(Quotations from the 1831 edition, not the 1818 edition)

       Today I mean to discuss what the novel Frankenstein actually is, how it works (since all human artifacts have some sort of function), and what we can know about it by the clues provided before Chapter 1.

      The first thing to do in examining any work of art—or in fact any object at all—is to determine what it is.  You wouldn't expect the same sort of experience to be provided by a sonnet and by an epic or the same sort of work to be done by a thumbtack and by a screw. Frankenstein and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are both novels, and that similarity makes the reading experience vastly different from the one we have while reading a play, since novels provide by means of words all that a play leaves to the director, costumer, and set designer. Yet these are very different kinds of novel. There are two ways in which Frankenstein is more complicated than Huckleberry Finn in the way it is put together. Huck Finn focuses squarely on the main character,  a fourteen-year-old boy who is supposedly writing the story and who starts at the beginning (or if you like at the end of the preceding novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, for Huck Finn is a sequel) and ends at what for the narrator is the present.  On the other hand, Frankenstein begins way off center, with Captain Robert Walton, a minor character who is in no way involved with the events that make up the main story line, and the novel purports to be a series of letters written by Walton to his sister, each of which deals with what for him is nearly the immediate present.  Novels written in the form of letters are called "epistolary novels," from "epistle," meaning "letter."  They can at times give a sense of great immediacy, as when the writer breaks off suddenly because someone enters the chamber where he is writing.  Such a moment occurs much later in Frankenstein.  There is a sound in the next room, and the captain stops writing to investigate and then resumes shortly afterwards with an account of what has just happened.  This kind of thing, which is unique to epistolary novels, provides a very vivid foreground, so to speak.  But there is another aspect of the way this story is told that works in the opposite direction, providing a mid ground and background that make it nearly three-dimensional, for in addition to its epistolary structure it is also a “framed story”; that is, within the tale of Captain Walton there is a long narrative told to the captain by Victor Frankenstein, and we say that this story is framed by that of Walton.  But it gets still more complex, for Frankenstein’s story frames another story, that of the creature, who seeks his maker out after having learned to speak and tells him his history up until that moment.  Now, bear with me.  Within the creature’s story there is yet another story—that of a French family on whom the creature has spied early in his life while hiding from the cruelty of human beings.  And (would you believe it?) there is even another story within that one, the story of an Arabian merchant and his daughter Safie.  So Walton tells of Victor telling him how the creature told him about the fortunes of a family whose lives were changed by the actions of an old Arab.  That makes five levels of narrative, each of the first four framing another story inside it.

     But you're thinking that Huckleberry Finn is complicated in a different way, in that, being a sequel, it has a special relationship outside of itself to another work; Tom and Huck as well as a number of minor characters appear in both books.  Well, no, even here Frankenstein has Huck Finn beat, for it relates to several other works.  First there is the set of plays dealing with Prometheus—you may have noticed that the subtitle of Frankenstein is The Modern Prometheus; well, both Aeschylus and Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote plays about this mythological figure.  Then too there is Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which is quoted in the opening “letters” and—but let's not get ahead of ourselves; we'll look at these later. 

     For now it's sufficient to say that this opening section of the novel before Chapter 1 is not fluff; it's a very carefully contrived frame story that resonates both with other artists' works and also with the main story that the frame surrounds.  When I speak of resonance, I'm thinking metaphorically of the way that when one string vibrates, its counterpart an octave above may begin to vibrate in sympathy.  In other words, one becomes aware of points of correspondence between two stories.  And the importance of resonance is the first of two main matters to which these early letters draw our attention.  The second is the vital importance of friendship.

