Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
The final paper I wrote for History of Europe 4380 at NSULA
I can’t say it is one of my better essays. In the spring semester of 2015, I took History of Europe 4380 with Dr. Smith at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. This professor was especially at pains to convey the meaning of Romanticism in literature and music throughout the decades of the Industrial Revolution. He felt strongly that Shelley’s Frankenstein had much to say about the changing times in the late 18th and throughout the 19th centuries. He gave us a few options for the final exam paper and this is the one I chose:
Answer the following question from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:
Discuss Frankenstein as a commentary on the dramatic changes sweeping Europe at the beginning of the 19th century. What is Shelley’s attitude toward modern society, science, and knowledge? In what ways is the novel an expression of nostalgia for an idyllic, communal past? How do the experiences of Frankenstein and the monster reflect Shelley’s obsession with the corruption of the “natural state of man” by society.
Here are the notes I took as I re-read this favorite novel in preparation for the exam:
(Obviously there might be spoilers in the text. I don’t expect that I have anything here that could ruin the novel for someone, but one never knows how another might feel about something. I’ve read this novel three or four times and always find new observations, so it is difficult for me to know what might be a spoiler. At any rate, these notes are not by any stretch a full or accurate summary of the novel; they are just particular themes, events, and quotes that struck me as key to answering the questions posed for the essay. Perhaps you might not want to know who dies and who lives, so if that is the case, I can only advise you to proceed with caution.)
Victor Frankenstein grew up in the beautiful Swiss mountains, after a very early nomadic, but idyllic childhood as the only child of loving, curious, intellectual, traveling parents, Alfons Frankenstein & Caroline Beaufort. Victor acquired a sister by the charity (sense of community, compassion, harmony) of his parents to a girl in the neighborhood. This echoed his own mother’s marriage to his father, which had been precipitated by that father’s adoption of her—thus saving her from distressed circumstances. His mother was the daughter of the father’s intimate friend, whose life was an example of the decline of the landed gentry.
The adopted sister is Elizabeth: calm, poetry-loving, favors the poetry of Alexander Pope. Elizabeth is content to appreciate and to savor the natural beauties of their environment. Victor is obsessed with uncovering the source of those beauties. He wanted to unlock the secrets of the natural world.
Victor Frankenstein: intense, drawn to applications of science, especially the ancient science of Paracelcus and Agrippa (alchemy) which exemplifies a nostalgia and hunger for something more meaningful than modern science. His father laughs at him for this and scoffed at the alchemists, who the father describes as “sad trash.”
Victor romanticizes the alchemists’ work as from the “untaught peasantry” (more romantic) than the precise nothingness of modern scientists like Isaac Newton. The search for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life!!!!!!!
Victor’s friend, Henry Clerval, is the son of a Geneva merchant.“He loved enterprise, [and] hardship, and even danger for its own sake.” He loved books of chivalry and romance, and reenacting such legends as the Knights of the Round Table. Henry’s father, the merchant, was against all such relics of a liberal education.
Elizabeth gets scarlet fever. Victor’s mother saves her, but the preserver caught the disease and died. Death of Victor’s mother = Death of his innocence? childhood? Victor is married to Elizabeth by his mother on her deathbed. Calm death.
Shortly after this mixed tragedy/celebration, he goes to the university at Ingolstad. Henry wanted to go too but Mr Clerval is vehemently against “liberal education.” Clerval wants his son to be a merchant like him and sees nothing but evil in “liberal education.” Henry is resolved against the “chains of commerce.”
Victor has two professors of chemistry at Ingolstad. One is vehemently against alchemy, looks on it with disdain as a useless study. But the other believes it is useful to look at the alchemists’ work, as a necessary beginning to science. “Such the words of the Fate announced to destroy me.”
Chapter 4: Frankenstein is so consumed by the pursuit of science at its basest level that he ignores and neglects to appreciate nature (for its own sake) and family affection.
Chapter 5: The monster begins coming alive. Frankenstein dreams of his Elizabeth walking the streets of Ingolstad and of himself holding his dead mother (the one who had given him life!)
Chapter 6: Letter from Elizabeth. Young Ernest wants to enter Foreign Service (military career). Victor’s father is not pleased but as Ernest is not academic it seems the best option for him. Madame Moritz is a widow with four children, including Justine, 12 years old…. After the death of Mr Moritz, Madame treated Justine poorly. Justine had been a favorite of the father, but not of the mother. Elizabeth convinces Madame to let Justine live with them.
Chapter 7: The murder of his young brother William (he was wearing a “very valuable” miniature of their mother, life giver; Elizabeth thought it must have been the murderer’s motive)
Chapter 10: He receives consolation from nature. It doesn’t remove the grief but “subdued and tranquilized” it.
Major themes: Nature / Primitive versus Knowledge / Civilization / Industrialization. Shelley (paraphrased): Doesn’t nature give us everything we need? Why do we seek more? Was “Thy Adam” now “thy Fallen Angel”?
Chapter 11: The monster gradually perceives human culture interacting with nature.
