Frankenstein

The teaching

Taught from Mary Shelley's novel of 1818 and her introduction of 1831, with the stage and screen that retold it.

The story in brief

An explorer sailing for the Pole takes aboard a dying man found on the ice, and the man tells him his story as a warning. Victor Frankenstein, a student of Geneva who read the old alchemists as a boy and modern chemistry at the university, finds the secret of giving life, builds a man of gigantic size from the stuff of charnel houses, and runs from it in horror the moment it opens its eyes. Abandoned, the creature learns to speak and read and to long for love; refused it by every human face, he kills Victor's little brother, lets a servant hang for it, and asks his maker for a companion. Victor begins one and destroys it, and the creature takes his friend and his bride. The maker hunts his creature into the Arctic, where Victor dies and the creature goes off across the ice to burn himself. The novel is told chapter by chapter on the branch Frankenstein in Forbidden knowledge.

What the creature read

The creature's education is the heart of his half of the book. Hidden in a hovel against a cottage, he learns speech by listening to a poor exiled family, the De Laceys, and history from the book the son reads aloud to the Arabian girl he loves, Volney's Ruins of Empires, from which he learns of riches and rank and that he has neither, nor family, nor any name.

Then he finds three books in a leather case in the woods. The Sorrows of Werter teaches him gentle and domestic feeling and makes him wonder at death; Plutarch's Lives teach him to admire the heroes of past ages and to love virtue; and Paradise Lost he reads as true history. Like Adam he is joined by no link to any other being, but Adam came forth perfect from the hands of a God who cared for him, and he is wretched and alone. Many times he thinks Satan the fitter emblem of his state, for like Satan he looks on the happiness of others and feels the bitter gall of envy.

Safie's story

Inside the creature's story stands another, of the family he watches. Felix De Lacey had freed a Turkish merchant unjustly condemned in Paris, and loved the merchant's daughter, Safie; for it the family was stripped of its fortune and driven into exile, and the merchant, once safe, broke his word and ordered his daughter home. Safie, whose Christian mother had taught her to aspire to a free mind and an independent spirit, fled across Europe to find Felix. The creature watches the family welcome the stranger who cannot speak their language, and learns it with her. They take in a foreigner from a distant land; the same family, when it sees his face, beats him from the door.

The waking dream

In her introduction of 1831 Mary Shelley tells where the story came from. In the wet summer of 1816 by Lake Geneva, Byron proposed that each of the company write a ghost story; for days she could think of nothing, while the men talked of the principle of life, of the experiments of Dr Darwin, and of whether a corpse might be brought back to life, perhaps by galvanism. That night, unable to sleep, she saw with shut eyes the student kneel by the thing he had made and saw it stir. He flees, hoping it will sink back into dead matter, and wakes to find it standing at his bedside, looking at him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.

What had terrified her, she knew, would terrify others, and next day she began with the words It was on a dreary night of November. She bade her hideous progeny go forth and prosper.

The stage and the screen

The stage drew its own moral at once. The first play, in 1823, was called Presumption, and its title says what it taught: the overreacher punished. Its playbill named the creature only by a dash, which Mary Shelley, who went to see it, thought a rather good way of naming the unnameable. The film of 1931 opened with an actor stepping in front of the curtain to warn the audience, and gave its maker the cry, cut by the censors of the day, that now he knew what it feels like to be God.

What the tellers teach

Each telling draws its own lesson. Percy Shelley, reviewing the novel, read it as a study in how evil is made: treat a person ill and he becomes wicked; answer love with scorn, single out one being as the outcast of his kind and cut him off from his fellows, and malice and selfishness are forced upon him. Mary Shelley's revision of 1831 leans towards fate, with Victor speaking of a destiny too strong for him, as if his ruin had been decreed from the first. And the subtitle had named him from the start: the Modern Prometheus, after the Titan who shaped humankind from clay and brought it fire, and was chained for it.