Frankenstein

Victor is the eldest son of a distinguished Geneva family. When he is small, his parents take in his baby cousin, Elizabeth Lavenza, whose mother has died in Italy, and his mother quietly decides she will one day be his wife. (In the 1831 revision Mary Shelley made Elizabeth an orphan adopted from poor cottagers on Lake Como instead.) Victor’s best friend is Henry Clerval, a merchant’s son who writes fairy tales and stages plays about knights, and two younger brothers follow, Ernest and little William. It is, Victor insists, the happiest childhood imaginable.

At thirteen, stuck at an inn on a rainy day, he finds a book by Cornelius Agrippa, the Renaissance magician. His father calls it sad trash without explaining why, so Victor devours it, and Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus too, hunting for the elixir of life. At fifteen he watches lightning reduce an old oak to ribbons and learns about electricity. The old masters topple in his mind, but his appetite for some grand secret doesn’t.

Just before he leaves for the university of Ingolstadt, Elizabeth catches scarlet fever. His mother nurses her, catches it and dies, joining their hands on her deathbed. At Ingolstadt the gruff Professor Krempe sneers at his outdated reading, but the kind Professor Waldman praises modern chemists who “command the thunders of heaven,” and Victor is converted on the spot. That day, he says, “decided my future destiny.”

Victor throws himself into science so completely that the stars often fade into morning while he is still at work. Within two years he has outgrown his teachers and become fixed on one question: where does life come from? To understand life, he reasons, he must study death. He haunts vaults and charnel houses until a light breaks in on him: he has found the cause of life, and can give it to lifeless matter. He won’t tell Walton how. Instead he offers the book’s central warning: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge.”

Then he builds a man, about eight feet tall because small parts slow him down, from materials gathered in dissecting rooms, slaughterhouses and graves, working alone in his “workshop of filthy creation.” Seasons pass unnoticed. He stops writing home and grows pale and feverish, dreaming that a new species will bless him as its creator.

“It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.” At one in the morning, by a dying candle, he sees the creature’s dull yellow eye open. He had chosen its features to be beautiful, but its yellow skin barely covers the muscles beneath, and its black hair and pearly teeth only make the watery eyes and straight black lips more horrible. Nearly two years of work, and “the beauty of the dream vanished.” Victor runs from the room.

He wakes from a nightmare to find the creature at his bedside, holding back the curtain, making sounds, a grin wrinkling its cheeks, one hand stretched out towards him. Victor bolts downstairs and paces the courtyard until dawn. Pause on what just happened: a newborn reached for its father, and its father ran.

In the morning Henry Clerval arrives from Geneva to study. Victor takes him home in terror, but the rooms are empty: the creature has gone. Victor collapses into a fever that lasts months, and Clerval nurses him through the winter. Slowly, studying languages with his friend, Victor becomes happy again.

Then a letter comes. Little William has been strangled in the fields outside Geneva, and the miniature portrait of their dead mother he was wearing is gone. Victor hurries home, nearly six years after he left. Arriving at night, he goes to the spot where William died. A storm breaks over the Alps, and a flash of lightning shows him a gigantic figure among the trees: the creature, who then climbs the sheer face of Mont Salève like a staircase. Victor knows at once who killed his brother.

But someone has already been arrested. Justine Moritz, a cheerful young woman whom Victor’s mother took in as a girl and who loved William like a mother, was out all night searching for him, and the portrait was found in her pocket. Victor knows she is innocent. He also knows that if he tells his story, of a man he built who scales mountains, he will be thought mad. So he says nothing.

Elizabeth speaks up for Justine with real courage, but the court condemns her. Worse, she has confessed. In her cell she tells Elizabeth why: her confessor threatened her with hellfire until she almost believed she was the monster he called her, so she “confessed a lie” to win absolution. Justine forgives everyone and goes to her death the next day. Victor, crouched in a corner of the cell, knows himself to be the true murderer, and still says nothing.

Victor sinks into black remorse and thinks of drowning himself in the lake; only Elizabeth and his father hold him back. Hoping the mountains will heal him, his father takes the family to the valley of Chamonix, under Mont Blanc. One rainy morning Victor climbs alone onto the great glacier the book calls the sea of ice, the Mer de Glace. A figure comes bounding towards him over the crevasses at superhuman speed. It is the creature. Victor curses him and lunges; the creature steps aside and asks to be heard.

