Frankenstein - Book 52

I read this book as part of my participation in the Woman's Classic Literature Event (Classics Club).

Frankenstein is an amazing book.  I started to read it a few years ago and couldn't get past the first few pages.  It just felt too heavy to me then.  This time around I was hooked the minute I started to read, which just goes to show you that you should give some books more than one chance.

I read the Ignatius Press edition of this book which opens up with an Introduction by Joseph Pearce.  This intro really made me dislike Percy B. Shelley.  I don't know if that was Pearce's intent but that was the reaction I came away with.  First Percy Shelley runs off with a 16 year old named Harriet and marries her not because he loves her but because he wants to 'mold' her.  He gets her pregnant.  Then he meets and falls in love with Mary, also 16 (and this is just a few months after all this stuff with Harriet). When Mary's father objects to Mary going off with Percy, Percy wants Mary to commit suicide with him.  That doesn't happen but they do run off together.  Harriet has her baby and then a few months later kills herself.  These are selfish, hormonal, impetuous adolescents. Well, Mary is, Percy is older but seems to have embraced being a radical adolescent as a life plan.  I am curious about their marriage.  It only lasted six years before Percy drowned.

Although young, Mary Shelley must have been able to hold her own against Percy's influence, somewhat.  Frankenstein is about taking the consequences for what you create.

The novel starts kind of bizarrely (at least to me) with letters from a man, bent on sailing to the North Pole, to his sister.  He's excited about his great chance at exploration, something he's been working towards for many years.  His ship gets stuck in the ice and though I have no idea how these letters would get from a lone ship stuck in arctic ice back to England, he keeps writing them.  His crew rescues a man from the icy waters, amazed to see a sole human in the wasteland of the northern waters.  While this man, who turns out to be Dr. Frankenstein, relates his story to our explorer, he in turn relates them to his sister in his letters to her.

Dr. Victor Frankenstein starts out nice enough.  He comes from a loving family and is raised with good moral principles.  However his obsession with science and his unbridled pride in doing something no one else has done, something godlike, to create a new creature, leads to his undoing.  Once he accomplishes his goal he completely falls apart.  He is not able to be responsible for what he has created.  He shrinks in loathing and fear from it.  In fact he doesn't even understand what he has created but can only ever view it through his very emotional and reactionary lense.  The creature, it turns out, was of a sensitive and loving nature, who was completely naive for essentially he is like a newborn in a full blown almost super-powered body.  Dr. Frankenstein abandons him immediately.  We don't even know what has happened to the creature for the first two years of its life until it corners Dr. Frankenstein alone on a glacier covered mountain top in the Alps and forces him to listen to him.

This Ignatius Press edition is based on the original by Mary Shelley.  Percy Shelley edited it later, carefully erasing any references to God.  Shelley was an atheist and I guess that meant Mary had to be one too.

(Spoilers!) Through Dr. Frankenstein's craven cowardice and pride, his younger brother, a beloved servant (who is accused of the brother's murder), his best friend and his wife all eventually meet their deaths as a result of the creature, three directly murdered by the creature.  The creature is desperate for companionship and borders on madness in his isolation; he turns to tormenting Frankenstein when he won't give him a wife like himself.

Most of facts of the story belie any real plausibility if you think about them too hard right from the premise about creating the creature to how the creature sustains himself, hides from human notice, learns to speak, etc..  But Shelley's powerful writing and the inexorable pace of the story kept me reading.  Dr. Frankenstein does get pretty irritating in his unremitting self-pity.  He makes every wrong decision you can make.

The whole story though does raise so many powerful questions.  Science and technology do give us powers we don't have the wisdom to handle.  We can not foresee what implications or consequences result from moving full speed ahead with innovation and experimentation.  With all progress comes a downside.  Think of how scientific those gas chambers were at Auschwitz.  Think of eugenic sterilization and cloning, surrogate slavery, sex change operations, abortion.  Of course a lot of good has come about too, but there is always an ugly underbelly to all this.  Playing God is never a good idea.Here's another horrifying way science could be used for evil.

A dark book which raises deep questions.  I am glad I finally read it.

For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.