Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus - 7

[StefanY]

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus

Written in the early 19th century, Frankenstein is a novel that is fairly easy to read and find entertainment value in even by today's standards. The rich language and Shelley's authorial style create an environment that allows the reader to totally submerse themselves into Victor's world.

The story itself is presented as a story within a story within a story (an sometimes even a level or two deeper than that) as a ship captain named Walton writes letters to his sister in England about his voyage across the top of the world and the strange tale of the man (Victor Frankenstein) that he encounters there. It is Victor's story that occupies most of the novel, and though most modern readers are aware of the Hollywood version of the famous Frankenstein monster, those unfamiliar with the actual novel version are in for a great surprise in the way that the creature is depicted in the novel. Hollywood has taken so many liberties with this tale and the depictions of the characters that reading the original is almost like opening one's mind to entirely new material. Shelley presents us with an incredibly thought provoking and fleshed out tale requiring the reader to put some serious thought into the morality of intense scientific research in the area of the creation of life.

With this novel, Shelley opened the door to the later development of the Science Fiction genre. In a move that is almost pure genius, Shelley avoids the need for the reader to have to suspend belief in the scientific method used to create another living being from dead tissue by allowing Victor to keep his methods undisclosed for fear that another scientist will follow his direction and make the same mistakes that he did in creating his monster.

All in all a very good novel!


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[PolarisDiB]

One of the strange things about Frankenstein and Dracula the novels is that both of them create an illusion of objective reportage through the whole a friend of a friend told me argument: letters and diaries are considered documents, and people's statements are considered truth with little to no cross-analysis. Frankenstein and Dracula are connected mostly through the Universal Pictures monsters from the 1930s, but the novels themselves are so different from their Universal Pictures counterparts AND from each other that it's interesting that people connect them so well--and even more interesting still that one of the primary structural connections they have (the "this is a true story" form based on reportage) largely goes unremarked.

--PolarisDiB