(Quotations from the 1831 edition, not the 1818 edition)        

      We have been taught by the letters preceding Chapter 1 to expect to see mirror images and to learn from them.  In fact, Victor Frankenstein consents to tell the story of his life because he perceives in Walton the image of himself as a young man and wishes to save him from a similar fate.  And Walton apparently accepts this analogy because he compares his guest to a mariner, like himself, who has been shipwrecked (and this was added in the 1831 edition, evidently because the author wished to make sure we saw the analogy).  In this metaphor (Frankenstein = Walton) lies the thesis of Victor Frankenstein's tale.  He believes that the pursuit of any lofty goal, whether it be the source of life or the Northwest Passage to the Far East, leads inevitably to ruin: “Learn from me,” he will say to Walton in Chapter 4 (p. 39) “if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”  Are you inclined to accept this thesis?  Perhaps you are.  After all, Victor Frankenstein is presented in the words of Walton, who has been longing for many months for a friend, his social and intellectual equal and, moreover, a man capable of the interchange of elevated sentiment.  Walton's praise of him is practically ecstatic; you are bound to be influenced by it.  Furthermore, you may be impressed by Victor's kindness to Walton.  Before meeting him, the only goal Victor had left was to destroy the life he had conferred years ago upon his creature, and he agreed to board Walton's ship only because it was going northward, where the creature had fled.  Now, however, he tells a story that, if successfully told, will cause Walton to return home.  He is making a personal sacrifice, for if Walton does give up his expedition, Victor will be forced to pursue his own final quest alone.  The self-sacrifice of this gesture of his endears him to us, but beware of beleiving everything he says just because you find his character attractive.  His thesis is the very definition of despair, and this may be why so many critics in our jaded world accept his thesis as Mary Shelley's thesis.  I recommend resisting despair unless it becomes inescapable.  But before we are forced to make a decision on this question, we have much more to learn from Shelley.

       In these two first chapters we will learn the means by which Victor was led to the incredible achievement which was the start of his undoing.  Yet still more fundamental lessons than this are also taught here.  We learn the value of possessing beauty since even the best of people judge by appearances.  It is too soon for Shelley to urge us to look beyond appearance or to show what injustice arises from basing judgments on appearances, but it is not too early to introduce this fundamental theme.  We are also reminded of two other themes, which have already been introduced and which keep recurring throughout the novel: the role that friends play in human development and the duties that parents owe to their offspring.  As before, we learn these lessons largely by examining mirror images. 

         In chapter 1, for instance, Victor points out one mirror image: that his mother, having herself once been saved from destitution, visited the poor.  It was “a passion—remembering what she had suffered and how she had been relieved—for her to act in her turn the guardian angel to the afflicted.”  How do we learn anything useful from this comparison?  Once again, we must not expect that all that matters is what we are told, whether by Victor, Walton, or anyone else.  If a narrator makes a comparison, we should certainly look at it, but we must make up our own minds about what it means.  The author herself never speaks in her own person in the novel.  All of the narrators in the book are characters she has created, and they all have different personalities and different degrees and kinds of insight. We must be guided by what we see, not only by what they see.  So when we have our attention called to the rescue of Caroline Beaufort and the rescue of Elizabeth Lavenza, even though the overt or apparent point—the ostensible point—is that the rescued becomes the rescuer out of gratitude, we may nevertheless find other significant parallels between the two incidents.

1.   What precisely caused each of these females to need rescuing in the first place? (“orphan and beggar”—fathers’ incapacity)  In the first edition Elizabeth came into the family because she was the daughter of Alphonse Frankenstein’s deceased sister, so she was really his niece.  Her father just dumped her on the Frankensteins.  Since seems pretty unlikely, the author changed the story so that Elizabeth is the daughter of a nobleman imprisoned indefinitely in Austria.  So, like Beaufort (Caroline’s father), Mr. Lavenza is not unwilling but unable to take care of his daughter.  Both he and Beaufort are failures as fathers.  It’s as if Mary Shelley wanted us to ask ourselves if these fathers should be blamed.  However, it isn’t the answer that matters; it’s the fact that we asked the question, so the next time we turn a page and see a father fail to provide for his offspring, the same question may arise again.

