Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel about a failed artificial life experiment that produced a monster, written by Mary Shelley. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818. Shelley's name appears on the second edition, published in France in 1823.
Shelley had travelled the region in which the story takes place, and the topics of galvanism and other similar occult ideas were themes of conversation among her companions, particularly her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. The actual storyline was taken from a dream. Shelley was talking with three writer-colleagues, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, and they decided they would have a competition to see who could write the best horror story. After thinking for weeks about what her possible storyline could be, Shelley dreamt about a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he had made. Then Frankenstein was written.
Frankenstein is infused with some elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement and is also considered to be one of the earliest examples of science fiction. Brian Aldiss has argued that it should be considered the first true science fiction story, because unlike in previous stories with fantastical elements resembling those of later science fiction, the central character "makes a deliberate decision" and "turns to modern experiments in the laboratory" to achieve fantastic results.[1] The story is partially based on Giovanni Aldini's electrical experiments on dead and (sometimes) living animals and was also a warning against the expansion of modern man in theIndustrial Revolution, alluded to in its subtitle, The Modern Prometheus. It has had a considerable influence across literature and popular culture and spawned a complete genre of horror stories and films.
The name "Frankenstein" – actually the novel's human protagonist – is often incorrectly used to refer to the monster itself. In the novel, the monster is identified via words such as "monster", "fiend", "wretch", "vile insect", "daemon", and "it"; Shelley herself called it "Adam".
Summary
Captain Walton's introductory frame narrative
Frankenstein begins in epistolary form, documenting the correspondence between Captain Robert Walton and his sister, Margaret Walton Saville. Walton sets out to explore the North Pole and expand his scientific knowledge in hopes of achieving fame and friendship. The ship becomes trapped in ice, and, one day, the crew sees a dog sled in the distance, on which there is the figure of a giant man. Hours later, the crew finds a frozen and emaciated man, Victor Frankenstein, in desperate need of sustenance. Frankenstein has been in pursuit of the gigantic man observed by Walton's crew when all but one of his dogs died. He has broken apart his dog sled to make oars and rowed an ice-raft toward the vessel. Frankenstein starts to recover from his exertion and recounts a story of his life's miseries caused by his obsession for wisdom to Walton. Before he begins, he warns Walton of the wretched effects of allowing ambition to push one to aim beyond what one is capable of achieving. In telling his story to the captain, he finds peace within himself.
ictor Frankenstein's narrative
Victor begins by telling of his childhood. Born into a wealthy family in Geneva, he is encouraged to seek a greater understanding of the world around him through science. He grows up in a safe environment, surrounded by loving family and friends. When he is around five years old, his parents adopt Elizabeth Lavenza, an orphan whose mother has just died. (She is their niece and Victor's cousin in the first edition, but this is not established in the second edition.) Victor has a possessive infatuation with Elizabeth. He has two younger brothers: Ernest and William, the latter seventeen years younger than he. Ernest however, was six years younger than Victor.
As a young boy, Victor is obsessed with studying outdated theories of science that focus on achieving natural wonders, at times to his father's disdain. In particular, he studies the works of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. He plans to attend university at Ingolstadt, Germany. A week before his planned departure, his mother dies, after nursing his beloved Elizabeth, who has been ill with scarlet fever. The whole family is aggrieved, and Frankenstein sees the mother's death as his life's first misfortune. At university, he excels at chemistry and other sciences, and, after studying galvanism, a phenomenon discovered in the 1790s, develops a secret technique to imbue inanimate bodies with life.
While the exact details of the monster's construction are left ambiguous, Victor explains "I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame."[2] Another statement, "The dissecting-room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials", suggests that some elements of Frankenstein's creation may not be from human bodies. Frankenstein finds himself forced to make the creature much larger than a normal man — he estimates it to be about eight feet tall — because of the difficulty in replicating the minute parts of the human body. His creation, which he has hoped would be beautiful, is instead hideous to his eyes, with dull yellow eyes, and a withered, translucent, yellowish skin that barely conceals the muscular system and blood vessels. After bringing his creation to life, Victor is repulsed by his work: "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."[3] Victor flees, hoping to forget what he has created, and attempts to live a normal life. His abandonment leaves the monster confused, angry, and afraid.