• Resonance: reflections and contrasts as a way of directing readers' thoughts
• Friendship: the role of friendship in completing the act of creation

      The first of these ideas is simply that mutually reflective images will be an important way of emphasizing things in this book.  We learn at the very first that Victor Frankenstein has a kind of double here in the frozen north: the gigantic individual in "the shape of a man" who traveled across the ice in a sledge just before Victor came on board Walton's ship. Furthermore, Victor and Walton are kindred spirits, both from the upper class, unlike that splendid sailor that Walton admires so much for unselfishly fostering his intended bride's union with the man she really loved.  You have to remember how strictly the class system separated people; this man, for all his worthiness, could never be the friend of Captain Walton, even if they could have surmounted the awkwardness of their differences in naval rank.  Walton even mocks the good sailor's habits of speech:  "he is madly desirous of glory: or rather, to word my phrase more characteristically, of advancement in his profession" (p. 5).  Frankenstein, though, not only is NOT a member of the crew (and so not Walton's subordinate), not only a member of Walton's social caste—actually better educated than Walton—but also they are both scientists with bold new ideas, and they are both at this moment engaged in quests that lead them toward the North Pole.  What are these resemblances for?  For one thing, Walton's similarity to Victor makes the older man wish to share his own story with Walton, for he sees him as heading for a disaster like his own.  But still more important is that against this background of similarity the two men's crucial difference stands out in bold relief.  Victor is motivated by revenge, whereas Walton is filled with love and benevolence. The story that forms the frame, Walton's story, is the antithesis of Victor's own story in several important ways.  First, Walton's venture into the north is public—everyone knows he is trying to reach the Pole—whereas Victor's venture was private, secret, never revealed to any human being until this time.  Second, Walton may be apart physically from his beloved sister, but he writes constantly to her even though most of the letters can never be sent; they are just a means of remaining close to her in his heart.  The entire novel is a collection of those letters.  On the other hand, Victor Frankenstein, during the whole period during which he was engaged on his daring project failed to keep in touch with his relatives despite being aware that his silence would worry them.  You will see very soon that I am not exaggerating.  He is as unlike Walton in his relationship to his beloved family as can be imagined: not one letter or visit home during his entire college education!  Hope and love are the main motivating forces in Walton's life, but Victor is so consumed by despair and hatred of his creature that he has left behind, neglected, his one remaining relative, a brother.  Now, we do not know anything about this brother when we first read the opening letters, but eventually we will know everything, and then how strange it will seem to reread Frankenstein's words to Walton: "You have hope, and the world before you, and have no cause for despair. But I—I have lost everything, and cannot begin life anew" (Letter 4).  Everything?  Well, not quite; there's still Ernest.  Still more peculiar is what he says in Chapter 4: "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."  This is a man who has left behind his brother and whatever "simple pleasure" may be derived in sharing their grief over the loss of the rest of their family, and he has undertaken a self-destructive quest for revenge instead.  Here he is, probably unconsciously, condemning his revengeful behavior with his own lips.  The contrasts between what Victor says and what he does and also between his behavior and Walton's, reveal that Victor Frankenstein, though a genius, is not thinking at all clearly as he converses with Walton, and his conduct is by no means beyond reproach. His story is about the moral isolation (symbolized by the frozen north) to which one is led by cutting oneself off from others and not being frank with oneself.  In these early pages, Shelley makes us aware of Walton and Frankenstein as counterparts because by thinking about their resemblances and still more their differences, we will (it is to be hoped) distance ourselves from Victor and learn to think for ourselves.  It's no easy matter since he's talking all the time, but once we have learned to look for reflections, we will have a means to see past his words to matters that the author, who never speaks, wants us to ponder.

      Now let's turn our attention to mirror images outside the novel.  I said that it resonates with other works.  Of these, the one I find most interesting—and about which I will have much more to say later on—is Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  At this point, I can do nothing more than pique your interest—I hope.  That poem, like this novel, is a framed story in which an old man tells a story to a younger man because he thinks he needs to hear it, but whereas in Frankenstein the frame is a trip to a frozen wasteland, in the Rime it is the tale, and not the frame, that involves a voyage to a frozen sea, and this sea is in the south rather than the north.  It's too early to explore the network of connections between the novel and the poem, but Shelley calls our attention to the poem by alluding to it in the very first letter:  "I am going to unexplored regions, to 'the land of mist and snow'; but I shall kill no albatross, therefore do not be alarmed for my safety, or if I should come back to you as worn and woeful as the 'Ancient Mariner.'" Coleridge's poem is about guilt and redemption, as Shelley's novel is about innocence and corruption.  More on this at a later date.