Chapter 12: The monster observes & learns interest, compassion, learning: the mysteriously sad cottagers, who loved each other but were often in tears from poverty and hardship, A father and his adult children—Felix and Agatha.
Chapter 13: The monster says: “Sorrow only increased with knowledge.”
Chapter 14: The monster learns of the cottagers’ lost wealth. They were emigrants from Paris. The father of Sophie (the Arabian visiter) was a Turkish merchant. Cottage is in Germany where the de Laceys live after their exile from France
Chapter 15: Monster found a portmanteau with books:
Paradise Lost (Milton)
A volume of Plutarch’s Lives
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe
Chapter 16: The monster is captivated by the miniature of the mother on William’s body: the mother who gave Frankenstein life—who gave life to the monster’s enemy. The monster never had a mother or even anyone to love him, as Frankenstein had been loved and adored and cherished from his birth.
Chapter 17: The pact between Monster and Creator. Creator reluctantly promises to create a female companion for the monster in exchange for the monster to “quit the neighborhood of Man.” Creator is fearful of the monster’s evil potential and possible return, and with backup, in the future!
Chapter 18: Victor determines to go to England to complete the promise to the monster, hoping that once it was done, he’d be in peace to marry Elizabeth. He meets Henry Clerval at Strasbourg and Henry accompanies him to England. That Victor should have a companion was important to his father.
Chapter 19. London. Tour of England on the way to Perth. Much description of Oxford, that place where King Charles I assembled his Royalist forces. Cumberland reminds him of Switzerland. Edinburgh delighted Victor, but Henry preferred Oxford. Henry and Victor part ways. Henry is reluctant to part, but Victor wants to explore Scotland alone. Northern Highlands, as far as the Orkney islands. Victor hires a cottage on one of the islands. He sets to work on the monster’s request.
Chapter 20: “Villain, before you sign my death warrant, be sure that you are yourself safe?”
Chapter 21: Victor is arrested for murder of Clerval. Mr Kirwin, the Irish magistrate, finds and reads the papers found on VF and contacts his family in Geneva by that manner. His father comes to visit. VF wishes for death to relieve him. He is released as it was proven he was on the Orkney Isles when the body was found. He and his father return to Geneva.
Chapter 23: Murder of Elizabeth at Villa Lavenza. Alfons, the father, dies from exhaustion, grief. VF ends up locked away for madness. Tells a criminal judge he knows the murderer and pleas for freedom to pursue the murderer. He admits to the strange tale! He does not get the judge’s permission to pursue.
Chapter 24: Victor decides to leave Geneva, which is disgusting to him now, and departs with some of his mother’s (life giver’s) jewels! He chases the Fiend. He visits the graves of William, Elizabeth and Alfons. VF determines to pursue the monster until the moment of combat. He will not give up. He will see it to the end. “All hell surrounded me with mockery and laughter.”
Monster: “You live and I am satisfied.”
From the Black Sea, up through the wilds of Russia. Rivers too when necessary (but the monster avoids them when possible)
Victor speaks of spirits guiding him. His friend, his brother, his parents, his wife.
Messages from the monster:
“My reign is not yet over.”
“You live and my power is complete.”
“Like the Archangel who, inspired by omnipotence, I am chained to an eternal hell.”
Battle between Creator and Creation, Good and Evil, but if one is evil how can the other, the creator of the evil be good? Like Prometheus, Frankenstein made the monster with a free will & made the means by which it could destroy itself.
What is the monster’s power? Is he triumphant? No more than if man “triumphed” over the nature that made him.
He is not satisfied anymore.
His crimes are “consummated” by death.
“There is my last victim.”
“The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.”
“I am alone.”
“For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires.”
FINAL PAPER
What is the meaning of life? Is it to be kind to our neighbors, to lift them from distress or help them in hours of need? Is it to be part of a community or is it to be in self-determined isolation? Is the meaning of life to pursue knowledge? Is the pursuit of knowledge constructive or destructive to mankind and to nature? Is the very act of endeavoring to understand nature in all its complexities an act of destruction against it? These are the questions that Mary Shelley inspires and toys with. Her novel is a nostalgic protest against the cold scientific knowledge and industrial progress. The overarching theme is a warning that modern science and industry will lead to the ruin of humanity and that only nature and a revival of romantic virtues can save it.
Nature and Science are at odds in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Life, though, at the beginning of the novel, is harmonious. The Frankensteins live peacefully in the mountains. They have a strong sense of community and a natural compassion for distressed neighbors. They are comfortable and moral, neither corrupted by the vices of the cities, nor tempted into greed for a share of the new riches flowing from the labor of coal miners into the pockets of the upper bourgeoisie. As a boy, Victor recalls being drawn to science, but not modern science. It was the old science of the Middle Ages, not the science of the Enlightenment, that drew his fascination. He romanticized the pursuit of the Elixir of Life by the ancient alchemists Agrippa and Paracelsus. Undeterred even by his father’s skepticism, he relentlessly pursued the subject. The fact that his father regarded it as the “sad trash” of the “untaught peasantry” only increased Victor’s sense of it as a romantic pursuit. He sought the secrets of life in alchemy. In the narrative, one senses the author’s approval of this kind of science, with its practical uses in daily life, especially for the peasant farmer. Victor thought he could fuse modern science and medieval alchemy, but as the plot unveils, the goal to fuse them leads to his ruin.