And he speaks beautifully. You made me stronger than you, he says, but I won’t fight you. “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” He was born good, he insists: “misery made me a fiend.” Even human courts let the accused speak before they are condemned. Victor, feeling for the first time what a creator owes his creature, follows him to a hut on the mountain and listens.

His first memories are a jumble of light and sound. He wandered into the forest near Ingolstadt, ate berries, and sat down and wept because everything hurt. He gazed at the moon with wonder and discovered fire by thrusting his hand into embers. When he walked into a shepherd’s hut, the old man fled; when he entered a village, the people drove him out with stones.

He hid in a lean-to against the back of a cottage and, through a chink in the wall, watched the poor family inside: a blind old man, De Lacey, his son Felix and daughter Agatha. When he realized that stealing their food was hurting them, he stopped, and at night he secretly cut their firewood and cleared their path of snow. They began to speak of a good spirit. Watching them, he learned what love looks like, and slowly, word by word, he learned to speak.

In spring a young woman arrived: Safie, the Arabian girl Felix loved. As Felix taught her from Volney’s Ruins of Empires, the creature learned alongside her, and faster: history, the division of property, the ties between parents and children. He also learned what he was: no family, no money, no friend, no one like him anywhere. “Of what a strange nature is knowledge!” he says. “It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock.” The De Laceys, he discovered, had been ruined and exiled from Paris because Felix rescued Safie’s father, a Turkish merchant unjustly condemned, who then betrayed them.

In the woods he found three books: Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives and Goethe’s Sorrows of Werter. He read Milton as true history. Like Adam he had been made with no link to any other being, but no loving Creator watched over him, and he often thought Satan the fitter likeness. In the pocket of the coat he had taken from the laboratory he found Victor’s journal, describing exactly how he was made and how his maker sickened at the sight of him.

All his hopes rested on the blind father. One day, while the others were out, he knocked and asked to rest by the fire, and old De Lacey welcomed him kindly. Then the others came home. Agatha fainted, Safie ran, and Felix tore the creature from his father’s knees and beat him with a stick. He could have torn Felix limb from limb. Instead he fled.

That night he declared everlasting war on humankind, and above all on his maker. When the family abandoned the cottage, he burned it to the ground and set off for Geneva, the city named in Victor’s papers. On the way he saved a young girl from a rushing river, and the man with her shot him.

Near Geneva he came upon a beautiful little boy and hoped a child might be too young to have learned horror. The boy screamed, called him an ogre and threatened him with his papa, M. Frankenstein. At that name the creature grasped his throat to silence him, and William was dead. He took the portrait from the boy’s breast and slipped it into the dress of a young woman passing by.

Now comes his demand. Make me a companion, a woman as hideous as I am, and we will live on acorns and berries in the wilds of South America, never to be seen again. “I am malicious because I am miserable.” Victor refuses, wavers, and at last, half from pity and half from fear, agrees.

Back in Geneva Victor stalls. His father hopes he will marry Elizabeth at once, but Victor can’t with his promise hanging over him, so he arranges a two-year tour of Britain, with the wedding to follow. Clerval goes too. After months in London, Oxford, the Lake District and Edinburgh, Victor leaves his friend in Perth and settles on a bare rock in the Orkneys to build the second creature in cold blood.

One evening he stops and thinks. She might be more vicious than the first. She might refuse a bargain made before she existed. The pair might have children, and loose a race of devils on the earth. Looking up, he sees the creature grinning at the window, and tears the half-finished body to pieces before his eyes. That night the creature returns. “You are my creator, but I am your master;—obey!” Victor refuses. The creature’s parting words are the most chilling line in the book: “I shall be with you on your wedding-night.”

Victor sinks the remains at sea, falls asleep in his boat and drifts to the coast of Ireland, where he is arrested: a young man has been found strangled on the beach. Shown the body, Victor sees Henry Clerval and collapses. He spends three months in prison, two of them delirious with fever, before he is cleared, and goes home dependent on laudanum to sleep.

