Frankenstein by Mary Shelly

by Chriss Cornish published: January 16, 2008 No Comments

This Book Is About

The story of Victor Frankenstein and of the monstrous creature he created has held the reading public spellbound since its publication almost a century and a half ago. On the surface, it is a novel of tense and steadily mounting horror; but on a more profound level, it offers searching illumination of the human condition in its portrayal of a scientist who oversteps the bounds of conscience, and of a monster brought to life in an alien world, ever more desperately attempting to escape the torture of his solitude. A brilliant exercise in the macabre, written with near-hallucinatory intensity, Frankenstein represents one of the most striking flowerings of the Romantic imagination.

Of it’s contemporary significance, Harold Bloom writes: “The greatest paradox and most astonishing achievement of Mary Shelley’s novel is that the monster is more human than his creator. This nameless being, as much a modern Adam as his creator is a modern Prometheus, is more lovable than his creator and more hateful, more to be pitied and more to be feared, and above all able to give the attentive reader that shock of added consciousness in which aesthetic recognition compels a heightened realization of th self.”

My Thoughts On This Book

So, everyone knows about Frankenstein. But hardly anyone has actually read it unless they had to for school. My husband has a copy in our library (yeah, we’ve got THAT many books) and I decided to read it as part of my continuing endeavor to experience those classics so common in our cultural mind.

All I can say is, man, I really had no idea what Frankenstein is about or how the story goes. From the movies, both parody and B&W classic, you have the impression that some kooky scientist raises a mass of miss-matched parts from the dead for scientific kicks and it goes on a rampage (“Wait! I was gonna make espresso”). That is so not it.

First of all, the full title of the book is Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus. Secondly, the real horror isn’t in some grunting zombie-esque creature but in the fall of Victor Frankenstein and the destruction his actions bring to the lives of the good people he loves.

The book starts out in the third person, when a young ship captain exploring in the arctic rescues a guy stranded on the ice with his dog team shortly after catching a glimpse of a high speed sled chase on the flow. The youthful explorer becomes friends with his rescuee, a haggard scientist named Victor Frankenstein. Victor soon realizes that his new friend suffers from the same ambitious scientific nature that he himself did as a youth and, to save the young man from himself, tells him his story. From that point it’s a first-person narrative from Victor Frankstein’s viewpoint.

Interestingly, when Frankenstein is rescued there’s nothing at all said about the dog team that had to be stranded with him on the block of ice floating in the sea. You get the feeling the poor beasts are sort of left, without a thought or hesitation, on the melting bit of ice to eventually die of either hypothermia, starvation or drowning; whichever takes them first. This would technically make them the first innocents the reader encounters being destroyed by Frankenstein’s obsessions, since he was out on the ice in the first place in pursuit of his creation. Just something that struck me when I read the opening.

Mary Shelly’s writing is good and very engaging. Everyone in her work is so real, so easily identified with. I ended up empathizing so much with the characters that I actually couldn’t finish the book. I just couldn’t watch the degradation of those decent people anymore. I didn’t get too far, either. I pretty much stopped after the teenage girl who their family took in and who was like a daughter to Victor’s sister is hanged for the murder of the youngest Frankenstein boy.

What really teed me off was that she ends up being bullied by the priest into confessing to the murder; he essentially threatens to use the Church’s rules to damn her to hell if she doesn’t say she murdered the boy. That so pissed me off. It still makes me angry. Sometimes writers just make their fictional people too real, too easy to relate to. It might just be me, though.

So, if you like well written stories of personal horror than you will love this classic of the genre.

Rating & Levels For This Book

I Give This Book
three Vikings out of five

Violence Level
two Burning Huts out of five

Romance Level
two Hearts out of five

# of actual vikings in book: 0

What do these levels mean? »

Humor Level
zero Smiles out of five

Lust Level
zero Kisses out of five

Author and Publishing Information For This Book

Author & Book Details

Title: Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus
Author(s): Mary Shelly (introduction by Mary Shelly, afterword by Harold Bloom)
ISBN#: 0451523369
Genre(s): Horror classic, proto-steampunk
Edition Reviewed: Signet Classic first printing
Illustrations: N/A
Page Count: 211 (224 with afterword and bibliography)
Part of a Series: No

Publishing & Copyright Details

Publisher(s): Signet Classic (imprint of New American Library [a Penguin Group division])
In Print: This edition, no, but newer editions are
Original Language: English
Published in Other Languages: Yes
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