From time to time as adults we throw a little classic in to our reading. The kind of story that spawned others and has passed the test of time. The kind you could have studied at school. That last one in a way makes it sound unappealing considering we don’t always look back on the book we studied at school fondly. Frankenstein though isn’t one of them, it’s one of the ones you wish you had studied at school. It has so many of those moments you could see yourself analysing in a class, it has layers. It is also very simple and obvious. A main uncomplicated but unbelievable story. Take it at face value and that’s it.
The writing feels like it could be updated although it shouldn’t ever happen. When things are translated they are also updated in language and in a subtle way style. A book written in English will forever be ageing. I would love to know how Tolstoy sounds to a Russian than he is in the latest translation I read. In that sense I can tell it was written in the early nineteenth century. While that’s not a problem it will be one day.
Shelley approaches all sorts of ideas and concepts throughout the book. They are too numerous to go into detail in just five hundred words but she discusses justice, the role of god, she approaches ideas of personhood and what is is to be a person, our understanding of ethics, even existentialism but this was long before it had become an ism. This is an entire philosophy course for a year covered. There are many essays written on it. I imagine it’s a common understanding too that there is the potential schizophrenia angle which relates in a way to ideas of duality in the book. They need each other, the monster never tries to hurt him and when he dies the monster goes off to die too. Did Frankenstein give a part of himself in the creation of the monster. In a way the monster shows more of what we call humanity than Viktor Frankenstein who in the end becomes a monster himself in a sad way. In a contemporary sense we could think of the development of Artificial Intelligence. The monster has not only an ability to learn but has self-consciousness, the ultimate stage of creating free thinking robots. I could go on and on.
Quite interestingly the book has nearly as interesting a back story. Mary Shelley was the daughter of the revolutionary thinkers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the wife of the poet Percy Shelley. In the ‘Year Without Summer’ of 1816 when they were visiting the exiled and infamous poet and writer amongst many things, Lord Byron in Switzerland, the weather forced them to stay indoors and Byron came up with the idea they all wrote horror stories. In a dream over the next few nights the story of Frankenstein and his monster came to Mary Shelley.
Along with all this and not to be forgotten it’s actually quite a good story. You don’t just read it to learn and look smart, you read it to enjoy. I assume they teach it in schools still and if they don’t can’t think why. It’s so full of everything it would be a waste. I ended it really feeling happy that I had just read a good book. We all should, we may just learn a little eloquence and humanity from a monster.
Observations and Misunderstandings 