The dark recess or our psyches

Frankenstein (1818) is the greatest novel of the Romantic movement. This isn’t a way to say that it’s a masterpiece comparable to the work of Jane Austen, who was the supreme stylist of the time, or or Balzac, who depicts every aspect of society in his Comédie humaine. But Mary Shelley’s novel explores the dark recess or our psyches with the same intensity as so much of the poetry of that era. To read her book – which is far more complex than the movies based on it – is to realize that she offers us a philosophical fable, an archetypal journey toward death, the foundational work of modern science fiction, and a poem (in prose) nearly the equal to Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Byron’s “Manfred.”
Perhaps the best way to approach the book is to think back over the story and notice its themes: the persistent interconnection of sex, birth, and death; the mirroring of monster and creator; the conflict between instinctive goodness and the societal creation of the criminal; the power of nature to soften and civilize; the human yearning for spiritual sympathy and love. Think, too, of the images of the Noble Savage and the Byronic wanderer with a secret sin, the multiple allusions to Satan’s fall from angel to devil and of Adam from Paradise, the sense of isolation and loneliness that results from moral transgression, and the need to confess one’s crimes in the hope of being understood if not absolved. Add to these the Monte Cristo-like desire to revenge oneself for undeserved suffering, and the ever-increasing sense of doom, followed by remorse that comes too late.
The novel can be quite creepy in its implications. Victor Frankenstein immerses himself in “filth” and creates what he regards as a kind of “abortion”, while his slashing destruction of the promised “female” companion prefigures the sexual brutality of Jack the Ripper. Relations always seem ambiguous: Victor marries a woman who is virtually his sister. During one daydream her image modulates into that of his mother. When the monster first observes the siblings Felix and Agathe, they behave like a young married couple. Later, the creature determines to “ravish” Victor from his happiness, saying, “I shall be with you on your wedding-night.” After murdering Victor’s new bride instead, he leaves her sprawled across the marriage bed as if orgasmically exhausted.
The movies have conditioned us to a lumbering half-comic lug who murmurs broken phrases like “I love… dead.” But Shelley’s original soon learns to spreak with the eloquence of a European philosophe.

uit: Classics for pleasure - Michael Dirda

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