Chapters 14 and 15 have three functions—or perform three tasks:

• They present the background of the cottagers,
• they detail the creature’s reading list (including the papers in his pocket from which he learns of Victor),
• and finally they describe his disastrous confrontation with the DeLaceys.

      I would love to discuss the dramatic irony in the confrontation scene, but I have left that for you to do in your written homework, and we can examine this episode and its aftermath once you have read Chapter 16. It would also be fun to discuss the interesting parallels between the creature and Goethe’s Werther and Milton’s Satan and Adam, but unless you have read The Sorrows of Young Werther and Paradise Lost, this discussion would be tedious; the books are introduced as literary mirrors for the creature and for us, and they add depth and texture to the tale, but they work properly only if you are already acquainted with the characters in those books. Suffice it to say that the parallels contained in all of the books the creature finds help him to think about his place in the world, and they help—especially the papers he finds in his pocket—to answer his oft-repeated question “What was I?” He is fairly galloping toward maturity now, and he gets sadder by the moment as he realizes what he is and how little chance he has of fulfillment. Yet his education has only begun; he is still naïve, and therefore he sees a parallel between himself and the outcast, refugee cottagers—a parallel which we readers have enough experience to distrust. That is why I have decided to examine only one of the three topics in these chapters, the cottagers’ background. My hope is that you have come to class today with a better idea of what dramatic irony is than you had before, on account of the homework, and I can build on this with a lesson on the dramatic irony which results from our seeing better than the creature sees when we learn the cottagers’ history. When he learned it, it teased him into hope that they might see him as a fellow sufferer and victim of injustice and therefore feel some sort of fellowship with him. In fact, this hope is made explicit just before the disastrous confrontation: The creature tells the old blind man that, although he has led a blameless life, he fears that a fatal prejudice may cause the people he depends upon to reject him, but DeLacey points out the similarity of their situations, saying, “I and my family have been condemned, although innocent: judge, therefore, if I do not feel for your misfortunes” (Chapter 15). What hope this must stir in the creature’s heart, and yet we strongly suspect that the creature’s hope of establishing any kind of fellowship with this family is an illusion—in fact, I may say that we know it is. Hasn’t he told Victor that his experience with the DeLaceys “changed me from what I was to what I am”; that is, “a fiend”? This disconnection between our viewpoint and the creature’s creates dramatic irony.
       The richness of the experience of dramatic irony depends upon the degree to which the characters in the story share with the audience information that reveals the truth to the audience but not to the characters. The more evidence we see swirling about just under their noses, the keener the thrill when they fail to see it. This evidence that the creature’s hopes are doomed can be found in the story of how Safie’s father betrayed Felix. He was the victim of injustice, just as the DeLaceys are, and Felix expected him to behave honorably and generously to him once he and his family had suffered injustice in their turn, but he did not do so, and in this way he prefigures or forecasts the DeLaceys’ failure to deal justly with the creature.
       In other words, the story of the Turkish merchant is a mirror image of the Delaceys’ whole story, and if the creature had only possessed the sophistication of us readers of novels, he might have perceived this and known how vain is the hope that someone who has known our own pain will pity us.
       Using a part of something to reflect the whole of it is a figure of speech known as synecdoche.  In ordinary one-word or one-phrase synecdoches, one calls a whole thing by the name of a part of it (or vice-versa, the whole may stand for a part, but I’m not interested in that right now): Census-takers “count noses” (on the assumption that there is one nose per person), or you call a person “a red-head” or a “blonde” or you say, “Give me a hand,” meaning “help.” Imagine your surprise and horror if only a hand, unattached to person, were given to you. A huge number of our most offensive terms to call each other are synecdoches; they equate the whole person with a single part of his or her anatomy. The only one I feel at all comfortable mentioning in mixed company is “Get your ass out of here.” It means of course to remove your whole self, and since you can’t remove the posterior without having the rest of the person go too, the synecdoche is not going to be misunderstood. Literary synecdoches are generally less gross:

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
  (T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock")
Friends, Romans, countrymen: lend me your ears.
  (William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)

