The Oxford English Dictionary cites the adjective ‘classic’
as denoting something that has been ‘judged over time to be of the highest quality
and outstanding of its kind.’ Indeed, to many people, a ‘classic’ book is one
that has kept afloat in the waters of time, and succeeded in remaining relevant
and pertinent in its message. Nevertheless, enduring over the years is not the
only criterion that can be applied to this debate: when applied to novels, the
term ‘classic’ is a more fluid, slippery beast than might appear. For a book
truly to become a classic, it is necessary for it to possess other attributes
besides resilience; the evaluation of books based solely on their age conjures
up an unfortunate stereotype of musty volumes encased in dust and filled with
obsolete, archaic language. Ultimately, it is the reader who passes opinion on
the work: a classic to one person may
seem glorified and not worthy of praise to another. A ‘classic’ novel must
communicate certain truths to its reader, and must achieve this by placing
these messages within the vessel of carefully selected language. It must not be
afraid to challenge, to provoke, or to alarm; however, it must open itself up
to interpretation like a flower unfurling its petals to face the sun. It must
comprise many textures, to be unpeeled like an onion by the avid reader, and,
through these, it must be able to speak universally to anyone who cares to read
it. Its characters must also prove to be immortal, and it must capture
fundamental themes of human existence and distil them into words. To illustrate
these points, it seems appropriate to introduce a book that, over the course of
the last two centuries, has established itself firmly in the canon of ‘classical’
literature: ‘Frankenstein.’
Its very conception perhaps indicates that it was destined
for success. In the Year With Summer,
1816, Mount Tambora’s eruption the previous year had imprisoned the world in
the icy grip of a volcanic winter. Although it was June, the bleak, cold
weather forced a group of holiday markers into the villa of their host, thus
abandoning their planned outdoor summer activities for indoor comfort. They
were the host, Lord Byron, John Polidori, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his
eighteen year old lover, Mary Godwin, who was later to become his wife. As the
light faded, the conversation moved to the topic of galvanism: the forcing of a
muscle to contract with an electric current. It then turned to the experiments
of Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, who was claimed to have animated
dead matter. Clustered the roaring fire, the group pursued this macabre threat,
and began to read ghost stories in French from ‘Fantasmagoriana.’ His vivid
imagination ignited, Bryon challenged his companions to a competition: to write
a story of comparable horror.
‘Frankenstein’ was first published two years later, after
Mary’s dream of ‘the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing
he had put together,’ and the novel crystallised around the image of a ‘hideous
phantasm of a man stretched out’. It was the progenitor of the science-fiction
genre, and was one of the most influential and pioneering works of its time: even
Byron, not an admirer of intellect in young women, conceded that ‘it is a
wonderful work for a girl of nineteen – not nineteen, indeed, at that time.’ It
seems remarkable, considering that the emancipation of women was not to be
realised for another century, that Mary achieved what she did. In her author’s
introduction, she even muses upon the question of ‘how I, then a young girl,
came to think of and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea?’ As Frankenstein
fashioned a dreadful creature, so too was a monstrous plot created by the
author. Was it perhaps a reflection of her being the daughter of two of the
most prominent radicals of that time, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft?
Or had the ideals of her Romantic lover, Shelley inspired her? Certainly there
is speculation that some of Frankenstein’s character is based on her own
husband: his pen name was Victor, and he dabbled with chemical reactions,
electricity, magnetism, electricity and séances during his years at Eton and
Oxford. Mary certainly embraced the implications of real technological
innovations of the period.
What began as a seed in the mind of a teenage girl grew into
a sprawling tree, casting out tendrils of ideas into the minds of its readers.
This fiction encompasses many themes, from the danger of overbearing scientific
aspirations and humanism to the values placed on aesthetic appearance, whilst
challenging the Romantic myth of individualism. Frankenstein’s Creature is
formed with the body of a fully formed man, but lacks language, conscience and
memory, and progresses through the primitive stages of development. He appeals
to his maker for compassion, exclaiming, ‘Oh! My creator, make me happy!’ and
longs for human identity and happiness; after being denied this, he enters a
destructive descent into devastating solitude, resulting in the deaths of many,
including both his own and his inventor’s. Such an atavistic reversal of
attitudes may be an allusion to human nature: resorting to violence when faced
with seemingly impenetrable obstacles is too often observed in man’s actions.
