by Mary Shelley, Published anonymously in 1818 (The Mother of Gothic Horror)
Young Victor Frankenstein grew up in an ideal loving environment in Geneva, Switzerland. His childhood companions were Henry Clerval and Elizabeth. He loses his mother, tragically, to scarlet fever. Her dying wish were that Victor and Elizabeth would marry. He goes away to college, University of Ingolstadt, and is intrigued by Natural Philosophy – “the field we now refer to as the physical sciences.” He decides to try and create life. He experiments for a year – piecing together a being from dead people. He succeeds in bringing this being to life but as soon as he does, he is horrified: “I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” He abandons the wretch. The wretch goes to the country and hides next to a cottage for 2 years and learns to read, learns language from a loving family. Blind father, son (Felix), daughter Agatha. They have no idea he is living in a shed or hole right next to their cottage. He spies and listens and helps them – getting firewood in the night. He knows he is hideous and finally works up the courage to present himself to the blind father. Felix and Agatha come home unexpectedly and erupt in terror at the sight of him. He runs away and hides but his loving family leave the cottage forever – abandoning him. He burns down the cottage and goes off in a rage against humanity. He saves a little girl from drowning but the father is horrified, terrified of him, and ties to kill him rather than thank him. Enraged at his creator, he ventures toward Geneva. That same evening, Victor’s father, Elizabeth, and Victor’s little brothers, William and Ernest, are out on a hike. The monster comes across William and tries to befriend him. William is terrified. The monster kills him, then discovers a locket he wore and takes it. He comes upon Justine, a sweet serving girl, out looking for William, and puts the locket in her pocket, unknowingly to Justine. She is accused of the murder of little William, a boy she helped raise and whom she loved dearly. Victor returns home for the trial and knows without a doubt his monster is the one who killed William but he does not say a word to save Justine. She is executed for the murder of William. Victor is in agony and despair day after day yet tells no one his secret. His father takes him and Elizabeth to a beautiful mountain retreat to try and shake the darkness from Victor. Victor ends up going on a hike to the top of a mountain and meets his monster. His monster strikes a deal – no more murders if Victor will create a female for him to live and share his life with. Victor agrees. Goes to the north of Scotland or Ireland and sets about creating the female. On the verge of success, he stops – realizing he is about to make another huge mistake which could end up destroying the entire human race; if they had children, “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth…” Also, “She might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness.”
So he destroys his work – and the wretch, who had followed him all the way, saw him do it through the window. The wretch vows vengeance: “I shall be with you on your wedding night.” The wretch murders dear Henry Clerval, on his way to get Victor. Victor marries Elizabeth and vows to tell her the day after their wedding the whole story. Thinking he would be able to end the nightmare that night. He tells Elizabeth to go to bed and she does – but screams, and he runs to her – to find her murdered – the wretch looking through the bedroom window.
Upon hearing that Elizabeth is dead, Victor’s father dies of grief 3 days later. Victor now goes on a hunt for the wretch. He follows him up north. They are on sleds with dogs and Victor cannot catch him. Victor is near death on an ice floe, he is rescued by a boat trapped in the ice and finally tells his story to the boat captain, R. Walton. The boat captain (not really a captain, but a young adventurer who hired a boat to try to find a passage north) is with Victor as he dies. The wretch is looking in at them. When he sees his creator is dead, he tells Walton that he will go now and build his funeral pyre.
Here is a quote of the monster when he realizes he was created by Victor – he had found some notes in the pocket of his dressing gown that were Victor’s journal of his creation. Once he could read, he read them: “I sickened as I read. ‘Hateful day when I received life!’ I exclaimed in agony. ‘Cursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God in pity made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and detested.”
“…Sometimes I allowed my thoughts, unchecked by reason, to ramble in the fields of Paradise, and dared to fancy amiable and lovely creatures sympathizing with my feelings and cheering my gloom; their angelic countenances breathed smiles of consolation. But it was all a dream: No Eve soothed my sorrows, or shared my thoughts; I was alone. I remembered Adam’s supplication to his Creator; but where was mine? He had abandoned me, and, in the bitterness of my heart, I cursed him.”
In the book, the beauty of Nature is constantly surrounding Victor, but he is incapable of joy any longer. When he and Clerval have taken a boat down the Rhine River: “I, a miserable wretch, haunted by a curse that shut up every avenue to enjoyment…We travelled at the time of vintage, and heard the song of labourers, as we glided down the stream. Even I, depressed in mind, and my spirits continually agitated by gloomy feelings, even I was pleased. I lay at the bottom of the boat, and, as I gazed on the cloudless blue sky, I seemed to drink in a tranquillity to which I had long been a stranger. And if these were my sensations, who can describe those of Henry? He felt as if he had been transported to Fairy-Land, and enjoyed a happiness seldom tasted by man….The mountains of Switzerland are more majestic and strange; but there is a charm in the banks of this divine river, that I never before saw equalled.”
Here, he and Elizabeth are on their way to Evian on a boat for their honeymoon night. It is a beautiful day and beautiful Alps surround them and the lake is beautiful. Elizabeth says, “Look also at the innumerable fish that are swimming in the clear waters, where we can distinguish every pebble that lies at the bottom. What a divine day! How happy and serene all nature appears!”
But from the first horror of his creation, progressively worse as the murders of his most beloved family and friends, Victor is absolutely miserable, afraid, remorseful, despairing, depressed. It’s painful to read. And the reader realizes it could have been so different if he would have taken responsibility for his creature, loved and cherished it and taught others to do the same. The creature had a heart of gold, was strong and intelligent and very loving. If only Victor had loved him and cared for him and raised him like a child, his life would have been so much happier, and his family and wife and best friend still alive to share it with him.
Remember this – all humans just want to be loved in order to blossom and become the creatures God intended us to be. If instead we are hated and despised, we become hateful.
Last page of book, the wretch is looking at the body of Frankenstein and talking with Walton – the adventurer on the boat in the ice: “I shall quit your vessel on the ice-raft which brought me hither, and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been. I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense, will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness. Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened up on me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer, and heard the rustling of leaves and the chirping of birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes, and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?”
Here is how Frankenstein came about (from Mary Shelley’s introduction): Mary Shelley, at the age of 18, with her husband, Percy, travel to Switzerland in the summer of 1816. It’s a cold and wet summer and they are sitting around reading ghost stories to each other. Lord Byron says, “We will each write a ghost story.” “I busied myself to think of a story…”
“Have you thought of a story?” I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative…”
“Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener…” “Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, fighting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, – I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world…”
“…’I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.’ On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words, It was on a dreary night of November, making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.”