J.G. Keely's Reviews > Frankenstein

If you have not read the book, then you do not know Frankenstein or his monster. Certainly, there is a creature in our modern mythology which bears that name, but he bears strikingly little resemblance to the original.

It is the opposite with Dracula, where, if you have seen the films, you know the story. Indeed, there is a striking similarity between nearly all the Dracula films, the same story being told over and over again: Harker, bug-eating Renfield, doting Mina, the seduction of Lucy, Dr. Van Helsing, the sea voyage from Varna, the great decaying estate--it's all there, in both book and cultural myth. Even the lines tend to recur, as almost every retelling has some version of the famed "I never drink--wine."

But think of Frankenstein's story, the moments that define it: the mountain castle, the corpse-thieving, the hunch-backed assistant, the silently shambling monster, the pitchfork-wielding mob, the burning windmill--none of these things appear in the original story. The first puzzlement comes when the story begins on a swift ship in the arctic, told in letters between the captain and his beloved sister.

The structure of the story as it follows is, in many ways, not ideal. It is not streamlined, focused, or particularly believable. It seems that every picturesque cabin in the woods is inhabited by fallen nobility, that every criminal trial is undertaken on false pretenses to destroy some innocent person, that an eight-foot-tall monstrosity can live in your woodshed for a year without being noticed, and that that same monstrosity can learn to be fluent and even eloquent in both speaking and reading an unknown language merely by watching its use.

The style itself is ponderous and florid, as Shelley ever is, which is fine when she has some interesting idea to communicate, but bothersome when she finds herself vacillating--which is often, since our hero, the good doctor, is constantly sitting about, thinking about what he might do next, and usually, avoiding actually doing anything. I understand the deep conflict within him, but it might have been more effective to actually see him act on some of his momentary urges before switching instead of letting it all play out in his head.

But then, it's hard to think of him as the hero, anyways, since his activities tend to be so destructive to everyone around him. Sure, he is aware of this tendency--hyper-aware, really--and constantly blames himself, but he doesn't come across as especially sympathetic.

The monster, on the other hand, is truly naive and hopeless, unable to change his fate though he often tries to do so, while the doctor tends to avoid doing anything that might improve the situation. There is a very Greek sense of tragedy at hand, in that we have a man who, though combined action and inaction, drives himself inevitably to utter ruin.

As Edith Hamilton defines it, tragedy is a terrible event befalling someone who has such deep capacity for emotion that they are able to recognize and feel every awful moment, and Dr. Frankenstein certainly has this capacity. In fact, he seems to have an overabundance of such feeling, to the point that he spends most of his time wallowing and declaring his woe--which is not always endearing.

But the tragedy remains the most interesting and engaging part of the book, overcoming the sometimes repetitive details of the story. It is an entwined tragedy, a double tragedy between the man and his creation, and it's never quite clear who is at fault, who is the villain, and who is the wretch. The roles are often traded from moment to moment, and there is no simple answer to wrap up the conflict.

Of course, the classic reading of this is an exploration of the relationship between man and his universe (often personified by 'god'). As human beings, we see our lives as a narrative, ourselves as the hero, and we look for villains to blame for our short-comings. the way Shelley lets this story play out between these two entangled lives, each justifying himself and blaming the other for every hardship forces the reader to look at how he does the same thing in every day of his own life.

Looking at the tale as it is presented, it is easy to read Dr. Frankenstein as the figure of 'god', the creator and authority, the author of life. We see the monster's pain and suffering and on one hand, it is all the result of his being created in the first place, and of his creator not planning well enough. But beyond that, there are also the actions and choices the monster makes that make him a monster--his own will.

But I began to look at it in the opposite way: the doctor creates a monster for which he can blame all of his problems, a force which dictates every moment of his life, which causes all of his pains, which haunts him, powerful and unseen, at every moment. Frankenstein has created a god. He has made a force which can lord over him, a god which resembles man, only more powerful, indestructible, inescapable, terrible. In the end, who is the real 'modern Prometheus'?

For almost the entire book, the only person who ever sees the monster is the doctor himself, and since the doctor is present for all of the killings, it isn't hard to interpret this story as the self-justification of a madman: the doctor, himself, could be doing all of the killings, causing all of the malice, and then explaining it away as the acts of a horrific creature that only he can see, that only he can speak to.

However, I am not willing to carry this 'unreliable narrator' reading to its bitter end, since the story itself does not quite support it--but the fact that the monster can almost be read this way intensifies to the degree to which it is a story of two intertwined egos, each one blaming the other, like so many toxic relationships between people, or even between one half of a troubled mind and the other.

But for all that the core idea of the story is strong and thought-provoking, it is still long-winded, unfocused, and repetitive. It is certainly impressive for the first novel of a nineteen-year-old, and demonstrates splendid imagination, but it does not benefit from her literary affectations. However, her style is still thoughtful and refined, unlike the halting half-measures of Stoker's small-minded Dracula , there is a great expanse here, a wide vista which well-reflects the Victorian artist's obsession with the horror of 'the sublime'.