The Literary Loon's Library: Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus

Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley, Penguin Classics, 1992, 261 pp. (originally published in 1818)

Frankenstein, one of the key texts in modern literature, was written by Mary Shelley in 1818 when she was only 21. She had already experienced quite an amazing range of events in her life, and she survived quite a few more after Frankenstein. Shelley was born in 1797 to two radical writers, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died within a few days of childbirth, and William Godwin, who raised her. Shelley received a much more extensive education than other young girls in that time period. She chose to elope with Percy Bysshe Shelley at the age of 17 -- two years later, Percy's first wife committed suicide, and the elopers were married. Only one of her four children survived, and Percy himself drowned in 1822. The next thirty years of her life were comparatively uneventful, and they were productive ones for her, although her later writings never achieved the same fame as Frankenstein which was composed in that most turbulent time of her life. She died in 1851.


Frankenstein was published anonymously, and the author was only later revealed to be Shelley. She wrote a new introduction (included in this Penguin Classics edition) for the 1831 edition, at which point she incorporated a number of changes. She also took the chance to answer a question she had apparently received quite often: how such a young girl could write about such horrible things. Her answer describes her literary sources, as well as a disturbing dream that was the kernel of inspiration for the story. Shelley borrowed quite freely from the sources she was familiar with -- there are large echoes of Paradise Lost (one of the three books the Monster reads in the course of the story) and Shakespeare, and the sequence of the Monster's "adopted" family and the Arabian lover in middle of the book seems lifted straight from one of the side stories in Don Quixote. Shelley brilliantly synthesized ideas of the time, and brought the sting of satire to bear on the modern idea of the scientist.


Frankenstein begins with a framing story. An explorer named Robert Walton has left the north coast of Russia and is on his way into the Arctic Ocean; Walton is writing letters to his sister in London and tells her how one day he saw a monstrous figure fleeing across the ice. A few days later, Walton rescues Victor Frankenstein from hypothermia and starvation. Frankenstein tells Walton the events that form the core of the novel, his creation of the Monster, and Walton relates them to his sister in epistolary form.


Victor Frankenstein's story is divided into three volumes. Volume 1 is the story of Frankenstein's childhood in Geneva, and his studies at a university in Germany that led to the creation of the monster. He thinks he can create wonderful new life, but at his first glance at his creation, Frankenstein turns away in horror. He subsequently becomes quite ill. He is called back to Geneva two years later by a letter from his father that has tragic news: his younger brother William has been murdered. Frankenstein is convinced that his monster committed the crime, but a piece of evidence has been planted with Justine, the family maid. When Justine is executed, Frankenstein feels like he has two deaths on his head.


Volume 2 is mainly the monster's story; Frankenstein meets him on a glacier near Geneva, and the monster tells his creator about his brief life. Everywhere he turned, he was met with disgust or open enmity. He was hiding out in the woods when he found a family he could safely observe, help secretly, and learn language and culture from while eavesdropping. In a heartrending scene, the monster reveals himself to the blind father of the family, only to be violently spurned when the rest of the family returns. Frankenstein finds out that his suspicions about William's fate were correct, and the monster threatens further violence on Frankenstein's family if a certain request of his is not fulfilled. He wants a bride, similar in nature to himself, simply because every normal human has rejected him.
Volume 3 is about the consequences of Frankenstein's refusal of this request. Frankenstein attempts to make the bride once, but destroys the result. He flees across northern Scotland and Ireland, only to face more death, and back in Geneva, a final round of murder and death. Every professional and filial attachment is either denied him or destroyed, and he blames it all on his creation. The monster tauntingly leads him on a long chase that ends up in the Arctic Ocean. Once Frankenstein is done his story, the book has a brief coda narrated by Walton.


