Hey kids! Welcome back to The Book Report.

In 1816, a combination of low solar activity and a category 7 volcano created a cold spell through North America and Europe, resulting in what is now known as The Year Without a Summer (just as a reference, the Eyjafjallajökull volcano that erupted in April 2010 was a category 4, Mount St. Helens was a category 5). Mary Shelley and her husband (at the time her lover) Percy Bysshe Shelley visited Lord Byron at his villa in Switzerland at Lake Geneva. Due to the cold, rainy weather there was not much opportunity for outdoor activities, so the group stayed in, discussing a range of topics including galvanism (the movement of dead or motionless tissue through an electric current), reanimation, and horror. Inspired by the conversation, Lord Bryon suggested everyone attempt to write their own horror stories one evening. Mary Shelley’s resultant work became the classic novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

The misconception which occurs most often in the book, perhaps, is when people refer to the Monster as Frankenstein. The name of the doctor is Victor Frankenstein, but Shelley never named the Monster in the book. In fact, Shelley never called the Monster a monster, her characters did. She always referred to him as a Creature, and in other writings called him Adam, but thanks to Hollywood history, he is forever cast as the Monster (and as Frankenstein when people with no concept of literary history refer to him).
The secondary title, The Modern Prometheus, refers to the Greek titan Prometheus, who created humans from clay and gave them the gift of fire. It was a gift he later regretted after seeing how a gift of life and warmth could be turned towards such destructive uses. So, while the image of the Monster has been firmly etched into our history of classic monsters, given that the two titles of the book refer to the doctor we need to examine how the book works with the title character as the true monster. And the two titles give us clues on how to examine the book: first we must look at the doctor as a man, and secondly as a god.

Frankenstein
Dr. Victor Frankenstein was obsessed with the ideas of life and death. It stemmed from the death of his mother and a profound fascination, from an early age, with Natural Philosophy. Natural Philosophy was the precursor to modern science, attempting to explain mysteries previously confined only to magic, mysticism, and religion using mathematics, chemistry, and physics: Alchemy, for example. Natural philosophy and its younger, smarter brother Science (prior to the 19th century, “science” was another word for knowledge) seemed to offer all the secrets of the universe to young Victor, and he wanted to claim them all for his own. Literature abounds with stories of the magician seduced toward darker and deeper magic and his thirst for knowledge increased, and Victor was no different with his thirst: it stemmed from a selfish desire for mastery over everything.
In the first two chapters, Victor unabashedly places himself at the center of his families universe. When he was the only child, he relished the attention his family gave him, and after his parents adopted Elizabeth, he makes no qualms about claiming her for himself. Such self-centered greed and ambition places him on the precipice of tragedy in this story, just as in other tragedies like Macbeth and Oedipus Rex.
As a tragedy written in the early 19th century, the book stands practically alone. At the time, many popular tragedies of earlier eras had their endings rewritten to happy conclusions. German poet, novelist, playwright, statesman, and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “The mere attempt to write tragedy might be my undoing.” It wasn’t until the end of the 19th Century that novels and plays manage to return to or reimagine the tragedy as an art form. Yet Shelley’s Frankenstein contains all the essential elements of good tragedy (um…“good” meaning “well written”) as the hero of the story essentially brings about his own destruction and the destruction of everything he loves.

Prometheus
The story of Prometheus is a tragedy of a different sort. After creating mankind out clay, Prometheus tricked Zeus into choosing the mere remains of burnt offerings from men after humans took the actual meat for themselves. In angry retribution, Zeus took the secret of fire away from men, but Prometheus stole it back and returned the secret as a gift to humans. For punishment, Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock, where an eagle would come and eat away his liver every day, since it would grow back overnight due to his immortality. It wasn’t until Hercules challenged the will of Zeus by killing the eagle removing his chains was Prometheus freed.
In parallel, Frankenstein imbues his creation with life, and is subsequently tortured for his gift. On the other hand, the monstrosity of it is that this god is repulsed by his creation. The horror aspect in this sense would be to imagine a world in which God hated the miracles he performed. Would his creations be justified, then, in rebelling against their Creator? An interesting philosophical dilemma, which brings weight and depth to this tragic horror novel.

Adaptations

Unlike other horror archetypes, Frankenstein’s Monster sees little re-imagining beyond spoofs. Which is not to say there aren’t plenty of stories about Scientist characters being tortured or hunted by their Creations, but in these stories, the Scientist nearly always is the sympathetic hero and the Creation monstrous and devilish. Frankenstein, however, works as the opposite and such stands practically alone as a horror novel of this type.

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Well, that’s it for this week.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_