2.   What do Caroline and Elizabeth look like?  Beauty is very useful.  Mind you, we’re never told that Caroline’s beauty is what made Alphonse Frankenstein save her from beggary, but it surely didn’t hurt, and in Elizabeth’s case it’s clearly the main cause of her rescue:  She was “fairer than a garden rose among dark-leaved brambles” (p. 20).  The importance of beauty in rescuing one from destitution has now been put in place for later use; the creature will need rescuing but lacks the beauty that is a prerequisite for winning sympathy.

         We also see another parallel that Victor does not point out: between Caroline's father and his own.  Here, the differences are more important than the similarities, for Beaufort was neither a good friend nor a good father.  Victor makes the first point by saying that his own father “bitterly deplored the false pride which led his friend to a conduct so little worthy of the affection that united” him to Alphonse Frankenstein: friends should allow their friends to help them in distress.  However, we are on our own to see the contrast between this bad father and the good father.

         What makes Alphonse such a very good father (and Caroline a good mother, too)?

My mother's tender caresses, and my father's smile of benevolent pleasure while regarding me, are my first recollections. I was their plaything and their idol, and something better—their child, the innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by Heaven, whom to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in their hands to direct to happiness or misery, according as they fulfilled their duties towards me. [They had a] deep consciousness of what they owed towards the being to which they had given life. . . . (p. 19)

This lesson in what parents owe to helpless creatures to which they have given life (all added in the revised 1831 edition, but the way) is meant by the author, not by the narrator, to sink into our minds and hearts, for the most important character in the story is just another such helpless creature, to which Victor gives life.  So let’s ask how Victor’s creature will differ (when he comes on the scene very shortly) from ordinary babies.  He’s not “bestowed by heaven” upon Victor.  And does that alter the duties that the creator owes to the creature?  This isn’t a rhetorical question; it takes some thought to work out an answer, but let’s leave the question hanging for a brief moment.

         At the end of Chapter 1, in the last paragraph, Victor says he believed Elizabeth to have been a gift bestowed on him by his mother.  He consequently “looked upon Elizabeth as mine—mine to protect, love, and cherish. All praises bestowed on her, I received as made to a possession of my own.”  Now we may ask again, what duties does a man have toward a being he has created in the laboratory?  If a mere possession, which is given to us without our even asking is to be “protected, loved, and cherished” and a child, which we have cooperated with heaven to bring into the world, deserves our love and nurturing so as to grow up to claim a happy “future lot,” wouldn’t we have still greater obligations to a helpless creature that we ourselves, without any external assistance at all, deliberately brought into the world?

         I don’t want anyone to suppose that I am ignoring or whitewashing the creature’s deeds.  There is no question but that he becomes a diabolical fiend.  My only point is that he doesn’t start out that way, as Victor would very much like to make Walton and himself believe.

       By this point in the story, we have been given many important concepts by the author, largely by means of comparing one situation or one character with another.  First is the notion that parents owe their children support and nurturing.  (Victor will not provide any for his creature.)  Second, beauty is very important in securing friends.  (The creature will not have beauty.)  In other words, as Victor told Walton before beginning his tale, human beings are not complete at birth; we need the help of others to finish the work of creation, which has only begun at the time of our birth.

       Turning now to Chapter 2, we find yet another passage about the function of friends, and this, like the earlier one, was newly added in the 1831 edition).  Here Victor explains how his own friends “perfectionate[d] [his] weak and faulty nature” (Letter 2) by complementing one another, each interested in a different aspect of life: Elizabeth in poetry & beauty, Henry in martial arts and politics, and Victor in what we could call science (then called “natural philosophy”).  Elizabeth was the catalyst that civilized the raw energy of the two boys, helping them to mature:

[Elizabeth] was the living spirit of love to soften and attract: I might have become sullen in my study, rough through the ardour of my nature, but that she was there to subdue me to a semblance of her own gentleness. And Clerval—could aught ill entrench on the noble spirit of Clerval?—Yet he might not have been so perfectly humane, so thoughtful in his generosity—so full of kindness and tenderness amidst his passion for adventurous exploit, had she not unfolded to him the real loveliness of beneficence, and made the doing good the end and aim of his soaring ambition.

