“The publishers of the standard novels, in selecting Frankenstein for one of their series, expressed a wish that I should furnish them with some account of the origin of the story. I am the more willing to comply because I shall thus give a general answer to the question so very frequently asked me‒ how I, then a young girl, came to think of and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea.”
-Mary Shelley
Frankenstein is an icon of pop culture and after spending the past week in its freakishly horrific pages, I’ve just begun to understand why. Mary was only 16 when she thought of the idea for her novel that revolutionized the horror and science fiction genres. Victor Frankenstein is an impressively intelligent and passionate university student who had become gripped with a singular ambition: animating life from death. Rather than spending time with his family and loved ones, he chooses to roam amongst slaughterhouses and graveyards, searching for the proper organs and corpses to stitch his creature together. Once he witnesses the ugliness of his creation come to life, Frankenstein flees in horror and disgust. Why he runs away, I’m still in awe, but somehow his shallow aesthetic values prevailed over the reality of the biological marvel before him.
The creature escapes the laboratory and spends the subsequent months hiding in hovels and forests, intently watching human life in the villages. He steals several books, learns how to read, write and speak French, and studies the mannerisms and culture of human society. He becomes eloquent, reads Paradise Lost, empathizes with the pain he sees in humans, and learns to appreciate aesthetic beauty in people, while also realizing the horror in the aesthetics of his own countenance. He almost appeared to be ‒ dare I say ‒ human. Confronting the villagers that he had watched and learned from for the past several months, he was met with frightening shrieks and was cast out into the wilderness once again. Rejected by everyone, including his own creator, he became despondent and filled with bitter notions of revenge and returned to wreak havoc on his own creator. The rest of the novel details the struggle between Victor Frankenstein and his own creation.
At first glance, this novel might
I say this often, but this book will be on my mind for quite a while. I guess that’s a testament to its legacy. It was a dense read, but I honestly loved every page. I loved it for its witty prose and brutally real descriptions. But most of all, I think I enjoyed it so much for one reason ‒ this reason being the one that keeps people hooked over two hundred years later ‒ its bold attempt to answer that fundamental question:
What does it mean to be human?
“And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant … I was not even of the same nature as man … When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned? … What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.” -Frankenstein’s creature.
The book for the upcoming week is A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle