Book Review: "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley

Frankenstein (1818)
Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
326 pages

Many years ago, I watched the 1931 movie of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. At some point later, I heard that the novel differed significantly from that version, which left me curious; only now, however, have I finally gotten around to reading it. Not surprisingly, I suppose, given its fame, the story is much more engaging and intriguing than I had expected from what I had seen.

While I (vaguely) recall the movie featuring a monster – Frankenstein’ monster – chased by mobs of fearful and angry townspeople, the novel presents a much more intimate struggle of deadly sparring between Dr. Frankenstein and the being (as Shelley refers to him) he has created. Shelley’s full title – Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus – points toward her main theme here: a scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who becomes so fixated on his quest of “bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” (64) that only after he succeeds in his work do its implications finally, too late, become clear to him.

The story opens with a series of letters another scientist, Robert Walton, writes to his sister, seeking to alleviate her concern for his safety as he pursues his dream of discovery. Walton describes his desire to sail north from Europe to the still unknown North Pole, where he believes the long days have created a land in which

snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be without example, as the phenomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitudes. What may not be expected in a country of eternal light? … I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. (8) 

Given that most readers will come to the novel familiar with its broad outlines, it’s hard not to see in these opening letters from Walton the dangerous hubris of Frankenstein – well ahead of the point in the story at which Shelley makes it evident.

As Walton’s ship flounders in increasingly thick ice and his crew begin begging him to turn around, they spot “a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, [who] sat in [a] sledge and guided the dogs, [and] we watched … until he was lost among the distant inequalities of ice.” (22) Shortly after, a second sled comes along, driven by a traveler struggling with the cold who introduces himself as Victor Frankenstein. The balance of the novel consists of Frankenstein – having recognized in Walton a fellow soul in the dogged pursuit of a seemingly impossible dream – telling his tale, the heartrending, cautionary story of his own obsession.

Frankenstein relates the events that led to his creation of the being, lamenting the passions that overtook him and that prevented him from considering the potential ramifications of achieving his goal. Then, telling of his revulsion at the appearance of what he had created, he goes on to describe the increasingly bitter conflict between them that results and the traumas he has experienced.

As Prometheus suffers for having provided fire to humankind by being chained to a rock and having an eagle arrive each day to eat his immortal liver, Frankenstein’s story reveals how he has been chained, figuratively if no less irrevocably, to the being he created. Yet, Shelley does not settle for a simple story of good versus evil. Frankenstein feels he’s brought forth a monster, but at the same time comes to recognize the humanity underneath the exterior that he finds so revolting, and his own responsibility for the suffering his creation faces.

The being himself in fact reveals, toward the end of the story, sentiments not so distant from those of so many who have travelled to foreign places and been met as the other: 

'Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honor and devotion …

I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all humankind sinned against me?' (320-1) 

Far from the movie’s presentation of a lumbering, unwitting brute scarcely aware of its own strength, readers encounter in Frankenstein’s creation someone self-educated and full of feeling, but also profoundly traumatized by the repeatedly hostile reactions of everyone he encounters.

Ultimately, however, Shelley’s novel revolves around its title character and the seemingly bottomless depths of his passion for discovering the unknown. Frankenstein spends long days describing to his newfound companion Walton the “great and unparalleled misfortunes” (29) he has suffered from the moment he completed his creation, including the family and friends who have died because of him, because of his actions. And, hearing Walton’s own plans, he repeatedly implores him to not make the same mistake he has: “Unhappy man! Do you share my madness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught/ Hear me – let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!” (27)

And yet, toward the end of the story, Shelley makes evident the full extent of the obsession that drove Frankenstein to create the being. Despite all he has experienced and suffered, despite lamenting his own audacity, and despite all his repeated cautions to Walton, when the ship’s crew again agitates for turning back, seemingly on the point of mutiny, Frankenstein browbeats them, saying 

'What do you mean? What do you demand of your captain? Are you, then, so easily turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition? And wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror; because, at every new incident, your fortitude was to be called forth, and your courage exhibited; because danger and death surround it, and these you were to brave and overcome. For this was it a glorious, for this was it an honourable undertaking. You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species; your names adored, as belonging to brave men who encountered death for honor and the benefit of mankind. And now, behold, with the first imagination of danger, or, if you will, the first mighty and terrific trial of your courage, you shrink away, and content to be handed down as men who had not strength enough to endure cold and peril; and so, poor souls, they were chilly and returned to their warm firesides. Why, that requires not this preparation; ye need not have come thus far, and dragged your captain to the shame of a defeat, merely to prove yourselves cowards. Oh! Be men, or be more than men. Be steady to your purposes and firm as a rock. This ice is not made of such stuff as our hearts may be; it is mutable and cannot withstand you, if you say that it shall not. Do not return to your families with the stigma of disgrace marked on your brows. Return as heroes who have fought and conquered, and who know not what it is to turn their backs on the foe.' (311-2)

There lies a thin line between the passion needed to achieve new discoveries and understandings, and what Shelley lays bare in Frankenstein: the blindness of obsession and the destructive consequences that can result. If you’ve only ever seen that old black and white movie version of her novel, please do crack open the book.

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Other notes and information:

Thomas Piketty, in his amazing work Capital in the 21st Century, describes how, in order to compensate for the lack of hard economic data from earlier centuries, he uses literature of different periods to interpret how people lived and worked, and what they could afford. 

 

The description Frankenstein’s being gives of the many months he secretly observed the lives of a family in a cottage in the woods with their garden and their daily routines gives just such a glimpse into life in Europe around 1800, on the eve of the industrial revolution.

