The church yard scene, in which Frankenstein visits the tombs of his family, his quitting Geneva and his journey thro’ Tartary to the shores of the Frozen Ocean, resembles at once the terrible reanimation of a corpse, and the supernatural career of a spirit. The scene in the cabin of Walton’s ship, the more than mortal enthusiasm and grandeur of the Being’s speech over the dead body of his victim, is an exhibition of intellectual and imaginative power, which we think the reader will acknowledge has seldom been surpassed.
-from the Athenaeum
(November 10, 1832)
Questions
1. What can be understood from what the monster reads? The collection of books he finds in the woods takes us from the spiritual history of the world to imperial decline to the concentrated essence of Romanticism. Does the monster’s reading lead him astray or equip him to deal with the world?
2. How does the way in which the story of Frankenstein is told-that is, through letters and the characters’ speech-affect one’s reading of the novel?
3. Frankenstein and many derivative books and films have been immensely popular. There is something about this story and its spin-offs that gets to us. What is it? The danger of scientific Promethianism-that is, daring to go beyond the realm of man and into that of the divine? The pathos of being an outcast? Fear of the dead coming to life and seeking revenge? The monster’s character as a marauding embodiment of our unconscious rage?
FOR FURTHER READING
Novels by Mary Shelley: First Editions
Falkner. A Novel. 3 vols. London: Saunders and Otley, 1837.
The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, A Romance. 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830.
Frankenstein; or, The Modem Prometheus. 3 vols. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mayor, and Jones, 1818. The original text, including Percy Shelley’s “Preface” (written in Mary’s voice).
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831. Shelley’s revised edition of the 1818 text, with a new “Author’s Introduction.”
The
Last
Man. 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1826.
Lodore. 3 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1835.
Mathilda. Edited by Elizabeth Nitchie. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 19 5 9 . Shelley wrote this novel in 1819 and 1820; because her father, William Godwin, was outraged by the incest theme, he suppressed its publication. This is the first published edition.
Valperga: or, the Life and
Adventures
of
Castruccio,
Prince of Lucca. 3 vols. London: G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1823.
Letters and Journals
The Journals of Mary Shelley: 1814-1844. 2 vols. Edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. 3 vols. Edited by Betty T. Bennett. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 19 8 0-19 8 8.
Major Innuences on Frankenstein
For a more thorough list, see Shelley’s reading lists for the period 1814-1818 in The Journals of Mary Shelley, volume 1, pages 85-103.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Christabel and Other Poems. 1816.
Davy, Sir Humphry. Elements of Chemical Philosophy. 1812.
Godwin, William. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness. 17 9 3 .
__________
. Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1798.
- Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. 1794.
Goethe, Johann Wilhelm von. Die Leiden des jungen Werthers [The Sorrows of Werter]. 1774; translated 1779.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 1667.
Plutarch. Parallel Lives. c.120 A.D.; translated 1579.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques.
Émile.
1762; read in French by Shelley.
Volney, Constantin François de Chasseboeuf, comte de. Les ruines; ou, Meditation sur les revolutions des empires. 1791; read in French by Shelley.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. 1787.
. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792.
. Maria, or, The Wrongs of Woman. 1798.
Works About Mary Shelley and Frankenstein
Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. The role of politics and technology in the creation of Shelley’s monster.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Part of the Modern Critical Interpretations series; a collection of notable essays that includes important feminist criticism by Barbara Johnson and Margaret Homans.
Forry, Steven Earl. Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Illustrated study of Frankenstein’s appearance and reception on stage and screen, with full texts of seven plays (including Presumption) .
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. A foundational work of feminism that includes a chapter on Frankenstein.
Levine, George, and U. C. Knoepflmacher, eds. The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. The first collection of scholarly essays on Frankenstein; includes Ellen Moers’s “Female Gothic” and Peter Brooks’s “Godlike Science/ Unhallowed Arts: Language, Nature, and Monstrosity.”
Marshall, Tim. Murdering to Dissect: Grave-Robbing, Frankenstein, and the Anatomy Literature. Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press and St. Martin’s Press, 1995. A study of the relationship between crime, medicine, and the concept of the human body during Shelley’s time.
Mellor, Anne. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Methuen, 19 8 8. Important study of the creation of Frankenstein, with special attention to Percy Shelley’s role.
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Indispensable feminist critique of the work of mother and daughter.
