Personally, I thought it was wonderful. I hadn’t read it since high school so there were a few things that made me go, “What the hell? I don’t remember that!” (seriously, he was engaged to his adopted sister?!?) but by and large I enjoyed it very much. I really loved that he used largely debunked science only because nobody told him it wasn’t considered valid anymore.
I found the pacing to be very slow which seems to be an issue with some of the older classics, so for this next month we are going to choose from a more modern set of books. Unfortunately this means they aren’t free on the kindle, but they should be cheap from used bookstores and available at every public library.
There is definitely a lot of pontificating in the book.
It’s worth noting that when we read this book, we’re experiencing writing that was produced near the beginning of the development of the English-language novel. It’s not that Frankenstein was published near the year of the first novel; it had been a hundred years since Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) came out. But this book definitely comes near the beginning of the flood of novels that will only start to pour out in the nineteenth century.
The conventions were still being created. An emphasis on action (as opposed to speechifying by characters and/or by the narrator) lay in the future. (That said, Jane Austen did a far better job of keeping the speeches to a minimum, during the same time period as the first publication of Frankenstein.)
Anyway: I hadn’t read this before. I was surprised about Captain Walton, and also surprised that Victor was only 21 (or so) when he made the Creature.
Did no one else read the book? I was hoping for more discussion, but if no one else read it I get that. Hopefully the choices for next month will generate a little more participation.
I’m reading it! But just coincidentally - didn’t realize it was a book club selection, and just stumbled upon this thread.
Since I am out of sync with the rest of you I’m not actually done yet - 59% of the way through, according to my Kindle.
Not sure of the rules of this thread, but I’m going to assume unboxed spoilers. If that is not the case, please let me know and skim past this post.
I’m right at the point where the monster has told Frankenstein that he wants him to make him a bride.
I have mixed feelings about this one, frankly. The writing is good in that early 19th century manner, but I don’t think the voices are differentiated enough. How different, really, are Victor, or Henry, or his cousin, or his father? Or the monster, for that matter?
Speaking of the monster…I knew before I even started that he was much more articulate in the book than he is in the movies. But I can’t believe just HOW articulate he is. And frankly, it annoys me. I can much more readily believe that a scientist could re-animate a stitched-together corpse than I can that that same corpse could spend a year spying on a rural family from a distance and learn to speak and read as well as he does. I mean, he’s reading Paradise Lost for Christ’s sake. It just feels lazy on Mary Shelley’s part, as though she just wouldn’t know how else to make a character speak.
Another thing that bothers me is Frankenstein’s immediate and utter revulsion from the monster. It comes out of nowhere. He isn’t just scared of what he’s done; he hates it. When his brother is murdered he’s convinced - on no grounds whatsoever - that the monster is responsible. Why? (Of course, he’s right - but that just feels like more manipulated plot mechanics.)
So…I dunno. I’m going to finish, and I’m curious to see what happens with the bride, but I’m just not completely sold on this yet.
There is speculation that this reflects a rather traumatic event in Mary Shelley’s life: at 17 she gave birth to her illegitimate child by Percy Bysshe Shelley (whose own wife had just given birth, too). The baby died a few days later and Shelley wasn’t there—he’d taken off to carouse with Mary’s hated stepsister Claire Clairmont.
Many scholars see the character of Victor as having been based on P. B. Shelley. From Mary’s point of view, Percy had fled from his illegitimate and sickly baby, just as Victor fled from his own creation.
From https://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/shelleybio.html
Mary clearly had mixed feelings about Shelley (she marrieed him and bore him children and mourned his death, but the fact was that he didn’t always treat her well). We might be intended to have similarly mixed feelings about Victor’s treatment of the monster.
I also thought the immediate revulsion was strange. What, he thought that the stolen corpse parts were going to win some sort of beauty contest before he saw them all assembled? The revulsion he feels seems almost like a post-partum depression type of thing, which could be what Shelley was going for if this was based on a rocky relationship and an illegitimate baby that didn’t make it.
An interesting thing I noticed about the novel is that the story makes a lot more sense if you assume that the monster doesn’t actually exist, and is a delusion concocted by Frankenstein to cover up his own homicidal impulses.