      Now I want to turn to the subtitle of the novel: The Modern Prometheus.  The Greek tragedian Aeschylus, in the fifth century B.C., wrote a series of three plays about the Titan Prometheus, and Percy Shelley began work on his verse drama Prometheus Unbound in the autumn of 1818, the year in which his wife's first novel, Frankenstein, was published.  It is safe to assume, therefore, that Mary Shelley knew all that there was to know about Prometheus, but most readers know little more than that he stole fire from heaven and was chained to a rock in punishment, where an eagle came daily to eat his liver; it grew back in the night only to be torn out once more the next day.  We live in an age in which complex questions are routinely reduced to slogans and sophisticated debate is compressed into sound-bites; everything is dumbed-down and oversimplified, and we must not allow this to happen as we ask the significance of this novel's subtitle.  Wikipedia, for all its many virtues, fails to investigate the subtitle properly.  The entry for the novel simplistically comments, as if the matter were obvious and uncontroversial, "This [i.e., the subtitle] is a reference to the novel's themes [sic] of the over-reaching of modern man into dangerous areas of knowledge."

      I have trouble following this interpretation—or if not following it, then swallowing it.  "Over-reaching" implies that Victor is wrong to seek to create life in the laboratory, and if that is what the subtitle is telling us, then Prometheus must also have done wrong.  What wrong did he do, though?  Well, one legend says that he fashioned human beings out of red clay and that Athena breathed life into his clay figures.  Not so bad, is it?  Another says that he stole fire from heaven to give them life.  Again, maybe it's naughty, but it sure looks good from our point of view.  Another says that the gods made men but Prometheus equipped them with survival skills and the tools of civilization, including fire.  Another says that Prometheus tricked Zeus into accepting the bones of sacrificial animals as the gods' portion (he wrapped them in fat to make them look tasty), and in this way he is responsible for quite a few big barbecues in ancient Greece because the priests and worshippers got the rest of the sacrificial victim.  But the trick backfired, for Zeus retaliated by hiding fire from mankind, and according to this story that is when Prometheus stole it back.  In short, all of the legends agree that Prometheus was a friend to mankind and that any deeds of his that got him in trouble with Zeus were deeds of kindness and justice.  It takes a lot of effort to find in these stories any hint of the "over-reaching" tendency that literary critics are so fond of blaming Victor for.  Over-reaching is what the Faust myth is all about, not the Prometheus myth.

      I prefer to see the "modern Prometheus" as a second creator of intelligent life out of clay, but this one fails to equip his creature with survival skills as Prometheus did; that's where he made his big mistake.  I blame Victor for being a bad parent, but the prevailing critical view is that he is blamable for creating life in the laboratory, a view that I think the Prometheus myth fails to support.  How does it come, then, that Wikipedia (just one voice of many) casually calls Prometheus, the creator and patron of mankind, a dabbler in forbidden knowledge, traditionally the role of Dr. Faustus?  There are several answers to this question.

     First, it's easy, for it comes pre-packaged in the novel:  Victor Frankenstein himself paints this self-portrait.  It is he who claims that he has overstepped the limitations prescribed for man, prefacing his tale to Walton with this warning, calling his tale an object lesson about the peril of seeking knowledge and fame:

"Unhappy man! Do you share my madness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me—let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips! . . . You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been. I do not know that the relation of my disasters will be useful to you; yet, when I reflect that you are pursuing the same course, exposing yourself to the same dangers which have rendered me what I am, I imagine that you may deduce an apt moral from my tale . . ." (Letter 4).

     The second answer is that in her introduction to the 1831 edition of the novel the author describes a nightmare that she says inspired the novel:  "I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together."  That word "unhallowed," meaning unholy, may seem to lend credibility to the idea that Victor violates some natural law by daring to create life, and yet we must remember that the nightmare that gave the author the idea for her novel is not the same as the novel itself.  In the novel no one except Victor questions the holiness or fitness of his enterprise.  And in their writings about the novel, neither Mary nor Percy Shelley ever mentions this matter as applied to Victor (rather than the nightmare phantasm).

