Lecture on Frankenstein, Chapters 22-23

           The retribution that Victor has courted and expected overtakes him in these chapters, taking him, despite his readiness, completely by surprise. The inevitability and fitness of his doom, his ignorance of the creature’s intentions, and our constant awareness of them make this climactic catastrophe resemble the conclusion to a tragic drama. Maintaining a clear separation between Victor’s fatal ignorance and readers’ achingly poignant certainty of the future—the essence of dramatic irony—requires the author to make use of all the tricks in her repertory. She takes care to remind us of the value of the lives that are about to be lost, she has her narrator himself offer oracular warnings of what is to come, and she again uses landscape reflections of the unfolding human drama to stimulate our imaginations and start adrenalin flowing.
           The pathos of the deaths of Elizabeth and Victor’s father is increased by a few final strokes of characterization. We have already been impressed with Alphonse’s anxious efforts to empathize with his son, fearing that he might feel trapped in a promised marriage to one whom he regarded only as a beloved sister. The fact that he was mistaken did not lessen the merit of his effort, and it caused us to recognize how important it is for parents to exert their powers of empathy to bridge the generation gap that so often prevents understanding in families. Now that Victor has heard and failed to understand the creature’s warning about his wedding night, we are reminded of the importance of empathy, which Victor so lamentably lacks. This reminder comes in the letter from Elizabeth that opens Chapter 22, where we learn that after ascertaining that Victor truly desired to marry Elizabeth, Alphonse then approached her to make sure that her heart was just as truly engaged and that she had no reservations, but without divulging that he and Victor had had the same conversation earlier. For discretion and empathy, few parents can compare to Alphonse Frankenstein, nor many fiancées with Elizabeth as she brings the question full circle to Victor once again.
           In addition to reminding us of the unparalleled value of these rare persons, Shelley must make certain that every reader senses the menacing future, for she intends to torture us with dread. To this end she employs a new kind of double vision: foreshadowing. The hints are heavy-handed, the first being Victor’s remark that he had been blind to the real meaning of the creature’s warning, “and when I thought that I had prepared only my own death, I hastened that of a far dearer victim” (Chapter 22). By misdirecting his fear to a conflict between himself and the creature—a conflict that we are nearly certain will not occur yet if ever—his imperfect prescience is more excruciating than was his complete lack of suspicion years before, when he was gamboling with “unbridled joy and hilarity” from the fields and toward his rooms in Ingolstadt, where the letter telling of William’s murder awaited him. Elizabeth’s subdued spirits and her sense of the future’s uncertainty also help to build a sense of approaching doom.
           This focus on the future accounts for the curious absence of the wedding ceremony from the novel. After the long postponement and tedious expectation of this event, all we hear of it is in a subordinate clause: “After the ceremony was performed.” It is as if the promises of future fidelity and mutual aid are simply irrelevant, as they in fact turn out to be. The whole of Victor and Elizabeth’s married life together will be spent on the honeymoon journey during that briefest and most exquisite stage of a woman’s life when she is, to use Keats’s phrase, a “still unravished bride.” Identifying this period between the wedding ceremony and the first night of the honeymoon as “the last moments of my life during which I enjoyed the feeling of happiness,” Victor predicts the next murder and then proceeds to describe the rapidity with which these happy moments passed away from him.
           As the chapter draws to a close, the foreshadowing becomes more elaborate. Shelley enlists the help of the landscape once more to direct our thoughts. First, she personifies the mountains, heightening the intensity of the perceived significance of the natural setting. On one side of the bridal boat stands “the beautiful Mont Blanc” like a queen surrounded by her waiting women, “the assemblage of snowy mountains that in vain endeavor to emulate her,” and on the other side stands the more masculine “mighty Jura opposing its dark side to the ambition that would quit its native country, and an almost insurmountable barrier to the invader who should wish to enslave it.” The personifications do not themselves forecast the future, but they do call attention to how uncannily nature reflects humanity, so that when the author demonstrates how swiftly nature changes, as she will do presently, we may expect the human drama soon to match its reflection.
           Elizabeth describes the deceitful tranquility of the natural scene: “What a divine day! How happy and serene all nature appears!” “Appears” indeed! Like the glad future that the couple seem to be entering together, the happiness and serenity are only an appearance, and accordingly the melancholy which Elizabeth feels and tries to mask with such bright chatter cannot long be kept at bay: “. . . joy for a few instants shone in her eyes, but it continually gave place to distracton and reverie.” The brevity of this seeming peace in the natural world is emphasized by repeated references to descent: “The sun sank lower in the heavens,” and “the river Drance” came down “through the chasms of the higher and the glens of the lower hills.” When the Alps are themselves said to “come closer to the lake” in the east, as if mountains could move, Victor says they form what looks like an amphitheater, seeming to encircle and even to overhang the couple’s honeymoon destination, the town of Evian. It is as if nature itself were waiting tensely, even with gloating expectation, for a drama to be played out there as on a stage. The wind now enters the picture, sinking too as the sun sinks to mark the end of Victor’s happiness, which seems still sweeter the more nearly it approaches its close. Now listen to the passage, the last two paragraphs of Chapter 22, in the author’s words:

           The sun sank lower in the heavens; we passed the river Drance and observed its path through the chasms of the higher and the glens of the lower hills. The Alps here come closer to the lake, and we approached the amphitheatre of mountains which forms its eastern boundary. The spire of Evian shone under the woods that surrounded it and the range of mountain above mountain by which it was overhung.
           The wind, which had hitherto carried us along with amazing rapidity, sank at sunset to a light breeze; the soft air just ruffled the water and caused a pleasant motion among the trees as we approached the shore, from which it wafted the most delightful scent of flowers and hay. The sun sank beneath the horizon as we landed, and as I touched the shore I felt those cares and fears revive which soon were to clasp me and cling to me forever.

