Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: A Close Reading - Essay Example

December 7 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: A Close Reading In 1818, a young woman wrote a disturbing scientific horror novelwhich has since become a seminal part of English-language literature. A story set within many narrative frames, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, follows the entwined stories of Victor Frankenstein (a medical student who stumbles across the secret of life) and the tragically human monster he creates from corpse parts. With carefully-chosen language, evocation of the Other, and the asking of deep thematic questions, Shelley envelopes the reader in a misty, doubt-filled haze which characterizes the many-layered story as well as Gothic fiction as a whole. This paper will look at the third chapter of Shelley's masterpiece both closely and as part of a wider picture to show that this early section of the novel, written in the early years of the larger Gothic movement, is full of prophetic detail about not only the rest of the story but the rest of Gothic literature. The third chapter of Mary Shelley's monumental novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus sets several key foundation stones for the rest of the story, beginning with the death of Victor Frankenstein's mother, covering his move to the university at Ingolstadt and ending with the medical student deciding on his “future destiny” as the person who “unfolds to the world the deepest mysteries of creation” (Shelley). The word “repose” is repeated several times throughout the piece, suggestive of the sleepless nightmare that Victor's life will soon become. Interestingly, Doody remarks that only “women … are permitted to have dreams” in pre-Gothic fiction, and Victor's use of sleep-related words so early on in the novel (and so early on in the Gothic literary movement) reinforces the point that he is “not in control of [his] environment” (Doody) – a characteristic that was, in 1818, only just ceasing to be reserved for female characters. Victor's dream in chapter V, for example, links back to this chapter by showing an image of “[his] dead mother in [his] arms”, as well as foreshadowing Elizabeth's death (Shelley). This suggests that Shelley imbued Victor with many negative qualities (assuming that readers would look down on anything feminine) in order to make his plight that much more unattractive. Victor's repeated use of sleep and sleepy words also enhance the uncertain atmosphere of Gothic fiction more completely, fabricating a narrative world in which “rational order briefly flickers in and out of the dreamlike” world (Doody). Frankenstein is not just dreamlike, but takes advantage of its firm chronological setting to enhance the haze. Shelley's choice of words are often evocative of the smog and science of nineteenth-century industrialization: “turmoil”, “chained”, and “musty” to name but a few (Shelley). This smog permeated literature at large, making the experience of reading a nineteenth-century novel like peering through a thick cloud of symbolism and metaphor at a stylised discussion of social issues. From Frankenstein to the dawn of modernism, this “obscurity” enhanced the atmosphere of a novel, as “to see a thing distinctly is to see its bounds” (Burke) – that which we cannot see clearly is sublimely terrible. One of the few things which breaks through this cloud, for Victor, is “the sunshine of [Elizabeth's] smiles” (Chapter III), but the reader soon learns that the fog is too dank and thick for something so beautiful to take effect for long. This chapter also makes use of some words which are repeated later in the book: for instance, Shelley refers to Victor's mother's “beloved eye [having been] extinguished”. The next time this word is used, it refers to the “half-extinguished light” (Chapter V) by which Victor comes face-to-face with his monster for the first time; thereafter he talks about the “hell within [himself] which nothing could extinguish” (Chapter VIII) and of his life as something he wishes he could “extinguish” (Chapter IX). The concept of extinguishing is one which accompanies some of the darkest and most pivotal sections of the plot, and the seed for its later use is sown here. A very important element of this chapter is foreshadowing, which comes from both our author and our main character. Victor's narration is liberally sprinkled with mentions of “omens” and “fate” and even of his “future misery” (Shelley), which allows the reader to know at a very early stage in the novel that the following will be a tale of doom and gloom. However, the dimensions of the story are greater than a mere character can perceive, and Shelley includes moments of foreshadowing beyond his meagre scope. One of these is the protagonist's realization that the minutely focused studies of modern science are indeed comparable to the grand promises of ancient philosophers – this leap in attitude is accompanied by a swift change in obsession, hinting that Victor's personality is an extreme one. Indeed, he later complete rejects science and even spends many years seeking to destroy his magnificent scientific creation. Another example of this foreshadowing is Elizabeth's illness, suggestive of her death towards the end of the novel – Victor's beloved cousin falls ill with scarlet fever at the beginning of the chapter, but recovers just in time for Victor's mother to die instead. Victor says that Elizabeth “was in the greatest danger” (Shelley), but it turns out that the 'greatest danger' is actually the one he manufactures himself, by giving life to his tragic creature and thereafter alienating the beast from society. In this section, Elizabeth is “saved” by the “watchful attentions” of her aunt, Victor's mother; towards the end of the novel, she is murdered by the creature because Victor's “watchful attentions” are focused in another