Well, I haven’t read the book since college, so this is going to be terribly vague, but here goes. First of all, Victor is insane. Maybe not gibbering and frothing at the mouth insane, but he’s got a few bats loose in his belfry, at the very least. He also provides the POV for most of the book, which means right off the bat that we’re dealing with an unreliable narrator. Everything that happens once he begins to tell the ship captain his story needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Up until the very end, Victor is the only person who ever sees the monster and lives. He creates both creatures in total solitude (not counting the prescence of the first monster when he creates the second), so there are no witnesses to provide independent confirmation that his experiments work. When he recounts how he created the creatures, his writing becomes dreamlike, and he omits pretty much all specific details on how he did it, suggesting that the experiments are a hallucination. (Obviously, the real reason for this is that Mary Shelley had no idea how one would revitalize a dead body, and the book was written long before George Roddenbury invented the concept of technobabble.) At one point, the monster comes back to confront him, and reveals that it has learned to read and speak English by spying on (and sometimes interacting with) various peasants in the countryside, but we only have the monster’s word that any of these interactions take place. Most of them are so absurd (he learned English by listening to a peasant teach it to a runaway Arabian princess in a barn :rolleyes: ) that it’s easier to consider them to be the narrator’s delusions, and not actual events.
Most tellingly, everyone the monster kills is somebody that Victor would have a reason to want dead. Including Elizabeth. Recall his dream about her before their wedding night, probably meant to be prophetic, but which reads as really disturbingly Freudian. (Especially disturbing, because Freud wouldn’t be born until almost forty years after the book’s publication.) Victor has some very bizarre and conflicted feelings about marrying Elizabeth, although he never consciously admits to them. Now, my memory is failing me a bit here, because the only other victim I can remember is Victor’s hideously arrogant and spoiled cousin, William, whom any rational, thinking human would want to throttle within ten minutes of making his acquaintance. I forgot who all the rest of the monster’s victims were, but I’m fairly certain that Victor had a reason to want all of them dead, although, again, he never admits such motivations. Victor didn’t create the monster as a seperate being made out of spare parts, or even as a science-engendered, physiologically different alter-ego in the mode of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but rather, Frankenstein’s monster is an alternate personality created by Victor’s sublimated emotions, chiefly anger and sexual frustration. The novel is neither fantastic or proto-science fiction, but the entirely pedestrian account of a man with acute schizophrenia and multiple-personality disorder.
Of course, the end of the novel blows the lid off this theory, as an independent party (the ship captain) finally encounters the monster shortly after Victor’s death. But I got the distinct impression when I read the novel that this was a deliberate Twilight Zonish “twist” ending: the monster we are meant to assume is a figment of a madman’s delusions turns out to be a very real, flesh-and-blood creature. If you can read the novel with absolutely no preconceived notions of what the story is actually about (which is, basically, impossible, thanks to more than a century of film adaptations), the whole thing can be read as one of the most effective pieces of literary misdirection of the 19th century.
To be clear, I’m not claiming for a minute that Mary Shelley intended such an interpretation. I’m just contending that such an interpretation is wholly consistent with what she wrote. I belong to the school of thought that holds any interpretation is valid, regardless of authorial intent, so long as it can be supported by the text. I also admit that my interpretation of Frankenstein was likely heavily influenced by my having seen Fight Club for the first time a few weeks prior to reading the book. My interpretation is not meant to be exclusive of any other interpretation, just a different way to approach the work. My interpretation is not valid for employees of Frankenstein, Inc, or their friends or relatives. Some restrictions apply, void where prohibited by law, ask your doctor for details, and so forth.
