The following essay is based on a lecture delivered to the Rising Tide Foundation and which can be viewed here:

A New Look at Dr. Frankenstein

By Gerald Therrien

Most of us think of Mary Shelley as the devoted wife of her late husband, Percy Shelley, who would patiently and methodically collect, organize and publish all of Percy’s writings for posterity – the Posthumous Poems in 1824, the Poetical Works in 1839, and most importantly the Essays, Letters from Abroad, and Translations in 1840 – that contained his ‘A Defence of Poetry’, and his translations of two of Plato’s dialogues – the Ion and the Banquet.

And so, Mary Shelley should be remembered for doing all this.

But we also should think of her as the author of numerous novels, of many short stories and reviews, and especially of that eerie masterpiece, her very first literary work – ‘Frankenstein’, that was published in 1818, when Mary was only 20 years old!

So, the first question we should ask, should be: how did a young 20-year-old woman come to write this classic psychological thriller called ‘Frankenstein’?

Mary did not know her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who died shortly after giving birth to her daughter, Mary.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France’, in 1790 – a year before Thomas Paine wrote his ‘Rights of Man, being an answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution’’ in 1791; and she then wrote ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects’ in 1792. She was quite the revolutionary!

Mary then went to Paris to learn of the events surrounding the French Revolution and she was witness to the execution of Louis XVI. In Paris, she associated with the Girondins, rather than the Jacobins – who followed Rousseau’s idea that women were the helpers of men.

Later she fell in love with an American, Gilbert Imlay (1754 – 1828) who had been a Lieutenant in the Continental Army, and was a diplomatic representative of the United States to France, and also a smuggler, helping to run the British blockade of French ports. Gilbert would claim that Mary was his wife (although they never married) to save her from the Terror and the attack on foreigners, and Mary would write ‘An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution’ in 1794.

Imlay and Mary would return to England in 1795, and she would write a novel about her travels to Scandinavia in order to try to retrieve a stolen ship of Gilbert’s – ‘Letters written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark’, in 1796. Her relationship with Imlay ended, but then at a dinner to host Thomas Paine, she met William Godwin who later said of Mary’s ‘Letters’:

“If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration.”

William and Mary would fall in love, and when Mary became pregnant, she and William were married in 1797 – even though he was opposed to marriage, but Mary died just 11 days after giving birth to Mary Godwin (Shelley). So, Godwin would raise and tutor Mary.

William Godwin was a controversial novelist and a political journalist who is best known for writing an ‘Enquiry Concerning Political Justice’ in 1793, while thinking about both Burke’s and Paine’s pamphlets. It was in response to Godwin’s book that Thomas Malthus wrote ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers’ in 1798, that was written against Godwin’s ‘optimism’.

So, whatever can be said both for and against William Godwin, he, at least, was on the right side, and he put himself smack-dab in the middle of the fight.

In 1814, Percy Shelley began to visit his mentor, William Godwin, every day, and he soon fell in love with his daughter Mary Godwin, and they eloped.

After their son William was born in 1816, they left with Mary’s step-sister Claire who was having an affair with Byron, to meet Byron in Geneva. And it was here, during their four months stay in Geneva, that Mary Shelley began writing ‘Frankenstein’.

Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe

But before we look into that story itself, we should first read her later-added introduction to the story – something that could lead us into the mind of this genius, and also could prepare us for a journey into her story.

Mary begins her preface by discussing her childhood memories – growing up on the ‘blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay’ in Scotland, and how, in seeking to pass the time in such a place, she would scribble down her stories, her ‘castles in the air’ – “the indulging in waking dreams – the following up trains of thoughts, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents”.

And she reminisces of how this became her ‘eyry of freedom’ – her elevated and secluded dwelling, like the nest of a bird on the side of a cliff – “the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy”.

But then, like us too perhaps when we have to grow up, she says that her life got busier, and that ‘reality stood in place of fiction’.  

She now jumps ahead to the summer of 1816, when she and Percy were visiting Switzerland, and reading ‘some volumes of ghost stories’, and each one of their small group of friends and neighbors, were challenged to write their own ghost story. And so she tried to rediscover her former childhood pastime of creating a story, but each day it was always in vain – “I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations”.

She began to speculate that ‘every thing must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase’. And I thought how wonderfully she describes our penchant for coming up with witty one-liners, that she likens to Sancho Panza – that more earthly side-kick of the romantic Don Quixote. But then, she goes on to say something so profound, about her search for somewhere to begin:

“Invention,it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject: and in the power of molding and fashioning ideas suggested to it”.

For those, like me, who don’t know the story of ‘Columbus and his egg’, here is how it was told by Girolamo Benzoni, in his book ‘History of the New World’ (1565):

“Columbus being at a party with many noble Spaniards, where, as was customary, the subject of conversation was the Indies: one of them undertook to say: ‘Mr. Christopher, even if you had not found the Indies, we should not have been devoid of a man who would have attempted the same that you did, here in our own country of Spain, as it is full of great men clever in cosmography and literature’.

Columbus said nothing in answer to these words, but having desired an egg to be brought to him, he placed it on the table saying: ‘Gentlemen, I will lay a wager with any of you, that you will not make this egg stand up as I will, naked and without anything at all’. They all tried, and no one succeeded in making it stand up. When the egg came round to the hands of Columbus, by beating it down on the table he fixed it, having thus crushed a little of one end; wherefore all remained confused, understanding what he would have said: that after the deed is done, everybody knows how to do it; that they ought first to have sought for the Indies, and not laugh at him who had sought for it first, while they for some time had been laughing, and wondered at it as an impossibility.”

Again, as Mary says ‘Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject: and in the power of molding and fashioning ideas suggested to it’!!! Wow! Invention isn’t created out of the void – because there is no void – it is created out of chaos, and not to give order, but to give it form.

And now, she tells how one day, various ideas were being discussed and one of these ideas was the nature of ‘the principle of life’ – ‘whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated’. That night she couldn’t sleep, but that “my imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.”

That was to be the rough pale glimpse of her frightful story – ‘of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world’.

And in the morning, she began to make her dream into a story and she began writing – ‘It was on a dreary night of November’.

And this small first sentence reminded me of the beginning lines of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem the ‘Raven’ – ‘Once upon a midnight dreary … in the bleak December’.

While the months had changed, the beginning for this recalling of an idea, was just so similar, and I became convinced that it could not be mistaken as simply fortunate or accidental.

Then Mary tells us how Percy encouraged her to develop her story – “and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world.”

Percy would write a preface for the initial publication of her story in 1818, and Mary would write this preface for the 2nd edition when it was re-published in 1831.

And Mary ends her preface by bidding her progeny to go forth – because it bears her loving remembrance of her husband:

“I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more.”

