking to dethrone the gods on Mount Olympus. In that revision, Mary Shelley changed Frankenstein’s very general phrase in the 1818 edition about friendship with Henry Clerval (“I agree with you . . . in believing that friendship is not only a desirable, but a possible acquisition”) to a much more specific judgment about human nature (“I agree with you, . . . we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves—such a friend ought to be—do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures”).
That reference to the “half made up” creatures comes from the debate about the nature of Love in Plato’s Symposium, in which various men at a banquet treat the subject in a series of speeches. Although Socrates will eventually win the debate (with the help of Diotima) by explaining that Love is a child of Penury and Plenty, Aristophanes offers the most elaborate and entertaining explanation: that Love is the desire to make whole and entire what once was whole and entire. In a variation of the Adam and Eve myth, primal man (distributed through three “sexes”: male, female, and androgynous), who was globular (and could presumably roll part of the way up Mount Olympus) and four limbed, had the ability to ascend to the heavens and challenge the gods. “Angered by man’s presumption or pride, the gods split each of the three sexes down the middle into separate halves so that they might never again have the ability to enter the precincts of the gods.” Love, Aristophanes explains, is the desire for self to reunite with its second self, its other half. Although Mary Shelley may not have known or remembered this myth prior to publishing the first edition in 1818, she certainly knew it by July 1818 when she transcribed Percy Bysshe Shelley’s translation of the Symposium.
The splitting in half of man conveniently introduces the second major way to read Frankenstein: as a complex doppelgänger novel in which all the major characters may be read as portions of Victor Frankenstein’s divided personality. Not only does Frankenstein see himself in the Monster (as is evidenced even in the early 1910 Edison film adaptation of the novel), but we can see aspects of him reflected in the other characters: Walton and even Clerval serve as Frankenstein’s equivalents in their ambition and pursuit of knowledge, while Elizabeth and, again, Clerval represent the complementary heart that Victor needs to be whole and entire (note that Clerval pursues the social sciences of politics and linguistics, in contrast to Victor, who isolates himself in the laboratory of the hard sciences). Hence, when Victor abandons Elizabeth and Clerval, heart and home, to go off to university and, as it were, eat of the Tree of Knowledge, he begins a journey to psychic suicide, which is represented by self (Frankenstein) pursuing self (Monster) to the death in the Arctic wastes.
A diagram helps to outline the character relationships as they double up in this novel:
HEAD
Robert Walton
Victor Frankenstein
The Monster
HEART
Margaret
Walton Saville
Elizabeth & Clerval
The Female Monster
Note how the Monster responds (killing Elizabeth and Clerval) after Frankenstein destroys the Female Monster—both actions are identical, and both further isolate the two protagonists, whose lives mirror each other.
I should alert the reader that I have been calling Frankenstein’s creation the “Monster”; other critics and screenwriters will often call him the “Creature” instead. In the author’s introduction to the 1831 edition, Mary Shelley avoids both words, using instead “phantasm,” “handywork,” “thing” (two times), “hideous corpse,” “phantom,” “spectre,” “progeny,” and “offspring” to name her creation. Percy Shelley studiously avoids any word for the creation in the preface he wrote for the first edition, and in his review of his wife’s novel he uses the words “creature,” “abortion,” and “anomaly” in three incidental places, but he names him five times as the “Being.” Both of the Shelleys thus seem to avoid using a single word (except Percy’s neutral “Being”) to name the creation, and no clear pattern of denomination appears in the text of the novel, where he is called by different characters the different names of “monster,” “creature,” “daemon” (typographically represented as “daemon” in this edition), “being,” “wretch,” and “devil.” By having no single name, the Monster has perforce a universality that embraces all of mankind; indeed, when Mary Shelley saw in the playbill of the first theatrical performance of her novel that a mere “———” was being played by Mr. T. Cooke, she remarked in a letter to Leigh Hunt that “this nameless mode of naming the un[n]ameable is rather good” (although Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein more often than not denominated the creation a “monster”). In effect, Mary Shelley forces each reader (and viewer) to be complicitous, having to use a name and make a moral judgment about Frankenstein’s creation: those who use the word “Creature” tend to sympathize with him (and excuse his actions); those who use the word “Monster” tend to hold him accountable for his murders. By attending so emphatically to the nameless, Mary Shelley indirectly asks the reader also to consider the etymologies of the forenames and surnames used for the other characters in this novel.
