Frankenstein (Barnes & Noble Classics) Read online

  Table of Contents Title Page

  A Terrible Vengeance

  The Life of Mary Shelley

  Foreword

  AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

  PREFACE

  LETTER 1 - To Mrs. Saville, England

  LETTER 2 - To Mrs. Saville, England

  LETTER 3 - To Mrs. Saville, England

  LETTER 4 - To Mrs. Saville, England

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Afterword

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  A Terrible Vengeance

  "I am malicious because I am miserable," the creature cried. "Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces--why should I pity man more than man pities me?

  "I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear. And toward you, my arch-enemy, my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred." A fiendish rage animated him, his face was wrinkled into contortions too horrible for human eyes to behold. "I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart, so that you curse the hour of your birth."

  The Life of Mary Shelley

  Mary Shelley's life, especially the first half of it, was as sad, melodramatic, improbable, and even tragic as any sentimental nineteenth century "sensation" novel.

  Given her background, Mary's intellectual prowess and literary talents are not surprising. Her father, William Godwin, was one of the most famous and versatile thinkers and writers of his time, having penned a very important thousand-page political tract, Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and a popular, provocative novel of pursuit and guilt, Caleb Williams, in the space of two years (1793-94). Her mother, the brilliant Mary Wollstonecraft, was a pioneer feminist; her book A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) remains one of the most forceful statements for sexual equality in the language. The Godwins were at the very center of radical social, political, moral, and literary thought in the last decade of the eighteenth century.

  Mary was born August 30, 1797. The combination of a difficult delivery and inept medical care resulted in Mary Wollstonecraft's death less than two weeks after her daughter's birth. Thus, Mary was never to know her mother in person, although the memory and reputation of Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the dominating influences on her life.

  Her father was a distant man at best and he never completely forgave his daughter for causing his wife's death. Godwin's second marriage in 1801 further complicated things. The relationship between Mary and her stepmother, Mary Jane Clairmont Godwin, was cold, even hostile. The second Mrs. Godwin openly favored her own children by a previous marriage, especially her daughter Jane (who later renamed herself Claire and became Mary's personal albatross). Thus Mary, a brilliant and shy girl, retreated into introspection and books--among them, Milton's Paradise Lost and Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"--both of which are echoed in Frankenstein.

  When Mary was fourteen, her delicate health and the tense domestic environment induced Godwin to send her to live with friends in Scotland. She remained there for two years, pained by the separation from her father, but enjoying a life of stable domestic felicity that is reflected in the portrait of Victor Frankenstein's family circle.

  In 1812, on a brief visit home, she met the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, at the time happily married. When they met again in May 1814, after her return to London, Shelley's marriage had soured and Mary, now nearly seventeen, had developed into an extremely attractive as well as brilliant young woman. The romance blossomed quickly. Shelley courted Mary at her mother's grave. By the end of June they were lovers. By July she was pregnant. The two ran off on July 28, 1814--accompanied by Mary's stepsister Claire. On December 10, 1816, Shelley's first wife, Harriet, was found drowned, a suicide. On December 30, Shelley and Mary were married.

  It was during the summer of 1816, when Shelley, Mary, and Claire were visiting Lord Byron at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, that she was inspired to begin Frankenstein. The writing of the book took a little less than a year. Although the Shelleys had some difficulty in finding a publisher, the book appeared approximately a year later on March 11, 1818. The critical and popular reception was strong. The book has never been out of print.

  By 1822 Mary seemed well on her way to literary prominence. Frankenstein was an acknowledged success, she had just completed a new novella, Mathilda, her fourth child, Percy Florence--the only one that would outlive her--was a strong, healthy boy, and Shelley's poetic career was in ascendency. Then, on July 8, Shelley, who loved sailing but never learned to swim, was drowned in a boating mishap.

  Instantly, Mary went from being a talented author on the brink of great success and the wife of a world-famous poet to being a poor widow with a family to support. Writing became a matter of financial survival rather than personal vision. Her career had to take a back seat to her son's future. Devotion to her husband's memory and reputation had to be tempered by a need for the goodwill--and monetary support--of Shelley's father, Sir Timothy Shelley, who loathed the memory of his errant son.

  The rest of Mary Shelley's life is that of a strong, tenacious woman struggling against financial hardships and personal disappointments to raise her son, to solidify her husband's reputation, and to establish herself as a serious writer. Despite the pressures, Mary did produce a respectable body of work--four novels, five volumes of biographical sketches, several articles and poems, a number of short stories, and unfinished biographical fragments of Godwin and of Shelley as well as editing and annotating Shelley's poetry and prose. On the personal side, the story does have a kind of happy ending. Mary was eventually reconciled with her father-in-law, and her son, Percy, ultimately inherited the Shelley estates and title. She died on February 1, 1851.