… aahhh … never more!!!

Perhaps, Poe had read Mary’s preface (in 1831), and that nudged him into thinking of an idea for a poem, the ‘Raven’ (in 1845) … perhaps …

Robert’s Tale

Mary Shelley’s novel ‘Frankenstein’ should remind us of one of those Russian nested dolls – that are called Matryoshka dolls, but some people call them babushka dolls – with smaller dolls found inside the outer dolls. Because as we read the story that the ‘daemon’ told to Victor Frankenstein; and of Victor’s story that he told to Robert Walton; and of Robert’s story that he told to his sister; all these stories are opened one after the other, and together they are told to us (the reader) by Mary Shelley.

Our story starts with four letters that Robert Walton wrote, from St. Petersburgh and from Archangel in Russia, to his sister back home in England, where Robert recounts his boyhood dream:

“a history of all the voyages made for purposes of discovery composed the whole of our good uncle Thomas’s library. My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading. These volumes were my study day and night …”

But these stories faded as Robert grew older, but then:

“I perused, for the first time those poets whose effusions entranced my soul, and lifted it up to heaven. I also became a poet … and imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.”

Although his career in poetry failed, he then inherited the fortune of his cousin, and his thoughts turned back to his earlier love of discovery in his uncle’s books –

“My life might have passed in ease and luxury; but I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path.”

And so he began planning an expedition – of arriving at the north Pacific ocean through the seas which surround the north pole. And if he was successful in reaching the north Pacific ocean, he would have to return to England, by rounding Cape of Good Hope of Africa, or rounding Cape Horn of South America, and that he may not see his sister for two or three years. And why did he want to do this?

“I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle; and may regulate a thousand celestial observations, that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent for ever.”

And now after 6 years of preparation, he has hired a ship and is gathering a crew of sailors, and he writes that:

“I am going to unexplored regions to ‘the land of mist and snow’; but I shall kill no albatross, therefore do not be alarmed for my safety, or I should come back to you as worn and woeful as the ‘Ancient Mariner’. You will smile at my allusion; but I will disclose a secret.”

[he is referring to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, that was published in ‘Lyrical Ballads’ along with the poems of William Wordsworth, in 1798, as part of the English Romantic movement.]

“I have often attributed my attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of the ocean, to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets … there is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and uninvited region I am about to explore.”

So, Robert had wished to be a poet, and wished to have ‘a purpose of discovery’, and preferred glory instead of wealth, and sounds like a healthy-minded individual. But Robert is sad about one thing –

“I have no friend Margaret, when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection.”

So, maybe Robert is searching for a north-east passage, and also for a friend.

Some months later after starting on his voyage, the ship was closed in by ice, and while waiting for a change in the weather and to break free of the ice, the sailors found on one of the large fragments of ice, a carriage fixed on a sledge that was drawn by dogs, but with only one of the dogs alive, and a single man within it:

“His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering. I never saw a man in so wretched a condition.”

And for Robert, who cared for this stranger, who was ‘generally melancholy and despairing’ and who slowly recovered his health and his spirit:

“I begin to love him as a brother, and his constant and deep grief fills me with sympathy and compassion.”

And they soon became good friends, as Robert explained his project and the stranger showed sympathy for Robert’s motivation:

“One man’s life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought for the dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race.”

But this only caused the stranger grief and despair, and yet Robert says:

“Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth.”

And the stranger [Victor Frankenstein], who had at one time wished that the memory of his great and unparalleled misfortunes might die with him, decided to tell Robert the story of his life:

“I do not know that the relation of my disasters will be useful to you; yet, when I reflect that you are pursuing the same course, exposing yourself to the same dangers which have rendered me what I am, I imagine that you may deduce an apt moral from my tale; one that may direct you if you succeed in your undertaking, and console you in case of failure.”

But, whether (as Victor thought) Robert and Victor were ‘pursuing the same course’, we shall have to wait and see, but Mary does want us to draw ‘an apt moral’ from his tale.

Victor’s tale

Victor Frankenstein began telling his life’s story to Robert Walton, and he talked first about his childhood:

“My mother’s tender caresses and my father’s smile of benevolent pleasure while regarding me, are my first recollections. I was their plaything and their idol, and something better – their child, the innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by Heaven, whom to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in their hands to direct to happiness or misery, according as they fulfilled their duties towards me … while during every hour of my infant life I received a lesson of patience, of charity, and of self-control, I was so guided by a silken cord that all seemed but one train of enjoyment to me.”

Perhaps this was Mary’s idea of how to correctly raise children (as she had just recently given birth to her and Percy’s son, William), and so it seemed to be with Victor’s parents, who would also adopt a young orphan girl from a poor guardian family: Elizabeth. And Victor recalls that:

“She [Elizabeth] busied herself with following the aerial creations of the poets; and in the majestic and wondrous scenes which surrounded our Swiss home … she found ample scope for admiration and delight.”

And Victor talks of how the two of them were different, that:

“While my companion contemplated with a serious and satisfied spirit the magnificent appearances of things, I delighted in investigating their causes. The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine. Curiosity, earnest research to learn the hidden laws of nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they were unfolded to me, are among the earliest sensations I can remember.”

[Note: The curious fact that this story occurs at Geneva may simply be that it’s where Mary and Percy were living at the time, when Mary wrote ‘Frankenstein’. Although it may also remind us of other stories of Geneva – of intrigue and skullduggery from that infamous oligarchic city-state, so similar to Venice.]

Later at school, Victor was ‘indifferent’ to the other students, except for Henry:

“I united myself in the bonds of the closest friendship to one among them. Henry Clerval was the son of a merchant of Geneva. He was a boy of singular talent and fancy. He loved enterprise, hardship, and even danger for its own sake. He was deeply read in books of chivalry and romance. He composed heroic songs and began to write many a tale of enchantment and knightly adventure …

Clerval occupied himself, so to speak, with the moral relations of things. The busy stage of life, the virtues of heroes, and the actions of men were his theme; and his hope and his dream was to become one among those whose names are recorded in story as the gallant and adventurous benefactors of our species …

Yet he might not have been so perfectly humane, so thoughtful in his generosity, so full of kindness and tenderness amidst his passion for adventurous exploit, had she [Elizabeth] not unfolded to him the real loveliness of beneficence and made the doing good the end and aim of his soaring ambition.”

Despite this poetic influence of his step-sister upon his friend, Victor would however become different.

“… neither the structure of languages, nor the code of governments, nor the politics of various states possessed attractions for me. It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn … Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate …”

[It should reminds me of some of today’s education systems, where the emphasis is too heavily placed on math and computers, while too little is placed on art, music and poetry.]

