Lecture on Frankenstein, Chapters 16-17

       These two chapters afford Victor a chance to make up for his deficiencies as a parent. He has been punished severely for his failure to anticipate his creature’s needs upon awakening into life, but now the creature promises to call a halt to his campaign of vengeance in return for a wife, and Victor consents to this bargain. Since he later reneges on his promise, however, it is important to recognize now that he makes it with his eyes fully open. The creature withholds no detail of his history but freely confesses his crimes and the motives for them. What we learn about the creature in these pages is important because Victor willfully forgets or denies much of it when, later on, he finds his promise burdensome. The most important fact is that the creature admits to no other homicides than those of William and Justine. He himself expresses “wonder that [after killing the boy], instead of venting my sensations in exclamations and agony, I did not rush among mankind and perish in the attempt to destroy them.” But the fact is that he did not and never does indulge in any sort of Viking-style bloodbath, despite Victor’s repeated claim that he has released among his fellow beings a monster “whose joy it [is] to shed their blood and to revel in their groans” (Chapter 22) and who takes “delight in carnage and misery” (Chapter 7; cf. Chapter 20) for their own sake.
        His first opportunity to take revenge for an injury is the night after the DeLaceys have rejected him. He says, “I could with pleasure have destroyed the cottage and its inhabitants and have glutted myself with their shrieks and misery,” but instead he howls and wreaks havoc in the woods. The next morning, although at first declaring “everlasting war against the species” of man, he soon changes his mind, reviews and criticizes his own conduct of the day before, and resolves to try again. Upon learning that he will never have a second chance because the DeLaceys have moved away, he feels murderous rage once more, but it is stilled by remembrance of the mildness, gentleness, and beauty of his “friends,” and he takes out his frustration on “inanimate objects” and the garden vegetables. The flames that consume the cottage, licking it “with their forked and destroying tongues,” remind us of the tongues of the inhabitants, which had heaped abuse on his head and destroyed his hopes. Their home has been their scapegoat.
        So far we have seen precious little in the way of carnage, but the closer the creature comes to Victor’s home in Geneva, he says, “the more deeply did I feel the spirit of revenge enkindled in my heart.” We do not quite know what to expect of this journey. It is being made to petition Victor to aid the creature in some way, though, so it does not seem reasonable to expect the creature to harm the brother of the man he depends on to help him, and yet we do know that William dies before creature and creator meet so we are off balance, uncertain how the murder will come about. Shelley prepares us for it with the greatest care, so that we will know exactly what to expect and yet at the same time be surprised by the way it comes about. This feat, she accomplishes by presenting almost exactly the same event twice, the first episode heightening and instructing our expectations and the second both defeating and gratifying them.
        The first episode is the one about the girl who falls into the river. Even after the creature has been repeatedly goaded into thirsting for revenge, all it takes is one day of sunshine to awaken his former instinctive goodness, for when a young girl comes running towards him and slips into the river, he rescues her without a second thought. Clearly it is not easy to turn the creature into a criminal. The best way of doing so is to punish him for doing good deeds, and that is, of course, precisely what happens when the male companion of the girl shoots the creature in fright. The scene is a perfect illustration of prejudice as self-fulfilling prophecy or teacher, for, smarting with pain and indignation, the creature once more “vowed eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind.”
        Like an instant replay, the next episode, with little William, follows the same pattern as the previous one. Another laughing child running away from a playmate unsuspectingly approaches the creature. We naturally expect the creature, with hate renewed and better instructed in brutality, to act upon his vow by rising up and destroying the little boy. We are surprised, then, when, instead of this, he conceives a hope that this child may be too young to be prejudiced, and he decides to kidnap him and bring him up as his companion. It is almost incredible, but even now, on the verge of his first murder, the creature still forgets his vow of revenge the moment that hope enters his mind. Granted, kidnapping is a serious crime, but there is no thought of murder at this time.
        But then, his hope is vain, for we teach our children prejudice—of trolls, of ogres, of demons, of orcs, of all varieties of ugliness—before they are six or seven or eight, and the words of hate come tumbling out of the little mouth, along with the fatal name of Frankenstein, which, we suppose, will seal William’s doom. And indeed, the creature appears to intend nothing less when he says, “Frankenstein! you belong then to my enemy—to him towards whom I have sworn eternal revenge; you shall be my first victim.” And yet, please notice that he does not instantly throttle the boy. He merely holds him for a time, while “the child still struggled and loaded me with epithets which carried despair to my heart.” And when the creature does move his hands from the boy’s body to his throat, even then his intention is not to kill him: “I grasped his throat to silence him, and in a moment he lay dead at my feet.” It was an accident. Granted, it was certainly more serious than involuntary manslaughter, for he killed the boy while unlawfully detaining him with the intention of kidnapping him, a capital felony, and it is likely that a jury would recommend the death penalty, but the fact remains that the creature did not mean to kill William; it was not clear to him in what way the boy would become his “first victim,” but his only intention in grasping his throat was to make him shut up.
        However, the creature has passed the point of no return, and he accepts responsibility for the accidental death; nay, he glories in it, gloats over it as his first strike against the parent who abandoned him at birth. Is it not amazing that even at this moment, with these toxic feelings boiling in his breast, he can be “softened and attracted” by the beauty of Caroline’s portrait around the corpse’s neck? Tender feelings are yet stirring in him when he maliciously frames Justine for the murder; in fact, envy of those who might be favored by the woman in the miniature portrait or Justine herself has mingled with the creature’s amorous longings and his murderous rage. Yet to give the devil his due, he does not rape Justine. The circumstances favor rape, and his thoughts tend in that direction, but his cruelty is much greater than rape could satisfy; rape could merely destroy Justine’s innocence, but the creature’s diabolical scheme rapes the very system of human justice itself, making it frustrate its own goal by destroying the innocent victim of his malice.
        There is no question but that, once commenced, the creature’s progress in crime is rapid, and he does not attempt to disguise his wickedness from Victor. Yet he has told his story clearly enough that any reasonable person must recognize that he did not enter the world a criminal but was converted into a fiend by misery. Even Victor, when he can resist his prejudice (that is to say, the revulsion caused by the creature’s appearance), recognizes the logic of his argument in Chapter 17:

I am malicious because I am miserable. . . . My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor, and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being and become linked to the chain of existence and events from which I am now excluded.

Victor even acknowledges his duty not “to withhold from him the small portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow” (Chapter 17).  This is why he agrees to make the creature a wife. Remember why he does it.
        You have often heard, I am sure, the expression “an albatross around your neck,” and you will not be surprised to learn that Victor considers this chore of creating a female creature in the light of an albatross whose weight oppresses him more and more. What you may not know is that in this particular novel, that expression is more than casually metaphorical. Victor quotes from the poem from which that allusion comes when telling how he felt, walking the streets of Ingolstadt after escaping from his apartment: “My heart palpitated in the sickness of fear, and I hurried on with irregular steps, not daring to look about me:

Like one who, on a lonely road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And, having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread."

The lines come from Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Captain Walton writes to his sister, quoting this same poem: “I am going to unexplored regions, to ‘the land of mist and snow,’ but I shall kill no albatross” (Letter 2), and he attributes his passion for seafaring to Coleridge’s poem, “that production of the most imaginative of modern poets.” Shelley almost certainly had Coleridge’s albatross in mind as the counterpart of Frankenstein’s hated task. That is why you will read “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” just after you read the next two chapters in Frankenstein, but I will give you a preview now.
        That poem is a story told by an old seaman about a voyage to the Antarctic, “the land of mist and snow.” One of the crew, in a moment of thoughtless negligence, kills a large bird that has been following the ship, an albatross, and practically from that moment the wind dies, the supplies run out, and the sailors begin one by one to die of thirst. The bowman is blamed for this, birds that follow ships being good omens, and the corpse of the bird is hung around his neck as a mark of his guilt. And there it hangs, while his friends keep on dying, until at last, as he watches some water snakes in the moonlight, snakes which before had seemed hideous and slimy, he perceives their peculiar, elfin beauty and blesses them in his heart. At that moment the albatross slips from around his neck and drops into the ocean, for he has redeemed himself by seeing in the snakes the beauty of life that he had been blind to when he casually killed the bird.
       Well, Shelley’s novel is a story told to (not by) a young seaman (not an old one) on a voyage into the Arctic (not the Antarctic). The old man who tells it says that in a moment of thoughtless negligence (these are really words that Victor uses) he bestowed life on (not took life from) a being and then left it to fend for itself until one by one those he loved began to die at the monster’s hands. Yet, like his counterpart, he gets a chance to redeem himself and make up for having brought life into the world without providing for its nurture and protection. This opportunity is his agreement to create a mate for his creature. Carrying this burden like an albatross around his neck, will he find release from guilt by perceiving beauty in what had before appeared hideous to him? Will he learn to value life more than he did when he created it? Wait and see.