Frankenstein: Relationships, Withdrawal, & Other Rambles

Some Thoughts Out of the Way

I was reading the chapter of the rise of the monster "on a dreary night in November" myself and, cinematically, didnt notice I overfilled my coffee, spilling it across the table. Needless to say, this book is beautiful but I'm not able to describe it with any justice. I can't begin to understand how the popular narrative of Frankenstein had warped to something hideous and unrecognizable. Here are my notes about Mary Shelley's book.

Fall of Icarus

Before reading, I've heard some theses on what Frankenstein is "about". One I want to address and argue against is the idea that Frankenstein is a warning of overambitions and the dangers of science going too far. This resembles the popular telling of Icarus whose overambition causes him to fly too close to the sun, melting his wings and falling to his death. This story's misunderstanding comes at the omission that Icarus was also warned to not fly too close to the waters, else his wings will soak and he will drown. It's not so much a warning against ambition, but specifically against mental withdrawal into one's own faculties, and away from the realities of a surrounding. Absorbed in his own joy of flight, Icarus lost attention to his father's concerns and the approaching natures that ends him. Frankenstein less warns against overambition, and more warns against withdrawal away from the world of people and presence. Its story is told through conflict between felt realities (relationships, environment and setting) and withdrawing into mental or physical isolation (intentional and forced). Frankenstein praises grounding in reality, cultivating and reciprocating the beauty of relationships, and presence of mind in the space one occupies and people around them.

Against "Realities of Little Worth"

Volume I Victor expresses degrees of disappointment in realities. He is dismissive of modern philosophers' focus on debunking than dreaming: I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth and deliberately deprioritizes the real feelings of peers and attention to setting in favour of his personal motivations: And the same feelings which had made me neglect the scenes around me caused me to also forget those friends who were so many miles absent... I knew my silence disquieted them... 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. Through the bulk of the novel, what Victor decides to describe in detail pulls between his withdrawn turmoil (in the form of self-indulgent blame, inable to communicate, and suffering) and the people and places around him. As the narrative whittles away Victor's living relationships and home (ostracized from society in the same way the Monster is), it is poetic they're both led to chase nothingness in the Arctic. In his last words, Victor explains his tragic destiny defined by the consequences of his non-human-centric actions, and he must fulfil a final tangible purpose. All my speculations and hopes are as nothing... If I were engaged in any high undertaking and design, fraught with extensive utility to my fellow-creatures, then I could live to fulfil it. But such is not my destiny; I must pursue and destroy the begin to whom I gave existence; then my lot on Earth will be fulfilled, and I may die

Descriptions of Place as Presence of Mind

The grounding in felt realities is expressed through description. Nature and geography are often the forefront of attention, with emotional grandeur. It's described with wonder, terror, and tranquility, all interpretations serve to beckon the narrators or mock them depending on state of mind. To be descript at all is a testimony of engaging with reality, and a natural use of the medium to slow and linger in time. As Victor begins to withdraw with disturbing thoughts, his pulse on nature also weakens and his surroundings vanish from description. Considering the importance of detail as credibility to an 'unbelievable' story, and observation a scientific necessity, any omission of detail creates lapses of memory and reality. The time Victor spent building his monster is incoherent as he's absorbed in his motivations. The days spent traveling to and around England to create the second monster is uncertain under the anxieties of Victor's monster.

