The Spirit's Actions
Victor Frankenstein’s sea voyage after his decision to break his promise to the creature strikingly resembles the voyage of Coleridge’s ancient mariner. The improbability of this episode and the seemingly needless narrative gymnastics required to manage it in the form of a sea voyage can be explained by assuming the parallels to be deliberate and thematically significant.
Briefly, the parallels between Shelley’s and Coleridge’s tales are as follows: A major change of heart results in the falling of dead flesh (symbolizing a burden of guilt) into the sea by moonlight, after which the voyagers sleep while an un seen agency arranges for them to confront their “victims.” That these parallels could be intentional is suggested by the fact that both Captain Walton and Victor Frankenstein quote from Coleridge’s “Rime.” Moreover, in Coleridge’s frame story an old mariner’s tale prevents a young man from reaching a wedding reception, whereas in Shelley’s frame story a young mariner listens to an older man deprived of his wedding night. After the crisis at sea, Victor’s vessel moves south to the rendezvous with the latest victim in Ireland whereas the ancient mariner’s goes north, and after sleep thirst seizes Victor while the mariner’s thirst is slaked. Such inversions of detail signal Mary Shelley’s conscious inversion of Coleridge’s theme of sin and redemption, and they detach readers from Victor’s own interpretation of his experience by contrasting his experience with the more wholesome experience of his counterpart.
The turning point in Frankenstein is the destruction of the female creature. From that moment, I contend, Victor’s destruction begins, engineered by the creature as the ancient mariner’s atonement is commenced by the spirit from the land of mist and snow, moving the ship toward the mariner’s salvation. I see the female creature as Victor’s albatross, a dead weight of flesh that he has carried around his neck (figuratively speaking) ever since he promised to make it for his creature. It represents his guilt for sending the creature into the world to face misery all alone; or rather, it is his opportunity to atone for this act of criminal negligence, but now, no longer pitying his creature, he simply tosses it overboard. Then as he sleeps, the boat moves mysteriously toward Ireland. How could this happen? I propose that the creature encounters Victor's boat while Victor is asleep and simply tows it to within easy sail of Ireland, where he has laid a trap for Victor.
Since the very same thing occurs in Coleridge’s poem, we need at least to consider the possibility. It would explain how Henry’s body chanced to be found in Ireland and how Victor happened to arrive just in time to be blamed for the murder.
It is not odd that the author has left the creature's role in this episode to be inferred rather than narrating it; the creature's abduction and murder of Henry Clerval have to be inferred likewise. The only question is whether it is physically possible for the creature to have performed this action, and that is what I want you to determine today.
[The class works here.]
Facts Needed to Determine
Whether Inferences Can Be True
Time
____________ When does Victor's conversation with the creature occur?
____________ When does Victor set out in his boat?
____________ What time is moonrise? (This will help position events in time.)
____________ When does Victor go to sleep in his boat?
____________ When does he wake up?
____________ When does he come ashore in Ireland?
____________ When was was the body found? (Murderer was seen departing “just before.”)
____________ How much time passes between the conversation in the Orkneys and the murder? (Check to see that this is less than answer to #1 since Victor can prove he was still on his island when the body was discovered.)
Distance
____________ Distance from a remote Orkney Island to Perth
____________ Distance from Perth to northern Ireland
____________ Distance from northern Ireland to ocean west of the Orkneys by water
Results of Examination of Text and Map
We know that after his colloquy with his creature 48 hours pass before Victor sets out in his boat, and another 16-18 pass on the ocean before he reaches Ireland. In that time, what has the creature done? Well, he has apparently rushed south 180 miles to Perth, found Henry Clerval, kidnapped him (for his body is still warm when found in Ireland), taken him 170 miles to Ireland, and strangled him—all within at most 47 hours, for we do know the exact times when he leaves Victor and when he is seen departing from the Irish shore. That this action is just barely possible for an eight-foot being more agile than man and able to subsist on coarser fare, can be determined by simple arithmetic, which would place his average traveling speed at about 7.6 mph, allowing an hour for necessities of nature and for locating Henry. That leaves unaccounted for the seventeen hours after the murder but before Victor's arrival in Ireland. Where is the creature during this period, and what is he doing? Suppose that, intent on luring Victor to Ireland, he rows northward and intercepts Victor's boat, providentially headed south. (Mind you, we're dealing with a creature who has climbed the unscalable front face of Mt. Salève and who, according to Victor, can row fast enough to make a boat shoot "across the waters with an arrowy swiftness.") Victor would have been at sea for an hour or two when the creature left Ireland, he is now asleep, and he remains asleep till late morning. What is to prevent the creature from taking advantage of this lucky accident by guiding the boat toward that port where he left the body?
