Lecture on Frankenstein, Chapters 3-5

T. A. Copeland

 

 

         The best books are meant for rereading; there are many points that simply cannot be grasped on a first reading because they arise from considering words and events in different, often widely separated, parts of the book.  Since a course like this really offers little opportunity for rereading, you must rely on me for insight into some such matters.  The main discovery I owe to rereading this novel many times is that I learned to distrust Victor Frankenstein’s own interpretation of his life.  One of the main reasons for this distrust is that his words in the earliest pages (when he is near death) often seem inconsistent with his behavior earlier in life (later in the novel).  As he tells Walton about a parent’s duties to the “helpless creature” he has brought into the world and how his own parents performed these duties so admirably for him, he seems unable to realize that he performed none of these duties for his creature but threw it together without even a plan for maintaining its life—providing nourishment, clothing, and shelter, let alone education.  Then in Chapter 3, his words at the end of paragraph 3 ought to linger in our memory until, at the end of the novel, we will see how blind he is to how these words apply to himself.  These are the words:  

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.  

What you don’t know yet without my telling you is that Victor actually does have one family member still alive when he is making this remark to Captain Walton, and yet far from thinking himself blest, he completely ignores this loved one in his mad quest to find and destroy his creature.  A man who can’t see how his own maxims apply to himself is not a trustworthy guide in interpreting his own story.
         However, he does record the facts, and as we hear him narrate his story, we can interpret it for ourselves by using what have learned about how the author guides us: that is, we will notice and think about whatever details she has highlighted by placing them in mirror images.  For instance, no sooner does Victor arrive at Ingolstadt University than he discovers his two contrasting professors, Krempe and Waldman.  One criticizes him and one inspires him.  Which is which?  Besides the contrast in manner, what other differences are there between them?  Is it any surprise that the one he dislikes is ugly and that the one he likes is handsome?  This is important because he and everyone else in this story judge by appearances, and we all know how untrustworthy appearances can be.  We will learn that they can be more than untrustworthy: they can be deadly.  

[From Krempe’s] I returned home not disappointed, for I have said that I had long considered those authors useless whom the professor reprobated; but I returned not at all the more inclined to recur to these studies in any shape. M. Krempe was a little squat man with a gruff voice and a repulsive countenance; the teacher, therefore, did not prepossess me in favour of his pursuits.
        Partly from curiosity and partly from idleness, I went into the lecturing room, which M. Waldman entered shortly after. This professor was very unlike his colleague. He appeared about fifty years of age, but with an aspect expressive of the greatest benevolence; a few grey hairs covered his temples, but those at the back of his head were nearly black. His person was short but remarkably erect and his voice the sweetest I had ever heard.  (p. 32)

         Victor is so very sensitive to appearances that he allows them to influence his judgment to a far greater degree than most people consider sensible or safe.  Just you wait till he sees his creature!  But I get ahead of myself.  We need to understand how Victor is brought back to the study of science after his disillusionment the night of the thunderstorm.
        Krempe confirms Victor’s contempt for modern science with its very limited aims, and he confirms his disappointment for the loss of the splendid promises of the ancients.  Waldman, though, acknowledges the glory of the ancients’ promises while making him understand how modern science,  without making any such grandiose promises, has achieved impressive results.  These are Waldman’s words:  

The ancient teachers of this science . . . promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera but these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.  (p. 33)

It is Waldman’s honesty and breadth of knowledge that make his voice reach Victor’s ear and bring him back to the study of science.  Now, Victor claims that this was a bad thing, but we need not believe him; let’s at least reserve our judgment.  This is how he puts the matter:  

Such were the professor's words—rather let me say such the words of the fate—enounced to destroy me. As he went on I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being; chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein—more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

This is bad?  Well, he thinks so; let’s wait and see.
        Chapter 4 describes Victor’s next couple of years as he gains knowledge and gradually forms his plan to build a creature, and then a third year and part of a fourth, during which he actually builds it.  At the end of the chapter, as he describes his work habits, he engages in a little self-criticism, which we should pay attention to because it helps to explain some later odd behavior and also because it is so very right:  

 . . . a resistless, and almost frantic, impulse urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. . . . I collected bones from charnel-houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame.  In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation: my eye-balls were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment.  (pp. 40-41)  

