Frankenstein: A Conflict of High Ideals and Tragic Horrors
by Mary Shelley
First published 200 years ago, Frankenstein has spellbound, disturbed, and fascinated readers for generations. One of the most haunting and enduring works ever written in English, it has inspired numerous retellings and sequels in virtually every medium, making the Frankenstein myth familiar even to those who have never read a word of Mary Shelley’s remarkable novel. Susan J Wolfson and Ronald Levao have edited The Annotated Frankenstein, a freshly annotated, illustrated edition illuminates the novel and its electrifying afterlife with unmatched detail and vitality. A section of Chapter 3 (with annotations) follows for some good reading.
To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death. […]I must observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body. In my education my father had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors. I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition, or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy; and a church-yard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay, and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel houses. […] I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiæ of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me4 — a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius, who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.
Remember, I am not recording the vision of a madman. The sun does not more certainly shine in the heavens, than that which I now affirm is true. Some miracle might have produced it, yet the stages of the discovery were distinct and probable. After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter. 5
The astonishment which I had at first experienced on this discovery soon gave place to delight and rapture.6 After so much time spent in painful labour, to arrive at once at the summit of my desires, was the most gratifying consummation of my toils. But this discovery was so great and overwhelming, that all the steps by which I had been progressively led to it were obliterated, and I beheld only the result. What had been the study and desire of the wisest men since the creation of the world, was now within my grasp.
Not that, like a magic scene, it all opened upon me at once: the information I had obtained was of a nature rather to direct my endeavours so soon as I should point them towards the object of my search, than to exhibit that object already accomplished. I was like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead, and found a passage to life aided only by one glimmering, and seemingly ineffectual, light.7
I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted; that cannot be: listen patiently until the end of my story, and you will easily perceive why I am reserved upon that subject. I will not lead you on, unguarded and ardent as I then was, to your destruction and infallible misery. Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow. 8
When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands, I hesitated a long time concerning the manner in which I should employ it. Although I possessed the capacity of bestowing animation, yet to prepare a frame for the reception of it, with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour.9 I doubted at first whether I should attempt the creation of a being like myself or one of simpler organization; but my imagination was too much exalted by my first success to permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man. The materials at present within my command hardly appeared adequate to so arduous an undertaking; but I doubted not that I should ultimately succeed. I prepared myself for a multitude of reverses; my operations might be incessantly baffled, and at last my work be imperfect: yet, when I considered the improvement which every day takes place in science and mechanics, I was encouraged to hope my present attempts would at least lay the foundations of future success. Nor could I consider the magnitude and complexity of my plan as any argument of its impracticability. It was with these feelings that I began the creation of a human being. As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large. After having formed this determination, and having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials, I began.
Notes:
3 Mary may be remembering Davy’s charismatic introductory lecture on chemistry, in which he proposed that “the study of the simple and unvarying agencies of dead matter ought surely to precede investigations concerning the mysterious and complicated powers of life” (313–314). He is also in this heritage twin to the hero of Percy Shelley’s poem Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude (1816):
I have made my bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black death
Keeps recordof the trophies won from thee,
Hoping to still these obstinate questionings
Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,
Thy messenger, to render up the tale
Of what we are. (23–29)
4 The language compacts the power of the classical god Jupiter, the divine fiat lux of the God of Genesis, natural lightning, and enlightenment science.
5 With an eerie difference, Victor echoes his father’s desire for lineage, “bestowing on the state sons who might carry his virtues and his name down to posterity.” More conspicuous are the alliances to fables of divine creation: Prometheus, who animated man from clay, and the God of Genesis, who “formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (2: 7). The mysteriousness of Victor’s breakthrough makes it seem (despite his protestations of rational labor) a dreamlike wish-fulfillment of a desire — one staged throughout the novel — to prevail over irreversible death.
6 Hogg’s recollection in 1832 of Shelley in 1810 seems filtered through the fame of Frankenstein: his “enthusiasm . . . his ardour in the cause of science, and his thirst for knowledge” breathed into his features “an animation, a fire, an enthusiasm, a vivid and preternatural intelligence, that I never met with in any other countenance” (New Monthly Magazine, January 1832, 93).
7 Sinbad the sailor is buried alive in a vast vault with the corpse of his wife (the custom in the kingdom in which he finds himself); he survives by ingenuity (some of it brutal) and eventually escapes by following a glimmer of light. The source tale is “Fourth Voyage of Sinbad,” from Arabian Nights Entertainments, collected in Tales of the East (1812), which Mary Shelley was reading in 1815.
8 This “moral” has such weak appeal at this narrative climax as to verge on a satire of the ritually intoned axioms meant to legitimize extravagant fictions.
9 The language of conception and labor throughout Victor’s project evokes a grotesque parody of the biology of female childbirth. Mary’s ms. insistently has creature, which Percy changed here, successively, to frame, being (like myself), animal — perhaps for variation, but in the process attenuating the bond of creator/creature in Mary’s wording.
10 The designation of “human being” contrasts the epithets to be heaped on the Creature, for whom “being” is neutral. The first instance is Walton’s report of “a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature” (Letter IV).
11 This is huge even by today’s standards; in the early nineteenth century the average height of a mature man was 5’6” (Lord Byron and John Keats were about 5’).