A Spirit from Beneath
I have already pointed out why we are justified in examining Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to find relationships with Frankenstein. I have also pointed out that each work is a framed story that involves a voyage to an opposite pole and a wedding long expected but never consummated. My belief is that the novel is a tragic inversion of Coleridge's tale of sin and redemption and that we are meant to see this parallel.
The action of each is triggered by a sudden, nearly irresponsible act. The mariner takes a life on a whim, while Victor Frankenstein bestows life in what he later repeatedly refers to as a moment of “negligence” or “thoughtless[ness].”
The guilt which this deed gradually accumulates upon the perpetrator comes in both works from the deaths of their companions—the other mariners, who die of thirst, and Victor's friends and family, murdered by his creature. The two works focus upon the effects of this guilt as it eats into the soul, estranging both men from the rest of humankind. Their moral alienation is reflected in their physical isolation surrounded by water and yet watched by those they have wronged. Victor spends many lonely hours on Lake Geneva, longing for the courage to drown himself (Ch. 9) and later sees the ocean “as an insuperable barrier between me and my fellow creatures” (Ch. 20), complaining that he is “doomed to live” under the constant “glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me”: sometimes Henry's and sometimes the creature's (Ch. 21). The Ancient Mariner too suffers under the accusing eyes of the dead, saying, “and yet I could not die.”
The Ancient Mariner's alienation, however, ends when he blesses the water-snakes. A sudden rush of love for what had before been ugly and alien relieves him of the burden of guilt which the albatross represents, and it drops “like lead into the sea.”
Likewise, Frankenstein has an opportunity to expiate his guilt by blessing another life whose ugliness revolts him, but it fails, delivering him into his creature's power and reducing him at last to a purely negative being motivated by revenge. This extended moment of choice begins on the glacier, the Sea of Ice, where he unexpectedly meets his creature. So moved is he by the creature's entreaties that he feels “for the first time . . . what the duties of a creator towards his creation were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness” (Ch. 10).
However, the blessing which Victor can confer on his creature differs from the Mariner's blessing upon the water-snakes, for it requires time, study, and travel, so that the moment which in the mariner's case passes in a heartbeat, is agonizingly prolonged for Victor. There is, unfortunately, ample time for his pity for the creature, which he felt momentarily on the glacier, to fade from his memory, and never until the hour of his death is it mentioned again. Therefore, when the moment of actually conferring the blessing arrives, he reneges and, with the same sudden impulsiveness as the mariner's blessing of the snakes, tears to pieces the female creature. In effect, he simply confirms his original offense by wilfully denying his creature the friend that would make his other deprivations bearable. Although Victor knows and has said to Walton that even God's creatures are sent into the world “but half made up” and that what completes the process of creation is a friend, he has also been revising history by persuading himself that his own creature was a bad seed to begin with, and this falsehood has led to a fear that the female may be still worse. Clearly Victor's judgment is impaired, and he ends with what amounts to a ruined albatross strewn about the floor of his laboratory, under the resentful gaze of a being which he has called his “spirit let loose from the grave.” It is hard not to think of the spirit from “the land of mist and snow” who loved the albatross and who pursues and punishes the Ancient Mariner.