direction, away from her (Shelley). These two scenes, in both of which Elizabeth's mortality is endangered, function as opposites, and work as yet another set of frames for the beginning and end of the story: in the first instance, the unmarried Elizabeth is ill with scarlet fever; later, when she is married to Victor, she is described as “pale” and “bloodless” in death (Shelley). The pairing of colour with marital state is an interesting one, as Western cultures typically associate white with virginity and red with sexuality. Hence the reader understands that Victor's account is not entirely to be trusted: his own passion towards Elizabeth, symbolized through colour, has waned over the course of the novel in proportion to his growing obsession with the monster. He does not make this explicit and we are left to wonder what other secrets have been hidden from Captain Walton, and therefore from the reader. Furthermore, the earlier scene ends with Victor leaving Elizabeth for Ingolstadt, where he will give life to the monster, whereas the later one shows Elizabeth leaving Victor at the vengeful hands of his creation. The repetition of an event (even though the roles are played by different characters) brings closure to the novel, allowing the moment of Elizabeth's death to feel like the completion of a process set up far earlier in the story's course. However, in some ways this chapter does not contribute much to some of the key themes of Frankenstein as a whole. Alienation is a major theme of the novel, and in this chapter we witness Victor as he is welcomed into society, not as he turns his back on it: M. Krempe talks to Victor “with warmth” and writes out lists of books for him to read; the “attractive” M. Waldman goes a step further by giving Victor the books recommended by M. Krempe (Shelley). At the start of chapter IV, the medical student refers to his new mentor as “a true friend” (Shelley). But of course Victor has to be brought into the company of others before his alienation from humanity is truly resonant with the reader. Again we see that chapter III is a foundation for the great terrors which occur later on in the plot. Shelley also strongly evokes the concept of the Other, a fearsome force which Burke labelled “the sublime” and which is referred to as “the uncanny” by Freud. The Other encompasses everything from the indefinable terrors which lurk in our nightmares to the mere unknown: in many early Gothic works, such as Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya (1806), the Other was played by foreign characters, highlighting a now-outdated xenophobia born of stereotype and ignorance. In Frankenstein Shelley defines the Other as a monster, created of the scientific desire to take on the role of God – but is the monster Frankenstein, or his creation? In this chapter, more specifically, the Other is not yet anything more than a looming inevitability. How, then, does it warrant mention in a close reading of chapter III? The presence of the Other in chapter III is closely linked to Shelley's foreshadowing, discussed above – Victor's creature is “supernatural” (Ellis, 222) in the most basic sense of the word, even coming across as zombie-like (particularly in film adaptations of the story), and as such haunts the novel from beginning to end, a permanent figure in the backdrop. The creature is both “lifeless” and “animate” (Freud), and as such plays on our deepest fears. In chapter III Shelley begins to experiment with the sensation of fear, by giving a detailed description of the first dead body in the story: Mrs Frankenstein dies “calmly, and her countenance expressed affection even in death” (Shelley). The paragraph goes on to evoke the horrific physical form of death by using anatomical words, such as “eye”, “ear”, “hand” and even “voice” (Shelley). Although these words are mostly used metaphorically, the cumulative effect is a physical one and causes us to slowly develop a complete mental image of the woman's corpse. Our reaction to death is a combination of strong “emotional reaction” and awareness of “the insufficiency of our scientific knowledge” (Freud), and here Shelley prepares us for the worse faces of death that are to come. The Other also reveals itself in the two different types of science with which Victor struggles in this chapter: having grown up on a diet of natural philosophers and alchemists, who promise that science can create gold from nothing and that the dead can be brought back to life, Victor suddenly becomes a devotee of modern chemistry, thanks to M. Waldman's speech on the “new and almost unlimited powers” that contemporary scientists had reached (Shelley). Despite claiming to have cast off the influence of his former tutors, Victor continues to talk about science in grandiose and embellished terms, talking of “pioneering”, “exploring”, and “unfolding to the world the deepest mysteries of creation” (Shelley). To modern science, the Other takes the form of those questions which can never be resolved, namely alchemy and resurrection. Victor attempts to bridge the two, without realizing that he has not quite relinquished his love of natural philosophy, and creates the worst type of monster in the process. In this chapter we witness the early hints which later form the key question of the novel: who is the monster? Is it Frankenstein's creation, or Frankenstein himself? Or, even, is it science? The Other in the later parts of the novel – which is not strictly relevant here, but deserves to be dealt with briefly – takes a very strange form. As Victor simultaneously flees and chases the monster, the monster is not really his creation, but his sense of self. At one point Victor describes the monster as “my own spirit” (Shelley), and as such his journey across Europe and the North Pole represents his “fleeing from self-knowledge” (Ozolins). For Shelley's protagonist, the Other is his own poorly-assembled