Frankenstein

A thread to discuss Mary Shelley's magnum opus Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and contents and adaptations surrounding it. I hadn't found a thread for it already, and considering how influential the book is for western fiction, it was only fair to create a place of its own.

I read the book some years ago and, while I already knew there were several differences from most adaptations, the originality still shocked me — the way the creature narrates how it came to hate his creator as he learned to read and survive was surprisingly poignant, tragic and fascinating, and I also liked how Victor never tells how the creature exactly came to be. It makes sense In-Universe, since he wouldn't want people to replicate his tragedy, but also because how the creature was born simply wasn't as important as what came after (it also makes it more universal, since it makes the story avoid future inaccuracies).

Edited by good-morning on Feb 5th 2023 at 2:50:17 PM

Yes, the Creature is far more interesting in the original than in most adaptations. He’s intelligent, thoughtful, eloquent, and ultimately malicious, though it’s made clear that the latter is the product of experience and not of his fundamental nature. He’s capable of subtlety in his malice (one of his first evil acts is the framing of the girl for the murder of Victor’s brother). The contrast between his genuinely moving story of his initial innocence and how it was corrupted, and all his later evil deeds, is the most compelling part of the book.

Edited by Galadriel on Jun 7th 2022 at 9:51:03 AM

One of the things the Overly Sarcastic Productions video on the original story pointed out was that the Creature is pretty similar to Victor Frankenstein in the sense that both of them are self-centered assholes.

Here's the vid btw:

Edited by M84 on Jun 7th 2022 at 7:49:39 PM

That's something that struck me reading the book for the first time because it doesn't really come through in the pop culture osmosis: Frankenstein himself is a total douchebag.

"Someone smart knows that Frankenstein was NOT the monster, someone wise knows Frankenstein WAS the monster".

Like father like son I guess.

That he was willing to desecrate bodies to make his "perfect" human already didn't say good things about him.

Edit:

The vid however does point out that Victor (and by extension the author of the story Mary Shelley) recognizes that making a female Creature wouldn't necessarily solve the Creature's problems since there was no guarantee that the female Creature would accept him. She might have rejected him instead.^note Which actually happens in Bride of Frankenstein — the Bride's first reaction upon seeing the Monster is a shriek of horror

Edited by M84 on Jun 7th 2022 at 11:00:16 PM

If you were a physician at all during that time period, you had to be willing to desecrate dead bodies. For a long time, robbing graves was the only way they could study human anatomy.

Victor Frankenstein himself, in my opinion, never comes off terribly well. Not in the original book, and not in most adaptations of it.

Edited by Robbery on Jun 8th 2022 at 2:10:19 AM

Though Victor lived in a time when medical students had other (somewhat) more legal ways to obtain cadavers. And even when graverobbing was commonplace, most doctors and medical students didn't do it themselves unless they were really desperate and strapped for cash. They paid people for bodies, no questions asked.

Edited by M84 on Jun 9th 2022 at 9:26:28 PM

"the Bride's first reaction upon seeing the Monster is a shriek of horror"

Kinda fitting in that it continues the cycles: creating aberration that reject you over and over.

What do you think of Victor's description in the trope Dr. Frankenstein? The text claims that the novel was meant to make readers sympathize with Victor and see his decision of abandoning the creature due to its hideousness as justified and morally correct, with modern interpretations seeing him as akin to an abusive parent being only a case of Values Dissonance, but I disagree.

While some interpretations do downplay the creature's cruelty, the novel also certainly doesn't intent to make Victor completely justifiable and clearly shows that the creature was perfectly civilized and helpful at first, with his ugliness not being any obstacle to his intelligence, thoughtfullness and free will — it is explicit that the reason why the monster chose vengeance and murder was because of his own conscious choices after being repeatedly rejected, and definetely not a direct consequence of his artificial birth or appearance. I just wanted to ask for your opinions before I changed it as it does is a case of interpretation.