Why has this book's fame persisted so long in our culture? Shelley's Frankenstein is a strong psychological drama, the pitiless tale of the destruction of one man. The book has longer passages of philosophy and reflection than modern horror readers are accustomed to, but the body count is certainly still quite high. The book has a major disappointment to audiences conditioned by all the movie versions to expect a hugely spectacular creation-of-the-monster scene: Frankenstein doesn't describe it to Walton for fear that Walton will write it down and let other people figure out the process. A copout, but a reasonable one by the book's internal logic. Interestingly, Shelley's story has been played as horror in most adaptations - but it's also a sound argument to call it science fiction. What should we do with our expanding scientific powers? How do we make decisions on life or death matters once that is within our hands? As much as Frankenstein is a cliché when it's applied to new scientific advances, the kneejerk warning of doom, it's also as if Shelley's book has never been applied at all. Cautionary tales by their nature can hardly ever be intense or sweeping enough. Does Frankenstein deserve his cruel fate? Shelley seems to punish the man for two sins, hubris and lack of pity. Frankenstein creates life and then turns away from it. Perhaps it's as simple as the fact that he doesn't learn from his mistakes despite his brilliance.


This leads me directly to my next point. Another reason for the book's enduring fame is the strength of the characters. Frankenstein is a complex and fascinating man, a scholarly prodigy, and noteworthy to his biology professors even though he has grown up reading alchemy textbooks. He ruins his life with overwork in the two years it takes to create the monster, then runs from the consequences, all the while living with crushing despair. He's hardly the mad scientist of the movie adaptations; his fit of mad science is followed mostly by remorse and the accumulation of fatal consequences. Frankenstein is quite glib, and doesn't learn from his own philosophizing, another of the book's ironies; at one point, he says: "A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule" (54). Even more interesting than Frankenstein himself is the character of the monster. We encounter his horrible deeds before he gets a chance to tell his own story, but when he does, the book subtly changes, tearing our sympathies between the two main characters. The monster becomes aware of the world, learns to read, and acts out of crippling loneliness -- all this is related in stunning details. Shelley has a knack for demonstrating complex states of mind through a character's actions, even though the prose may be a bit thick for the modern reader. Shelley skimps on the other characters in the book, such as Walton or the one female character, Elizabeth.


Frankenstein is well worth reading, and it's much different than the popular conception of the story. This is not surprising, considering the way it has wended its way through popular culture for almost two centuries. The story has been picked over by horror and science fiction writers and scriptwriters ever since (for example, the last speech of the monster -- "'But soon,' he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, 'I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt'" (215) -- is quite similar to the famous "Tears in Rain" speech in Blade Runner, another lament by a created being), and there have been a multitude of movie adaptations and sequels, even computer games. The majority of them are simply awful, but one or two points of interest crop up.

Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 is one of Bradbury's most famous books, and it reads like a fever dream -- intensely cinematic, directed by its own weird dream logic, and full of the quality of images that haunt you for days. The book is a cautionary tale about what happens when books are forgotten or actively suppressed, and it forms one of its own best arguments in favor of the book as a keystone to intellectual freedom. The society it describes is a dystopia, but unlike other famous dystopias like 1984 and Brave New World, the book holds out some hope, however fragile and tentative. Fahrenheit 451 is a deceptive book too; it's a quick read, and it seems to be about people burning books.

Fahrenheit 451 begins with a famous opening line: "It was a pleasure to burn" (33), a line that resonates throughout the book in interesting ways. The story centers on a man named Guy Montag, who is a fireman, but in his future, the houses are all fireproof and the main job of the fireman is to find books and burn them. By the third page of the story, though, we’ve already learned of Montag's unease with the repressive social order that his profession helps to continue. He meets a neighbor girl, Clarisse McClellan, who’s out walking one night when he’s returning from work. After an unsettling conversation, Clarisse asks him if he’s happy, and his ready answer is belied by his sudden realization that everything isn’t all right. This is followed closely by what happens when Montag arrives back home-his wife Mildred has overdosed on sleeping pills and needs to have her stomach pumped. Mildred participates enthusiastically in all of the distractions society has ordained: driving  fast in her car without paying attention to the scenery outside, listening to her Seashell all night, and most disturbing of all, paying more attention to the "family" in her living room (three walls of which have been converted to giant televisions) then her own husband. But none of these distractions are enough-the next morning Mildred denies that the overdose ever happened.

