Frankenstein

A story inside a story inside a story

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was published anonymously in 1818, when Mary Shelley was twenty. She began it in the summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva, where Lord Byron challenged his guests to each write a ghost story. A revised edition with her name and a new preface appeared in 1831. Most modern paperbacks print one of the two texts.

The book has three narrators, nested like boxes. The outer layer is a set of letters from Robert Walton, an English explorer sailing toward the North Pole, to his sister Margaret Saville. Inside Walton's letters is the account of Victor Frankenstein, a Swiss scientist Walton rescues from the ice. Inside Victor's account is the story of the creature, told in its own words. The structure matters. The reader meets the creature first as a monster described by Victor, and only later hears its side.

Walton is a mirror of Victor. He has left a comfortable life to chase glory in an unexplored place. He complains that he has no friend. When his ship becomes stuck in ice, the crew sees a huge figure on a sledge pulled by dogs. The next day they pull a second, exhausted man from a drifting ice floe. It is Victor, who has been chasing the giant. Walton nurses him, and Victor agrees to tell his story as a warning.

Victor's education and the spark of life

Victor grows up in Geneva in a loving family. His father Alphonse is a respected magistrate. His mother Caroline adopts a girl named Elizabeth Lavenza, who is raised as Victor's companion and intended wife. He has two younger brothers, Ernest and William, and a close friend, Henry Clerval, who loves poetry and chivalry. Victor loves science.

As a boy he reads the old alchemists Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, who promised the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone. When a lightning strike destroys an oak tree near his house, he becomes interested in electricity. Just before he leaves for the university of Ingolstadt, his mother dies of scarlet fever caught from nursing Elizabeth. Her last wish is that Victor and Elizabeth marry.

At Ingolstadt, Professor Krempe mocks his alchemists, but Professor Waldman tells him that modern chemists have real powers: they command the lightning and look into the body's hidden workings. Victor works for two years without visiting home. He studies how bodies decay and, in Shelley's famous vagueness, discovers "the cause of generation and life." He never explains the method. He decides to build a human being from parts taken from charnel houses, dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses. To make the work easier he makes the body eight feet tall.

On a rainy night in November he brings it to life. The moment it opens its yellow eye, his ambition turns to disgust. Its skin barely covers the muscles beneath, its lips are black and its hair is lustrous. He runs to his bedroom, dreams that he kisses Elizabeth and she turns into his mother's corpse, and wakes to find the creature at his bedside, reaching toward him. He flees into the courtyard. When he returns with Clerval, who has just arrived to study, the creature is gone. Victor collapses with a fever that lasts months. He never looks for it.

The first death and a wrongful execution

Victor recovers under Clerval's care and plans to go home. Then a letter from his father arrives: his youngest brother William has been strangled in the woods near Geneva. Victor travels home through a storm. Lightning over the hills shows him a giant figure near the murder site, and he knows at once that his creature killed William.

The family's servant Justine Moritz is accused. A miniature portrait that William wore was found in her pocket. Justine is innocent, but her confessor pressures her into a false confession, and she is hanged. Victor knows the truth and says nothing. He tells himself that no one would believe a story about a creature made from corpses. Elizabeth, who had defended Justine, loses her faith in justice. Victor sinks into guilt and thinks of suicide.

To clear his mind he travels to the valley of Chamonix below Mont Blanc. On the glacier called the Mer de Glace, the creature approaches him at speed across the ice. Victor curses it and threatens to kill it. The creature answers calmly. It asks him to listen before he judges, and it leads him to a hut where it tells its story.

The creature's story

The creature wakes without language or memory. It stumbles into the forest near Ingolstadt and learns the senses one at a time: light hurts, cold bites, berries feed, fire warms and burns. In a village, people scream, throw stones and chase it out.

It finds shelter in a lean-to attached to a cottage. Through a crack in the wall it watches the family inside: a blind old man, De Lacey, his son Felix and daughter Agatha. They are poor and often hungry. The creature stops stealing their food and begins secretly cutting firewood for them at night. It learns their language by listening. When a young Arabian woman, Safie, arrives and Felix teaches her French, the creature learns with her. From the lessons it hears about history and society, wealth and poverty, and understands that it has no property, no family and no face it can show.

In a satchel found in the woods it discovers three books: Milton's Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives and Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. It reads Paradise Lost as a true history. It compares itself to Adam, made by a creator, but sees that it is closer to Satan, cast out without company. In the pocket of the coat it took from Victor's laboratory it finds Victor's journal, which records the creature's own making in words of disgust. Now it knows who made it and that its maker fled from it.

It decides to approach the blind old man alone, hoping that someone who cannot see it will hear it. The conversation goes well until Felix, Agatha and Safie return. Agatha faints, Safie runs and Felix beats the creature with a stick. The creature flees. The family moves away. Enraged, the creature burns the cottage and sets off toward Geneva to find its maker.

On the way it saves a girl from drowning in a river. The man with her shoots it. Near Geneva it meets a small boy and plans to take him as a companion, thinking a child is too young to have learned prejudice. The boy screams and says his father is Monsieur Frankenstein. The creature strangles him. It takes the portrait from the body and plants it on a sleeping young woman in a barn, Justine, so that she will be blamed.

The creature ends its story with a demand. It wants Victor to build a female companion, as ugly as itself, so that it will not be alone. It promises that the two of them will leave for the wilds of South America and never be seen again. If Victor refuses, it will destroy everyone he loves. Victor is moved by the story and agrees.

The second creature and the broken promise

Victor delays for months. Then he travels to England with Clerval, officially to see the world before his marriage, and in fact to learn new techniques. They visit London and Oxford, then Scotland. Victor leaves Clerval and rents a hut on a remote island in the Orkneys, where he begins the second body.

One night, with the work nearly done, he thinks about what he is doing. The female might refuse the creature. She might be more vicious than he is. The two of them might breed and spread across the world. He looks up and sees the creature watching through the window with a grin. He tears the half-finished body apart. The creature howls, then comes in and speaks. It calls itself Victor's slave no longer and promises revenge. Its final words are a threat: it will be with Victor on his wedding night. Victor hears this as a threat to his own life, not to Elizabeth's.

Victor drops the remains into the sea from a small boat, falls asleep and is carried by wind to the coast of Ireland. There he is arrested. A man has been found strangled on the beach the night before. The magistrate, Mr. Kirwin, takes him to see the body. It is Henry Clerval. Victor collapses for two months. His father arrives from Geneva and brings him home when the court clears him.