Basically, Victor is an obsessive-compulsive worker, a workaholic, like many geniuses.  Beethoven was known to go for days at a time ignoring the food that was left at his door.  Victor ignores not only his nourishment and rest but also his obligations to his family, and it pains him to remember now how easy it was then for him

. . . to forget those friends who were so many miles absent, and whom I had not seen for so long a time. I knew my silence disquieted them, and I well remembered the words of my father: “I know that while you are pleased with yourself you will think of us with affection, and we shall hear regularly from you. You must pardon me if I regard any interruption in your correspondence as a proof that your other duties are equally neglected.”
        I knew well therefore what would be my father's feelings, but I could not tear my thoughts from my employment, loathsome in itself, but which had taken an irresistible hold of my imagination.  (p. 41)

And then Victor adds a remark that sheds much light on his habit of seeking solitude when he might be enjoying the society of his friends and family.  He says,

I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed.
        I then thought that my father would be unjust if he ascribed my neglect to vice or faultiness on my part, but I am now convinced that he was justified in conceiving that I should not be altogether free from blame.  A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity.  I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule.  If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.

When we learn (as we will) that Victor is saying these words to Walton while engaged on the pursuit of his creature, a pursuit so single-minded as to make him forget that he has a brother still living with whom he might be enjoying “those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix,” we want to dope-slap him.  Then, too, it’s hard not to remember Beaufort, Victor’s maternal grandfather, slinking away in shame, when Victor says at the very end of the chapter, “I shunned my fellow creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime.”  Well, you were guilty of a crime in shunning them, and it won’t be the last time, either!
         But at last we come, in Chapter 5, to the fateful day when his creature’s eye opens.  Now, creative geniuses often report feeling as Victor feels when he brings his labors to an end.  Throughout the process of creating their statue or painting or whatever, they have been sustained by the splendor of their vision of what they wish to create, but when it is at last completed, they feel a post-partum let-down.  No reality can ever compare with the mental image they have been yearning after.  This is the experience Victor describes in paragraph 3:  “. . . now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”  And in paragraph 4: “Oh!  No mortal could support the horror of that countenance.  A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch.  I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then, but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.”
         Well, we know what the result of this depression is: he goes off to his bedroom (not thinking very clearly) and lies down, while out there in his lab an eight-foot-tall creature is coming to life and looking about.  It eventually finds him, it smiles at him, and then as he is rushing away in horror, it extends a hand to detain him.  This, of course, freaks him out even worse, so he runs out of his apartment, and in his absence the creature wanders away into the night.  And nothing good happens after that.

         We can forgive Victor up to a point since we know that he is on the verge of a serious physical and nervous collapse because he has driven himself too hard.  We may wish he had had the sense not to do that, but it’s his nature.  However, it is harder to forgive him for not anticipating this disappointment, for he said in Chapter 4, “I prepared myself for a multitude of reverses; my operations might be incessantly baffled, and at last my work be imperfect, yet when I considered the improvement which every day takes place in science and mechanics, I was encouraged to hope my present attempts would at least lay the foundations of future success.”  If he had been able to remember these very sensible words, he might have seen his completed creature as a prototype—not beautiful by any means but certainly a success in every other way.  But this is not how he sees it, and it is worth considering why.
         Like most people, Victor reacts to stress with a simultaneous exaggeration of his most basic traits of character and the erosion of the superficial traits that good breeding has ingrained in him.  This is why he becomes excitable and hasty, to the point of recklessness, in passing judgment on his creature and fleeing from the sight of it, for he is by nature impulsive, as when he instantly and utterly gave up on science after the thunderstorm.  Likewise, his sudden and unthinking revulsion at Professor Krempe, “a little squat man with a gruff voice and a repulsive countenance,” arose from the same sensitivity to appearances that we now see demonstrated in a greatly enhanced form when he turns with loathing from the “watery eye” and “straight black lips” of his creature.  This almost preternatural sensitivity to ugliness, like the impetuosity with which he yields to it, are deeply rooted aspects of Victor’s nature, emphasized by his nervous and physical exhaustion.  However, in one respect his enfeebled condition has quite altered his normal character, for his recoil from the creature is tinged with a superstitious horror that he has never before exhibited.  He previously called attention to his resistance to horror:

In my education my father had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors. I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition, or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy; and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life. . . .