Sure that the creature means to kill him on his wedding night, Victor marries Elizabeth with pistols in his pocket, promising to tell her a dreadful secret the next day. That night at an inn at Evian, while he prowls the corridors hunting for his enemy, he hears a scream. Elizabeth lies dead across the bed, the mark of the creature’s fingers on her neck. At the open window the creature grins and points at the corpse, then dives into the lake. Within days Victor’s father dies of grief, and Victor spends months in a solitary cell, thought mad.

Kneeling at the family graves, Victor swears to hunt the creature until one of them dies. A fiendish laugh answers out of the dark, and a voice whispers that it is satisfied: Victor has chosen to live. The chase leads down the Rhone, to the Black Sea, through Tartary and Russia. The creature leaves messages carved in trees, and sometimes food, a dead hare to keep his pursuer going, drawing him north to the everlasting ice. On a dog sledge Victor gains on him across the frozen sea until the ice splits between them. That is where Walton found him.

Now the frame closes. Walton’s ship is trapped, men are dying of cold, and the crew demand that he turn for home if the ice frees them. Victor rouses himself for one last speech, “Oh! be men, or be more than men,” but Walton, bitterly, agrees to turn back. Dying, Victor insists he was right to refuse the creature a mate, and leaves Walton this advice: “Seek happiness in tranquillity, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.” Then he can’t resist adding that another man may succeed where he failed.

At midnight Walton finds the creature weeping over the body. He suffered more than Victor ever did, the creature says; every murder tore him apart; he wanted only love and was spurned at every turn. Why does nobody hate Felix, or the man who shot the rescuer of his child? Yet he hates himself more than anyone can. Even Satan had companions; he is quite alone. Now he will go to the northernmost point of the earth and burn himself on a funeral pyre, so that no one can ever make another like him. He leaps onto his ice-raft and is “borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.”

We never see him die. And Walton, the one ambitious man in the book who listens to the people around him, turns his ship for home.

Victor grew up happy in Geneva with his cousin Elizabeth, his best friend Henry Clerval and his little brothers. Fascinated since boyhood by old books of magic and by a lightning bolt that blasted an oak, he went to university at Ingolstadt soon after his mother died. There, working alone in secret for nearly two years, he discovered how to give life to dead matter. He built a man about eight feet tall from materials taken from dissecting rooms, slaughterhouses and graves. On “a dreary night of November” the creature opened its eyes, and Victor was so horrified by its face that he ran from the room. When the creature found him at his bedside and reached out a hand, Victor ran again. The creature vanished.

Nearly two years later Victor’s little brother William was strangled near Geneva. In a lightning storm by the spot, Victor glimpsed the giant figure and knew the truth, but kept silent for fear of being thought mad. Justine, the family’s gentle servant, was framed with a stolen miniature portrait, bullied into a false confession and executed.

On a glacier below Mont Blanc the creature confronted Victor and told his own story. Driven off with stones by everyone who saw him, he had hidden beside a cottage, secretly cutting firewood for the poor family inside, the De Laceys, and learning to speak and read by listening to them. He read Paradise Lost and wondered why his creator had abandoned him, when even Adam had a loving God. When he finally showed himself to the blind father, the son beat him and the family fled. Bitter, he declared war on humankind; when he met Victor’s brother, he killed him and framed Justine. Now he asked for one thing: a female companion as ugly as himself. They would vanish into the wilds of South America. “I am malicious because I am miserable,” he said. Victor agreed.

Victor travelled to Britain with Clerval and began the second creature on a remote Orkney island. But fearing she might be worse than the first, and that the pair might breed a race of monsters, he tore her apart while the creature watched through the window. The creature promised: “I shall be with you on your wedding-night.” Victor drifted in a boat to Ireland and was arrested for a murder; the dead man was Clerval, strangled by the creature. Months later, back in Geneva, Victor married Elizabeth with pistols in his pocket, sure the creature meant to kill him. Instead, that night at Evian, the creature killed her. Victor’s father died of grief.

Victor swore revenge and chased the creature across Europe and Russia into the Arctic, which is where Walton found him. With his ship trapped and his men dying of cold, Walton agrees to turn back. Victor dies on board, urging him to avoid ambition. That night Walton finds the creature weeping over his maker’s body. He has suffered more than anyone, he says, and hates himself for what he has done; now he will burn himself on a funeral pyre at the top of the world. He leaps onto the ice and disappears into the dark.