Edited by good-morning on Oct 11th 2022 at 11:25:48 AM

The Framing Device pretty much gives us a good sense of how we're meant to feel about Frankenstein as he's someone who has led his entire family to ruin as well as other loved ones through what is shown to be blind ambition. The Creature is shown to be sympathetic at the end as well with Vengeance Feels Empty.

Whether we're meant to believe Victor was an abusive parent or not, I think the larger issue is that Victor's entire scheme was a bad idea from start to finish. Abandoning the creature because it's ugly isn't where the Doctor went wrong, though it certainly didn't help, so much as attempting to create life in the first place.

Tinkering with God's domain or not, it is also from what many feminist interpretations read as a internalized misogyny on Victor's part: the only reason you would want to create life without a woman being as if you wanted to cut them out of the process.

But the irony is that Victor also abandoned the Creature for like, what, a few hours? The thing is Victor came back and the Creature was gone.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 11th 2022 at 9:22:45 AM

Victor's biggest flaw is that he refused to take responsibility for the Creature he brought into the world until it was far, far too late.

And of course, he loses a whole lot of sympathy when he lets an innocent woman be executed for murder even though he knows it was the Creature who was the real killer.

Edited by M84 on Oct 12th 2022 at 2:58:09 AM

The text of that page doesn't say that the novel was meant to make readers sympathize with Victor (which I think nobody who read the novel would ever think), but that the audiences at that time would have sympathized with him. And I doubt that even this claim is true.

Edited by YourBloodyValentine on Oct 12th 2022 at 5:35:50 AM

That is a very good point, is there much information on the audience reception of the novel in the time? Some adaptations had either a more black and white view by portraying the Creature an unnatural abomination, like in Victor Frankenstein, or made him much less eloquent, philosofical and intelligent, a lá the 1931 version, but I do wonder how Victorian readers interpreted the text and if the trope description is correct.

Edited by good-morning on Oct 12th 2022 at 12:30:18 PM

I have found a website with some contemporary reviews of the novel: https://romantic-circles.org/reference/chronologies/mschronology/reviews.html

I've read some of them, and the impression I had is that they were not much concerned on whether Frankenstein was justified or not in abandoning the creature, whether he is sympathetic or not. They are more concerned on the consequences he suffers because of his decisions - that is, they read it as a sort of tragedy, where the point is the fate which the protagonist suffers for having stepped out of the boundaries of 'normality'.

About the creature, some reviewers view him as sympathetic, some others stressed the fact that he committed crimes (he murdered people, after all); but this doesn't seem to change the view that they have of Victor, that he himself is the cause of his downfall.

Thank you, it's fascinating to see reactions in a world where the book wasn't popular yet! Does anyone think that the paragraph in question has a point then? Even if how sympathetic the creature is varies, it seems that the audience of the time didn't really view Victor as a being in the right for abandoning his creation in fear; quite the opposite.

In fact, I don't think many adaptations have made Victor to be in the right for hating the creature, have they? Most changes are about making the monster much less intelligent and talkative that he was in the book due to the Universal movies, but they are so different in the plot point of the creature growing to hate humanity that you can't quite say how much more sympathetic they made Victor. Many adaptations also make him much more of a Mad Scientist that he ever was.

Edited by good-morning on Oct 24th 2022 at 10:20:40 AM

Interesting thing, there apparently actually is a Frankenstein Castle in Germany, and it does have a few legends about it. One of which, coincidentally enough, concerns an alchemist who lived there and built a monster made out of dead bodies, brought to life with the Elixir of Life. The Brothers Grimm collected the story when they were gathering folk tales, though they considered it too disturbing and so it didn't make it into any of the published editions of their fairy tale collections. They're known, however, to have shared it with the woman who translated their works into English—who also happened to be Mary Shelly's step-mother.

How bad must it be for the freaking Brothers Grimm to consider too disturbing?

Another reason it didn't make the cut is that it involved a real person; the alchemist in question was a real guy, named Johann Konrad Dipple (if you go around calling yourself an alchemist, I suppose people are going to tell stories about you), and the stories about him were, at the time the Grimms were doing their research, actually fairly recent (Dipple died less than a hundred years before the first edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales was published).