      However, the kind of synecdoche I’m interested in today is quite large, not just a single word or phrase. Such a synecdoche can be a whole episode of a larger work and, although uncommon, these large synecdoches are found in many works of literature, and that is what we have here in the story of the cottagers and Safie.
       The Turk is at the heart of the novel, the chief character in the most deeply embedded tale. Remember that the first narrator is Robert Walton, writing to his sister and recording the tale told by Victor Frankenstein, who is now relating the tale told to him by his creature, which includes the story of the cottagers, which in its turn encapsulates the story of the Turkish merchant and his daughter Safie. The Turk, here at the center of the whole novel, is the index to the story of the cottagers as a whole, a synecdoche, and we pity him for the same reason Felix pities him: because he’s a victim of a miscarriage of justice even more flagrant than that which hanged Justine. The prejudice against him seems more naked than in Justine’s case, and his condemnation seems to have been, as in Justine’s case, a deliberate set-up, a frame job. Yet there is one significant difference between the Turk’s case and Justine’s: Even though probably innocent of the charge, the Turk is nevertheless a dishonest and dishonorable man who insults Felix by attempting—quite unnecessarily, by the way—to bribe him, and he makes matters worse by hypocrisy since he hasn’t the slightest intention of honoring his promises. Worse, Felix’s father and sister become accessories by allowing their passports to be used by the fleeing Turk and his daughter, and for their charity the law imprisons them. Then, when Felix himself falls victim to the justice system by naively turning himself in to free his family, the Turk callously leaves him—and them—in the lurch with a puny payoff that adds more insult to injury.
       What are we supposed to learn from this? Or better yet, what might the creature learn from it if he had the experience of human nature that we have? The lesson is not to oversimplify. It’s all too easy to imagine that a victim of injustice will be compassionate to another victim of injustice because he’s been there himself. This is what Felix did in expecting the Turk to honor his offer of Safie’s hand in marriage even after Felix had been taken into custody, but Felix is an idealist: He believes in the Golden Rule. You and I may admire the Golden Rule, but we also know how seldom it is actually practiced. If people actually treated others as they would like to be treated, they wouldn’t need to be reminded of the Golden Rule, now, would they? We know well enough what to expect from these kindly French people. They may be as good as the Turk is evil, but they are still human beings, and we know that human beings rarely make the effort to look beneath the surface to see where their charity is most needed and most deserved. On the other hand, the creature knows little of human weakness. He lives by the Golden Rule himself, though, in performing his secret chores to help the cottagers, perhaps in hopes that they may treat him likewise or perhaps with no selfish motive at all. Either way, he has the idealism of early youth (he’s about a year old now, isn’t he?), and therefore, rather than learning from the way Felix paid for his unwise trust, he misses the warning and continues (as he says) “in an innocent half-painful self-deceit” to call the cottagers his “protectors.” Shelley is anxious for us not to fall into his error and therefore has him throw in this warning to us not to expect his protectors to protect him. We must know the truth so as to be moved by his ignorance of it. He knows that his appearance will “disgust” them, but he never imagines the hysteria and overreaction that these people are capable of when startled by his appearance. In the narrative present, at the time of his speaking to Victor, the creature has gained much disillusioning experience and knows that “everyone hates the wretched,” but unfortunately he did not know this at that earlier point in his development. Since you and I do know it, we can look beyond his limited vision, and if we see the Turk’s unfeeling betrayal of Felix and his family as foreshadowing their betrayal of the creature, we are having that literary experience called “dramatic irony,” a kind of cold shiver that makes us in this case pity the pathetic self-deception of the creature’s hope.