Two of the named characters to consider, both of whom may represent Mary Shelley herself, are Margaret Walton Saville (note the initials MWS) and Safie, the two names being homophones (if Saville is pronounced as French). The first of these names takes us to the outermost frame story, in which Robert Walton writes to his sister, MWS, over a period of 276 days (the gestation period) from 11 December 17[96] to 12 September 17[97] (the bracketed years supplied in accord with a perpetual calendar), the dates roughly in accord with the time Mary Shelley was conceived and born. The dates of Walton’s journal enable us to go back and read Victor’s creation of the Monster in accord with the dates of the French Revolution (1789) and the Reign of Terror (1793) or, for that matter, with the Industrial Revolution and perhaps, by extension, with any technological revolution by which man, thinking he can change the world for the better, ultimately enslaves and destroys himself.
The second of these names takes us to the innermost story, in which Safie is introduced as a means by which the Monster learns to speak and to read. The very carefully chosen name Safie (she was originally called Maimouna and then Amina) suggests Sophie or Sophia and hence knowledge or wisdom—and reminds us again that Frankenstein is a novel about the dangerous consequences of the pursuit of knowledge. Those consequences are explored in each layer of this frame story, in which we encounter Walton narrating his own story as well as Victor’s, Victor narrating his own as well as the Monster’s, and the Monster narrating his own as well that of the De Laceys’—all centered by the story of Safie, whose considerable learning does not enable her to look beyond the ugly countenance of the Monster as she flees the De Lacey cottage in her last scene. That flight from a displeasing “countenance” becomes a trope throughout much of the novel—and indeed through all the film adaptations. However, what horrifies us the most is not the Monster but the responses to the Monster. At the very center of the novel, the Monster is spurned by Felix (the happy), Agatha (the good), and Safie (the knowing). Even more horrible is the Monster’s own self-deprecation in his final words to Walton: “You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself.” Frankenstein, ultimately, is a novel about self-loathing; and the Monster’s final exit in “darkness and distance” predicts “The horror! The horror!” of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, another doppelgänger frame tale published at the end of the nineteenth century.
Chronology
Most of the entries in this selective chronology construct a narrative about the conception, production, publication, and reception of Mary Shelley’s novel—tracing the first incarnation of the Frankenstein “phenomenon” between 1814 and 1832, including both the book reviews between 1818 and 1832 and the flurry of theatrical adaptations between 1823 and 1826. For an even more extensive chronology (with bibliographical citations for each entry), see Robinson, The Frankenstein Notebooks, lxxvi–cx. In the entries below, MWS and PBS stand for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
July 28, 1814: Having recently declared their love for each other, the sixteen-year-old MWS (accompanied by her slightly younger stepsister, Claire Clairmont) and the twenty-one-year-old PBS (despite being married to Harriet Westbrook) “elope” to the continent for what later became known as their “Six Weeks’ Tour.”
December 28, 1814: MWS attends André-Jacques Garnerin’s lecture in London on electricity, galvanism, gasses, and phantasmagoria, revealing that she was interested in matters scientific and spectacular prior to conceiving and publishing Frankenstein.
March 6, 1815: MWS and PBS’s daughter (born prematurely on February 22) dies.
Late August/early September 1815: MWS, with her stepbrother, Charles Clairmont; PBS; and Thomas Love Peacock, visits Oxford and sees the rooms where, according to Clairmont, PBS (together with his fellow student Thomas Jefferson Hogg) “poured with the incessant & unwearied application of an Alchemyst over the artificial & natural boundaries of human knowledge.”
January 24, 1816: MWS gives birth to William Shelley, who is near her side during much of the composition of Frankenstein.