  But, with the possible exception of The Last Man (1826), an early science fiction novel about the last man left alive after the earth has been devastated by plague, little of her post-Frankenstein creative work is read today by any but Shelley specialists. Perhaps the pressures that followed the early death of her husband prevented her from developing her serious talents to their fullest degree. Or perhaps Mary Shelley was one of those artists, seemingly characteristic of the Romantic Age, who were destined to burn their talents out early in life in one single pure flame.

  --Keith Neilson

  Foreword

  You are about to read the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

  Many are surprised to learn that Frankenstein was, originally, a novel. It all began, they thought, in an old movie with an eight-foot Boris Karloff lurching about with bolts in his neck, being chased by a raging mob. And since then, of course, the "Frankenstein monster" has been all over the place--in stage plays, tableaus, a dozen film "sequels," parodies, comic books, TV sitcoms, dolls, toys, posters, on cereal boxes, and so on.

  In a sense, all of these "incarnations" of the creature are "true," just as true as that first version invented by Mary Shelley in 1816. The "Frankenstein monster" is one of those fictional characters that seem to have broken loose from the works that spawned them and achieved their own in
dependent identity, becoming a popular literary myth. The list of such characters is a short one: Hamlet, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Tarzan, Uncle Tom, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, perhaps a few more.

  These characters seem to embody certain qualities or personify certain problems that evoke persistent and deep--even unconscious--responses in the popular imagination. They are universally recognized, even by those who have no idea of their origins. Their names become a shorthand way of referring to problems. We all know what is meant when we hear "He's a Jekyll and Hyde" or "You're a regular Sherlock Holmes." Sometimes the names even make it into the dictionary.

  But when a character becomes such a fixture in the popular imagination, it may become difficult to talk about the original. The first-time reader may be puzzled, even disappointed, by the differences between the "real thing" and the myth, particularly when that myth was crystallized in the contemporary mind, not by that original, but by more recent versions. And of all the characters listed above, Frankenstein has undergone the most thorough transformation in the popular mind.

  Therefore, to keep the surprises and disappointments to a minimum, we had better start with a list of the major differences between this book and popular perceptions: --"Frankenstein" is the name of the scientist who made the creature, not the monster itself (although, in a sense, the name does fit them both--more on that later).

  --The creature is not an ugly, inarticulate, mindless eight-foot lurcher with bolts in his neck. He is graceful, intelligent (he can read and write), very articulate, and has no protruding hardware (although he is extremely ugly and eight feet tall).

  --His brain did not come from a criminal's corpse.

  --No big laboratory scene, no lightning to animate the corpse (although there is a good deal of lightning throughout the book).

  --No hunchbacked assistant.

  --No mob of villagers, no burning mill.

  What isn't different?

  The basic situation, the central themes and character types, the profound questions raised and the ambiguous answers given and not given--the core of whatever it is that has made Frankenstein one of the most powerful, persistent, enigmatic works of art in the modern world.

  Frankenstein did not spring forth fully written from Mary's brain. Years of preparation in terms of personal experience and literary influences, some consciously learned, some unconsciously absorbed, went into its making. Mary's natural shyness and introversion were intensified by domestic tensions in the Godwin household. She read voraciously and many of the books became central to Frankenstein: her late mother's great feminist tract A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, Milton's Paradise Lost, and most important, her father's three best known works--the political tract, Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793), and the novels Caleb Williams (1794) and St. Leon (1799).

  Godwin's works provided Mary with thematic inspiration and narrative shape. Enquiry concerning Political Justice articulated a vision of man's nature and his relation to society that animates Frankenstein. Like Victor Frankenstein, Reginald, the hero of St. Leon, turns his back on domestic felicity to pursue forbidden knowledge--in St. Leon's case personal immortality and unlimited wealth--only to discover that, once achieved, the forbidden goal brings only disaster.

  Although there is no supernaturalism in Caleb Williams, the novel gave Mary her structural model. Young Caleb also seeks forbidden knowledge, although of a more mundane variety--the guilt of his benefactor and father-figure, the rich, aristocratic Falkland. Once his motives are discovered, Caleb must flee. Falkland's agents stalk and persecute Caleb across the face of Europe. It is only when he returns home to confront Falkland face-to-face that Caleb is able to fight back against his tormentor. In Frankenstein, Victor makes his creature, abandons it, then finds himself stalked by it. Like Caleb, Victor, the hunted, must then become the hunter.