      The third reason people like to see Victor as a rogue scientist is that ours is an age of fierce anti-intellectualism.  Even intellectuals are anti-intellectual. We are still in the process of reacting against the Age of Reason in the 18th century.  The romantic writers—including Mary and Percy Shelley—were the first to revolt against the Enlightenment's reliance on reason to answer all questions.  Horror, superstition, the supernatural, and above all the passions had been overlooked by the 18th-century Establishment, and the Romantics eagerly looked to these neglected aspects of the human mind for inspiration.  Human passions being the same in all human beings (at least theoretically), Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their Lyrical Ballads (1798), turned away from the educated classes to outsiders, unsophisticated and ignorant peasants or sailors, to find models of the basic truths of the human heart, and only twenty years later Mary Shelley created the ultimate outsider, a being whose heart is good and who has the same feelings as more sophisticated beings but is cut off from intercourse with them not only by inexperience and ignorance of language but by an ugliness so hideous that all human beings either flee from him or attack him; she explores this being's soul as it faces the fear and rejection of human kind.  The next generation, that of Mark Twain, continued to explore life through the eyes of unsophisticated people, the son of the town drunk and a runaway slave.  Well, the point of this tedious catalogue is to make clear that the disenchantment with fictional characters of refinement and intellect which began in the late eighteenth century is still at work today.  It is this distrust of intellectualism and scientific inquiry that account, I think, for the popularity of the view that Victor Frankenstein, the mad scientist, played God and paid dearly for his presumption.

     Yet reason was not universally despised in Mary Shelley's day any more than it is today, and modern science excited the minds of the young Romantic poets; there is documentary evidence of many heady discussions of scientific matters among the small group of young English folks who spent that famous summer of Mary's nineteenth year, 1816, on the shore of Lake Geneva.  That's where this story was born, out of the conversations and pastimes of Mary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Mary's half-sister Claire (pregnant at that time with Byron's child), and Byron's 21-year-old live-in physician and boyfriend, Dr. Polidori, or Polly.  Mary and Percy were in Switzerland on the lam, hiding out from her father and from Shelley's wife, Harriet.  Byron happened to have a villa next door, and so they were thrown together.  As for the possible moral objection to creating life artificially, it doesn't seem likely to me that Mary would have had any serious qualms.  We know that her father, her lover Shelley, and her host, Lord Byron, were all atheists at one or another time in their lives. Shelley published a tract called The Necessity of Atheism. So, although Mary herself seems to have been a theist of some sort, we should not automatically assume that she saw any necessary conflict between religion and science or that she regarded science with suspicion. Shelley includes electricity in some of his poems, and Byron, whose conversation must have had some influence on Mary's young mind, was a free-thinker about all sorts of subjects. No, I point out once more that it is Victor and Victor alone who ever associates evil with his scientific work—and that only after his neglected creature begins to punish him for neglecting it.
      What is really going on with Victor is that he feels such a heavy guilt for having allowed the creature to wander forth into the world alone and ignorant, to encounter the hatred of mankind, that he has to find a way to shift the blame.  He himself had a perfect childhood, watched over by the best parents one could ever ask, but when he came to be a parent himself, he let his child down, and he knows it.  He can better bear to feel guilty about becoming a scientist than for being a bad parent, and so he says, in effect, "If I'd never bought that damned car, I'd never have hit that poor old lady."  Right, it was the car's fault.
      Moreover, Victor, for all his intelligence and sensitivity, is a most unreliable guide on moral issues, especially at the time when he is imparting his history to Captain Walton.  Consider the fact that Victor not only looks mad ("his eyes have generally an expression of wildness, and even madness," Letter 4).  Later in his narrative he also reports two periods when he was completely out of his mind, to the extent of having in one case to be confined to a dungeon of some sort in Ireland, and we will eventually learn that shortly before his arrival on board Walton's ship he was entertaining the wildest sort of fantasies about his dead relatives and was also confusing dreams with reality. These facts make me marvel that the greater part of the critical literature on this novel relies on Victor's interpretation of his story without so much as taking the trouble to defend him against the charge of unreliability; the critics never consider for even a moment the possibility that he might be mistaken; every word that drops from his lips, they take for Gospel. Now, it's easy to see why Victor's first auditor, Captain Walton, overlooks the obvious signs that he can't be trusted to interpret his own story correctly: Walton's lonely and has been longing to find a friend.  Then, suddenly, although he never expected to find a friend on the ocean, a sensitive and highly intelligent man appears out of nowhere, the answer to his prayer.  Of course Walton overlooks Victor's mental instability, but the critics have no excuse for being equally gullible.