But then, Victor recounted the point in his life that fundamentally changed his outlook:

“When I was thirteen years of age, we all went on a party of pleasure to the baths near Thonon; the inclemency of the weather obliged us to remain a day confined to the inn. In this house I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa. I opened it with apathy; the theory which he attempts to demonstrate and the wonderful facts which he relates soon changed this feeling into enthusiasm. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind, and bounding with joy, I communicated my discovery to my father. My father looked carelessly at the title page of my book and said, ‘Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash.’

If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded and that a modern system of science had been introduced which possessed much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical, under such circumstances I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside and have contented my imagination, warmed as it was, by returning with greater ardour to my former studies. It is even possible that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin. But the cursory glance my father had taken of my volume by no means assured me that he was acquainted with its contents, and I continued to read with the greatest avidity.

When I returned home my first care was to procure the whole works of this author, and afterwards of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. I read and studied the wild fancies of these writers with delight; they appeared to me treasures known to few besides myself … I took their word for all that they averred, and I became their disciple … Under the guidance of my new preceptors I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life …”

Who were these alchemists and occultists that Victor began to study:

Albertus Magnus (1200 – 1280) was a Dominican friar, and the teacher of Thomas Aquinas. He was also an alchemist and astrologer and wrote ‘Speculum Astronomiae’ in defense of astrology.

However, since the Dominicans were placed, in order to lead in the prosecution of the Inquisition, why did a Dominican lead in the study of alchemy and astrology? Shouldn’t Albertus have been a victim of the Inquisition for this astrology work? Apparently not?!?

Cornelius Agrippa (1486 – 1535) a mercenary and ‘knight’ of the Holy Roman Emperor and a skeptic, wrote ‘Three Books of Occult Philosophy’, that magic could resolve the problems of skepticism.

Paracelsus, the pen name of Theophrastus Bombastus von Hehenheim (1493 – 1541), whose father was a commander of the Knights Hospitaller, was another alchemist like Albertus, and he wrote ‘Astronomia Magna’ on astrology, divination and demonology.

Victor immersed himself in the study of astrology, alchemy, magic and demonology!!!

In more modern times, Carl Jung also studied Paracelsus, and he wrote two essays on Paracelsus, delivering one of them in 1921 – in the actual house in which Paracelsus was born, and the second one in 1941 – to mark the 400th anniversary of Paracelsus’s death.

[To learn more about Carl Jung and his followers, please read Cynthia Chung’s ‘The Origins of the Counterculture Movement: A Gathering of Anarchists, Occultists and Psychoanalysts for a New Age’ and also the seven part series of ‘The Shaping of a World Religion’ at cynthiachung.substack.com]

It would seem that Mary and Percy Shelley was fighting against the same Jung-sters and occultists that we are having to fight against today.

Victor’s Future by Chance

Victor Frankenstein further tells his story to Robert, recounting a time when he was fifteen, and he witnessed a violent and terrible thunderstorm:

“I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. When we visited it the next morning, we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbons of wood. I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed.

Before this I was not unacquainted with the more obvious laws of electricity. On this occasion a man of great research in natural philosophy was with us, and excited by this catastrophe, he entered on the explanation of a theory which he had formed on the subject of electricity and galvanism, which was at once new and astonishing to me. All that he said threw greatly into the shade Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, the lords of my imagination …”

First, if one thought of the new study of electricity at that time, then one would surely think of Dr. Benjamin Franklin. And so, the way that this new discovery of the science of electricity had ended his infatuation with the ancient alchemists, should not be made to appear as anti-Franklin, but actually should be seen as being pro-Franklin, in that it showed Victor that these alchemists were useless.

A better case could be made that the story of Victor Frankenstein of Geneva should remind us somewhat of the ‘Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva’ by Henri de Saint-Simon where ‘he called for the establishment of a religion of science with Sir Isaac Newton as its patron saint.’ [quote from Zachary Karabell] , and as Saint-Simon would write to his nephew:

“I believe in God. I believe that God created the universe. I believe that God made the universe, subject to the law of gravity.”

Sir Isaac Newton, being an infamous alchemist, literally wrote the book on ‘Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’, and so, it would appear that Victor was soon to be seen as following in Sir Isaac’s footsteps!!!

But a problem still appeared in Victor’s mind, that instead of using this astonishment at the science of electricity, Victor reacted very differently – with despair!!!

“… but by some fatality the overthrow of these men [i.e. the alchemists] disinclined me to pursue my accustomed studies. It seemed to me as if nothing would or could ever be known. All that had so long engaged my attention suddenly grew despicable. By one of those caprices of the mind which we are perhaps most subject to in early youth, I at once gave up my former occupations, set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation, and entertained the greatest disdain for a would-be science which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge. In this mood of mind I betook myself to the mathematics and the branches of study appertaining to that science as being built upon secure foundations, and so worthy of my consideration.”

Just because some of our closely-held beliefs are overthrown, shouldn’t let us fall into despair, but should motivate us into making further discoveries, to try to learn if or why our beliefs were misguided.

Today, we refer to natural philosophy as ‘science’, because we prefer to think of it as more secure that way. But science isn’t exact, it isn’t so secure. When we study new phenomena, we also have to study how these new phenomena are reacting with our senses.

We shouldn’t just blindly ‘follow the science’! Because ‘science’ is really a method or a theory or a philosophy, that tries to explain how this reaction between phenomena and our senses occurs. And we generally try to follow the ‘natural philosophy’ that could best describe what our sense are reacting to. And if we find a better ‘natural philosophy’ than the one we had been using, well then, we just replace it with the new and improved version. Without despair, but maybe with a reminder that this new one may not be perfect either.

So ‘natural philosophy’ is a more appropriate description of how we try to interpret our observations of the wonders of the universe.

But a despairing Victor rejected not just the alchemists, but he rejected the natural philosophers, and instead he ended up studying mathematics [just like Sir Isaac], because he thought that mathematics would be more secure and wouldn’t change!!!

But that should remind us of all those mathematicians, who when their equations didn’t add up, instead of admitting a possible flaw in their method or theory, instead exclaim that the error was due to some unknown, unseen and mysterious (and invented or made-up) force – like sub-atomic particles or even anti-matter, or UFOs!!!

Victor continued to tell his story, when a few years later his parents sent him to study at university, but where he said his future was determined by chance –

‘Chance – or rather the evil influence, the Angel of Destruction … asserted omnipotent sway over me…’

At the university, he was interviewed by one of his professors, who taught natural philosophy, and Victor told him of the alchemists that he had studied, and the professor replied –

“Have you really spent your time in studying such nonsense? Every minute, every instant that you have wasted on those books is utterly and entirely lost. You have burdened your memory with exploded systems and useless names. Good God! In what desert land have you lived, where no one was kind enough to inform you that these fancies which you have so greedily imbibed are a thousand years old and as musty as they are ancient? I little expected, in this enlightened and scientific age, to find a disciple of Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus. My dear sir, you must begin your studies entirely anew.”