He boasted of spending whole “days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses. My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings.”  He spoke with clinical detachment of seeing “the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.”  Now, however, the creature’s ugly body makes him recall the reanimation of a mummified corpse and Dante’s description of the torments of the damned.  In his right frame of mind, Victor would have been fully able to dismiss such thoughts as irrational and to remind himself of his own sensible early self-admonition that the finished product might have defects, but in the debilitated condition to which his self-abusive work habits have reduced him, these supernatural terrors actually increase and spin out of control.  Listen to him spiral hysterically through a series of nouns describing the creature as he tells of his and Henry’s return to his lodgings:

I trembled excessively; I could not endure to think of, and far less to allude to, the occurrences of the preceding night.  I walked with a quick pace, and we soon arrived at my college.  I then reflected, and the thought made me shiver, that the creature whom I had left in my apartment might still be there, alive and walking about.  I dreaded to behold this monster, but I feared still more that Henry should see him.  Entreating him, therefore, to remain a few minutes at the bottom of the stairs, I darted up towards my own room.  My hand was already on the lock of the door before I recollected myself.  I then paused, and a cold shivering came over me.  I threw the door forcibly open, as children are accustomed to do when they expect a spectre to stand in waiting for them on the other side; but nothing appeared.  I stepped fearfully in:  the apartment was empty, and my bedroom was also freed from its hideous guest.  I could hardly believe that so great a good fortune could have befallen me, but when I became assured that my enemy had indeed fled, I clapped my hands for joy and ran down to Clerval.

         Now, how did “the creature” turn into “my enemy”?  He is, in point of fact, not now Victor’s enemy, but by the time Victor recovers from his breakdown, the case will have altered.  Remember the role of friends in the creative process.  “We are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves—such a friend ought to be—do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures.”  The creature will have no friends.  The author makes us think about this is by putting at the very end of the fifth chapter a reminder of Victor’s own long-neglected friends:

[Henry says to him,] “. . . your father and cousin would be very happy if they received a letter from you in your own handwriting. They hardly know how ill you have been and are uneasy at your long silence.”
        “Is that all, my dear Henry?  How could you suppose that my first thought would not fly towards those dear, dear friends whom I love and who are so deserving of my love?”

Well, just you imagine the creature’s friendless wanderings while you read the next few chapters about Victor and his friends.

         To conclude, I understand why Victor cannot face his creature once it comes to life, and I accept the author’s account of how he allows the creature to escape.  Given his character, his typical habits of work and study, and the weakened state they have induced in him, things could scarcely have fallen out otherwise.  However, to understand is not to forgive, and I cannot forgive his failure in foresight.  He had the sense to anticipate a less than perfect conclusion to his labors, but then he forgot his own wise thoughts.  Worse, he had at least a year to make a plan for what he would do with the creature if he actually succeeded in bringing it to life, but he made no provision for this at all, and by the time the creature awakes to life, his brain is incapable of devising any plan to deal with it; he can do nothing but sleep.  Throughout his story, Victor has proved himself prone to focusing very narrowly—on a very few companions, on a particular scholarly interest, even on study to the exclusion of social life—but to allow a one-track mind to govern one for an entire year, never once looking past the point of hoped-for success to the question of what the next step might be—this is such an extreme form of single-mindedness as to amount almost to monomania.  This is why I find it so unaccountable that so many scholars uncritically accept Victor’s version of how he ruined his own life.
         Suppose a friend of yours tells you, “Well, Junior finally did it: he went along with his friends and tried to rob a bank, and now he’s been arrested, and it looks pretty bad for him.  We never should have had that kid.”  Wouldn’t you think he was overlooking his own possible mistakes in raising the boy?  And yet, when Victor claims that his life has been destroyed by the ancient alchemists, whose promise of the elixir of life has led him to make his creature, most readers make no objection.  But I object.  If he had made even the slightest preparation for his success—just enough to have prevented the creature from running away—he might have avoided every later misfortune.  And, you see, I think it possible that Victor knows this at some level and that to avoid the humiliation of admitting his inadequacy as a parent, his own parents having been so splendid, he shifts the blame to the alchemists that planted in his mind the ambition to create life and the scientists who gave him the tools to achieve his dream.