Frankstein: who is the real monster?

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UNIVERSIDADE ESTADUAL DA PARAÍBA – UEPB

CENTRO DE EDUCAÇÃO – CEDUC

DEPARTAMENTO DE LETRAS E ARTES – DLA

CURSO DE LETRAS LÍNGUA INGLESA – LICENCIATURA – MATUTINO

COMPONENTE CURRICULAR: LITERATURA INGLESA III

DOCENTE: THIAGO RODRIGO DE ALMEIDA CUNHA

LETÍCIA DANTAS FERREIRA

FRANKENSTEIN: WHO IS THE REAL MONSTER?

CAMPINA GRANDE - PB

2018

FRANKENSTEIN: WHO IS THE REAL MONSTER?

There are about two thousand and two years before that a group of friends gathered in a house decided to challenge each other to see which one could create the best terror story ever seen.  Among them, there were Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley. The latter would write the story that became one of the most famous terror stories: Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley was born in London on 30 August 1797, the only child of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. At the age of seventeen, she met Percy Bysshe Shelley to whom she would marry some months after. In 1815, Mary gives birth prematurely to daughter, who dies a few days later.  In the following year, Mary gives birth to another child, William that also dies three years later. After, in 1817, while she was writing Frankenstein, she brings Clara into the world. In 1818, she first publishes Frankenstein which had a revised edition published in 1831; this edition is the one which this work dealt with. At the age of fifty-three, she died in London on 1 February 1851.

Frankenstein was first published anonymously in 1818 by Mary Shelley. This work became known by the cinematographic image of the monster that appears in it, with a “green skin” and screws on its neck. However, this aspect is needed to be explained. There was a misunderstood and a replacement of the monster’s name and also with the appearance of the monster. In fact, in the book the monster is nameless, and the name “Frankenstein” refers to the doctor who created the monster. Second, the monster was not covered with a “green skin”, Mary describes him: “His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath” (p.58). We can see that the movies versions were in somehow distinct in relation to the written work.

The story is written in epistolary form that starts with Captain Robert Walton writing letters to his sister, Mrs. Margaret Walton Saville. In those letters, Walton describes his trip towards the pole, how he was excited with this adventure, and also he talks about the challenges he had to face. One of them was the loneliness, Walton mention that by being alone he has nobody to whom he could share his joy or worries. He says “I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine” (p.7). On the fourth letter, he notices his ship surrounded by ice making them impossible to sail over the sea.

In this place full of ice and mist, in the middle of night about two o’clock he saw a strange scene, “We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, (…)a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge and guided the dogs.” (p.14). Later, we discover that this creature was the Frankenstein’s monster.

In the following morning, when Mr. Walton woke up and went upon the deck, he found all the sailors busy in one side of the vessel. Apparently they were talking to someone. The person was Doctor Victor Frankenstein and he was “on the brink of destruction” (p.16). The captain immediately made him get into the ship, and took care of him. Some days after, Captain Walton and doctor Frankenstein started to get closer as friends. Some time had passed, and Frankenstein decided to tell Walton his story in order to make it as a lesson to the captain.

Victor told him that he had an adoptive sister called Elizabeth and his parents enjoyed to travel around the world. He talks about his family, his friends, things that he read and his love about science. The doctor narrates how he got into the contact with the ideas of natural philosophy, chemistry and the theories of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. The philosophy of those authors, said Victor, led him to the misery and sorrow that he was found.

After have been concerned and obsessed with studying the secrets of heaven and earth, and with the deepest mysteries of creation, Victor started to make experiments and collect material in order to verify if the theories he had studied were actually possible to achieve it. With that idea in mind, he started “to examine the causes of life” investigating first the implications of death. After some time, he discovered how to give animation to lifeless matter, and aiming to create a “human being” he started to collect “bones from charnelhouses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame.” (p.55). The creature was about “eight feet in height, and proportionably large” (p.54).

After some experiments, the creature is alive. At the moment Victor recognizes the product of his study he realizes that the beautiful creature he had wondered was not that perfect. In fact he says that “the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (p.59). At the sight of the creature’s appearance, he rushed out of the room, abandoning the creature showing his disgust in relation to this living thing. In this moment the doctor calls the creature a “wretch”, a “monster”, “demoniacal corpse”.  In this aspect, we are induced to think that the monster is actually a bad person. In fact he was abandoned by his creator and had nobody to take care of him, and as we can see throughout the story, some actions that the “monster” did were not exclusively related to a natural instinct of doing incorrect actions, but were more related to a lack of responsibility of the doctor.

Once Victor had abandoned the creature, he had any information about where and how the “monster” was living. He mentions that some time had passed and any news had come to him about the “wretch” thing. One day, though, one letter from Elizabeth is delivered to him. In this letter she says that his little brother William was murdered, and he decided to visit his family after this incident. In this situation, Justine, the William’s nanny, was accused of having murdered the child. After some days the trial happened and she was condemned to death. Of course she was not the one who murdered William, and Frankenstein was aware of that. He knew that the murderer was his creature; “A thousand times rather would I have confessed myself guilty of the crime ascribed to Justine, but I was absent when it was committed, and such a declaration would have been considered as the ravings of a madman and would not have exculpated her who suffered through me”(p.90). The monster killed William as a way to call Frankenstein’s attention. However he did not tell anyone about it, thinking that nobody would believe in his tale; his silence made another person be killed unfairly.