Victor wasn’t really disappointed to hear this, since when he had earlier rejected natural philosophy, he had decided that these alchemists were ‘sad trash’.

But then he went to a lecture by another professor, who taught modern chemistry, who said that:

“The ancient teachers of this science promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera but these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”

Victor now resolved ‘to return to my ancient studies and to devote myself to a science for which I believed myself to possess a natural talent’ and ‘I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.’

When Victor returned to his ‘ancient studies’ of natural philosophy (that had included the alchemists), he wasn’t so much interested in the understanding of the process of life, as he was in exploring the ‘mystery’ of life, as if life is somehow beyond our understanding, but simply requires a revelation (by chance, no doubt) instead of a determined discovery.

Later, when he visited that professor and told him of his studies of the alchemists, he was told that:

“These were men to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of the foundations of their knowledge. They had left to us, as an easier task, to give new names and arrange in connected classifications the facts which they in a great degree had been the instruments of bringing to light. The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.”

After that, his version of this alchemist-influenced ‘natural philosophy’ became his sole occupation as he looked for a revelation of the ‘mysteries of creation’.

Victor and the Fallen Angel

Victor now pursued his studies intensively –

“examining and analysing all the minutiae 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 me … I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter … I might in process of time renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption …”

He worked away unremittingly, forgetting about his surroundings and his friends, and growing pale and emaciated in his secret toil at this one pursuit –

“but I could not tear my thoughts from my employment, loathsome in itself, but which had taken an irresistible hold of my imagination. I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed … I appeared rather like one doomed by slavery to toil in the mines, or any other unwholesome trade, than an artist occupied by his favourite employment …”

Until …

“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils … when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs … I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room …”

“… Like one who, on a lonely road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And, having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.”  [from Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner.”]

Victor took refuge in the courtyard for the remainder of the night, and upon returning to his room the next day, he found that the demon was no longer there, it must have fled. His friend Henry Clerval arrived that same day, and he nursed Victor back to health from his ‘nervous fever’ – as Victor was always imagining and expecting the return of his demon to seize him. Victor remained at the university for another year, but with the lurking thought of that fatal night, he had acquired ‘a violent antipathy even to the name of natural philosophy’.

Then Victor received a letter from his father, telling him of the murder of his youngest brother, William, and he immediately set off for home. Upon arriving at Geneva, at night during a thunderstorm, he went to visit the scene of William’s murder, and:

“perceived in the gloom a figure which stole from behind a clump of trees near me … it was the wretch, the filthy dæmon, to whom I had given life. What did he there? Could he be (I shuddered at the conception) the murderer of my brother? No sooner did that idea cross my imagination, than I became convinced of its truth …”

In the morning, he arrived at the house of his father, and he thought of telling everyone about this creature and that they should begin a pursuit of him.

“But I paused when I reflected on the story that I had to tell. A being whom I myself had formed, and endued with life, had met me at midnight among the precipices of an inaccessible mountain. I remembered also the nervous fever with which I had been seized just at the time that I dated my creation, and which would give an air of delirium to a tale otherwise so utterly improbable. I well knew that if any other had communicated such a relation to me, I should have looked upon it as the ravings of insanity. Besides, the strange nature of the animal would elude all pursuit, even if I were so far credited as to persuade my relatives to commence it …”

And so Victor decided to remain silent!

And even when a servant girl, Justine, who had been adopted into his father’s household, was wrongfully accused of the murder, Victor remained silent!

During her trial, she had confessed in order to obtain absolution – her confessor threatened her with ‘excommunication and hell fire’ unless she would admit guilt. But all during the trial, and when she was executed the next day, Victor still remained silent about the creature.

And ‘the fangs of remorse tore my bosom and would not forgo their hold’, but by his silence, his remorse turned to his despair – ‘when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?’ – and now, he only wished for revenge upon the creature.

I think that Mary is telling us, that by remaining silent, his remorse was not tempered with a sense of compassion, and so that remorse turned to despair and then to revenge!

Later, while wandering along one of the Alpine valleys, to try to forget about his despair, Victor saw a large figure approaching – the wretch that he had created!

“I trembled with rage and horror, resolving to wait his approach, and then close with him in mortal combat.”

Victor said to him:

“Oh! That I could, with the extinction of your miserable existence, restore those victims whom you have so diabolically murdered!”

The fiend replied with a threat:

“You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends …”

And here Mary begins comparing the fiend to the fallen angel [from Paradise Lost], who uses guilt and pity (instead of compassion) to persuade Victor into doing what he wants:

“Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous … Hear my tale, it is long and strange.”

And now, the demon would tell his story to Victor.

The Education of the Fiend

As Mary Shelley has the fiend tell his story to Victor, maybe she was also thinking of her own young child, growing and learning how to understand his sense perceptions:

“It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct. A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses.”

After fleeing from Victor’s residence, the fiend wandered through the nearby woods, until he found shelter in a hut.

“An old man sat in it, near a fire, over which he was preparing his breakfast. He turned on hearing a noise, and perceiving me, shrieked loudly, and quitting the hut, ran across the fields with a speed of which his debilitated form hardly appeared capable … But I was enchanted by the appearance of the hut; here the snow and rain could not penetrate; the ground was dry; and it presented to me then as exquisite and divine a retreat as Pandæmonium appeared to the dæmons of hell after their sufferings in the lake of fire.”

[Again, Mary is hinting a comparison of the fiend to one of the fallen angels.]

The fiend continued his travels, when he entered a village:

“The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me, until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons, I escaped to the open country and fearfully took refuge in a low hovel, quite bare, and making a wretched appearance after the palaces I had beheld in the village. This hovel however, joined a cottage of a neat and pleasant appearance, but after my late dearly bought experience, I dared not enter it.”

Hiding in this hovel, he would find a small crevice in the wood that covered a former window, where he could observe the comings and goings of the family that lived in the cottage – a young son (Felix) and daughter (Agatha), with their blind elderly father. Another babushka is opened as the story of this family is, unknowingly, told to the fiend, who observed and listened to them.

“I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds … as there was little to do in the frosty season, he read to the old man and Agatha … This reading had puzzled me extremely at first, but by degrees I discovered that he uttered many of the same sounds when he read as when he talked. I conjectured, therefore, that he found on the paper signs for speech which he understood, and I ardently longed to comprehend these also.”

And so, like a child does, he began slowly to learn and understand their language, and also while listening, to think about himself and about his own situation:

“I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty, of rank, descent, and noble blood. The words induced me to turn towards myself. I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow creatures were high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these advantages, but without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few!”

