Frankenstein

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Frankenstein

Author	Mary Shelley
Publisher	Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones
Publication Date	1818
Country	England
Genre(s)	Horror, Science Fiction
ISBN
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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (aka The Modern Prometheus) (1818) ranks among the few novels whose basic plot is familiar to almost everyone on earth. One of the first major works to combine horror with science fiction, it introduced the concept of the “mad scientist,” and has become a metaphor for the travails of modern civilization. Yet it has been subject to so many adaptations and spin-offs that the details of the original narrative are often forgotten.

The tale concerns Victor Frankenstein, a Swiss student whose determination to discover the secret of life is perhaps inspired by his mother’s untimely death. He constructs a humanoid monster out of corpses, but is so shocked by its hideous appearance that he collapses, allowing it to escape. The world quickly educates the monster, who is universally shunned and assaulted until he becomes a skulking eavesdropper who learns to read and speak; in fact he becomes positively long-winded, and narrates much of the novel in the best oratorical style. Blaming Frankenstein for his misery, the monster embarks on a campaign of vengeance, murdering Frankenstein’s brother, his best friend, and ultimately his bride. When creature and creator meet, Frankenstein promises to make a mate for the monster, but ultimately he can’t go through with it, and their enmity becomes implacable. A pursuit leads Frankenstein to the Arctic, where he dies of exposure, leaving the monster with an empty life which he swears to end by burning himself at the North Pole.

So, creator does not crush creation, but neither does the monster actually kill its maker, although the terrible cost of thoughtless experimentation is certainly conveyed. The “daemon” makes the case for those born into a world they never made, but it is always clear that he is not really human, and he loses sympathy by murdering a child at play and the heroine on her wedding night. And yet, despite the melodrama, this may be the most high-minded horror novel of them all.

The daughter of a famous feminist mother and a famous philosopher father, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley acquired a famous poet for a husband, and it was Percy Bysshe Shelley who encouraged her to expand her original brief narrative into a novel. He also wrote the uncredited introduction, emphasizing the instructive elements of the narrative. Eschewing interesting details like the technique for giving life to inanimate flesh, the book is a treatise as much as a tragedy. Perhaps because of this tension, Frankenstein has over the centuries retained its significance as a fable of human fallibility.

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Movies of the Novel