After his quiet, secretive and exhausting efforts to create a living human being, Victor becomes ill. He is nursed back to health by his childhood friend, Henry Clerval. It takes him four months to recover from his illness. He determines that he should return home when his five-year-old brother, William, is found murdered. Elizabeth blames herself for William's death because she has allowed him to have access to his mother's locket, which she believes has caused a thief to murder William and steal the locket. William's nanny, Justine, is hanged for the murder based on the discovery of Victor's mother's locket in her pocket, and due to her confessing, though she regrets it. The locket was placed there by Victor's creation.
When Victor learns of his brother's death, he returns to Geneva to be with his family. He sees the monster in the woods where his brother has been murdered, and becomes certain that his monster is the killer. Ravaged by his grief and self-reproach to have created the being that has caused so much destruction, he retreats into the mountains to find peace. After some time in solitude, the monster approaches him. Initially furious and intent on killing the creature, Victor attempts to attack it.
The monster, far larger and more agile than its creator, eludes him and allows him to compose himself. Intelligent and articulate, it tells Victor of its encounters with people, and how it had become afraid of them and spent a year living near a cottage, observing the De Laceyfamily living there. The De Laceys have originally been wealthy, but have been forced into exile when Felix De Lacey has rescued the father of his beloved, an Arabian girl named Safie. This man, a Turkish merchant who has wrongfully been accused of a crime and sentenced to death, has, once rescued, agreed to allow Felix to marry Safie. Ultimately, though, he has not been able to stand the idea of his daughter marrying a Christian and fled with her. Safie has returned to Switzerland, eager for the freedom of European women.
Through observing the De Lacey family, the monster has become educated and self-aware. It has also discovered a lost satchel of books and learned to read. Seeing its reflection in a pool, it has realized that its physical appearance is hideous compared to the humans it watches. The monster compares itself to Lucifer from Paradise Lost, one of the books it has read. In its loneliness, it has sought to befriend the De Laceys. It has presented itself first to the aged father of the family, who is blind and cannot see its deformity, and has been received with kindness and hospitality. Unfortunately, the others of the family have been horrified by its appearance and reacted viciously out of fear, with violence against it. Because of this interaction, the De Laceys fled their home.
In its travels some time later, the monster has seen a young girl tumble into a stream and rescued her from drowning. A man, seeing it with the child in its arms, has pursued it and fired a gun, wounding it. The monster has now sworn to have vengeance on all humanity, and especially on its creator.
The monster, traveling to Geneva, has met a little boy — Victor's brother William — in the woods outside the town of Plainpalais. It has hoped that the child would be a companion for it, because he has appeared to be potentially unaffected by older people's perception of its hideousness, and planned to abduct him: "Boy, you will never see your father again; you must come with me." Horrified, the boy has shouted insults and revealed himself as a Frankenstein: "Hideous monster! let me go. My papa is a syndic - - he is M. Frankenstein - he will punish you. You dare not keep me." The creature has grabbed the boy by the throat to silence him. When it has discovered that it has accidentally strangled its victim, it has taken this as its first act of vengeance against its creator. It has removed a locket from the boy's body and placed it in the folds of the dress of a a young woman — William's nanny, Justine — who has been sleeping in a barn nearby, assuming she would be accused of the murder.
The monster concludes its story with a demand that Frankenstein create for it a female companion like itself, on the basis that it is lonely since nobody will accept it. It argues that as a living thing, it has a right to happiness and that Victor, as its creator, has a duty to obey it. It promises that if Victor grants its request, it and its mate will vanish into the wilderness of South America uninhabited by man, never to reappear. Victor at first refuses, but the monster replies with the chilling demand, "You are my creator, but I am your master. Obey!"
Fearing for his family, Victor reluctantly agrees and travels to England to do his work. He is accompanied by Clerval, but they separate in Scotland. Through their travels, Victor suspects that the monster is following him. Working on a second being on the Orkney Islands, he is plagued by premonitions of what his work might wreak, particularly as creating a mate for the creature might lead to an entire race of monsters that could plague mankind for millennia to come. He destroys the unfinished example after he sees the monster looking through the window. The monster witnesses this and, confronting Victor, vows that it will have its revenge on Victor's upcoming wedding night. Victor sails far out to sea to dispose of the parts of the unfinished example, and remains adrift and alone. Meanwhile, the monster murders Clerval and leaves the corpse on an Irish beach, coincidentally near where Victor finds himself washed up after an unintentionally long voyage. Arriving in Ireland, Victor is imprisoned for the murder of Clerval, and becomes seriously ill, suffering another mental breakdown in prison. After being acquitted, and with his health renewed, he returns home with his father.