Had Victor resisted hysteria and completed his task, he would have been relieved of his albatross's weight by bringing it to life, but instead he relieves himself of it by simply dumping it overboard one moonlit night. Until this moment he has never willingly failed in his duty to his offspring. In Ingolstadt he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown when he withdrew in disappointment from the newly awakened creature, and he was half-asleep when he ran from it in fear. He had no opportunity to make any rational choice concerning its welfare until meeting it on the glacier, when he consented to do his duty—and again now—but now he rejects it. The language he uses to describe this decision reveals that it was no carefully reasoned plan but rather an impulsive surrender to the misgivings that had been gnawing at him during his British tour: “The idea of renewing my labours did not for one instant occur to me; the threat I had heard weighed on my thoughts, but I did not reflect that a voluntary act of mine could avert it. I had resolved in my own mind, that to create another like the fiend I had first made would be an act of the basest and most atrocious selfishness; and I banished from my mind every thought that could lead to a different conclusion.” This single-mindedness, this stubborn refusal to be distracted, is a trait that we have often seen in Victor, both in the white heat of his creativity in the laboratory and in his endless brooding. In this quotation he admits that this is what prevented him from reconsidering a hasty decision made in a moment of panic and resentment. Now, aboard Walton's ship, he acknowledges that thoughts opposing his decision did occur to him but were never examined. From that moment began his spiritual demise, which ends with his abandoning humanity in a demented quest motivated by hatred and despair.
Like the mariner's, then, Victor's turning point comes from his own will, but the outcome in both cases is engineered by a Spirit from Beneath, to whom the ruined flesh that dropped into the ocean “was dear.” We have seen that it is possible that the creature chanced upon the sleeping Victor in his boat as he rowed northward toward the islands and towed the boat to within a few hours' sail of Ireland. This possibility begins to look plausible when we consider other respects in which the two voyages are remarkably similar. The moment after the dead things sink into the sea, both men fall asleep, and when they wake they each confront the matter of thirst. Now, since the mariner has begun his penitence, his long-endured thirst is slaked by rain signifying grace, but Victor, who has only now for the first time deliberately done anything he should feel guilty about, is tormented with thirst for the first time. And both men soon suffer a second swoon and come face to face with their victims in eerie circumstances. Although the mariner finds that they bear him no grudge and even help him to return home, Victor finds himself not altogether unjustly accused of Henry Clerval's death.
If the creature does not tow Victor's boat to its rendezvous with horror, if the parallels with Coleridge's poem are only imaginary, why does the author bother to have Henry spirited away to Ireland at all? The creature might have murdered him in Perth with much less trouble, and if framing Victor was his aim, that too might have been managed more comfortably on land, with less left to chance. No, clearly the author wanted Victor to sail, and I think her reason is to clarify his guilt by contrast with the Ancient Mariner. Whereas the mariner accepted his burden of responsibility for his misdeed and atoned for his casual act of destruction by an equally spontaneous impulse of love, Victor has refused to recognize where his responsibility lies and cannot love his creature. He therefore blames science itself for the creature's crimes—and himself for pursuing scientific research—casting himself in the pitiable role of the hapless dupe of a wicked scam instead of admitting to failure as a parent. But making the creature was no mistake, as he wants to believe (how could creating the wondrous miracle of life be evil?); failing to care for the creature after it came to life was his mistake, and refusing to do so once he became aware of the mistake is his crime. He has every reason to feel “as if I was about the commission of a dreadful crime” when he casts his albatross deliberately away, and he has every reason to say of Henry that his own “murderous machinations [have] deprived [him] of life.”
Seeing the creature as an agent of vengeance like the Spirit from the land of mist and snow enriches our reading of Frankenstein, emphasizing the tragic waste of a magnanimous soul, whose aversion to ugliness and inability to think ahead deprived his own son of the care the newborn deserve and whose inability to forgive and lack of empathy deprive him of the most basic right any sentient being can have, the right to have a friend. Thus by his own choice Victor consigns himself to the same torment his creature suffers, while both the Ancient Mariner and the much younger mariner Robert Walton, when faced with the ugly, the guilty, the alien, having every reason to hate and reject it, find somewhere within them the motive to say, “This is another living creature; let it be.”