I actually prefer the first edition to the more famous third. In one, Elizabeth is a distant cousin of Victor’s and in the other, Victor’s parents essentially bought her from a poor Italian family.
Weird how the author (and Captain Walton) thought it was possible to sail to the North Pole. Maybe she was just incredibly prescient about climate change?
I read somebody’s graduate thesis about how Frankenstein was an important feminist book by an important feminist author. She seemed undeterred that there were no actual female characters (Elizabeth was a plot device and poor Safie was barely even that). If Mary Shelley identified personally with any character, it was Victor. Funny how Victor spent months, years on these coaching trips around Europe writing passionate letters to Elizabeth, but only spent about four days with her total as an adult.
I’d love to see a “Gothic Bromance” mash-up of Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights:
Heathcliff: My poor Catherine is dead! Never will I see her again!
Victor: Actually, there is a way you could…
It comes to many as a shock to learn that the original Frankenstein was a handsome young medical student!
There was a notion in the Nineteenth Century that there might be an open polar sea at the Pole, if you could break through the surrounding coastal ice.
Before Frankenstein, in the circa-1800 Christian world view, human life had been created in two ways–once by God breathing life into Adam and Eve, and then by mothers bearing children.
Frankenstein can be read as a metaphor for either process of creation. What is the responsibility of a parent to his/her children, or of God to humanity? The idea that parents have responsibility to nurture children was not controversial, either in 1800 or today. Frankenstein’s failure as a father is so grotesque as to perhaps be uninteresting.
But what about his failure as a god? What about God’s failure as a god? In the Bible, God is repelled by his creation when Eve and Adam sin. He consigns mankind to a life of hard labor, and denies salvation until an act of grace several thousand years later. Is Frankenstein’s failure a backhanded slap at Christianity?
On the flip side, Frankenstein has arrogated unto himself the prerogatives of God. He finds it isn’t as easy as he thought. Doesn’t he deserve his comeuppance? In this reading, the book defends God by positing creation as something beyond human ken.
Whatever the merits of the metaphor, one has to respect Frankenstein as the progenitor of so much pop-culture follow-on. The stitched-together corpse, the jolt of electricty, the monster turning on its creator–all will be with us forever.
Okay, I’ve finished the book and…I feel conflicted.
On the one hand, I’m glad I read it. For one thing it’s such an iconic work that I feel like it’s something that should be read, and it’s short enough that there isn’t a huge investment in it.
Shelley’s prose is quite graceful, and she taps into some deep kind of horror in her description of the relationship of Frankenstein and his creation. There really are memorable scenes of horror in the book - most notably, for me, the scene in the Scottish isles when Frankenstein is working on the monster’s bride, then decides to destroy her.
On the other hand, as mentioned before, I just couldn’t get over 1) how all the characters spoke EXACTLY the same way. This was increasingly bothersome to me. There was no way to distinguish the monster from Frankenstein from Henry from his father from Elizabeth and on and on. Shelley had one narrow way of writing, and that, apparently, was all she could do.
And 2) the seemingly mindless changes of passion exhibited by Frankenstein and the monster. It was absurd, the level of sudden hatred they felt for one another, and then absurd, again, how the monster instantly repented as soon as Frankenstein died. It just made no sense.
In the end I’m glad I read it. But I would recommend it only hesitantly, and would not seek out more of Shelley’s work.
Incidentally, I think this may be the rare case of a book that is improved by a movie adaptation. James Whales’ “Bride of Frankenstein” is, as best I can recall, a masterpiece on a level that I’m not sure the book is.
Rodgers01, I agree with your assessments of deficiencies in the book. Over the years, I gather, most have come to a conclusion similar to yours: it’s a good book to read given the influence it’s had, but it’s not necessarily “literature” as such.
I’m quite interested in the question of how the Whale-movie changes came about. The Wikipedia article on the 1931 film lists no fewer than six writers who contributed to the screenplay. But, unfortunately, the article goes into no detail about the decisions to make both the protagonist and the monster differ in so many ways from those we find in the novel.