Frankenstein! Monster
or Just Misunderstood? (Creepy Week)
I always knew Frankenstein as a monster created by some
crazed scientist and his creepy little sidekick, Igor. He’s a big bumbling oaf
with stiff joints and a couple bolts in his neck who goes on a vicious killing spree.
Fact or fiction? There was only one way
to find out.
I finally read the classic novel, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
and today I’m here to set the record straight.
Here is the full synopsis. A lot happens in this book, and I tried to
keep it brief but as you can see it didn’t work out that way. Spoiler alert! Do
not read this if you don’t want to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth…..all the way to the bitter end.
The story begins with a giant man on a dog sled speeding
across the ice at the North Pole. Later,
a crew on a ship rescues a half dead man, who we find out is Victor
Frankenstein, the man who was pursuing the giant. Victor then reveals the long sordid truth to
the captain.
The nameless giant is the invention of Victor Frankenstein
who took two years piecing this man together from human body parts, sort of
like a living quilt. Like any proud
parent, Victor is ecstatic at the life he has produced. But when he looks at his big, bouncing bundle
of skin, bones, and cadaverous by-products, he doesn’t shout out “It’s alive!”
as we’ve been conditioned to understand. It was more like “Holy mother of
God! It’s hideous!”—well something along
those lines. Anyway, Victor takes a much-needed
parental pause usually reserved for the teenage years and leaves to clear his
head. Poor monster, rejected and abandoned by his papa, decides to find greener
pastures.
First stop is a village where the eight-foot oddity is immediately
pelted with big rocks and run out of town.
Not a welcoming beginning. Shunned and stoned (and not the snack-craving kind of stoned), the monster realizes that he will never be accepted in society. So, he runs away into mountains, where he
lives a clandestine existence in a shack attached to a run-down cottage. For a year, he watches the family in the
cottage through some holes in the wall. The monster takes this opportunity to
learn their language. Unknowingly, they teach
him to speak and he feels a real connection to the strangers who don’t know he
exists. And in his longing to belong, to
be part of a real family, he decides to take a chance and reveal himself. Unfortunately, our monster does not get the
reception he was hoping for. The open
arms he was expecting to embrace him were replaced with wildly flinging arms of
fury that beat the crap out of him. Then they put their legs to work and ran in
fear. Needless to say, this disheartens the monster and he realizes no human will
ever accept him. Ever! He’s infuriated, and in his rage he burns down
their house. Now he is just an angry
monster.
Back in Ingolstadt, Victor is recovering from an illness
when he learns of the death of his 5-year-old brother, William. Little William
was found strangled. The public accuses
Justine, the nanny, because William’s necklace was found in her pocket, and they
probably had no butler to blame. She is found
guilty by the court, and executed by hanging. Victor has an inkling that it
wasn’t Justine, but his own monster who killed William—and he was right.
Monster finally finds Victor and explains how he had actually
not killed William intentionally. He
just wanted a friend, but little William wanted nothing to do with him. He screamed and screamed, which made the
sensitive monster kind of nervous and he grabbed his throat to silence
him. He was silent, alright. The monster accidentally had strangled
William’s little neck. Monster then confesses to setting Justine up for the
crime.
Finally, the monster tells Victor in no uncertain terms that
Victor needs to make him a woman so that he can have some kind of companionship.
Victor gave him his miserable life but no one will have anything to do with
him. Monster is lonely on this big
planet. Victor has to make it up to
him. The way the monster sees it, a
woman would be just the ticket, and in exchange, the monster promises to leave
to a remote place and stop killing.
Victor knows this guy is serious, so he travels with his
friend, Henry Clerval, to create the female monster and stop the madness. Victor toils away and makes great strides,
but then his conscience flares up like an itchy rash and he realizes he can’t
go through with it. Two wrongs don’t
make a right type of thing. He destroys
the woman.
After being accused, imprisoned then acquitted for Henry’s death,
Victor goes on with his life. At first
he hems and haws and tries to put off the wedding, but after awhile he finally takes
the plunge and marries Elizabeth, whom he has known all his life. (Victor’s mother, God rest
her soul, and
father had adopted her when she was small.) The happy couple plans to honeymoon
in a romantic hotel overlooking Lake Como, a beautiful place with beautiful
neighbors like George Clooney.
Alas, the wedding night proves to be as tragic as the
monster had warned. Instead of killing
Victor, however, he kills Elizabeth. Victor is beside himself. He races back to Geneva to see if the rest of
his remaining family, meaning his dad and younger brother, Ernest, are ok. He tells his dad what happened to
Elizabeth. Having raised her as his own
daughter, poor old dad is heart-broken and dies shortly thereafter. Monster is turning into a serial killer. The
death toll now rings at five: William,
Justine, Henry, Elizabeth, and Father Frankenstein (Alphonse to his friends).
This leaves Victor no choice but to seek out and kill the
monster himself. He realizes it doesn’t matter what happens to him, he has to
stop the killing machine. So, he chases
him all over the continent until he ends up at the North Pole
That’s where we first came in on the story. The crew on a
ship had actually seen a giant man on a sled zipping across the ice like a bat
out of hell. It was hours later that
they spotted Victor. Here was a
half-frozen, half-starved man sliding around the desolate ice on a make-shift
craft.
The captain and his crew rescue Victor from a certain icy
death. Victor tells his incredible story and the captain resolves to take up
the cause and begins his search for the monster. Captain Schettino, uh, I mean Captain Walton puts the
entire crew in danger continuing to icebound places they have no business
being. Finally, he decides enough is
enough. He has to save his crew, and to Victor’s dismay, the captain turns the
ship around. Victor still has not
recovered from his frozen escapade. In
fact, he’s fading fast. With no more fight
left in him, Victor gives up the ghost and passes away, another indirect victim
of the monster. Final death count, six.
Suddenly, the captain hears an awful sound coming from
Victor’s cabin and runs to find the monster wailing over Victor’s body. In a long and eloquent speech, the monster tells
his side of the story and how he knows he cannot live this life anymore. With dramatic flare, he vows to find a place
in this icy hell hole and burn himself to death on a pyre. Having said that, he
jumps out of the window onto his raft and drifts away into the darkness.
The End.
Now you know.
Frankenstein is not the monster’s first name, he was no dummy, and there
was no Igor. So, was Frankenstein's creation a true monster or just misunderstood? The answer, of course, is both.
On a side note, what you may not know is that Mary Shelley, the author, was only 19
years old when she wrote this horror story. She preceded the ranks of young authors like Carson
McCullers who wrote The Heart Is a Lonely
Hunter at 23 and S.E. Hinton who
wrote The Outsiders when she was just 16 years old. Interestingly,
Mary Shelley fell in love and ran away with the already married Percy Shelley,
who completed a novel at the young age of 18.
After the suicide of his wife, Percy and Mary finally married. That same
year they spent a summer in Switzerland where Mary first conceived the story of
Frankenstein. It is reported that Mary claimed on a June night in 1816 the moon
shone through her window and her imagination took her away. She
furiously scribbled out Frankenstein in a “waking dream.”
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Mary Shelley's handwritten edition of Frankenstein (Chapter 16) |
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. You don’t have to go far to read
classics. Many are posted free
online. Click on the link to view the
free full-version pdf of Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley: http://www.planetebook.com/ebooks/Frankenstein.pdf
Happy reading,
Annette
What did you
think of this book? Post a comment or email: Readinginthegarden@gmail.com