self-awareness and desires, and to confront its mystical shape is a prospect to be dreaded. Chapter III of Frankenstein is an important one because it features in-depth explanations for Victor's scientific passion; although other chapters record more significant science, the details in those chapters are not so clear. This is because, within the story, Victor is purposely obscure so his dreadful mistake is not mimicked by others; his vagueness is beneficial to Shelley because, of course, such science does not exist even now, almost two hundred years later. This has the added benefit of generating the concept of the “fantastic”, as delineated by Todorov – although the tale of Victor's creation stays firmly away from any supernatural genesis, the vague horror of the story leads to the “collapse of the limit between matter and mind” (Todorov) as effectively as Ann Radcliffe's 'supernatural explained' in The Mysteries of Udolpho. Although Frankenstein was written relatively early during the Gothic movement, Shelley's use of science as the supernatural was ground-breaking – and probably remains so today, as modern audiences would rarely be satisfied with a scientific horror story that did not at least attempt to explain the science in excruciating detail. Victor's physical and academic journey in this chapter – his move from Geneva to Ingolstadt, and from a student of ancient natural philosophy to a proponent of modern chemistry – is reflective of the physically and academically peripatetic nature of the story. Shelley's protagonist moves on from Germany to England, Scotland, and eventually the North Pole; his studies close in on themselves, from the works of “modern masters” (Shelley) to his discovery of the spark of life, before imploding completely and leading to Victor's complete reversal of attitude, in which he seeks to destroy science. It can be argued that Shelley was hopeful that the book would influence modern science the same way, from the wild joys of capability to a recognition of necessary morality before it was too late. Shelley's main character is “the seeker after forbidden knowledge” (Punter, 106), and through his harrowing experiences the author transmits a moralistic warning against science – a warning that came early on in the lifespan of modern science, long before ethical practices had been clearly established. In chapter III Victor's rapid and total (he believes) conversion from natural philosophy to modern chemistry hints at the lengths he will later go to murder his creation: a speech delivered by one of his professors encourages him to feel “as if [his] soul were grappling with a palpable enemy”, and thereafter he refers to the experience as “having decided [his] future destiny” (Shelley). Victor speaks as though he is a hapless plaything of fate, obsessive and entirely lacking in autonomy. Shelley thereby encourages future scientists to remain in control of their work, rather than letting the science become more powerful than those who handle it. The true warning is against people playing god, as Victor does when he creates life (ignoring, of course, the fact that almost all humans can create life through reproduction). “Fear originated the idea of deity” (Burke), and when humanity insists on taking on the role of god that, in turns, inspires fear itself – the whole point of Shelley's novel, other than to frighten and excite the senses, is to induce us to ask why we should take science as far as it can possibly go, with no reference to humanity and morality along the way. Why does Victor Frankenstein work tirelessly for two years, risking his own health in the process, to create life, if only because he can? The bloody consequences of his experiment should suffice to satisfy us that some scientific endeavours should never be attempted. This message remains a pertinent one now, nearly two hundred years later, as technology improves and we risk creating a computer with some semblance of free will. Chapter III of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is not one of the most exciting nor action-packed, but it serves as a foundation stone for many important points which come up later in the novel, as well as setting some of the groundstones for later Gothic literature. The author's language creates a claustrophobic, foggy world for the reader, peppering them with ominous foreshadowing and hinting at the shadowy, terrifying monster which is about to loom darkly out of the text; her focus on moral issues brings the story back to the respectable didactic nature of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century fiction, while still remaining relevant today. In grander terms, Frankenstein inspired the entire genre of science horror, combining the new discipline of experimentation with the still-fairly new medium of novelistic storytelling; although now many of Shelley's conceits appear cliched, they are in fact the source material for much of the Gothic literature that followed. This chapter contains many of the most important parts of Frankenstein and of the Gothic literary movement. Works Cited Burke, Edmund. “Sublime and Beautiful.” Public Bookshelf. Web. 6 December 2011. Doody, Margaret Anne. “Deserts, Ruins and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel.” Virginia Graduate English Department. Web. 5 December 2011. Ellis, Markman. The History of Gothic Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Virginia Graduate English Department. Web. 5 December 2011. Ozolins, Aija. “Dreams and Doctrines: Dual Strands in Frankenstein.” Virginia Graduate English Department. Web. 5 December 2011. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. The Gothic Tradition, Vol. 1. London: Longman, 2000. Print. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus. Project Gutenberg. Web. 7 December 2011. Todorov, Tsvetan. “The Fantastic.” Virginia Graduate English Department. Web. 5 December 2011. Read More