Once home, Victor marries his cousin Elizabeth and prepares for a fight to the death with the monster. Wrongly believing the monster's vowed revenge meant his own death, he asks Elizabeth to retire to her room for the night while he goes looking for the fiend. He searches the house and grounds, but doesn't find it. The enemy murders the secluded Elizabeth — as Victor has destroyed its mate — instead. Victor sees the monster at the window pointing at the corpse. Grief-stricken by the deaths of William, Justine, Clerval, and now Elizabeth, Victor's father dies. Victor vows to pursue the monster until one of them annihilates the other. After months of pursuit, the two end up in the Arctic Circle, near the North Pole.
Captain Walton's concluding frame narrative
At the end of Victor's narrative, Captain Walton resumes the telling of the story. A few days after the vanishing of the creature, the ship becomes entombed in ice and Walton's crew insists on returning south once the they are freed. In spite of a passionate speech from Frankenstein, encouraging the crew to push further north, Walton realizes that he must relent to his men's demands and agrees to head for home. Frankenstein dies shortly thereafter, and Walton discovers the monster on his ship, mourning over Frankenstein's body. Walton hears the monster's adamant justification for its vengeance as well as expressions of remorse. Frankenstein's death has not brought it peace. Rather, its crimes have increased its misery and alienation; it has found only its own emotional ruin in the destruction of its creator. It vows to exterminate itself on its own funeral pyre so that no others will ever know of its existence. Walton watches as it drifts away on an ice raft that is soon lost in darkness.
Composition
How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?
During the rainy summer of 1816, the "Year Without a Summer", the world was locked in a long cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. Mary Shelley, aged 18, and her lover (and later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati byLake Geneva in Switzerland. The weather was consistently too cold and dreary that summer to enjoy the outdoor holiday activities they had planned, so the group retired indoors until dawn.
Among other subjects, the conversation turned to galvanism and the feasibility of returning a corpse or assembled body parts to life, and to the experiments of the 18th-century natural philosopher and poet Erasmus Darwin, who was said to have animated dead matter. Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company also amused themselves by reading German ghost stories, prompting Byron to suggest they each write their own supernatural tale. Shortly afterward, in a waking dream, Mary Shelley conceived the idea for Frankenstein:
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 mustit be; for SUPREMELY frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.
She began writing what she assumed would be a short story. With Percy Shelley's encouragement, she expanded this tale into a full-fledged novel. She later described that summer in Switzerland as the moment "when I first stepped out from childhood into life". Byron managed to write just a fragment based on the vampire legends he heard while travelling the Balkans, and from this John Polidori created The Vampyre (1819), the progenitor of the romantic vampire literary genre. Thus, two legendary horror tales originated from this one circumstance.
Mary's and Percy Bysshe Shelley's manuscripts for the first three-volume edition in 1818 (written 1816–1817), as well as Mary Shelley's fair copy for her publisher, are now housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The Bodleian acquired the papers in 2004, and they belong now to the Abinger Collection. On 1 October 2008, the Bodleian published a new edition of Frankenstein which contains comparisons of Mary Shelley's original text with Percy Shelley's additions and interventions alongside. The new edition is edited by Charles E. Robinson: The Original Frankenstein (ISBN 978-1851243969)
Publication
Mary Shelley completed her writing in May 1817, and Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheuswas first published on 1 January 1818 by the small London publishing house of Harding, Mavor & Jones. It was issued anonymously, with a preface written for Mary by Percy Bysshe Shelley and with a dedication to philosopher William Godwin, her father. It was published in an edition of just 500 copies in three volumes, the standard "triple-decker" format for 19th century first editions. The novel had been previously rejected by Percy Bysshe Shelley's publisher, Charles Ollier and by Byron's publisher John Murray.
The second edition of Frankenstein was published on 11 August 1823 in two volumes (by G. and W. B. Whittaker) following the success of the stage play Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankensteinby Richard Brinsley Peake;[12] this edition credited Mary Shelley as the author.
On 31 October 1831, the first "popular" edition in one volume appeared, published by Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley. This edition was heavily revised by Mary Shelley, partially because of pressure to make the story more conservative, and included a new, longer preface by her, presenting a somewhat embellished version of the genesis of the story. This edition tends to be the one most widely read now, although editions containing the original 1818 text are still published. Many scholars prefer the 1818 text, arguing that it preserves the spirit of Shelley's original publication (see Anne K. Mellor's "Choosing a Text of Frankenstein to Teach" in the W.W. NortonCritical edition).
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