This is one of those books that has been retold, adapted, and parodied so many times that I thought I knew what I was getting into, and was very, very wrong.
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus was first published anonymously by Mary Shelley in 1818. Her name wasn’t publicly attached to the book until a French edition was released in 1921. The version I read was an 1831 edition with an additional foreword by Shelley herself, which told about how, when, and why she originally came up with the idea.
It was supposed to be a ghost story! She and her husband were hanging out with Lord Byron in Switzerland and they found a book of German ghost stories. They decided to each make one original ghost story, and the last one to present their idea was Mary Shelley. She writes that the idea came to her in the middle of the night, and when she told her husband Percy about it, he encouraged her to develop it into a full novel.
And now it’s one of the oldest and most famous science fiction horror novels in the Western canon, predating even Jules Verne.
It’s also one of the most butchered stories ever, too, with so many parodies and retellings and unfaithful adaptations that I was surprised by how simple and unadorned the original story was!
Modern reinterpretations, at least the ones I’m aware of, are so very different! In this book, we get no castle, no lightning storm, no villagers with torches and pitchforks, no Igor, and so on! So many of the elements that I thought were part of the story are simply not present in the book.
The book is structured in the way that a lot of these old 19th century novels were, but moreso. We start with a statement that the contents of the book are fiction, signed by the pseudonymous “Marlow,” which leads into a series of letters written by adventurer Robert Walton to his sister (both fictional), which then leads into Victor Frankenstein telling his story to Walton, and THEN a major part of Victor’s story is relating the monster’s story!
It is perhaps the most layers of independent narrator draped over a story that I have ever seen.
The style is extremely wordy and flowery, with all of our different narrators sounding more or less the same. The flowery language can help during descriptions, and when the characters’ emotions push up to the surface, but oftentimes it just serves to bloat the story, repeating some of the same sentiments over and over.
This is not helped by the extremely broody tone. Walton is a fine enough narrator, but both Victor and the monster suffer from extreme broodiness as they are both portrayed as very distraught over what has become of them.
The plot is solid, but some of the character motivations and reactions are somewhat thin. The reactions that people have to the monster are also hard to explain—everywhere and always women faint and men attack, even though there were plenty of people at the time who had suffered from, say, smallpox or even leprosy. The reaction to the monster is so extreme that it almost seems magical in a story that relies heavily on the natural sciences.
One other positive surprise was the book’s avoidance of what are now tropes of this sort of story. Early in the book, Victor finds and studies some books from the old alchemists. But rather than finding inspiration in them, he all but drops them himself when he realizes they made big promises with very little actual results. Then, when he goes to college, he learns modern science and talks eloquently about the differences. But when he goes to create the monster, he neither draws something actionable from the alchemists, nor forges a link between the old alchemists and modern scientists. Practically any author telling this sort of story today would have made some sort of link. But Shelley avoids this trope before it even was one.
As a work of science fiction and horror, the book also falls a bit short in a few places where I was expecting more. Victor’s description of the process of creating the monster is seriously lacking in detail, which might be excused because he doesn’t want others to repeat his mistakes, but it also is told in so few lines that it fails to support the dark and horrific atmosphere.
The narrative suffers from long periods of illness and near-madness of Victor, which give other forces in the story time to do what they need to do, but it feels a bit artificial.
There is some argumentation and reasoning that appears late in the story that is quite interesting. The monster gives Victor a way to—it claims—assuage its rage. But it’s more complicated than that, because Victor claims the monster is deceptive and persuasive, and even Victor’s reliability as a narrator deserves a little bit of questioning.
All in all, this book was not what I was expecting, both in some good ways and some bad. I have discovered the extent to which adaptations have exaggerated and twisted the original story. I was not as impressed by the book as I think certain literati would like people to be. However, I was glad to finally experience the book with none of the exaggerations that have appeared since its publication.
As always, there will be a spoiler section in the embedded video above. I realize it’s a little silly to worry about spoiling a 200 year old book, but my experience with the book was so different from what I thought I knew about the story that I figured it’s still worth making the separation.
Also, you can read the version I read for free here.
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