“And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome … Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?”

We are seeing here, some reflections from Mary upon her father’s ‘Political Justice’ and the question of one’s recognition in society, that depended upon one’s wealth and one’s accepted social standing – something that was quite pronounced at that time, and it seems, still today!

One night while wondering in the neighboring woods looking for food, the demon found a portmanteau containing some books – ‘Paradise Lost’, ‘Plutarch’s Lives’ and ‘Sorrow of Werther’, that he then studied, again with a concern for his own self:

“As I read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read.”

‘The Sorrows of Werther’, was Goethe’s first novel – and the one that would make him famous, and that was greatly admired by the German Romanticists, and that Goethe would later regret ever writing.

[And it kind of reminds us of Victor Frankenstein, who created the fiend and then very much regretted it.]

‘The Sorrows of Werther’ was a story of the romantic Werther’s failure in his career due to his lack of upper class and social standing, and of his unrequited love and fateful melancholy – that led Werther to commit suicide to end his sorrows.

“The gentle and domestic manners it described, combined with lofty sentiments and feelings, which had for their object something out of self, accorded well with my experience among my protectors and with the wants which were for ever alive in my own.”

The fiend would see Werther’s life as similar to his own – and his wish that he too could be accepted – by his ‘family’. Talk about death and suicide was a shock for the fiend, but he really sympathized with Werther, although he didn’t really understand Werther’s sorrows.

Plutarch’s ‘Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans’ contained the stories of the founders of the ancient republics. From Werther’s imaginations, the fiend learned ‘despondency and gloom’, while from Plutarch, he learned ‘high thoughts’:

“He elevated me above the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to admire and love the heroes of past ages … I read of men concerned in public affairs, governing or massacring their species. I felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice, as far as I understood the signification of those terms, relative as they were, as I applied them, to pleasure and pain alone.”

Mary was showing us the problem of an education that lacks a higher understanding – a poetic understanding, that must therefore only rely on our primitive sense of pleasure and pain. The fiend didn’t really have a proper sense of virtue, because he only understood it from a sense of pleasure and pain.

Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ and the story of the fallen angels brought up again this contrast with the fiend’s own life:

“Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.”

But because he lacked a higher (poetic) understanding of his emotions and he only understood them with respect to pleasure and pain, his lack of being accepted (like today’s wanting to be popular) instead caused a feeling of envy, that lacked any self-esteem, and that grew into a hatred of his creator, Victor:

“Hateful day when I received life! Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred … No Eve soothed my sorrows nor shared my thoughts; I was alone. I remembered Adam’s supplication to his Creator. But where was mine? He had abandoned me, and in the bitterness of my heart I cursed him.”

After thinking many hours about all of this, he decided that he must plot a way to be accepted by his ‘family’ – social acceptance, something that Werther had failed to do.

“These were the reflections of my hours of despondency and solitude; but when I contemplated the virtues of the cottagers, their amiable and benevolent dispositions, I persuaded myself that when they should become acquainted with my admiration of their virtues they would compassionate me and overlook my personal deformity. Could they turn from their door one, however monstrous, who solicited their compassion and friendship? I resolved, at least, not to despair, but in every way to fit myself for an interview with them which would decide my fate.”

The Fiend’s Plan of Revenge

The fiend had grown emotionally attached to this family that he was watching – when they were unhappy, he felt depressed; when they were happy, he was full of joy. Soon he formed a plan to win their favor.

“I formed in my imagination a thousand pictures of presenting myself to them, and their reception of me. I imagined that they would be disgusted, until, by my gentle demeanour and conciliating words, I should first win their favour and afterwards their love.”

The fiend didn’t believe that he was unworthy of their sympathy. And why would they turn him away with disdain and horror. After all, the poor that stopped at their door were never driven away.

His plan was to enter their cottage when the blind old man was all alone, and in the absence of the children, he would gain the trust of the old man, and through him, he might be tolerated by his children.

That plan seemed to be going tolerably well, until the children arrived back home, and to their horror, saw the fiend clinging to the knees of the old man. The daughter fainted, and the son threw him to the ground and beat him violently with a stick, until the fiend fled from the cottage.

“I continued for the remainder of the day in my hovel in a state of utter and stupid despair. My protectors had departed and had broken the only link that held me to the world. For the first time the feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom, and I did not strive to control them, but allowing myself to be borne away by the stream, I bent my mind towards injury and death.”

The family had left the cottage, never to return, and with his fantasy of becoming part of the family gone, and with these feelings of rage and revenge growing inside his heart, he destroyed everything left in the garden and burned down the cottage.

“From that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and more than all, against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery.”

“Unfeeling, heartless creator! You had endowed me with perceptions and passions and then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind. But on you only had I any claim for pity and redress, and from you I determined to seek that justice which I vainly attempted to gain from any other being that wore the human form.”

Now, the fiend decided to journey to Geneva, to seek out Victor to demand his justice! Or to inflict his revenge!

After arriving at Geneva, he rested in a hiding place among the fields, until he was woken by the sounds of a young child playing. Suddenly, the fiend thought that perhaps this child was too young to be horrified by his appearance, and that he could take him and educate him to be his friend. But when he approached the child, he struggled to escape and screamed at the fiend:

“Hideous monster! Let me go. My papa is a syndic—he is M. Frankenstein—he will punish you. You dare not keep me.”

The fiend heard the name Frankenstein:

“Frankenstein! you belong then to my enemy—to him towards whom I have sworn eternal revenge; you shall be my first victim.”

This was Victor’s young brother, William, and the fiend grasped his throat to silence him, and he soon lay dead.

“I gazed on my victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and hellish triumph; clapping my hands, I exclaimed, ‘I too can create desolation; my enemy is not invulnerable; this death will carry despair to him, and a thousand other miseries shall torment and destroy him’.”

When the fiend had finished telling this story to Victor, he then made his demand:

“We may not part until you have promised to comply with my requisition. I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects … You must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being. This you alone can do, and I demand it of you as a right which you must not refuse to concede.”

At first, Victor was defiant:

“I do refuse it, and no torture shall ever extort a consent from me. You may render me the most miserable of men, but you shall never make me base in my own eyes. Shall I create another like yourself, whose joint wickedness might desolate the world? Begone! I have answered you; you may torture me, but I will never consent.”

And the fiend replied:

“Have a care; I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your birth … Oh! My creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing; do not deny me my request! … If you consent, neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again; I will go to the vast wilds of South America.”

Victor again refused his entreaties:

“You propose to fly from the habitations of man, to dwell in those wilds where the beasts of the field will be your only companions. How can you, who long for the love and sympathy of man, persevere in this exile? You will return and again seek their kindness, and you will meet with their detestation; your evil passions will be renewed, and you will then have a companion to aid you in the task of destruction. This may not be; cease to argue the point, for I cannot consent.”