           Chapter 23 continues to warn of the impending disaster by describing the weather. As the couple’s happiness in being together nears its end, so does the daylight, the twilight being appropriately called “the transitory light.” The moon is likewise heading toward its set and, as if not exiting swiftly enough, is obscured by clouds moving with the swiftness of—how fittingly—a vulture! But while the moon is sinking the wind has risen, even to violence, and the waves rise also as rain descends, the heavens and the earth seeming to smash together as if to crush the human beings caught here between them. Listen now to this model of foreshadowing:

           It was eight o'clock when we landed; we walked for a short time on the shore, enjoying the transitory light, and then retired to the inn and contemplated the lovely scene of waters, woods, and mountains, obscured in darkness, yet still displaying their black outlines.
           The wind, which had fallen in the south, now rose with great violence in the west. The moon had reached her summit in the heavens and was beginning to descend; the clouds swept across it swifter than the flight of the vulture and dimmed her rays, while the lake reflected the scene of the busy heavens, rendered still busier by the restless waves that were beginning to rise. Suddenly a heavy storm of rain descended.

           Once Elizabeth has been murdered and Victor recognizes his fatal misunderstanding of the creature’s threat, foreshadowing is of no further use, and Shelley returns to other sorts of reflections to channel our thoughts. The first of these is the appearance of the creature’s grinning face at the window, recalling that moment on the island when Victor looked up to see “by the light of the moon the daemon at the casement. A ghastly grin wrinkled his lips as he gazed on me, where I sat fulfilling the task which he had allotted to me.” Within moments the creature’s bride lay in ruin at Victor’s feet. Now we read, “I saw at the open window a figure the most hideous and abhorred. A grin was on the face of the monster; he seemed to jeer, as with his fiendish finger he pointed towards the corpse of my wife.” Thus has Elizabeth been added to the symmetrical pattern that will soon make Victor’s life an almost perfect reflection of his creature’s.
           One of the first concerns of both reader and Victor after the horror is past is, of course, the safety of the rest of his family: “my father even now might be writhing under [the creature’s] grasp, and Ernest might be dead at his feet.” The author teases us with uncertainty when she has Victor tell Walton, “Know that, one by one, my friends were snatched away.” What can this mean except that Alphonse and Ernest fell victim to the creature but that their deaths are not to be described? Yet no, almost at once Victor clarifies: “My father and Ernest yet lived,” so it now appears that the ominous sentence referred only to the previous murders. However, this does not assure the safety of Ernest and his father but simply leaves their fate uncertain, and we soon learn that Alphonse did not long survive his darling Elizabeth, “his more than daughter, whom he doted on with all that affection which a man feels, who in the decline of life, having few affections, clings more earnestly to those that remain.”
           “Cling more earnestly to those that remain.” Echoes haunt us. Where have we heard that sentiment—and those words—before? Most recently in the preceding chapter, where Victor’s father says, “Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let us only cling closer to what remains and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune.” Nor is this the only place where this sentiment was expressed; it first appeared in Chapter 3: “My mother was dead, but we had still duties which we ought to perform; we must continue our course with the rest and learn to think ourselves fortunate whilst one remains whom the spoiler has not seized.” And now we are again reminded of this sensible advice in language that, within seven lines of the name Ernest (its second appearance in this same passage, by the way) contains the adverb earnestly. What happens to Ernest? We seem to be exhorted to ask the question, but we never learn the answer. Why draw attention to Ernest by repeating his name and then echoing it in a sentence that reminds us that we should “think ourselves fortunate” as long as even one of those we love remains alive? I suggest that it is to call attention to the fact that Victor never again mentions his remaining brother, and this, I propose, is a serious fault according to Victor’s own philosophy. Has he not told Walton that a man who allows “any pursuit whatever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections” or to “destroy [his] taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix,” is engaging in a pursuit “not befitting the human mind”? He has, and yet upon his father’s death he begins his quest for the creature, forgetting entirely about having a brother left alive and claiming to have lost everything. Now, if Ernest actually does survive, of course, this is probably the best way of keeping him safe, but we are not told that Victor has any intention of protecting him; he seems simply to forget all about him. This is a sign that he fails to judge his own behavior by the rules of conduct he offers to Walton to guide him, and I cannot regard this failure as anything but a sign that Victor’s mind is deranged and that he is not to be trusted to interpret his own life.