Lecture on Frankenstein, Chapter 24

        We have known from the beginning of the novel that it would end with Victor wearing his body out a vain pursuit of his creature, but the ending turns out to be a good deal sadder. Victor becomes in all respects except appearance the image of his own creature, the worst possible fate for him in view of the hatred that unites them. Now he is his creature’s plaything, led by the nose on a punishing journey whose real purpose is the creature’s determination to kill him by inches while Victor thirsts to destroy the creature.
        Finally the author’s playing with echoes, reflections, parallels of all sorts, climaxes in a chapter with doubleness at its core. This is the tragedy of two Romantic giants, both beings of surpassing intellectual power and ability, capable of extraordinary deeds yet blighted by hatred, stifled and doomed to waste their powers in fruitless hostility and then to die in the snow. Each is the creature of the other, one born of loveless curiosity, the other of loathing, so crazed with impotent rage as to trade all that remains of his life for a chance to undo his greatest, his only accomplishment. Victor imagines himself to be in control of this quest, except insofar as he is instigated by heaven and the ghosts of the creature’s victims, but in fact the creature is pulling his chain and taunting him when he falls behind. Victor’s interpretation of his own life, that he failed as a creator, has always been challenged by another, that he succeeded as a creator but failed as a parent, and now his belief that he is terminating his experiment is challenged by the truth that he is only a monkey, the weasel being the one really in charge of the situation. A step beyond this double view of the chase is ambiguity, perhaps the ultimate in double vision, in which two portraits of Victor vie for dominance within our own minds: Is he a hero or is he a pathetic failure? The author leaves us free to decide for ourselves.
        The chapter opens with Victor’s admission that he has been reinvented, as it were, by his lust for vengeance. In the very first sentence he admits his loss of “all voluntary thought” as he is “hurried away by fury.” Revenge, he says, gave him strength and the steadiness of mind and emotion that is required for his hunt. It even kept him alive, for “I dared not die and leave my adversary in being.” The new Victor is defined completely by the poison of revenge. Yet he is not consistently conscious of having lost control of his own destiny.
        For allies he thinks he has “wandering spirits of vengeance” as well as the spirits of William, Justine, Henry, Elizabeth, and his father. When rage and vengeance had “overwhelmed every other feeling,” he says, these spirits “hovered round and instigated me to toil and revenge.” I confess that I have a hard time imagining the gentle Elizabeth—or, in fact, any of the rest of them—saying, “Kill it, Victor. Make it suffer,” never having heard them utter a single word of hate or aggression in life. And indeed, when Victor invokes these kindly spirits, it is not they who reply. Rather, as we have learned to expect whenever Victor addresses spirits, the creature, who has been lurking in the graveyard nearby, answers his prayer, saying, “You have determined to live, and I am satisfied,” swiftly departing and drawing Victor after him more like an obedient dog than like the bloodhound Victor fancies himself to be.
        There are many signs that Victor’s inability to see himself as his creature’s dupe is part of a profound mental illness. It cannot be doubted that he has had spells of insanity in the past, for he says that after his return from Ireland to Geneva his tranquility gave way to bouts of rage and depression: “Memory brought madness with it, and when I thought of what had passed, a real insanity possessed me. . . .” After the deaths of Elizabeth and his father, he was actually incarcerated in an asylum, “For they had called me mad, and during many months, as I understood, a solitary cell had been my habitation.” While chained in darkness, he says, “I dreamt that I wandered in flowery meadows and pleasant vales with the friends of my youth, but I awoke and found myself in a dungeon.” These dreams recur to him later on in his delirium as reported by Captain Walton. Indeed, during his pursuit of the creature he accepted his waking life as a dream and his dreams as reality: “Often when wearied by a toilsome march, I persuaded myself that I was dreaming until night should come and that I should then enjoy reality in the arms of my dearest friends.”
        In the dream world that Victor inhabits, he believes that a “spirit of good followed and directed my steps” and even prepared a table before him in the wilderness—or, to use his own words, “a repast . . . in the desert that restored and inspirited me.” And yet we know for a fact that the creature prepares at least one of these repasts, a dead hare, even sending Victor an invitation to dine on it. Victor admits that “sometimes [the creature], who feared that if I lost all trace of him I should despair and die, left some mark to guide me.” It takes very little effort to believe the creature to be the guiding spirit Victor mistakes for a guardian angel, and when Victor confesses to following his quest more “as the mechanical impulse of which I was unconscious, than as the ardent desire of my soul,” the source of this impulse is more likely to have been the creature or Victor’s hatred of the creature than heaven, as Victor claims. Has not the Lord said, “Vengeance is mine”? Since when does He instigate mortals to gratify their appetite for revenge? God prepares a table in the wilderness for his elect, but we also hear in the Bible of the devil’s table, from which we dare not eat. Is Victor Frankenstein being favored of heaven or duped by hell?