       But if the Turk’s ingratitude is not enough of a warning, Shelley plants a seed of doubt about the cottagers’ trustworthiness when she adds to the Turk’s story the story of his daughter Safie. There are two possible sources for the Safie episode, as far as I know (there may be more). One is a ballad of oral tradition known as “Young Beichan” in Scotland and “Lord Bateman” in England, and it is the story of a man imprisoned in Turkey (an American variant says in Kentucky), and the jailer’s daughter falls in love with him. They plight their troth, she helps him to escape, later she crosses the sea (or in America the river) to hold him to his promise, and he marries her, taking the steps two at a time, we are told, when he hears that she is at the door. Both parties in this story are pretty admirable, and it has a happy ending, but this ballad provides no model for Safie’s departure from home. For that, Shelley borrows from the much darker story of Shylock the Jew in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Shylock is a villain, a money-lender, and we do not like him, but when his daughter Jessica runs off to marry a Christian, taking with her everything she can lay her hands on, including a ring which her dead mother had given Shylock before their marriage and which Jessica later trades for a monkey, we begin to see the villain as a betrayed father whose heart has been broken. “I would not have parted with it,” Shylock groans, “for a wilderness of monkeys.” It’s not a pretty story.
       Now let’s look at Safie’s case. Look closely at the next-to-last paragraph of Chapter 14, where she is said to have taken “with her some jewels that belonged to her and a sum of money.” It’s a minor point, I admit, but please notice that the clause “that belonged to her” modifies the word jewels only. The author might just as easily have written, “taking with her some jewels and a sum of money that belonged to her,” from which we could, if we chose, have inferred that both the jewels and the money belonged to her, but Shelley does not wish us to think so. The money was by no means hers to take, and it turns out to have been more than just the housekeeping money. It supplies the DeLacey household with enough capital that they can afford a few luxuries and servants (plural, if you recall). I know that we are all ready to agree that the Turk had it coming—and so did Shylock, for that matter—but the fact remains that a child owes honor and obedience to her parent, even to a bad parent (it’s one of the Ten Commandments), and the money wasn’t Safie’s; she stole it, so, Christian though she is, she has broken two of the Ten Commandments before she shuts the door on her father’s apartment, and his possessions, which she had stayed behind to forward to him when they arrived, will in all probability never reach him.
       Another bit of language that brings home to us the fact that Safie’s conduct requires a special effort on our part to approve of is a phrase that the author uses three times within four pages”: “to fall into someone’s hands.” Find it first in the seventh paragraph of Chapter 15: “But Paradise Lost excited different and far deeper emotions. I read it, as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true history.” How exactly did these books fall into the creature’s hands? (Salvage—so they simply came into his possession; it’s perfectly legal.) Now look at the final paragraph of Chapter 14: After the death of her Italian guide and translator, Safie “fell into good hands,” meaning that it was more or less accidental that the landlady of the house where the servant died happened to be kind and helpful. So it’s not quite a matter of Safie’s coming into someone’s possession, but it’s nothing shady or sinister either. But now look at the paragraph before this one:

When alone, Safie resolved in her own mind the plan of conduct that it would become her to pursue in this emergency. A residence in Turkey was abhorrent to her; her religion and her feelings were alike averse to it. By some papers of her father which fell into her hands she heard of the exile of her lover and learnt the name of the spot where he then resided.

Are we supposed to imagine that the Turk left these papers out on the dining room table where Safie might casually come upon them as the creature came across the suitcase containing the books? Were they, do you suppose, in his desk in some obvious place? Seriously, now, they were in all probability hidden from Safie. These are not documents that her father would want Safie to see. She could never have come upon them without deliberately searching her father’s private papers. It’s all very well to say that as a wronged daughter she had a right to do whatever it took to find her lover as well as to avoid a repressive life in her native country, but all I am trying to do is to point out that there are some details in Safie’s past that we must find excuses for. In our own day, “Thou shalt honor thy father and mother” and even “Thou shalt not steal” are considered more elastic rules of conduct than they were in ancient days, but even today we must at some level be aware that we are doing a little special pleading in overlooking Safie’s violation of them. This may not ever rise to the level of consciousness, but it has some chance of doing so when we see it contrast so sharply with the creature’s own natural goodness. He has never read the Bible, and yet not only does he follow the Golden Rule, which Christ said was to replace all the ancient Jewish laws, but he also obeys, as it were by instinct, the only two of the Ten Commandments that have ever applied to his situation: He has given up stealing once he knew it for what it was, and in his interview with the old man he takes the greatest care not to bear false witness. It is, in fact, his refusal to tell a lie that gives the conversation its delicious dramatic irony: He was taught, he says, by a French family who live “near this spot.”
       Altogether the creature conducts himself more admirably than the cottagers during the emergency. After all, he says he could have killed Felix by tearing him apart, but he was too sick with grief even to desire revenge at that moment, whereas Felix takes a weapon and falls violently upon him, a being who, whatever his size and ugliness, whatever he may appear to be doing, is seated and unarmed—and in an attitude of supplication, clinging to the old man’s knees. Meanwhile, when Agatha faints at the sight of the creature, Safie rushes past Agatha’s fallen body to save herself. These are good people, much better than Safie’s father, but they are no more than people, and the fact that they have suffered from injustice has never guaranteed that they would be just themselves. They are only normal, flawed people and not the “superior beings” the creature thinks them. They are subject to the same weaknesses that have made every other person the creature has ever met lose composure and either flee or attack him. We have never been given any reason to expect them to behave with greater discretion or kindness or restraint when confronted with the creature’s hideous appearance.
       The old man alone is immune to it because he cannot see, but he gets scarcely a chance to commune with the creature before the young people return, and the quiet and civilized conversation turns into what looks to Felix like an attack on his father. Here we have at last what the creature calls “the fatal effects of [his] deformity.” It will take several more blows by the hammer of fate to give final form to the creature’s moral nature, but the process has begun, and ugliness has begun it, ugliness.
       Shelley’s thesis in this novel is that criminals are made, not born, and what makes them is rejection from the circle of humanity. Consider what the old man replies when the creature exclaims, “I trust that, by your aid, I shall not be driven from the society and sympathy of your fellow-creatures”: “Heaven forbid!” says DeLacey, “even if you were really criminal; for that can only drive you to desperation, and not instigate you to virtue” (Chapter 15).
The creature’s ugly face is little more than a symbol for whatever it is that makes an individual obnoxious and initiates his expulsion from the human community. Once rejected, though, as was the Turk, who became “obnoxious” to the French government, or as were the DeLaceys when their charity backfired on them, or as was the creature when he found no pity where he had hoped to find it, the outcast all too often learns not compassion for others but bitterness and malice which can lead him to commence a journey into crime.

Notes

Synecdoche: Actually, synecdoches can exist without words. This device exists in many media. Take, for example, the following magic trick. It takes two confederates to trick a third party (we’ll call him by the carnival name “the mark”—it means the victim). One of the two presenters is the “magician” and the other the master of ceremonies. The MC holds a deck of cards carefully arranged so that the ninth and tenth cards from the top are both tens. He tells the mark that the magician can identify any card he pulls from the deck, and he fans out the deck of cards to offer the mark his choice. Even if the mark removes the ninth or tenth card, the ninth card from the top will still be a ten. The MC then asks to see the secret card and, taking the first nine cards from the top of the deck, asks the mark to insert his card anywhere in this little pile. Then, one at a time from the top of the deck, he flips these ten cards down on the table in front of the magician, face up. They are arranged in three columns: of four cards, two cards, and four cards, exactly like the layout of a ten-spot card. Now he taps each card in succession as he asks the magician, “Is it this, this, this, this . . .” and so on from the first to the last card. The ten will be either the last or the next-to-last card, depending on where the mark inserted it, and when the MC taps the ten, he makes sure to touch the spot on the card that corresponds to the location of the secret card on the table. The magician studies for a bit and points to the mark’s secret card.  Return to text.

A whole episode of a larger work: The literary genre called the epyllion, for instance, regularly contains an episode that, properly interpreted, can function as the key to interpreting the work as a whole. Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis contains an interlude about Adonis’s horse, which runs away after a wild mare while his rider is resisting the charms of the queen of love. Venus uses this example of the naturalness of sex in her seduction of the boy, but other interpretations are possible. In Marlowe’s epyllion Hero and Leander, which is unfinished, the encapsulated digression on Cupid can be used to guess at how we should have understood the poem if it had been completed.  Return to text.