If the creature broke the man in Moby-Dick, then the man broke the creature in Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel is a classic of science, morality, and the horror that comes from arrogantly playing God.[1] [illustrations by the late, great Bernie Wrightson]
It is also, first to last, a tale layered with the exquisite agony of love, loneliness, and loss, a paean to the need for affection and sharing between souls, to being able to look into another’s eyes and see one’s worth mirrored back without judgment or fear. For this, in the end, separates the men from the monsters.
What a piece of work is Victor Frankenstein! A man of shimmering intelligence and infinite curiosity, and enough hubris to give Sophocles fits. He is the epitome of the romantic hero, blessed with all the gifts and idealized virtues of his class and just enough childhood distress to spark our empathy and make him accessible. In short, Victor is every man’s peerless friend, every woman’s perfect lover,[2] and when he falls—as all tragic heroes must—his misfortunes are “great and unparalleled” as befits his nature. He is also a man of erratic tempers and obsessive passions, who, when he loses control, trusts—consciously and not—that his loved ones will always be there to restore him to his nobler, gentler self. As he tells his arctic rescuer,
…we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves—such a friend ought to be – does not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures. (Frankenstein, p. 25)
Of course, he says this at journey’s end, after years of suffering and fear and violence, when he has lost all and knows only the emptiness of pursuit and despair. Once upon a time, an awareness of this defining human need would have made a real difference to the arc of his existence, but young Frankenstein could not see it. He was more concerned with his Promethean[3] dreams of defying the Gods and creating a new race of beings, titanic in form and function.
A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs. (Frankenstein, p. 42)
Now, as any parent knows, the responsibilities of creatorship far outweigh its perks. Unfortunately, Victor craved all of the latter and none of the former. He played with the forces of life and death yet, when the result wasn’t the golden child he’d imagined, he shattered the paternal covenant and ran.
We who like our heroes charming and our monsters ugly will probably relate to this, but Shelley does not make it that simple.
Victor’s “fiend”[4] is no grunting hulk, lumbering through the countryside; he is a complex, three-dimensional being. Granted, he’s never going to be the centerfold of the Schweizer Illustrierte, but “his limbs were in proportion” and Victor had originally “selected his features as beautiful.”[5] That he did not turn out that way was hardly the creature’s fault, and, like the rest of us, he is so much more than the sum of his external parts. With a quick mind and a spirit that would make any parent proud, he’s resourceful, articulate, and better read than many an American college student. No thanks to Frankenstein, he learned to value virtue and hate vice, value peace above war and justice above inequity. Vicariously he experienced affection and happiness; he gave to others, eased their burdens without expectation of return. Like any other man, he thought and felt, he longed for companionship and its joy. As he tells his maker, “I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity.” Had he a father who cared for him, taught him, kept him safe, he might have become the transcendent being Victor imagined.
Unfortunately, Frankenstein is the product of a Romantic Age in which appearances count. His ideals are exquisite, his ambitions lofty. How could such a man look upon the nascent convulsions of reanimated flesh, the raw light igniting sallow eyes, and see anything but the ghastly, damning imperfection of his hubris? To his aesthetically bound preconceptions, Victor brought not a man back from the dead, but a daemon. Horror so overwhelms him that he cannot bring himself to spend a moment in the creature’s company, let alone try to imagine the depths of his soul. He does not even give his child clothes or teach him the basics of survival. The panicked papa, too craven to aid, too proud to destroy, simply tosses the misbegotten scion of his labors to the hostile world, frightened, lost, and alone.
Thus, on that rainy November night, our shiny hero begins to tarnish. Where youthful chutzpah drove him to create life, cowardly choices thereafter—decisions based on fear, self-loathing, or willful neglect—result only in misery and death. Frankenstein’s abject flight and subsequent years of hiding and betrayal do more to beget a monster than all his sleepless months in the lab.
But Monster Who? Creation or Creator? Who earns our sympathy?
I side with the creature, the ultimate outsider, arguably more sinned against than sinning. At least at first. In his short life, he knew abandonment, anguish, pain, and dread. Like lame Hephaestus, he was thrown away not for the virtues of his character, which were many, but for the vices of his form. Though damaged and despised, he somehow still finds a way to love life and marvel at the wonders of the world. From the depths of his aloneness, he understands the obligations of a creator better than he who made him. When, after many years, they meet, he lays out his case for a debt owed:
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….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. (Frankenstein, p. 78)
With impeccable logic and passion that would thaw the coldest heart, he bares his life to Victor, then asks him for the gift only he can give: a helpmeet, fashioned as he, to share his life and ease his wretched existence. In exchange, he promises to vanish from the world of men, go deep into the South American wilds, and there live and die, perhaps not happy in human terms, but “harmless and free from the misery” he feels. Though backed by a threat of violence, it is a reasonable request and no more than his due. “Let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit!” he pleads.