        The unholiness of Victor’s quest is underscored by its twisted resemblance to its wholesome antithesis, a lover’s pursuit: “I viewed the expanse before me with anguish, when suddenly my eye caught a dark speck upon the dusky plain. I strained my sight to discover what it could be and uttered a wild cry of ecstasy when I distinguished a sledge and the distorted proportions of a well-known form within. Oh! With what a burning gush did hope revisit my heart! Warm tears filled my eyes, which I hastily wiped away, that they might not intercept the view I had of the demon; but still my sight was dimmed by the burning drops, until, giving way to the emotions that oppressed me, I wept aloud.”
        Passages like this remind us of the ardent affections Victor displayed in his youth, of which he might be yet capable, had he not lost so much that he squanders the little that is left. We grieve for the waste of his formidable intellect when we read how, in his youth, he “deemed it criminal to throw away in senseless grief those talents that might be useful to my fellow creatures,” and we must agree with him that he now resembles the devil, in exchanging the fields of heaven for a blasted wasteland. And we must also grieve that he seems completely unaware that he is now doing precisely what in his youth he thought to be criminal. Once more, too, we are reminded of his sentiment that any activity that tends to “weaken your affections” by removing you from enjoying the company of your loved ones is “unlawful, that is, not befitting the human mind.” This time it is not the name of Ernest that reminds us that Victor has yet a living relative; it is simply references to siblings. Victor politely declines Walton’s encouragement to form “new ties and fresh affections,” pointing out that the friends he has lost can never be replaced, not only because they were such exceptional people but also because the acquaintance extended so far into his past. “A sister or a brother,” he says, “can never . . . suspect the other of fraud or false dealing. . . .” Then upon the heels of this reference, Walton begins another letter, “My beloved sister.” We can scarcely help wondering where Ernest is and thinking how sad it is that Victor insists he has lost everyone. Granted, this brother has never been any sort of real companion for Victor and their acquaintance goes back no further than Ernest’s boyhood, not to Victor’s, but he is nevertheless family, and he and Victor share many of the same memories of their parents, of William, and of Elizabeth. I think I would feel more sympathetic than I do with Victor if only he claimed at least to be sacrificing his life to protect his brother from the creature rather than simply throwing it away on vegeance.
        At last we come to the first of two final glimpses of Victor, his speech to the crew, urging them to support their captain’s original ambition to reach the North Pole. It is a very peculiar speech in view of the fact that his motive for telling his personal history to Walton was to persuade him to curb his ambition and give up his project. Why is he now lobbying for the opposite aim? I find myself recollecting how peculiar it was to create the elaborate voyage to Ireland when the plot events might have been accomplished more easily and in a shorter time in Scotland. We have to assume that the author has some reason more important than the plot, first for including the sea voyage and now for making Victor speak on behalf of the ambition he previously deplored. In the former case her motive was thematic, since only a sea voyage could enable us to recognize Victor’s experience as the inversion of the Ancient Mariner’s redemption. Now the speech to the crew is necessary in order to leave us with two equally vivid but incompatible views of Victor’s character.
        The first of these views is that of the relentless pursuer. Victor scolds the men for backing out of their commitment at the first trial of their courage and resolve, and he urges them to stand firm in their purpose and pursue their captain’s dream to its conclusion. It’s rather easy to think of Victor’s relentless pursuit of his creature as analogous to the steadfastness he demands of the men. However, suppose that we think of Victor’s own ambition to create life in the laboratory as the aim Victor was pursuing. In that case, hasn’t he already done what the captain’s crew are now proposing to do? Didn’t he back out when the going got rough? As you listen to his splendid speech, see if you can hold these two views of him in your mind at the same time: resolute hunter in the frozen north and spineless quitter in Ingolstadt:

Turning towards the men, he said, “What do you mean? What do you demand of your captain? Are you, then, so easily turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition?
        “And wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror, because at every new incident your fortitude was to be called forth and your courage exhibited, because danger and death surrounded it, and these you were to brave and overcome. For this was it a glorious, for this was it an honourable undertaking. You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species, your names adored as belonging to brave men who encountered death for honour and the benefit of mankind. And now, behold, with the first imagination of danger, or, if you will, the first mighty and terrific trial of your courage, you shrink away and are content to be handed down as men who had not strength enough to endure cold and peril; and so, poor souls, they were chilly and returned to their warm firesides. Why, that requires not this preparation; ye need not have come thus far and dragged your captain to the shame of a defeat merely to prove yourselves cowards. Oh! Be men, or be more than men. Be steady to your purposes and firm as a rock. This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts may be; it is mutable and cannot withstand you if you say that it shall not. Do not return to your families with the stigma of disgrace marked on your brows. Return as heroes who have fought and conquered and who know not what it is to turn their backs on the foe.”