The fiend kept arguing:

“I swear to you, by the earth which I inhabit, and by you that made me, that with the companion you bestow, I will quit the neighbourhood of man and dwell, as it may chance, in the most savage of places. My evil passions will have fled, for I shall meet with sympathy! My life will flow quietly away, and in my dying moments I shall not curse my maker.”

Since Victor could not sympathize with him, he instead pitied him, and agreed to his demand:

“His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him and sometimes felt a wish to console him, but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred. I tried to stifle these sensations; I thought that as I could not sympathise with him, I had no right to withhold from him the small portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow … I thought of the promise of virtues which he had displayed on the opening of his existence and the subsequent blight of all kindly feeling by the loathing and scorn which his protectors had manifested towards him … After a long pause of reflection I concluded that the justice due both to him and my fellow creatures demanded of me that I should comply with his request.”

At this the fiend suddenly fled – fearful, perhaps, of any change in Victor’s sentiments.

The Change in Victor

Back home in Geneva, Victor tried to collect the courage to start his work, but day after day, he just couldn’t.

“I feared the vengeance of the disappointed fiend, yet I was unable to overcome my repugnance to the task which was enjoined me. I found that I could not compose a female without again devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition. I had heard of some discoveries having been made by an English philosopher, the knowledge of which was material to my success … To England, therefore, I was bound.”

Victor travelled to England, accompanied by his friend, Henry Clerval. After staying in London for some months and meeting these English natural philosophers, Henry and Victor received an invitation from a friend in Scotland, and now Victor decided that he could work on his project in some remote spot there

[Note: The first time that Victor had undertaken his experiment, it was in Germany, and we saw how Goethe’s ‘Sorrows of Werther’ was so admired by the German romanticists. Now, Victor was going to attempt a second experiment in Scotland – the home of one of the founders of British romanticism, Walter Scott, who was an avid admirer of the German romanticists.]

Our friend Mark Twain, in his ‘Life on the Mississippi’ had this to say about Scott.

“… Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote …”

As you can see, Mark Twain was not a lover of romanticism!

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But on their way north to Scotland, Victor and Henry stopped at Oxford.

At Oxford, Victor and Henry reminisced about the battle for Oxford during the English civil war, that:

“It was here that Charles I. had collected his forces. This city had remained faithful to him, after the whole nation had forsaken his cause to join the standard of Parliament and liberty.”

Hmmm. that explains some things. Oxford sided with the king while the whole nation sided with parliament!

After visiting the tomb of John Hampden who was killed in the battle near Oxford, Victor says that:

“For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to contemplate the divine ideas of liberty and self-sacrifice of which these sights were the monuments and the remembrancers.”

At that time in England, beginning in 1812, Hampden clubs were being set up, in his memory, in towns and cities throughout the country, to promote political reform and ‘the divine ideas of liberty and self-sacrifice’.

After arriving in Scotland, Victor left Clerval with their friend, while Victor left to make a tour of Scotland – alone, travelling to one of the remotest islands of the Orkneys – where he could work ‘ungazed at and unmolested’ in a small miserable two-room hut.

While reassembling his chemical instruments in his new laboratory, Victor thought back on his first efforts that had created the fiend:

“During my first experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my employment; my mind was intently fixed on the consummation of my labour, and my eyes were shut to the horror of my proceedings. But now I went to it in cold blood, and my heart often sickened at the work of my hands.”

And then Victor reminded himself of the pact he had made with the fiend – when he was only concerned with his own safety, but now he thought of the fate of others, if he succeeded in his task.

“Three years before, I had created a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated my heart and filled it for ever with the bitterest remorse. I was now about to form another being of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighbourhood of man and hide himself in deserts, but she had not …

Even if they were to leave Europe and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?

I had before been moved by the sophisms of the being I had created; I had been struck senseless by his fiendish threats; but now, for the first time, the wickedness of my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the whole human race.”

Like events in the world today, Mary is warning of the consequences of giving in to inhuman blackmail, from a fear for one’s own personal safety. And that acting from remorse, from compassion, instead brings up a fear for everyone’s safety. I think that visit to Oxford, did Victor some good.

And at that moment, by the light of the moon, he caught a glimpse of the demon through the window! And Victor tore to pieces what he had been laboring over, and vowed never to resume his work.

Soon, the demon entered the room – Victor’s second meeting with him:

Demon: “Do you dare to break your promise? … do you dare destroy my hopes?”

Victor: “Begone! I do break my promise; never will I create another like yourself.”

Demon: “Slave, I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension. Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master; obey!”

Notice the change that occurs in the demon, when his sophisms were rejected, and his tone of arrogance – ‘slave … I am your master: obey’, for arrogance was the sin of the fallen angels.

Demon: “You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains – revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! …

Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict.”

Victor: “Devil, cease; and do not poison the air with these sounds of malice. I have declared my resolution to you, and I am no coward to bend beneath words. Leave me; I am inexorable.”

And the demon fled into the night. But just before he fled, he warned Victor:

“but remember, I shall be with you on your wedding-night”.

Here is the ‘punctum saliens’ of our story, the point of change, when Victor refuses the demon’s demand. Mary shows us that the fiend, that Victor now calls the devil, is seeking Victor’s repentance.

But repentance without remorse or compassion is simply submission, that Victor refuses. Justice demands remorse, but power demands submission.

Victor’s New Quest

All the next day, Victor walked around the isle, quite agitated, thinking about who would be the next victim of the demon’s revenge. That evening he received a letter from Clerval, who wrote that he had to return to London and asked Victor to join him. But before Victor could leave, he must pack up his chemical instruments, and dispose of the remains of his destroyed experiment.

And so, the next day he packed up the destroyed relics in a basket, and weighed it down with some rocks, and that night he sailed out into the sea in a little skiff, to throw the basket into the sea.

But the wind and waves drove him farther away from his isle, and he ended up on the coast of Ireland. When he landed, and arrived at a small town, he was brought before the magistrate – ‘to give an account of the gentleman who was found murdered here last night’.

When Victor was shown the dead body – it was his dear friend, Henry Clerval, who had been strangled – ‘for there was no sign of any violence except the black mark of fingers on his neck’. Victor had to be carried away, while in convulsions, and he developed a fever that left him on the point of death for two months.

Victor was later found innocent of the crime, and his father arrived to bring him home to Geneva. Victor told his father that:

“I am not mad, the sun and the heavens, who have viewed my operations, can bear witness of my truth. I am the assassin of those most innocent victims; they died by my machinations. A thousand times would I have shed my own blood, drop by drop, to have saved their lives; but I could not, my father, indeed I could not sacrifice the whole human race.”