Montag also becomes disillusioned while at work. For one thing, the Mechanical Hound, a strange and terrible robotic beast (similar to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles) that is kept in a kennel at the firehouse, doesn't seem too certain of his scent anymore, and the Hound always gets its prey. And the Fire Chief, a disquieting and intelligent man, begins to doubt Montag's devotion to his job. What would it hurt to save one book from the next fire? Does Montag even see his own role in society as clearly as the Fire Chief does his? The rest of the book is a snapshot of Montag's journey from a passive fireman drone into a thinking human being, which is the reason why the book has endured as long as it has. Bradbury is not talking about the physical burning of books, although that too can be part of the spectrum of things he refers to. Book burning is a singularly effective metaphor, set up as it is to hit a hot button at the literal level.

The book is divided into three sections: "The Hearth and the Salamander" introduces Montag at home and at work; "The Sieve and the Sand" finds Montag increasingly disillusioned with his society; and "Burning Bright" concerns Montag's escape and the eventual end of the society he left behind. The sections are 40-60 pages in length, and the overall book is perhaps shorter than its reputation would suggest. It's somewhat of a truism that Bradbury's writing works best at shorter lengths -- he has written a number of novels after all. Fahrenheit 451 has the same strong imagistic writing as Bradbury's short stories, and this has the effect of making the book seem longer. The compressed bursts of metaphor and description and tangled phrase tend to slow the mind's eye as the extra layer of meaning and intent gets deciphered. Take, for example, the famous opening line of the book, and the subsequent paragraph:

It was a pleasure to burn.

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning. (33)

 

This is almost everything we need to know about Montag and why he has been a fireman. This is also some extraordinary writing, and indicative of what's to come prose-wise: several metaphors can be jammed into one sentence, and repetition of words and rhythms is used very carefully.

Bradbury can be an off-kilter plotter. Clarisse, who arrives in to the book like a breath of fresh air, is killed off within a few pages. This is tragic, of course, but also shocking. Readers who come to the book with expectations that have been conditioned by repeated exposure to conventional plots will find this most true. Ironically, in Truffaut's version, by no means a conventional movie, Clarisse survives all the way to the end of the story, and as Bradbury points out in his introduction to this edition, Clarisse also survives in the play and the opera that he wrote based on his own book. Leaving aside for the moment that Clarisse's death removes the only charismatic and non-passive female character, I don't mind the way that her death functions in the book. It's a shock, but she is also balanced thematically and structurally by the introduction of an older male character, a former professor named Faber. The young girl and the old man serve as guides for Montag on his journey of self-awareness.

 

Both Brave New World and 1984 ended with the total victory of the totalitarian state and the breakdown or suicide of the individual. Fahrenheit 451 is a little different. Bradbury's book argues that such a repressive society, in support of which the firemen burn so many books, would self-implode, simply because it has no flexibility and has no fertile ground of old ideas to generate new ideas. The victory of the individual at the end of Fahrenheit 451 is achieved at the cost of the self-destruction of the rest of society, which is scant hope for those individuals who are currently in the grip of a repressive system. Indeed, the bookish rebels that Montag meets at the end of the story are simply waiting; they are in no way actively encouraging change. It's amazing in a way that Bradbury can pull off such a dispassionate and non-heroic ending. Is Bradbury's optimism naive? The methods of control in Montag's society are certainly clumsy and inefficient compared to the biological ones used in Brave New World. It's reassuring to have at least one cautionary tale that has a hopeful ending.

 

The strength of Bradbury's vision leaves this future etched in our minds long after the book is finished. His collection of strange speculations somehow works, probably because he is working so effectively on our fears: crazy teenagers out to run over helpless pedestrians; a war that no one cares about because they’re too obsessed with their own petty interests, but eventually ends our civilization; relationships completely empty of emotion, and the systemic stifling of unique individual minds into dull, monotonous conformity. There is deep, constant loneliness in this book, the lonely of heart and the lonely of mind. It becomes unbearably sad, and what replacement for intimacy, for humanity, can the literary gathering at the end ever be? Bradbury wants to hold out hope, I think, and it's not the literal solution that he trusts in. Everyone should read this book. Not to find out about the Mechanical Hound, or the future and its gadgets, or anything like that. This book doesn't predict the future and it doesn't want to. We find in Bradbury's creation a small part of our own angst, our own struggles in a world with too many distractions and moral ambiguities, and in turn it creates an outlet for our own unbearable rage. The book is an astonishing masterpiece.