Relationships with People as Force of Life

Relationships are a guiding force in Frankenstein, able to compel behaviour and description, and to keep life living. Victor paints his relationships in flaw-less angel-like reverance. When travelling to England, he admits his distress prevents him from noticing anything around him. Both he and the reader lose sense of space.^[1] His reuniting with Henry galvanizes him, and Victor begins to expound his adoration for Henry and his observations of nature, with colour and vigor. It's through this Henry-Victor connection that recovers, if ever brief, Victor's connection to what is around him. Sight, smell, touch, sound.^[2] Victor's close relationships act as tethers that rescue Victor from his mental isolations and back into the world.^[3]. His descriptions of Elizabeth and Henry are written with an almost sorcery-like force that can compel Victor to live in the present, in their warmth. The Monster also paints his relationships with the same reverance, the unrequitedness unaffecting of his loving illustrations until he is properly rejected. From this event, he begs Victor for reciprocation, from him as a father, or from a creation of a friend or a lover (all three types of relationships which he sabotages for Victor). He is denied, and in his remaining act for connection, the Monster forces upon Victor a new Victor-Monster relationship of vengeance.^[4] Rather than meet the Monster at love, Victor will meet him at misery. Vol II and III follow Victor's desperate preservation of his realities, while they are whittled away both physically by the Monster and mentally in Victor's own withdrawals. On his honeymoon, Victor is consumed by anxiety to the point of being not just unphased by Elizabeth's grounding abilities, but self-absorbed that he is the target, and dismissively leads her to separation and death. With Victor's father following suit, the Victor-Monster relationship is the only tangible reality that remains, one that, with the same sorcery-like powers of Henry and Elizabeth, compels Victor to live, in vengeance. The two characters mirror a grief-ridden journey of nature as beauty, nature as mockery, self-disgust, abhorrence of Man, and finally, a life only kept living by righteous revenge. Too unsound to observe his nature, and having lost all his loved-ones, Victor's flowery accounts of agony flitter with thoughts that could be read as the Monster's in an earlier chapter.^[5] The two of them Tom-and-Jerry in a miserable symbiosis until, when Victor dies, the Monster grieves the loss of his only reciprocation and tangible relationship, and welcomes his own rest in the isolation of the Arctic.

The Perspective of a Teenage Girl

Mary Shelley's writing is opulent for this subject matter, with a quality of ideal that goes beyond the expected intensity of gothic writing, giving me a familiar fantasty-tinged whimsical essence of a teenage girl. There is a rose-tinted idealistic painting of all the characters, particularly the men, as beautiful, courageous, talented, and sensitive intellectuals. Captain Walton's introduction reads close to parody with details of his brave adventures and masculine ambitious, bookmarked with sensitive yearnings of affection for his sister (lover?).

"Light, Hunger, Thirst, and Darkness"

The Monster's beginnings of life is an intensely beautiful part of the book. Right before his recollection, Victor gives a tragic plea of the 'curse' of what it means to experience humanity (superiority to bruteness) Alas! why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute, it only renders them more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us. This frivolty to base instincts is poetically exposed by the following descriptions from the Monster. The Monster describes his vague and desperate grasp of reality, I knew, and could distinguish, nothing; but feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept... No distinct ideas occupied my mind; all was confused. I felt light, hunger, thirst, and darkness; He describes the beauty of taste, sight, sound, as his senses begin to separate from each other. It's a description of nature that, unlike the sublime intensity of landscapes Victor paints, the Monster expresses a deeply cellular and atomic beauty, that emotionally weighs the brute's 'hunger, thirst, and desire'. The Monster's first months of birth were strictly attention to realities of life, until rejections of reality causes him to withdraw in spite for Victor.

Fire: Cultivation, Warmth, and Pain

Fire is an apt metaphor for Act II. It's the Monster's first experience of comfort and beauty, but only available to him from a distance. He learns that plunging his hand into the flames is painful, and mourns having to leave its radius. This sets up his barriered and unrequited relationship to the family he lives under and observes. He collects and 'sacrifices' firewood to them, like caring for the flames of a fire, finding warmth in their prayers to such a miracle. Fire is life and light is hope, and it's what the Monster cannot hold. In making himself known to the family, he has plunged himself into the flames, ruining it all. This metaphor wraps up with his literal burning of the house. With the references to Paradise Lost, its easy to see the Monster as a fallen angel surrounded by flame.

Quotes, Footnotes

₁ "I threw myself into the carriage that was to convey me away, hardly knowing whither I was going, and careless of what was passing around... Filled with dreary imagination, I passed through many beautiful and majestic scenes, but my eyes were fixed and unobserving." - VII, Ch1

₂ "'This is what it is to live,' he cried; 'now I enjoy existence! But you, my dear Frankenstein, wherefore are you desponding and sorrowful?' In truth, I was occupied by gloomy thoughts, and neither saw the descent of the evening star, nor the golden sunrise reflected in the Rhine."

₃ (After the rise of the Monster) "Nothing could equal my delight on seeing Clerval; his presence brought back to my thoughts of my father, Elizabeth, and all those scenes of home so dear to my recollection. I grasped his hand, and in a moment forgot my horror and misfortune; I felt suddenly, and for the first time during many months, calm and serene joy." - VI, Ch5

₄"Slave, I before reasoned with you... 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" - VIII, Ch3

₅ "O Night, and the spirits that preside over thee, to pursue the daemon, who caused this misery, until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict. For this reason I will preserve my life... Let the cursed and hellish monster drink deep of agony; let him feel the despair that now torments me." - VIII, ChVII