However, the Creature is not entirely robbed of his words and emotion: although
he remains unremorseful for his past deeds when faced with death, he then
laments the loss of a state of mind in which his ‘thoughts were once filled
with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty of the world.’ In this way,
Mary invites her reader not to despise either of the central characters: no
clear protagonist and adversary are presented. Frankenstein is not a scheming,
egotistically obsessive scientist; he is instead a romantic figure, dedicated
to his art and resolute in benefiting humankind. His creation may kill and
destroy, but this is incited by his own misery, and his tragic fate elicits
great pity in the reader.
A classic book must lend itself to all manner of
interpretations, and ‘Frankenstein’ is no exception. It is one of the most
protean texts in the English language, and its resonance with the turbulent
period against which it was written makes it a book of many layers. A Marxist
approach would emphasise it as a manifestation of its historical background by
highlighting the language with which Mary depicted the Creature as echoing with
that used to describe the contemporary working class. The Italian literary scholar
Franco Moretti argues that: ‘Between Frankenstein and the monster there is an
ambivalent, dialectical relationship, the same as that which, according to
Marx, connects capital with wage-labour.’ The disparity between the Creature
and its maker echoes when read in its socio-economic context: as a result of
the hierarchical nature of the social system, degradation and misery were
well-known to those lower down the class-ladder. In this respect, the Creature
is almost an emblem of the proletariat, with all the restrictions of power that
this status entails. This analogy can be further developed: if the Creature
symbolises the working class, then his creator represents the industrialists
and bourgeoisie; by the end of the story, each has caused the other’s ruin. The
book can thus be read as a critique of the oppressive authorities that hold
sway over others, from capitalism to the slave trade; it rejects these, and
serves to remind the reader that subjugation engenders opponents who can subdue
in turn the original power. Paulo Freire distilled this perspective in the
following phrase: ‘the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend
themselves to become oppressors. The very structure of their thought has been
conditioned by the contradiction of the concrete, existential situation by
which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them to be men is to
be oppressors.’
The Creature, after those he admires ‘dashed me to the
ground and struck me violently with a stick,’ resolves to wreak revenge on
those who treated him so unjustly, and embarks upon a murderous campaign.
However, the theory that those who are the recipients of suffering can mutate
into the ones who first inflicted their pain can again be shown not to be
solely shackled to fiction: less than half a century prior to the book’s
publication, the bloody French Revolution had taken place, and this may have
lingered in the author’s consciousness. In fact, she described the moment of
the French Revolution thus: ‘The giant now awoke. The mind, never torpid, but
never roused to its full energies, received the spark which lit it into an inextinguishable
flame.’ One observer would even remark that ‘Mary et Shelley étaient enfants de
la Révolution.’ The monster’s shift in attitude from empathetic to vengeful
mirrors in part this uprising: much of the working class did set out with benevolent intentions, but their actions degenerated into the Reign of Terror, accompanied
by gruesome guillotine slaughters and merciless violence. The English professor
Anne K. Mellor suggested that: ‘Mary Shelley conceived of Victor Frankenstein’s
creature as an embodiment of the revolutionary French nation, a gigantic body
politic originating in a desire to benefit all mankind but abandoned by its
rightful guardians and so abused by its King, Church, and the corrupt leaders
of the ancient regime that it is driven into an uncontrollable rage –
manifested in the blood-thirsty leadership of the Montagnards – Marat, St Just,
Rosepierre – and the Terror. Frankenstein’s creature invokes the already
existing identification of the French Revolution with a gigantic monster troped
in the writings of both Abbé Barruel and Edmund Burke.’
Knowledge of the background of the book and its creator,
does, therefore, provide a more profound insight into the mechanics of the
story, for any work of literature is governed in part by its context. It would
not be far-fetched to claim that many of the most fascinating works of
literature have been penned by people as interesting as their oeuvre. The
author’s mother, for example, contracted and died of puerperal poisoning ten
days after giving birth, and Mary also lost three young children and her
husband. This proximity to birth and loss is transposed on to her work, for the
trials of life and death found in ‘Frankenstein’ could stem directly from a
fascination with such occurrences. Her childhood is worthy of mention as well: William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were regular visitors to Mary’s
household in her childhood, and, aged nine, she heard Coleridge recite ‘The
Rime of The Ancient Mariner.’ This event would undoubtedly have imprinted
itself indelibly on her mind: indeed, Walton declares that he will ‘kill no
albatross’ when he reaches ‘the land of mist and snow.’