      Now, at last, I have found my way out of the discussion of resonance and have arrived at the second important matter that the introductory letters emphasize: friendship.  It is a vital theme in the novel because, although Victor has only a very few friends, they are so supremely important to him that it might be said that he has no real happiness apart from them, and yet he shuts them out and spends most of his time alone.  It is also important in the case of the creature, who, although he has a tender heart and a benevolent nature, to begin with, has no friends at all, and this lack twists and perverts his psychological development into crime.  Counting on the power of resonance to make the word "friend" vibrate whenever we hear it later on, Shelley has Captain Walton pine for loneliness in letter 2:

But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother!

      "Repair the faults"—that's what friends are for, and this idea is underscored by Victor Frankenstein, who makes the very same observation.  First Walton says,

I spoke of my desire of finding a friend—of my thirst for a more intimate sympathy with a fellow mind than had ever fallen to my lot; and expressed my conviction that a man could boast of little happiness, who did not enjoy this blessing.
      "I agree with you," replied the stranger; "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. I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship."

This idea must have seemed to the author to need repeating, for this speech of Victor's is an addition to the text, introduced in 1831.  The idea is profound: that God only begins the process of creation; it is completed by the friends we make in life, who "perfectionate our weak and faulty natures."  So God doesn't make us perfect!  That's what life is for, provided that we do find friends.  It's very interesting to notice how friendship acts upon Victor at this final stage of his life.  He really cares about Walton.  Hearing him talk about his hopes and plans touched a chord in his nature and made it resonate.  Walton is exclaiming about

how gladly I would sacrifice my fortune, my existence, my every hope, to the furtherance of my enterprise. One man's life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought; for the dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race. As I spoke, a dark gloom spread over my listener's countenance. At first I perceived that he tried to suppress his emotion; he placed his hands before his eyes; and my voice quivered and failed me, as I beheld tears trickle fast from between his fingers—a groan burst from his heaving breast. I paused;—at length he spoke, in broken accents:—"Unhappy man! Do you share my madness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me—let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!"

And so, what does Victor do?  He tells Walton his story in an attempt to save him from Victor's own fate.  Now, go back a bit:  Why did he agree to come on board the vessel in the first place?  Because it was going north, where he wants to go.  And what will be the result of his telling Walton his story, supposing that he is successful in warning him to curb his ambition?  Walton will turn around the first chance he gets and sail south.  That's the way that friendship works.  Far from using Walton as a tool to gain his revenge, which was what he had first intended, Victor proves himself able even here at the end of his life, even though tortured with guilt and hatred, to sacrifice his dearest wish in order to do his friend a kindness.  It's really very beautiful, and if it makes us meditate on friendship enough to want to reread Victor's own words about the function of friends, we may find yet another idea:

. . . 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. I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship.

Does any word jump out at you?  You may remember that Walton referred to Frankenstein as a "creature" earlier in Letter 4:  "I never saw a more interesting creature. . . ." and "He must have been a noble creature in his better days, being even now in wreck so attractive and amiable."  Why can he legitimately call a human being a creature?  Because he was created.  Still, it sounds a bit odd, particularly when repeated.  Consider, now, the fact that in Mary Shelley's day the "ea" of "creatures" was pronounced exactly like the "ea" in "steak" and "break," "craytrs" (where we get "critters"), and you realize that reading the passage aloud, no one could possibly miss the repetition of "creatures" since it rhymes with "natures":

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. I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship.

And why should we be thinking about creatures and friendship at just this point?  Surely because the author is screaming out to us from behind her characters' words, "You can't just create an intelligent being and turn it loose; it's not finished; it needs friends!"  It's just as well to think this thought now, at the outset, so that you won't forget it later on when it counts.  The whole double tragedy of Victor and his creature boils down to the fact that the one had friends but made no provision for the other to have them as well.  Walton knows Victor's life is a ruin, but he doesn't yet know that he and his creature have destroyed each other.  All he sees is a fellow-adventurer whose journey through life he compares to his own chosen profession:  "Strange and harrowing must be his story, frightful the storm which embraced the gallant vessel on its course and wrecked it—thus!" (16).  This prologue hangs like a pall over the sunny pages we are about to read.  Return to it in thought.  It bears thinking on.