It validates the description Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blaine give in their excellent World Without End: An Illustrated Guide to the Climate Crisis, of the dramatically different – really, unrecognizably different – lives people led before the abundance introduced by the significant energies from fossil fuels changed, and continues to change, our world. (My reviews of both books linked to at right.) 

 

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "El abismo del olvido" ("The Abyss of Oblivion") by Paco Roca and Rodrigo Terrasa

El abismo del olvido (The Abyss of Oblivion) (2023)
Paco Roca (1969)
Rodrigo Terrasa (1978)
295 pages

Along with grisly pitched battles and destructive city-sieges, the Spanish Civil War (July 1936 – April 1939) also included wide-spread violence far from the frontlines. Although the two sides – supporters of the elected Republican government and of the rebel nationalist military junta that rose up against it – quickly established control over particular regions of the country, many cities, towns and villages behind the lines experienced what often became a kind of vigilante violence. This included killings not only to eliminate partisans of the side not in power in that area, but also, under the cover of the general political and social disruption, to settle old scores.

During the war, both sides perpetrated such violence. But, after the war, the fascist dictatorship continued summary executions of those accused of clandestinely supporting the Republic, and some townspeople took advantage of the opportunity to incriminate and have executed those who had sided with the Republic during the war and against whom they harbored a grudge.

Estimates of the numbers killed during and after the war remain the subject of significant scholarly disagreement. Many people disappeared, with some executed while others fled for their lives. Those killed had their bodies unceremoniously dumped into common graves – the records of their death often deliberately destroyed in an attempt to hide the extent of these transgressions.

Post-dictatorship Spain has experienced a long running debate about how to deal with these mass graves – fosa in Spanish; things came to a head with the passage in 2007, by the then ruling left-wing party, of the The Law of Historical Memory, authorizing government funds for families who sought to exhume the remains of family members. Although families of the victims welcomed the opportunity to get closure through a proper identification and burial of their loved ones’ remains, many on the right decried the law as unnecessarily opening old wounds.

Although the topic has remained a political football, with right-wing governments in Spain eliminating funding and left-wing government’s reinstating it, some graves have been exhumed. In the graphic novel The Abyss of Oblivion (El abismo del olvido ) Spanish cartoonist Paco Roca and journalist Rodrigo Terrasa tell the story of the exhumation of one such mass grave, fosa 126 in the town cemetery of Paterna, in Valencia, as a way of illustrating the past horrors and present-day opportunities for dignity and reckoning such exhumations represent for Spanish families who had a loved one executed.

By using the graphic novel format, the pair transform what could have been a dry chronicle of history into a powerful, visual story, one that brings to life people who so long ago disappeared into the anonymity of a mass grave. It reveals, too, their relatives’ long years of suffering, as well as their tireless efforts to bring closure to their decades of trauma.

The story opens with the execution of 15 men in September 1940, more than a year after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and their burial in fosa 126, one of 180 such mass graves in the cemetery in Paterna alone. The scene then shifts to some sixty years later, as archeologists begin their exhumation of the grave; as one archaeologist notes, they approach their work with dual goals:

'The first is to recover and identify the bodies for those family members who want to obtain them…. The second function of the excavation [is to] document it as the archeologists we are, with engagement and scientific rigor … as if this was a crime scene.'

‘Which it is,’ [points out a colleague]. (40)

 Shifting smoothly between past and present, Roca and Tarrasa explore the histories of several of the men in the grave site, and in parallel the lives of their descendants. They build their narrative around one family in particular – exploring the life of one of the men executed and his daughter’s long struggle to get permission to have the fosa in which he is thought to have been buried exhumed. She seeks to have her father’s remains recovered and identified, so she can bury them next to her mother.

And, like the dual goals of the archeologists, the story Roca and Tarrasa illustrate serves two purposes. On the one hand, they tell a powerful history of the evils of the fascist regime as it continued to seek out and persecute anyone thought to be an enemy, as well as the depravity of those among its flunkies who leveraged their positions to have those they disliked arrested and executed. The story pointedly demonstrates the pervasive environment of fear created – which was, of course, the regime’s intent.

By tying the narrative to particular families, however, the pair manage to rescue at least some few of the vast number of the executed, and their families, from the abyss of oblivion that had engulfed them. By telling their history, both in the text but also through illustrations of their home life and the events they experienced, the story gives voice to the lives they lived. And it reveals how much the victims and their families lost, from the moment of arrest up to execution, and through the long decades that followed. It also explores the courage of those who quietly found ways to undermine the regime’s attempts to cow people into submission as well as the enduring strength of the families who for so many years kept the memory of their loved ones alive.

The events of the civil war now lie more than eight decades in the past, and the subsequent dictatorship fell over half a century ago; the why and the what and the how have been extensively covered in numerous tomes of history, perhaps none more famous than Hugh Thomas’ The Spanish Civil War (my review linked to at right). While historians continue to debate many of the details, one of the enduring legacies of the war has been the disagreement between those who want to leave the history buried and those who feel it is important – for themselves and for the country – to remember. In that sense, unlike histories of the war and the dictatorship, this graphic novel provides a window into a tension that continues to exist in Spain, especially in rural communities, where people often have intimate knowledge of who did what.

While at times heartrending, Roca and Tarrasa also tell a story of hope and strength. Of how so many people caught in the violence and destruction of autocracies and dictatorships managed to persevere. And of how, to adapt a quote attributed to Martin Luther King, the arc of the moral universe though long, does indeed sometimes bend toward closure, if not necessarily justice.

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Other notes and information:

As an epilogue, a short prose essay, with a sprinkling of photographs, details the facts of the case of the main characters in the story.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf