Whose Story Is It?

General

• Nature as nurturing and benevolent life force that only punishes those who transgress
• Victor is morally responsible for his acts
• The Creature is potentially good but driven to evil by social and parental neglect
• The DeLaceys, a family that loves its children, offers the best hope
• Human Egotism causes the greatest suffering in the world
• All stories variations of each other
• Fathers and sons are almost equally responsible and irresponsible
• A birth myth
• Abandons child
• Deficient infant care
• Emphasis on trauma of after-birth—mothering
• Victor defies mortality by “giving birth”
• Some Common Critical Perspectives
• Dangers of science/knowledge
• Existential fable (ultimate alone-ness)
• Split between reason and feeling
• Excesses of Idealism/Genius/Imagination
• The Divided Self
• Stultifying force of social convention
• Prejudice
• Victor’s apparent antagonist: God as maker of Man
• Victor’s real competitor: woman as maker of children

Allusiveness—a very literary text

• Percy Shelley’s poetry
• Mary Wollstonecraft—female education; bad parents; justice
• William Godwin—benevolence and education; Caleb Williams
• Byron as in the Byronic hero, especially Manfred
• Rime of the Ancient Mariner—specifically alluded to several times
• Walton—the Wedding Guest
• Victor—the Ancient Mariner
• Paradise Lost (everywhere, including the title page)

The Title Page

• anonymous publication
• Modern Prometheus—who was Prometheus?
• Greek Prometheus stole fire from Zeus to give to humans (an act of sympathy) for which he was punished
• Roman Prometheus fashioned human from clay and animated it with fire stolen from Jupiter (an act of ambition?) for which he was punished
• Paradise Lost quotation—Adam’s lament in Book X
• Whom do we associate with Adam in this book?
• The Creature
• He was made
• Questioning creator/creation
• The creature says it
• The creature’s self-hatred/self-loathing
• Raises the question of what is means to be human
• Victor
• Victor did it
• He eventually says it/feels it
• Is Adam right?
• Who in the novel is Adam? If Frankenstein is Adam, then Adam is wrong; if the creature is Adam, then perhaps Adam is right.
• What is the tension/relationship between Prometheus and Adam?
• Both disobedient
• Both eternally punished
• Adam hurts humankind, Prometheus helps—Did Adam do humans a favor?

Structure

• Nesting boxes
• Walton’s letters to his sister
• Frankenstein’s dictated story (which he later corrects)
• Story of Caroline Beaufort
• Story of Justine Moritz
• The Creature’s telling of his story
• books found
• letters from the DeLacey’s
• The Creature’s final scene
• Emphasis on Documentation and Proof
• Walton’s obsessive letter writing
• Victor’s Scientific inquiry and investigation
• Elizabeth Lavenza’s concerns about Victor’s fidelity
• Two Trials
• Justine’s conviction
• Victor’s release (an inquest)
• Creature’s documents
• Victor’s journal
• Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, The Sorrows of Young Werther
• letters from the DeLaceys
• Setting
• Everyday life: note the complete absence of “realist” description of the ordinary places in the book—the Frankenstein home, the university, the various inns visited and so on.
• Beautiful and Picturesque landscape
• tours through the Rhineland
• visit to Oxford
• and many more
• Sublime landscape
• sea of ice—glaciers of the Alps
• waste of Orkneys
• unreal landscape of the Arctic Sea

Who is the Hero?

• Walton
• Victor
• Creature

Walton’s Story?

• Double of Victor (like the Wedding Guest seemingly singled out for moral lesson)
• Explorer (Enlightenment model of scientific discovery)
• Relationship to Nature—Baconian (seek out Nature in her hiding places)
• Ambitious for name and fame (though the question of what they are really ambitious for is pretty unclear)
• Sister safely at home in bourgeois family—His only human connection
• He moves further away from the known and protecting world (St. Petersburg, Archangel)
• He defies his father’s injunction
• He rejects community (as Victor does but not as strongly)—he returns defeated but he nonetheless returns
• Walton’s desire for a friend—a kind of self-love
• Self-love = narcissism = selfishness—he’s ready to endanger crew, why? for fame?

Frankenstein’s Story?

• Dark Romantic/Gothic figure: almost a cliché of Romantic anti-hero (think Manfred)
• Greater than others but flawed
• Ambition both his greatness and his downfall
• In stark contrast to “puny” middle-class society
• His expression prized above all else—I must create and damn the consequences
• Ambition clearly tied to Selfishness in Volume 1
• His selfishness
• forgets about home for first two years he’s at university
• abandons the creature and worries about his suffering
• abandons Justine and worries about his suffering
• later he will abandon Elizabeth strangely unaware that she is threatened because he will think himself threatened
• Why does he create the Creature?
• Suffering over his mother’s death?
• Misguided in his studies—father should have diverted his attention
• God-like power—a new species would bless me as its creator
• Ultimate creativity available to women but denied men
• What does he do about the consequences?
• abandons the Creature
• attempts to return to his life
• is awakened by death of William—he knows it is the Creature; finally recognizes what he has done, but still does nothing about it
• allows Justine to be executed
• Where is God? The Possible Scenarios
• God created humans and manages their world
• Victor’s desire to be god-like must fail because he is not god
• he can only create a monster
• his foolish ambition would therefore need to be punished
• Both Victor and the Creature are Adam (human) and Satan (fallen angel)
• God created us and left (we have been abandoned)
• Again, Victor’s desire to be god-like must fail because he is not god
• he can only create a monster
• However, his actions mimic God’s actions and therefore he does not need to be punished
• Victor is God (creator), Adam (human), and Satan (fallen angel); the Creature is Adam (human?) and Satan (fallen angel)
• Humans created God (or the gods)
• Victor’s desire to be god-like could succeed (why not?)
• he might be an imperfect creator but he is so not because he is human but because he is Victor
• no punishment for creativity; though he is punished for breaking all ties to community
• Both Victor and the Creature are God (creator), Adam (human), and Satan (fallen angel)
• Victor creates Creature, Creature creates destruction
• Victor occupies Eden as does the Creature
• Victor falls as does the Creature
• Who serves whom?
• Creator serves Creation
• Creature demands another being; eventually says I am your master
• Victor’s recognizes duty as creator (but the problem of free will)
• Parents’ duty to children
• Safie’s father’s betrayal of Felix
• Victor’s father’s lax parenting
• Victor’s mother’s untimely death
• Justine’s mother’s favoritism
• Creation serves Creator
• A new species would bless me as creator and source
• DeLaceys as Creature’s protectors—he serves them
• Victor’s pursuit of Creature—Creature sustains him
• Children’s duty to parents
• Walton defies father
• Victor ignores family (repeatedly)
• Felix brings ruin on DeLaceys
• Victor's "true" crime?
• Is not creating another being (and therefore "playing God," or overreaching, or "one step higher would set me highest")
• His true crime is not taking responsibility for his action/creation
• In the moral universe of the novel, the "bad act" (which Victor repeats throughout) is
  failing to recognize that he lives in mutuality and therefore has responsibilities and duties to his community

Creature’s Story

• Story of experience, of becoming “human”
• Coming to consciousness
• Real question: Not how does one make life out of dead bodies, but what does it mean to become a sentient being and ask the big questions about life?

• Begins in confusion
• Confused senses
• Light and dark only
• Self/object boundaries
• Hunger and thirst
• Pain instinctive (physical, emotional, spiritual)
• Sense of alienation instinctive
• The need for comfort is as necessary as food or drink
• Looks at moon in wonder and awe (a shadowy enlightenment)
• Narrative of innocence/naïve relationship to world
• Language of giving and taking
• Everything comes from a creator who both gives and takes
• Omnipotent
• Creation begins with consciousness
• Consciousness begins with perceptions
• Shelley’s main deviation from the education/enlightenment story is her insistence on an innate need for spiritual guidance and emotional sustenance
• Fire (Promethean)—But where is Prometheus?
• Paradoxical—both provides light and causes pain
• Cannot simply follow instincts, must learn
• No one brings fire to creature; he stumbles on it—we must make our way, no creator to help us
• Self-authorship—the way was all before us, which way to choose
• Why Can’t the Creature Learn Speech on his Own?
• You need to hear
• You need someone to talk to
• You need others
• What is Speech?
• Interaction
• Sharing
• Reciprocal
• Story—his story will make the invisible visible—will show the good soul under the hideous exterior
• Model of Speech—Bird’s song
• “express my sensations”
• presupposes that because the bird’s song gives him pleasure, it must be expressing the bird’s pleasure—this is complete egocentrism, no self/object boundaries