Upon his return to Geneva, Victor now prepared for his upcoming marriage to Elizabeth. But all he could think of was the threat of the demon – “I will be with you on your wedding-night” and that night would be when the demon would try to kill him!

“Such was my sentence, and on that night would the dæmon employ every art to destroy me and tear me from the glimpse of happiness which promised partly to console my sufferings. On that night he had determined to consummate his crimes by my death. Well, be it so; a deadly struggle would then assuredly take place, in which if he were victorious I should be at peace and his power over me be at an end. If he were vanquished, I should be a free man.”

On their wedding night, Victor walked up and down the passages of the house, prepared to confront the demon. But the demon would not come to kill Victor, but he came to kill Elizabeth!

Upon hearing a scream, Victor rushed to find Elizabeth – ‘the murderous mark of the fiend’s grasp was on her neck, and the breath had ceased to issue from her lips’.

Then, Victor looked up, and saw the fiend at the open window – “a grin was on the face of the monster; he seemed to jeer, as with his fiendish finger he pointed towards the corpse of my wife.”

Victor grabbed his pistol and fired at the demon, but the demon was able to run away, plunge into the lake, and to escape. Victor returned to Geneva, and told his father of the death of Elizabeth, but the news was too much for his heart to bear, and in a few days his father died in his arms. Victor resolved to pursue the demon and he reflected on the best means of securing him.

He went to the magistrate in the town, and told him his story of the fiend – “I now related my history briefly but with firmness and precision, marking the dates with accuracy and never deviating into invective or exclamation.” But the magistrate replied that it would be impossible to follow such a powerful creature. Besides it has been two months since his crime, and we wouldn’t know where to begin to look for him.

But Victor could only think of revenge and so he resolved that – “I devote myself, either in my life or death, to his destruction.”

Victor quit Geneva forever and departed on a quest for the demon. But first, he went to the cemetery where William, Elizabeth and his father were buried, and swore that:

“By the sacred earth on which I kneel, by the shades that wander near me, by the deep and eternal grief that I feel, I swear; and by thee, O Night, and the spirits that preside over thee, to pursue the dæmon who caused this misery, until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict.”

Victor pursued the demon – “I have traversed a vast portion of the earth and have endured all the hardships which travellers in deserts and barbarous countries are wont to meet.”

He following the windings of the Rhone, on a ship across the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, and among the wilds of Tartary and Russia, and northward across the plains and deserts until he reached the ocean, and traversed the snows and ice with a sledge and dogs, until he was trapped on a drifting piece of ice and when he was about to sink in distress, he saw Robert Walton’s ship –

“I quickly destroyed part of my sledge to construct oars, and by these means was enabled, with infinite fatigue, to move my ice raft in the direction of your ship … I hoped to induce you to grant me a boat with which I could pursue my enemy.”

But Victor’s extreme exhaustion stopped him from continued his quest. Having finished his story, he then makes a dire request of Robert – to continue his vengeance!

“Swear to me, Walton, that he shall not escape, that you will seek him and satisfy my vengeance in his death. And do I dare to ask of you to undertake my pilgrimage, to endure the hardships that I have undergone? No; I am not so selfish. Yet, when I am dead, if he should appear, if the ministers of vengeance should conduct him to you, swear that he shall not live—swear that he shall not triumph over my accumulated woes and survive to add to the list of his dark crimes. He is eloquent and persuasive, and once his words had even power over my heart; but trust him not. His soul is as hellish as his form, full of treachery and fiend-like malice. Hear him not; call on the names of William, Justine, Clerval, Elizabeth, my father, and of the wretched Victor, and thrust your sword into his heart. I will hover near and direct the steel aright.”

At one time, Walton had asked Victor about how he had made the creature, but Victor replied: “Are you mad, my friend? … Learn my miseries and do not seek to increase your own.”

Victor reminisced about the changes in his life – what he thought he would be, and what he became:

“When younger I believed myself destined for some great enterprise. My feelings are profound, but I possessed a coolness of judgment that fitted me for illustrious achievements. This sentiment of the worth of my nature supported me when others would have been oppressed, for I deemed it criminal to throw away in useless grief those talents that might be useful to my fellow creatures. When I reflected on the work I had completed, no less a one than the creation of a sensitive and rational animal, I could not rank myself with the herd of common projectors. But this thought, which supported me in the commencement of my career, now serves only to plunge me lower in the dust. All my speculations and hopes are as nothing, and like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell … I trod heaven in my thoughts, now exulting in my powers, now burning with the idea of their effects.”

Victor now compares himself to one of the fallen angels too, burning with the consequences of his creation, but his vengeance is driven by his remorse, not by a selfish vengeance – in order to stop the demon.

Sympathy for the Demon

Robert now continues our story, in letters to his sister.

“We are still surrounded by mountains of ice, still in imminent danger of being crushed in their conflict. The cold is excessive, and many of my unfortunate comrades have already found a grave amidst this scene of desolation … I mentioned in my last letter the fears I entertained of a mutiny …”

A small group of sailors, chosen as leaders by the other sailors, came to Robert in his cabin with a request – that if the ice should dissipate and a clear route of escape should open up, it would be rash to proceed, and they wished Robert to promise them that they would not continue their voyage but instead turn southwards and return.

Upon hearing this request by the sailors, Victor, lying in bed, addressed them:

“Are you, then, so easily turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition? And wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror, because at every new incident your fortitude was to be called forth and your courage exhibited, because danger and death surrounded it, and these you were to brave and overcome.  …

Oh! Be men, or be more than men. Be steady to your purposes and firm as a rock. This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts may be; it is mutable and cannot withstand you if you say that it shall not. Do not return to your families with the stigma of disgrace marked on your brows. Return as heroes who have fought and conquered and who know not what it is to turn their backs on the foe.”

Robert consented with the sailors, that if they were not destroyed, that he would return to England. But Victor did not want to return with them but wished to continue with his pursuit of the demon. He tried to get out of bed, but simply couldn’t and he fell back on the bed and fainted. When he finally revived, he said to Robert:

“Think not, Walton, that in the last moments of my existence, I feel that burning hatred and ardent desire of revenge I once expressed; but I feel myself justified in desiring the death of my adversary …

In a fit of enthusiastic madness, I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty, but there was another still paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention …

The task of his destruction was mine, but I have failed. When actuated by selfish and vicious motives, I asked you to undertake my unfinished work … Yet I cannot ask you to renounce your country and friends to fulfil this task.”

Victor released Robert from his previous request, that after Victor’s death Robert would pursue the demon, and soon after Victor passed away. Although Robert’s original reason for his voyage may have proved unsuccessful, because of his ship being in the right place at the right time to rescue Victor on the ice flow, Robert’s kindness enabled him to befriend Victor and to rescue his story, that otherwise would have died on that ice flow with Victor.

