Frankenstein is a novel that can be read and analyzed from many points of view: biographical, formalist, psychoanalytical, feminist, Marxist, deconstructionist, new historical—to name a few. Here, I suggest that we are best served by reading the novel in two ways: as a conflation of the three basic Western myths about the dangerous consequences of the pursuit of knowledge, and as a doppelgänger novel that stresses the interconnections among the characters. Both of these “readings” may be extended to the many film adaptations of the novel.
Two of the Western myths about the dangers of the pursuit of knowledge are readily apparent in the novel: the Monster’s reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost takes us to the Genesis myth and the punishment of man for defying God’s prohibition against eating from the Tree of Knowledge; and the subtitle of the novel, “The Modern Prometheus,” and the many uses of Promethean “fire” in the text remind us that Prometheus was punished for stealing fire or knowledge from Zeus and giving it to man. The third myth did not become explicit in the novel until Mary Shelley revised her text for the 1831 edition and alluded to Plato’s Symposium, specifically to Aristophanes’ myth about primal, multilimbed, and globular man seeking to dethrone the gods on Mount Olympus. In that revision, Mary Shelley changed Frankenstein’s very general phrase in the 1818 edition about friendship with Henry Clerval (“I agree with you . . . in believing that friendship is not only a desirable, but a possible acquisition”) to a much more specific judgment about human nature (“I agree with you, . . . we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves—such a friend ought to be—do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures”).
That reference to the “half made up” creatures comes from the debate about the nature of Love in Plato’s Symposium, in which various men at a banquet treat the subject in a series of speeches. Although Socrates will eventually win the debate (with the help of Diotima) by explaining that Love is a child of Penury and Plenty, Aristophanes offers the most elaborate and entertaining explanation: that Love is the desire to make whole and entire what once was whole and entire. In a variation of the Adam and Eve myth, primal man (distributed through three “sexes”: male, female, and androgynous), who was globular (and could presumably roll part of the way up Mount Olympus) and four limbed, had the ability to ascend to the heavens and challenge the gods. “Angered by man’s presumption or pride, the gods split each of the three sexes down the middle into separate halves so that they might never again have the ability to enter the precincts of the gods.” Love, Aristophanes explains, is the desire for self to reunite with its second self, its other half. Although Mary Shelley may not have known or remembered this myth prior to publishing the first edition in 1818, she certainly knew it by July 1818 when she transcribed Percy Bysshe Shelley’s translation of the Symposium.
The splitting in half of man conveniently introduces the second major way to read Frankenstein: as a complex doppelgänger novel in which all the major characters may be read as portions of Victor Frankenstein’s divided personality. Not only does Frankenstein see himself in the Monster (as is evidenced even in the early 1910 Edison film adaptation of the novel), but we can see aspects of him reflected in the other characters: Walton and even Clerval serve as Frankenstein’s equivalents in their ambition and pursuit of knowledge, while Elizabeth and, again, Clerval represent the complementary heart that Victor needs to be whole and entire (note that Clerval pursues the social sciences of politics and linguistics, in contrast to Victor, who isolates himself in the laboratory of the hard sciences). Hence, when Victor abandons Elizabeth and Clerval, heart and home, to go off to university and, as it were, eat of the Tree of Knowledge, he begins a journey to psychic suicide, which is represented by self (Frankenstein) pursuing self (Monster) to the death in the Arctic wastes.
A diagram helps to outline the character relationships as they double up in this novel:
|
HEAD |
Robert Walton |
Victor Frankenstein |
The Monster |
|
HEART |
Margaret Walton Saville |
Elizabeth & Clerval |
The Female Monster |
Note how the Monster responds (killing Elizabeth and Clerval) after Frankenstein destroys the Female Monster—both actions are identical, and both further isolate the two protagonists, whose lives mirror each other.
I should alert the reader that I have been calling Frankenstein’s creation the “Monster”; other critics and screenwriters will often call him the “Creature” instead. In the author’s introduction to the 1831 edition, Mary Shelley avoids both words, using instead “phantasm,” “handywork,” “thing” (two times), “hideous corpse,” “phantom,” “spectre,” “progeny,” and “offspring” to name her creation. Percy Shelley studiously avoids any word for the creation in the preface he wrote for the first edition, and in his review of his wife’s novel he uses the words “creature,” “abortion,” and “anomaly” in three incidental places, but he names him five times as the “Being.” Both of the Shelleys thus seem to avoid using a single word (except Percy’s neutral “Being”) to name the creation, and no clear pattern of denomination appears in the text of the novel, where he is called by different characters the different names of “monster,” “creature,” “daemon” (typographically represented as “daemon” in this edition), “being,” “wretch,” and “devil.” By having no single name, the Monster has perforce a universality that embraces all of mankind; indeed, when Mary Shelley saw in the playbill of the first theatrical performance of her novel that a mere “———” was being played by Mr. T. Cooke, she remarked in a letter to Leigh Hunt that “this nameless mode of naming the un[n]ameable is rather good” (although Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein more often than not denominated the creation a “monster”). In effect, Mary Shelley forces each reader (and viewer) to be complicitous, having to use a name and make a moral judgment about Frankenstein’s creation: those who use the word “Creature” tend to sympathize with him (and excuse his actions); those who use the word “Monster” tend to hold him accountable for his murders. By attending so emphatically to the nameless, Mary Shelley indirectly asks the reader also to consider the etymologies of the forenames and surnames used for the other characters in this novel.
Two of the named characters to consider, both of whom may represent Mary Shelley herself, are Margaret Walton Saville (note the initials MWS) and Safie, the two names being homophones (if Saville is pronounced as French). The first of these names takes us to the outermost frame story, in which Robert Walton writes to his sister, MWS, over a period of 276 days (the gestation period) from 11 December 17[96] to 12 September 17[97] (the bracketed years supplied in accord with a perpetual calendar), the dates roughly in accord with the time Mary Shelley was conceived and born. The dates of Walton’s journal enable us to go back and read Victor’s creation of the Monster in accord with the dates of the French Revolution (1789) and the Reign of Terror (1793) or, for that matter, with the Industrial Revolution and perhaps, by extension, with any technological revolution by which man, thinking he can change the world for the better, ultimately enslaves and destroys himself.
The second of these names takes us to the innermost story, in which Safie is introduced as a means by which the Monster learns to speak and to read. The very carefully chosen name Safie (she was originally called Maimouna and then Amina) suggests Sophie or Sophia and hence knowledge or wisdom—and reminds us again that Frankenstein is a novel about the dangerous consequences of the pursuit of knowledge. Those consequences are explored in each layer of this frame story, in which we encounter Walton narrating his own story as well as Victor’s, Victor narrating his own as well as the Monster’s, and the Monster narrating his own as well that of the De Laceys’—all centered by the story of Safie, whose considerable learning does not enable her to look beyond the ugly countenance of the Monster as she flees the De Lacey cottage in her last scene. That flight from a displeasing “countenance” becomes a trope throughout much of the novel—and indeed through all the film adaptations. However, what horrifies us the most is not the Monster but the responses to the Monster. At the very center of the novel, the Monster is spurned by Felix (the happy), Agatha (the good), and Safie (the knowing). Even more horrible is the Monster’s own self-deprecation in his final words to Walton: “You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself.” Frankenstein, ultimately, is a novel about self-loathing; and the Monster’s final exit in “darkness and distance” predicts “The horror! The horror!” of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, another doppelgänger frame tale published at the end of the nineteenth century.