Shaw, Debra Benita. Women, Science, and Fiction: The Frankenstein Inheritance. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Shelley’s influence on science-fiction writers.
Smith, Johanna M. Mary Shelley. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. A thorough survey of Mary Shelley’s writings, including plays, poems, and literary biographies that are still on the margins of critical discussion.
Spark, Muriel. Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary
Wollstonecraft
Shelley. Had-leigh, Essex, United Kingdom: Tower Bridge Publications, 1951. The biography that introduced Shelley as a subject for serious academic study.
Sunstein, Emily W. Mary Shelley: Romance
and
Reality. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. A prize-winning biography of Shelley.
a
The publishers Colburn and Bendy selected Shelley’s 1831 edition of Frankenstein as the ninth novel in their inexpensive Standard Novels Series.
c
Shelly married the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) in 1816; he died by drowning.
d
According to legend, Tom of Coventry was struck blind when he looked at Lady Godiva.
e
The tomb of the Capulets is where Romeo and Juliet end their lives in Shakespeare’s play.
f
The preface was written by Percy Shelley, in his wife’s voice.
g
In this sense, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth, OED), “The maintenance of the proper relation between the representations of nearer and more distant objects in a picture ... the maintenance of harmony of composition.”
h
“A heavy sea in which large waves rise and clash upon the coast without apparent cause” (OED).
i
Some sources, notably the OED, distinguish the meaning of daemon (“inferior divinity”) from that of demon (“evil spirit”), but Shelley seems to use these words interchangeably.
l
Italian for “slaves always fretting.” Elizabeth’s father is associated with Italians rebelling under the Austrian domination of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
m
A country house. Belrive is 4 miles from Geneva on the southwest shore of Lake Geneva.
n
Temperament; constitutional frame of mind; disposition. Note that in the preceding paragraph, Frankenstein claims that “it was my temper to avoid a crowd.”
o
By “natural philosophy,” Frankenstein means what is now called natural science.
p
A resort on the south (French) shore of Lake Geneva.
r
Frankenstein is thinking of a poem by the Romantic writer Charles Lamb (1775-1834),
The Old Familiar Faces
(1798)
.
s
The air or manner of a person as expressive of personality or mood.
t
Buildings or other structures where dead bodies or bones are deposited.
u
The relation of cause and effect; the operation of causal force.
v
Author’s note: Coleridge’s
Ancient
Mariner.
x
A grassy plain to the south of Geneva, used by promenaders.
y
A light two-wheeled, single-seated, one-horse carriage.
z
A suburb to the north of Geneva.
aa
Now called Chamonix; a beautiful valley that lies at the base of Mont Blanc and near the Mer de Glace (“sea of ice”), which Frankenstein describes on pages 87-88.
ab
Frankenstein is contrasting the rounded cone or dome (“dôme”) of Mont Blanc with the pointed peaks (“aiguilles”) that surround it.
ac
Branches of the river Arve.
ad
Author’s note: The moon.
af
The former capital of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires; since 1930 it has been called Istanbul.
ag
A believer in the Muslim religion; also a now-obscure reference to a Turk.
ah
The fugitives’ journey to Turkey takes them through Mont Cenis, in southeastern France, and Leghorn (Livorno), an important Tuscan port.
ai
The sirocco, a hot, dust-filled wind from the deserts of Libya, in northern Africa, that blows on the northern Mediterranean coast, especially in Italy and its environs.
aj
An introduction to a discourse.
ak
(Strasbourg), a large city and major inland port 70 miles north of Basel, Switzerland.
al
Author’s note: Wordsworth’s
Tintem Abbey.
am
Clerval and Frankenstein cross the English Channel and continue to sail west up the Thames River toward London.
an
In Oxford the Thames River is known as the Isis.
ao
Mental weariness and dissatisfaction; boredom.
ap
A cluster of islands off the north coast of Scotland.
ar
An omen; an indication of a future event.
as
Sessions of the superior courts held periodically in English counties for the purpose of trying civil and criminal cases.
at
Frankenstein’s reference in French to his homesickness for Switzerland.
au
The original name for the French port of Le Havre.
av
A small, goatlike antelope that inhabits the highest ridges of the mountains of Europe and the Caucasus.
aw
“Your vessel” is Walton’s ship; the words take readers away from the story of Frankenstein’s experiments and back out to the “frame tale” of Walton’s ambitious voyage.
ay
In this context: astonishing, strange, surprising.