Later that night, Robert heard a strange sound, and returned to his cabin, and there saw the creature looking over the dead body of his creator.

“That is also my victim! In his murder my crimes are consummated; the miserable series of my being is wound to its close! Oh, Frankenstein! Generous and self-devoted being! What does it avail that I now ask thee to pardon me? I, who irretrievably destroyed thee by destroying all thou lovedst. Alas! He is cold, he cannot answer me.”

Robert replied to the demon:

“Your repentance is now superfluous. If you had listened to the voice of conscience and heeded the stings of remorse before you had urged your diabolical vengeance to this extremity, Frankenstein would yet have lived.”

The Demon continued:

“I pitied Frankenstein … But when I discovered that he, the author at once of my existence and of its unspeakable torments, dared to hope for happiness, that while he accumulated wretchedness and despair upon me he sought his own enjoyment in feelings and passions from the indulgence of which I was for ever barred, then impotent envy and bitter indignation filled me with an insatiable thirst for vengeance. But I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse which I detested yet could not disobey … Evil thenceforth became my good … And now it is ended; there is my last victim!”

Robert again replied:

“Hypocritical fiend! If he whom you mourn still lived, still would he be the object, again would he become the prey, of your accursed vengeance. It is not pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your malignity is withdrawn from your power.”

The Demon despaired:

“Yet I seek not a fellow feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? … But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone …

Fear not that I shall be the instrument of future mischief. My work is nearly complete …

I shall quit your vessel on the ice raft which brought me thither and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch who would create such another as I have been. I shall die.”

The demon leapt from the cabin window and was soon lost in the darkness.

And here ends Mary’s psychological and philosophical masterpiece  – ‘Frankenstein’.

And we can look back at both Victor and the demon, and their motivations and destinies. Sometimes we saw Victor as selfish, and sometimes we saw him as courageous. Sometimes we pitied the demon, and sometimes we wished he was dead. But also what was most intriguing, was Mary’s view of the difference in the ‘Sorrows of Werther’ and ‘Paradise Lost.’

The demon once said that:

“Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.”

and that:

“Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred.”

Mary learned this from her father’s view of Paradise Lost.

Contrary to the CIA’s Mickey-pedia version of Godwin, that reads ‘drawing from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which depicted Satan as a rebel against his creator, he denounced the Christian God as a theocrat and a tyrant that had no right to rule’, I think that’s all wrong, it’s quite the opposite. It’s an insult to Godwin, it’s an insult to Milton, and I think it’s an insult to God too! 

However, I did find one reference of Godwin to Milton’s Paradise Lost in his book ‘Political Justice’ [1 – 323]: ‘… as Milton’s hero felt real compassion and sympathy for his partners in misfortune …’

When I read that, I thought the opposite of what Mickey-pedia asserted. The fact that Satan had felt even a little compassion and sympathy, would throw into the trash-bin of history, all that nonsense we’ve been taught about Manicheanism, that the world was made up of two equal and opposing forces, that were vying for control of the world.

For EVEN Satan showing compassion, means there was a tiny bit of goodness in him. And that means there is only one force, and that the world could be seen as based upon many different layers or gradations of that true compassion – the Good, from the very lowest level [i.e. Satan] to the very highest level [i.e. ideals of Beauty, Goodness and Truth].

But while the demon demanded sympathy for himself, he never had sympathy for himself, or for Victor – only pity. And so, his vengeance of Victor, was based on envy, and not sympathy for him.

However, Victor’s vengeance was of a different kind. Victor once said that:

“… to pursue the dæmon who caused this misery, until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict. For this purpose I will preserve my life.”

Victor at one point thought of ending his life, in order to stop the demon’s killings, since the murders were done for revenge. But Victor didn’t do that. He endured the sorrows of the loss of his brother, the loss of his best friend, the loss of his wife, the loss of his father, and yet he still had some a bit sympathy for the demon. Although he pursued the demon to destroy him, it was for the sympathy of mankind. And so, Victor was resigned to his own death.

And what of the demon, maybe he wanted Victor to kill himself, but he couldn’t get Victor to do it. When Victor did die, the demon had no more reason to live, and then he was resigned to his death.

At the time that Goethe wrote ‘The Sorrows of Werther’, he also wrote a different poem ‘Prometheus’, that was not romantic. Mary titled her first story ‘Frankenstein, a Modern Prometheus’. If Victor Frankenstein may be a kind of modern Prometheus, then might the demon be seen as a modern Zeus – a fallen angel. Our sympathies would lie with Victor, then.

And perhaps, we’ll sympathize with Mary Shelley, when we think of what she chose to do with her life, after the death of the love of her life – Percy Shelley.

Postlude – on Mutiny

I had one final thought about ‘Frankenstein’, and that is Mary Shelley’s use of the concept of ‘mutiny’.

Just before Victor Frankenstein died, he changed his mind, and he released Robert Walton from his promise to pursue the demon after Victor was dead. Victor had said:

“Think not, Walton, that in the last moments of my existence, I feel that burning hatred and ardent desire of revenge I once expressed … When actuated by selfish and vicious motives, I asked you to undertake my unfinished work … Yet I cannot ask you to renounce your country and friends to fulfil this task.”

Victor was putting an end to his ‘revenge’; and with that ending of revenge, when Victor died, the demon had no more reason to live. [I think we could all learn a lesson for today, in trying to find peace in the Middle East – to end revenge!]

And Victor says that the reason for this change was that:

“In a fit of enthusiastic madness, I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty, but there was another still paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention …”

He changed, because of his ‘duty’ to the human race – to the common good. And, it is interesting to see that this change in Victor, to end his revenge, occurs after (and perhaps because of) the threat of mutiny by the crew of Robert Walton’s ship of discovery. Now, what did Mary Shelley think of ‘mutiny’?

Well, firstly, I think we should refer to Victor’s visit to Oxford, and her reference to John Hampden and the English civil war, when Victor says that:

“For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to contemplate the divine ideas of liberty and self-sacrifice of which these sights were the monuments and the remembrancers.”

And so, that English revolt should not be called a ‘mutiny’, because it was fought for the common good, and for ‘the divine ideas of liberty and self-sacrifice’. But Aaron Burr’s revolt can be called a ‘mutiny’, because it was fought on behalf of an empire, and against the common good. And so, the revolt of the thirteen colonies can not be called a ‘mutiny’, because it was fought against an empire, and for the common good.

Now secondly, a fight for the common good is not called a ‘mutiny’, if it is successful. Then, if successful, it’ll be called a ‘revolution’, and it won’t be called a ‘paradise lost’.

Mary Shelley, like her mother, was quite the revolutionary!