4/20/2023 0 Comments Frankenstein annotations![]() ![]() The way Shelley structured her story was very helpful to me as a writer. When Frankenstein fails to see that and take responsibility for the ramifications of his creation, the real evil and darkness of the story reveals itself. The monster didn’t ask to be there, but he was. And things come full circle back to the quote that opens the story. What makes a monster in this case? Frankenstein’s motives, ambitions, secrets, lies and knowledge create within him the very same monster. The monster is rejected by society and his own creator. While this is cruel and embodies a sense of evil, one cannot help but trace the end results back to their root causes. The monster retaliates, killing those who mean the most to the Frankenstein. Shrouded in secrecy and shame, he tries to abandon his creation, even destroy the mate he created for him. One can say that Frankenstein is more the monster than the creature he created, as he possessed the dangerous knowledge and used it in a way that served his ambition. The idea of monstrosity and what makes a monster is a fascinating and complex subject where Mary Shelley does what Chekov was quoted as saying- she doesn’t necessarily have all the answers but sets up the questions effectively. The allusions to Adam and Eve and the desire for dangerous knowledge comes through and the monster even references it directly as he begins to gain his own knowledge through reading and learning to speak intelligently and through reading texts like Paradise Lost. We see the path he is on in his search for it and the results of too much knowledge in Frankenstein’s life. The danger of too much knowledge is a prevalent theme that emerges through Walton’s letters. Both feel a sense of loss and loneliness and through that pain, seek to remedy that through their ambitions. Walton himself is introduced through the letters he writes his sister and the reader can see the parallels between him and Frankenstein. As readers, we are constantly reminded of different narrators, perspective shifts and the eerie presence of others, much the way the monster lurks over Frankenstein and the village. The reader listens with Walton to Frankenstein, as does Walton’s sister, bringing it back to that oral tradition of storytelling where the reader must focus on the storyteller. I love this structure because it brings a consciousness to the storytelling, a complexity to the structure itself that exists in the story and its characters. And within Frankenstein’s narrative live the narratives of others, including the monster himself. The letters he writes are the main frame in which the story can live, but the main narrative is told through Frankenstein himself. Walton is one of many voices who take over the story. This sets up a series of perspectives through which this story is told. Weakened by the cold, Walton takes him aboard his ship and listens as Frankenstein recounts the story of how he created a monster. Robert Walton, an explorer on a quest for his own knowledge and discovery in the North Pole, writes a series of letters to his sister about Victor Frankenstein, who has been traveling there in search of the monster he created. Shelley does this under the umbrella of a complex structure that is almost stitched together from various sources like the monster himself, rooted in the oral tradition of storytelling around the campfire, where texts were orally handed down from one generation to another. There is depth in her exploration of women and how passivity renders them victims in every scenario, in the rich subjects of monstrosity, the danger of too much knowledge, secrecy, even abortion. Mary Shelley has not just written a scary ghost story, which her husband Percy Shelley claims was her only endeavor when crafting this masterpiece. Resentment, anger and vengeance all rise up in the presence of a profound abandonment by such creators, especially when they are left to fend for themselves in a cruel world where they are forced to carry the burden of ugliness and evil. It sums up Adam’s feelings, as well as Victor Frankenstein’s monster’s views of their creators. This rhetorical quote at the beginning of both texts is rooted in Adam’s cries to God after his fallen condition, where he has no other choice but to compare himself to Satan. ![]() One can argue the bigger monstrous creation is Victor Frankenstein himself and not the actual creature he creates. These are lines on the title page of Frankenstein and which also appear in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, referenced repeatedly in Mary Shelley’s novel about a creator with an obsessive thirst for knowledge and the monstrous creation that results from this. From darkness to promote me?” - Paradise Lost by John Milton ![]()
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