        As you know, I am very far from admiring Victor Frankenstein—or trusting his judgment. Therefore, I favor seeing him here as unwittingly condemning himself with his own mouth. We know that the creature was a remarkable success in every respect except physical beauty, and we know enough about how scientific breakthroughs are accomplished (or for that matter, how English papers are written) that we are not surprised that the cosmetic aspects of any project should be the last to be dealt with. Therefore, when we consider the project as a whole, the ugliness of this prototype can’t be considered a major problem despite its horrible effects in this particular case. Victor hit a big snag when his creature got loose, and he has paid a huge price for this, but it was the fault of bad planning or rather of a lack of planning, not of the scientific work itself or of the project’s nature. Has he not, then, done precisely what he accuses these men of doing, abandoning the great dream at “the first mighty and terrific trial of [his] courage”? He undertook to create life “to be hailed as the benefactor . . . of [a new] species,” and he undertook it because it was bold and challenging, not because it was easy; he expected “dangers and terror.” But he has abandoned and repudiated his quest, as much a failure as are the men he harangues. So which is the real Victor Frankenstein, the relentless pursuer of his foe or the cowardly scientist who let one devastating experimental debacle drive him from the pursuit to which he had dedicated his life? Does he unconsciously condemn himself in this speech, or is he a model that the men ought to heed?
        We may be tempted to try to accept both views, since one could perhaps be a failure at one period of one’s life and a hero later on, but this compromise is not possible. The heroic Victor would have to be following a just quest in order to be heroic. He could not be seen as implicated in the criminal course his creature has taken. Where is the justice in contributing to the corruption of an innocent person, provoking him to commit unforgivable crimes against you, and then seeking his extermination? Since this is precisely how I do regard Victor, I have no difficulty rejecting his own view of himself and accepting the less flattering one. However, the author at this point leaves the choice up to the readers.
        Victor’s last words are also ambiguous, but they illustrate a different kind of ambiguity: obscurity and inconsistency. We are not to mistake these words for delirium, however, for Victor claims that he is not in the grip of mad revenge now; he claims to have examined his behavior rationally and to have found in it both good and bad. He admits that he failed to assure his creature’s “happiness and well-being” as he was obligated to do as its maker, and yet he still claims that this duty conflicted with his duty to the members of his own species and that their being much more numerous justified him in denying his creature a wife. Although he reasserts his conviction that the new species would destroy the old one, we are free to say, “Horsefeathers!” as we did before. This matter is not by any means settled, and the dying Victor’s very last words offer nothing firmer to hold onto as a summing up. He says only, “Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.” Are we to take these last words as referring only to other people’s dreams or to his own as well? Is he still maintaining that creating life was blasphemy, doomed to produce malevolent monsters, and that only dreams like Walton’s have any chance of success, or is he conceding that he may have given up where another scientist might have redoubled his efforts and succeeded? We will get no further help from Victor in interpreting his story. The author again leaves us free to make up our own minds.
        All that remains is to examine Victor’s twin, who is left, as it were, onstage after his creator’s death. He too has been converted from goodness to evil, through pain, and not only the pain that drove him to seek revenge but pain also in the conversion itself, the execution of his acts of vengeance: 10,000 times greater pain, he claims, than he inflicted on Victor. It was apparently difficult to drive out of him all his innate goodness, and every new evil act wrenched his heart, which endured the violence of the change with unimaginable torture.
        He claims, in fact, that after the murder of Henry he pitied Victor and forgot his threat of vengeance just as he had done before encountering each of the two children. Yet this threat was recalled to him by Victor’s daring to marry. Then and then alone, seeing Victor about to enjoy what he had cruelly denied to his creature, “I recollected my threat and resolved that it should be accomplished. I knew that I was preparing for myself a deadly torture, but I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse which I detested yet could not disobey.” Like Victor, who felt controlled by a “mechanical impulse of which I was unconscious,” the creature too became a puppet actuated by the force of hatred, and although he had recovered some of his benignity after previous seizures of this kind, this time the conversion seems to have been thorough, for he avers that he felt no pity or qualm when killing Elizabeth. Yet it is significant that since that time he has, as far as we know, remained innocent of blood.
        The creature’s final interview with Walton confirms that his malice was focused upon Victor alone and not, as Victor and he himself so often claimed, upon the human race. Captain Walton evidently believes this and also that Victor’s death has left the creature with no reason to live, for, in spite of a prejudice against the creature for having caused his friend’s death, he allows him to flee, convinced that he will do as he has said: seek “the most northern extremity of the globe,” where he will erase the last traces of Victor’s experiment by burning his own body. Will not this act, committed at the North Pole, come close to achieving the aims of both Victor Frankenstein and Robert Walton? If so, the creature may be seen as outshining both of these adventurers, but we have also seen into his heart, where he is only supreme in misery. The book thus concludes with yet one more form of double vision: paradox.
        Let us begin a list of forms of doubleness with this word: paradox. I will then add others that I have discussed in former lectures. I will amplify the last of them with examples. While I work, you can do the same with others.