         Our parents also should be our friends, for when they are, as Victor's were, we learn to be grateful and to love them, and filial love is a foundation for morality to build on:

No human being could have passed a happier childhood than myself. My parents were possessed by the very spirit of kindness and indulgence. We felt that they were not the tyrants to rule our lot according to their caprice, but the agents and creators of all the many delights which we enjoyed. When I mingled with other families, I distinctly discerned how peculiarly fortunate my lot was, and gratitude assisted the development of filial love. (Paragraph 3)

         But of course, mistakes can happen, and even a good parent may err.  What careless handling of a situation by Alphonse Frankenstein does his son blame for getting him started on the quest for the elixir of life? [Cornelius Agrippa—“sad trash”]

         What was the result of this incident?  [Wait.]  I don’t ask “what damage did this do to Victor?” but only what its result was.  I leave it entirely to Victor to assign value judgments.  I am going to try to be objective, so when Victor says that reading the ancient alchemists’ works was “the fatal impulse that led to my ruin,” I will simply say that they gave him the idea of creating life.  Another way of saying it, with positive connotations, would be to say that the alchemists were his inspiration.  We need not say that either.  The simple fact is that the alchemists made incredible promises about what laboratory work could accomplish and thereby gave Victor far-reaching hopes in his most impressionable years.

         A little later, though, another chance event (also in the rain, just to mark the parallel for you) made Victor give up the alchemists.  What was this event?  [Lightning, tree]

         As a result of seeing such a dramatic illustration of the power of nature as Cornelius Agrippa and the alchemists had never shown it, he became instantly disenchanted with not them only but all of science:  “All that had so long engaged my attention suddenly grew despicable.  By one of those caprices of the mind, which we are perhaps most subject to in early youth, I at once gave up my former occupations; set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation; and entertained the greatest disdain for a would-be science, which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge” (p. 27).  Notice that strange phrase “deformed and abortive creation,” and let it come back to you in a day or two when you read of his sudden disenchantment with his creature.  He typically makes these snap judgments; he’s impulsive by nature and rash, not prudent, not judicious.  He admits that this is not a good trait to have, confesses that giving up science altogether was a childish impulse, like throwing out the baby with the bath water, but he also thinks that he would have lived a happier life if he had never returned to scientific work.  He dresses up this idea with fancy religious language as the work of “the guardian angel of my life,” “the spirit of preservation,” “the spirit of good,” and he alleges that Destiny, which evidently he believes in, “was too potent” and frustrated this spirit of good.  However, when we clear away this superstitious language, this is what remains:  The alchemists had excited the imagination of a young genius and made it hunger after things so miraculous that ordinary scientists of his own day never dared to dream of them, with the result that when at last he returns to the study of natural philosophy, he will emerge with both the dreams of a bygone day and modern, state-of-the-art tools by which to achieve them.
       To this conclusion we have been led by Victor's account of his father's failure to explain why Cornelius Agrippa's work was “sad trash.”  In other words, Victor has represented his whole career as a scientist as having begun with his father's careless dismissal of his interest in the alchemists.  I find this especially interesting because Victor makes clear his conviction that science itself is to blame for his ruin and that his father is to blame for his special pursuit of the source of life. I am reminded of Huck Finn's belief that his inability to think of Jim as a mere piece of property is the result of his bad upbringing and his failure to go to Sunday School.  Both Huck and Victor are probably right as far as the facts go, but their evaluation of right and wrong cannot be trusted.

        What we need to take away from Chapter 2 is that parents can indeed make mistakes in bringing up their children, and these mistakes can have far-reaching consequences.  However, we are not obliged to agree with Victor that his father's mistake led to a bad consequence or that the study of science is necessarily evil in any way.  These are claims which have by no means been proven as yet, and they will, in fact, never be proven, no matter how often Victor may assert them.  But that parents make mistakes—that, we will see soon enough when Victor becomes a father.