Shelley’s influence also seeps into the book, as he
encouraged her to write it. Notes at the back of the text inform the reader that
Mary adopted a number of his suggested changes, including, in the form of ‘the
path of my departure was free,’ an allusion to his poem ‘Mutability,’ which
states that ‘the path of its departure still is free.’ He also wrote actual
lines of the book: ‘the labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed,
scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind’ in
the third chapter indicates the gravity he placed upon scientific
achievements; ‘the republican institutions of our country have produced simpler
and happier manner than those which prevail in the great monarchies that
surround it’ in the fifth chapter demonstrates his commitment to the republican
cause. The book itself can be seen as either revolutionary or retrogressive,
which appears to chime with Mary’s own indecision: she fluctuated between
supporting the radical cause, and fearing the devastating effects of war and
uprising.
The novel can also be read as a realist one, for
Frankenstein is not punished by metaphysical intervention, but instead by the
consequences of his actions. Mary also seeks to explore and defend the emotions
of those whom the world rejects and betrays. A feminist interpretation of the
story would see Mary, the daughter of a fervent feminist, as having produced an
ironic critique of the power-mongering patriarchy around her. The position of ‘father’
is questioned, and a feminist reading of the book would cite ‘Frankenstein’s
failure to mother his child’ – the words of Anne K. Mellor – as his flaw. There
is a notable absence of ‘God the Father’ and Frankenstein’s father is rather
distant, hastily dismissing his son’s enthusiasm for the old alchemists that
spark his imagination. De Lacey is a figure of impotence, for his blindness
renders him incapable of caring for his children: a passive character, benevolent
but dependent and feeble. Walton’s father’s ‘dying injunction’ is to ensure his
son is denied a seafaring life, which leads to Walton’s determined effort to
oppose this, and the ‘treacherous Turk,’ Safie’s father, is a figure of
oriental despotism .Mary also seems sceptical of the male aim to conceive
without the partnership of a woman, and conveys the consequences of such
desires in her novel; these are depicted as being caused by the exceeding
motivation of the male protagonists, who transgress boundaries between the
human and the divine, for Frankenstein seeks to father a ‘new species’ who will
‘bless me as its creator.’ It must be noted, on the other hand, that although one
might expect the daughter of a passionate feminist to portray resilient, forceful
women, the reality is rather different. On the contrary, the novel is virtually
devoid of such characters. Letters from Captain Walton’s sister, replying to
his correspondence, are not included; Frankenstein’s mother dies caring for her
adopted daughter before he reaches adulthood; Justine is hanged for confessing
to a crime she did not commit; Elizabeth, though beautiful and gentle, waits
dutifully for her lover before being murdered, and Frankenstein terminates his
quest to creating a female companion for his Creature, vowing never to create a
being ‘equal in deformity and wickedness.’
Another central theme of the book is the effect on human
sympathies and relationships that obsessive questing to ‘conquer’ the unknown
as. Frankenstein may satisfy his Promethean longing, but, as a result, he
destroys all sympathies and relationships with his compulsive enterprise. This
is what makes the book such a shocking warning: it seems so distant far away
from normality, yet its themes lurk in the shadows of everyday lives even in
the 21st Century. The story demonstrates that life is precious and
delicious, and should be properly nurtured for it to flourish: the Creature is
almost a metaphor for life itself, a complex of forces that we tamper with at
our peril. They may be refracted through the prism of fiction, but the book’s
essential messages are not diminished. Its characters are strikingly original,
and it has endured over a long period of time and will continue to do so. It
seems fitting to end with Goethe’s immensely appropriate words, which are not
only applicable to ‘Frankenstein’, but also to other ‘classic’ books: ‘Ancient
works are classical not because they are old, but because they are powerful,
fresh, and healthy.’