O, how a fiend does teach the rules of godhood! One would have to be made of stone to resist such an entreaty, and, for all his failings, Frankenstein is not that. Unfortunately, he is also not the benevolent maker his creature needed.
Samuel Butler wrote, “Oaths are but words, and words but wind.” Though Victor swears to make an Eve for his Adam—and knows well the price of betrayal—once out of the monster’s sight, his words blow thinner than a summer breeze. Haunted by past wrongs and future nightmares, Victor runs. Again.
Not that we’re surprised. At this point, it is almost as if he can’t help himself. Free of the monster’s persuasive rhetoric, he can hear only the threat of death and destruction pounding in his ears. His life has become so full of fear, distrust, and guilt, he cannot grasp that one so monstrous outside could possibly be so virtuous and human inside. Revenge from a daemon is easy to understand, but not forgiveness. Because he cannot get past his own prejudices, he damns the monster to a life of anguish and solitude and has the gall to call him “treacherous.” Every agony, Victor brings upon his own head. Every drop of blood shed by his loved ones, flows over his hands.
To some, Frankenstein’s decision not to bring another revenant into the world will appear noble, even self-sacrificing, given the cost. I see it as both dishonorable and foolish. The creature offered peace, yet, once Victor chooses to vitiate their agreement, potential gratitude turns to absolute hatred. Betrayed yet again, the monster makes good on his threat, cutting out his maker’s heart with mayhem and death from Switzerland to the Orkneys and back again. He keeps his word.
The scales balance. Frankenstein finally feels the persecution and torture his creature felt his entire life.[6] Of course, hampered by a hero’s perspective, he blames the beast rather than accept the passive-aggressive role he played in his own destruction.
Wretched and despairing, with neither family nor friends to soothe his passions, he travels the world, mad as Ahab, surviving year after year on a diet of vengeance and rage. The monster’s execution is his raison d’être, and should he die in the process, so much the better: his misery will cease and he’ll no longer have to face life alone.
When the end comes, monster and man, by turns hunter and hunted, are almost indistinguishable. I say almost because, to this reader, the creature seems more human, more self-aware, more forgiving than his maker. Damaged as his form might be, his conscience always remained intact, remorse always gnawed at his soul. He not only comprehends the fullness of his crimes, but knows that each blow, each act of revenge, no matter how provoked, diminishes him ten-thousand times more than his “self-devoted” foe. Atlantean to the end, he shoulders his responsibilities and welcomes death with the grace of self-determination.
Like all good monster stories, Frankenstein is a cautionary tale. Maker and monster are emblems of raw knowledge and the disasters of parental neglect. Of getting so obsessed with being able to do something that one forgets to question if one should. Two hundred years old and it remains a story of the future, of forcing the evolutionary arc of nature because it seems a neat idea at the time. Cloning, drugged and irradiated plants and animals, fracking, GMOs—Jurassic Park is simply Frankenstein with dinosaurs! We continue to plunge ahead, pushing the limits of scientific possibility sans critical reflection, without stopping to ask if this way monsters lie. And when they show up—as they surely will—do we do better than Victor Frankenstein did, or, ignoring the horrifying lessons of his tormented creature, do we simply hold our breath and stumble cravenly on?
[1] Much as I love James Whale’s 1931 film, it lacks the nuance and depth of the source. Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 version sheds the charm of the earlier film for shock value and misses major points in the process. Despite the vaguely steampunk flourishes, in their current TV incarnations on Penny Dreadful, Frankenstein and his creature hit very close to the mark.
[2] And vice versa.
[3] At first blush, Shelley is obviously referring to Frankenstein in her subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus,” yet, given the literature of the time, one can see the Creature fitting the bill, too. In 1789, Goethe, an influence on both Shelley and her fictional scientist, published his poem, “Prometheus.” In it, the Titan rails at Zeus: “When I was a child/And did not know where from or to,/I turned my seeking eye toward/The sun, as if beyond there was/An ear to hear my lament,/A heart like mine,/To take pity on the afflicted.” Frankenstein’s monster would have concurred.
[4] In the tradition of anonymous faerie-tale antagonists, he is called fiend, daemon, creature, devil. Frankenstein does not even deign to give his child a name.
[5] Let’s be honest, though: what newborn is ever pleasant looking save to the most adoring parent?
[6] Naturally, given his romantic narcissism, his suffering is worse than anything his creature could possibly have endured and so his rage the more justified. Or so he tells himself. Where would we be without our rationalizations!