The Frankensteins’ peaceful, unmolested existence began its demise with the death of Victor’s mother. Shelley characterized Caroline Beaufort as a fossil of the landed gentry. She was lovely and charitable, possessing in one vessel all the virtuous qualities of idealized nobility. Her death symbolizes the death of Victor’s (and mankind’s) innocence. Innocence and virtue die repeatedly throughout this novel. The law works in the interests of the metaphorical monster, just as the tides (in real life) were moving in favor of what Shelley perceived as the monstrosity of industry and modern science.
Shelley paints an eighteenth-century paradise, unmolested by modern progress. Victor’s monster is the product of his obsession with knowledge of life at its most basic root—knowledge—knowledge unchecked by morality, knowledge for power alone. Like the God complex of man’s pursuit of power and conquest of nature, Frankenstein is determined on a ruinous course toward the reversal of death and eternal life. Like Victor himself, the monster is born innocent and with a propensity for love and compassion. The monster was enchanted by the cottager family he observed in stealth—themselves, like Caroline Beaufort, fossils of the French aristocracy, living at peace but regretting the past. Shelley placed virtue, innocence, and purity in the past. Yet to her, nature was the true source of happiness, even superior to the pursuit of knowledge.
Shelley clearly placed virtue, innocence, and purity in the past. Henry Clerval, Victor’s friend, is the son of commercialism, but oddly obsessed with the chivalrous tales of the Middle Ages. Clerval is the antithesis of his father, the wealthy merchant who wanted him to avoid wasting time on a modern liberal education. Liberal education was a product of the Enlightenment, combining science and Romanticism, sense and sensibility. Rationalism and Romanticism were the antithetical ideologies of the liberal mind.
Clerval's father scoffed at this and wished his son to work, as he, in the pursuit of commercial profit. Shelley found faults in both courses. Commerce was evil to her as the destroyer of nature, but too much thirst for knowledge was the destroyer of Frankenstein's nature, and it was only in the natural environment, far away from universities and factories, that he found any peace. In having the monster assert that his sorrow grew as he obtained more knowledge, Shelley evoked one of many parallels in the novel to the story of Creation; once he took a bite of the apple, the monster was lost to paradise.
Trapped by his obsession with the pursuit of knowledge, Frankenstein forgot his native home and secured himself on a path to being isolated from humanity and nature. This was taking science is too far. In this obsession, he forgot about home, family, community, and love. Once returned to the mountains and rivers around his home, his inner peace somewhat restored. Shelley wrote that nature consoled him. It didn’t remove his grief, but, as she wrote, it calmed him.
Shelley implied that nature contains everything we need. Nature is indeed the source of all industry, and industry’s rape of its own source was the biggest evil for Shelley.
There is nothing that we need that nature cannot provide. But instead of going on sustainably, modern progress bent towards the conquest of nature. This is comparable to Frankenstein's wish to unlock the secret of life and death. Why would it be advantageous to conquer the source of everything, of ourselves? The answer given by Shelley is that, while it might be advantageous in the short term, it is nothing but destructive in the long term.
There are many references in the text to Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. The monster read Milton’s Paradise Lost. These references call forth the idea of man in his natural state—innocence—tempted, and ultimately destroyed by the evils of knowledge. The monster said he was created as Frankenstein's Adam, but became Frankenstein's fallen angel.
Despite the numerous crimes against his family by the monster he created, Frankenstein had moments of compassion for the monster. This reflects the fact that compassion is a component of human nature. It is in our nature to have compassion and to hope for the best. The coal industry was polluting the countryside, the timber industry felling trees. Yet coal was to power the future—railroads to move people and goods, electricity to make us more productive and even give us nighttime leisure. No one regarded these things as absolute evils. They had consequences, but the benefits were abundant. Compassion for the workers could even be used as an excuse. Felling trees and mining for coal required workers. Without these industries, what would become of the workers? This raises the cruel irony of the people being driven from the countryside by the enclosure of the common lands. Jobs and livelihood were to be found in the cities.
Shelley gave Frankenstein clarity in the Orkney Islands—clarity in the remotest, most primitive environment. He determined that there could be no bargaining, no compromise. To give the monster an “Eve” would only ensure generations of evil. Nor was the prospect of his removal to South America or Africa any comfort. Industry was no less exploitative there. If anything, it just sealed the partnership between the twin evils of Empire and Industry. The monster and his Eve would have bred more monsters, all of whom would form a new dominant class of labor and land exploiters.
Industry and science won, no less in the novel than in real life. Yet while the monster destroyed Frankenstein’s hopes, he was unsatisfied. There is empowerment in knowledge, but no tranquility, no peace. Tranquility, peace, hope, compassion—a sense of community—are primitive to our natures, and knowledge for its own sake divides us from the purity of the source.