Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus
by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly
by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly
Link:/Listening Time (1818 version): https://librivox.org/frankenstein-or-the-modern-prometheus-1818-by-mary-wollstonecraft-shelley/ (7 hours 59 minutes)
Link/Listening Time (1831 version): https://librivox.org/frankenstein-edition-1831-by-mary-shelley-wollstonecraft/ (8 hours 44 minutes)
OK so these books are kind of longer, and they took a bit more time to get through. To top it off, I found out there are two versions of the story...
One time this year, while I was reading the book, I was at work taking care of a lady with a lot of tattoos, they were images of a lot of horror/gothic characters on her arms and chest: Like the old Count Dracula from the old movie, and there was Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride...that sort of thing.
Then when I went to flush the IV line on her arm, and I noticed:
Me:
"Hey! That's Frankenstein! I'm reading that book!"
Her: (clearly very excited to find someone interested in the same stuff she was):
"It's Frankenstein's MONSTER!!"
(It was fun, we had a good time talking about the story. And I told her I was reading both versions this year. And how different your perception of the story is when your an adult as opposed to when you're reading it as a kid...)
Me: "Victor is a bad dad!"
Her: "Victor IS a bad dad!!"
In 1818 the original version of the story was published, and most of it was inspired purely from Mrs Shelly's own imagination.
Of course, her husband was a writer also and he had some very poetic ideas for the characters and the plot. When he died a couple of years later, Mrs Shelly was very sad. Eventually when she published the second edition of the story in 1831, she included a lot of ideas that her husband wanted. Its unfortunate that his ideas don't seem to fit into the story-dynamic she created. In the 1818 version, Victor is very conscious of the choices he makes. To me he seems aware that he could channel his grief at his mother's death in any number of ways and he chooses to cut himself off from his family to devote himself exclusively to this work: discovering the physical process that animates life.
In the 1831 version, Victor is driven. He can't help himself, he just has to discover the mechanics of life.
I personally favor the 1818 version. I like to think of the 1818 version as the more "accurate" one, and the 1831 is the one Victor had written to make himself look like less of a jerk.
There are a few other changes too,Victor's wife Elizabeth is explicitly stated to be his cousin in the first version, while in the second she is a particularly attractive orphan his mother
As a kid, I kind of just assumed that Victor was a reliable hero and when he implies that he had no other option but to do some drastic and crazy thing...I kind of just took him at his word.
Now that I'm older, I feel there's a bit more to discern about him. I really feel that Victor is the type of person who takes his family relationships for granite and that really comes back to bite him. When his mother tells him and Elizabeth she'd like them to be together he kind of just thinks, "DUH!"
He's never put much thought or feeling into the relationship. To him, his relationship with her is just something that always has been and always will be. His parents want him to have a wife, he eventually will need a wife. He's known Elizabeth his whole life. Why not?
Then his mom dies. His whole family is very supportive, they all crave a connection with him and say things like. 'We know you're really busy with school and everything. But we're really anxious to hear from you and hear how you're doing. We are here for you and we love you...' but he just shuts them out because he doesn't want to deal with his feelings.
He'd rather think through his problems, and he'd rather do it alone.
To me, the dynamic this story creates is not the cosmic collusion of a mad scientist discovering/creating 'artificial life' that it's presented to be in the 1831 version. It's a lot more human than that: Victor had a baby and, as emotionally distant a person as he was, he wasn't ready to be a dad. Especially to someone who wasn't the perfect creation he had envisioned.
I think that even if Victor and the Creature had nothing in common, except for the fact that they're both people and one of them created the other, I'd still think of their relationship as that of a parent and child. However, this dynamic becomes even more clear when we finally get the Creature's perspective:
How alike Victor and the Creature think (I refuse to refer to him as "Monster" even though he does some pretty bad things...I'll talk more about that in a bit...) They like to read the same books, they reason in similar ways, and the Creature would have LOOOVEED to belong to the Frankenstein family.
I don't want to paint the Creature as a completely innocent guy. He did some really bad things, and unlike a lot of the movie depictions of him, he is a completely rational being and he knew what he was doing was wrong. What bugs me is that we see the Creature ultimately take responsibility for his actions and we don't see Victor do that. Even while he's describing, though the WHOLE story, exactly what he did wrong...
(So who's the real monster in this scenario?)
Notes:
- For me it really opened up a can of worms when I discovered Victor might not the shining, intelligent, doomed medical student I had supposed him to be on my childhood reading. So I looked around on the internet for people's thoughts and actually quite a few people agree with me:
http://interestingliterature.com/2012/12/04/frankenstein-the-most-misread-novel/
- I also got to watch Danny Boyle's Frankenstein:
It's a play told from the Creature's perspective, and the actors alternate between the roles of Victor and The Creature.
And it's very true to the spirit of the book, although it is a bit darker in a few parts.
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