  But while the structure of Frankenstein resembles Caleb Williams, its presentation is more complicated and devious. The novel begins and ends in the Arctic where Robert Walton, a sea captain, scientist, and would-be poet--who appears in none of the adaptations--discovers Victor Frankenstein on an ice-floe while leading an expedition to the North Pole. Frankenstein then tells his story, at the center of which is the creature's account.

  In other words, the structure resembles a bulls-eye, with Walton on the outside, Victor Frankenstein in the middle ring, and the creature at the center.

  Why so complicated? Why is Walton, so easily disposed of in the adaptations, so necessary to the novel? The answer lies in the peculiar relationship--real and thematic--that develops between these three men. Think of the novel as a three-legged stool which would collapse if any of the legs were missing. As you move from the outside to the center of the novel, ask yourself how each character contributes to the novel and how each character relates to the other two.

  Frankenstein has been called the first science fiction novel. Without getting into that debate, it is worth noticing that both Walton and Frankenstein are obsessed scientists who have turned with backs on normal society and are, therefore, voluntarily alienated from it. The creature is the ambiguous product of one of those experiments; his alienation is forced upon him. He desperately wants to be a part of society, or at the least to have a companion to share his solitary damnation. Thus, each of them is on a quest; each needs the other two to work out the practical and moral implications of that quest. Frankenstein and his creature finally destroy each other.

  Walton, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, is left to tell the tale and the reader, like the wedding guest, is expected to understand the meaning of Frankenstein's doomed experience through Walton's eyes and mind.

  Frankenstein is not always an easy book to read. But Mary Shelley's vision is as powerful and valid today as it was on that rainy night in 1816 when she had her tormented waking dream. And, despite all of the versions and variations that have been written, drawn, performed, and filmed, it is only by going back to her original novel that one can find that vision in its purest and most potent form.

  --Keith Neilson

  AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

  THE PUBLISHERS OF the standard novels, in selecting Frankenstein for one of their series, expressed a wish that I should furnish them with some account of the origin of the story. I am the more willing to comply because I shall thus give a general answer to the question so very frequently asked me--how I, then a young girl, came to think of and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea. It is true that I am very averse to bringing myself forward in print, but as my account will only appear as an appendage to a former production, and as it will be confined to such topics as have connection with my authorship alone, I can scarcely accuse myself of a personal intrusion.

  It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing. As a child I scribbled, and my favourite pastime during the hours given me for recreation was to "write stories." Still, I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air--the indulging in waking dreams--the following up trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings. In the latter I was a close imitator--rather doing as others had done than putting down the suggestions of my own mind. What I wrote was intended at least for one other eye--my childhood's companion and friend; but my dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed--my dearest pleasure when free.

  I lived principally in the country as a girl and passed a considerable time in Scotland. I made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts, but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee. Blank and dreary on retrospection I call them; they were not so to me then. They were the aerie of freedom and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fan
cy. I wrote then, but in a most commonplace style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered. I did not make myself the heroine of my tales. Life appeared to me too commonplace an affair as regarded myself. I could not figure to myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever be my lot; but I was not confined to my own identity, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age than my own sensations.

  After this my life became busier, and reality stood in place of fiction. My husband, however, was from the first very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage and enrol myself on the page of fame. He was forever inciting me to obtain literary reputation, which even on my own part I cared for then, though since I have become infinitely indifferent to it. At this time he desired that I should write, not so much with the idea that I could produce anything worthy of notice, but that he might himself judge how far I possessed the promise of better things hereafter. Still I did nothing. Travelling, and the cares of a family, occupied my time; and study, in the way of reading or improving my ideas in communication with his far more cultivated mind was all of literary employment that engaged my attention.

  In the summer of 1816 we visited Switzerland and became the neighbours of Lord Byron. At first we spent our pleasant hours on the lake or wandering on its shores; and Lord Byron, who was writing the third canto of Childe Harold, was the only one among us who put his thoughts upon paper. These, as he brought them successively to us, clothed in all the light and harmony of poetry, seemed to stamp as divine the glories of heaven and earth, whose influences we partook with him.

  But it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house. Some volumes of ghost stories translated from the German into French fell into our hands. There was the History of the Inconstant Lover, who, when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted. There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise. His gigantic, shadowy form, clothed like the ghost in Hamlet, in complete armour, but with the beaver up, was seen at midnight, by the moon's fitful beams, to advance slowly along the gloomy avenue. The shape was lost beneath the shadow of the castle walls; but soon a gate swung back, a step was heard, the door of the chamber opened, and he advanced to the couch of the blooming youths, cradled in healthy sleep. Eternal sorrow sat upon his face as he bent down and kissed the forehead of the boys, who from that hour withered like flowers snapped upon the stalk. I have not seen these stories since then, but their incidents are as fresh in my mind as if I had read them yesterday.