Frankenstein is the story of a man who does one colossally stupid thing and then feels sad about it for the rest of his life.
I guess that’s pretty common in tragic literature, and many of the Great Works in the Canon would fit that description; but I really want to emphasize just how much this is the entire story of Frankenstein. One bad decision; and then hundreds of pages of the main character feeling harrowed, despondent, anguished, morose, and all sorts of other words that mean sad.
Much of the sadness is conveyed while the protagonist travels, either through the Swiss Alps, or to England, or to France. Always, the same two points are conveyed:
I don’t mean to dump too hard on the text here, because the sadness is conveyed well. And it is a fitting and suitable sadness. He has good reason to be sad. But still: there is a lot of it. A brooding tone pervades the entire work with almost no reprieve. The analogy that springs to mind is a live performance of the Grateful Dead. Frankenstein consists of Mary Shelley opening with a single sombre chord and then riffing on it for 335 pages.
Why was Herr Frankenstein so very sad?
Before we get to the answer: I was unsure whether to bother with a spoiler alert here; after all, everyone knows the plot of Frankenstein, right? But if you’d asked me to tell you the plot of Frankenstein before reading this book, I would probably have responded with only the most cursory of outlines. Something like: “a scientist figures out how to make a human form and imbue it with life, then things go wrong.”
And if you’d pushed me for more details, I likely would have mentioned two iconic scenes.
First scene: the scientist in question pulls on a lever connected to a lightning rod. A surge of electricity flows out of his equipment and into a corpse on the table. The corpse stirs. The scientist screams “IT’S ALIVE!”
Second scene: a mob of villagers with torches and pitchforks attempt to hunt down the newly-living creature.
It turns out that neither of these scenes are actually in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And there is some other stuff in there that is absolutely wild. Definitely not what I expected going in.
So: SPOILER ALERT.
Victor Frankenstein is a young man with great promise. He stumbles across an old alchemical treatise, studies it thoroughly, and develops a penchant for alchemy. When he arrives at university to commence his formal studies, he makes the mistake of confessing his love for alchemy to the professor of natural history, and is mocked for it. He resolves to start afresh, learn Real Science, and Show Them All. After some months spent studying, it occurs to him that he could probably actually put a human body together out of old parts and then bring it to life. You know, if he wanted to. If doing so were ever called for.
Young Frankenstein spends about 1 page of the book’s 335 weighing up the pros and cons of bringing a gestalt human corpse to life before plunging ahead with the project. He spends the following months digging up corpses, sewing sinews and muscles and tendons together in the proper arrangement, and doing other gross stuff that he alludes to but never shares with the reader. He mentally breaks down at various points during the work, and it’s unclear how much of it is because the work is so disgusting, how much of it is because of pre-existing medical conditions, and how much of it is because he subconsciously senses that the thing which he is doing is actually super dumb. He doesn’t waste much time on reflection, though: there is new life waiting to be rashly brought forth!
The moment he succeeds in giving his creation life, Frankenstein runs into his bedroom and has a massive freak-out. He paces back and forth until he eventually succumbs to exhaustion. He sleeps fitfully, haunted by nightmares. When he awakens, the creature is next to his bed, grinning at him. The young STEM major, in way over his head, flees the building. By the time he returns, the creature is gone.
Frankenstein is struck by a “nervous fever”, which incapacitates him for several months. His childhood friend, Henry Clerval, travels up to the university to care for him. Eventually Henry and the Frankenstein family persuade Viktor to return to his childhood home.
Soon after Viktor arrives home, his younger brother is murdered and the much-loved family maid wrongly executed for the crime. This, as you can imagine, does little to improve Viktor’s mental state. He goes for a long solitary trip through the Swiss Alps, and we are treated to page after page of descriptions of alpine scenery.
Finally, in the middle of nowhere, he encounters “the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed”. It’s him. After some hostile initial exchanges, the creature persuades Frankenstein to at least hear him out.
They sit down in a conveniently-placed alpine hut, and the monster tells his life story. How his first memories were of the forest, and hunger, and pleasant sunshine. How people he encountered were always screaming at him. How he hid in a farmhouse for half a year, spying on the inhabitants, in the hope of one day making friends with them. How poorly the inhabitants took it when he did eventually show himself. How he stole a book and learned to read. How he accidentally-on-purpose strangled Frankenstein’s brother, and then definitely-on-purpose slipped the boy’s pendant into the apron of a random sleeping woman so she’d go down for the crime. How lonely it was to be the only eight-foot-tall superhuman monstrosity terrorizing the Swiss countryside. How much better it would be if only he had a girlfriend who were also an eight-foot-tall superhuman monstrosity. They could terrorize the Swiss countryside together. It would be so romantic. Please, Doctor Frankenstein – could you play God just this once more so I won’t have to be miserable all the damned time?
His tale is kind of sympathetic, sure; we all know it’s rough to be an outcast. But also: what possible chance does so tone-deaf a request have of succeeding? “I killed your brother and framed the help, life is hard, please forge for me a waifu”?
Unsurprisingly, Viktor is like: no way. The monster is like, alright, but what if I promise to move with my new gf to “the vast wilds of South America”, subsist on berries, and never bother human settlements again? Viktor still isn’t sure. The monster is like, ok, how about if you don’t help me I’ll keep murdering the people you love. How about now?
Viktor eventually is like: I guess I can trust this guy. He returns home, and his dad sits him down for a chat. Remember that peasant girl your mother and I adopted when you were small? The one we had always hoped you’d eventually marry? asks his father. Would you like to marry her? Viktor is all: of course, Elizabeth is the light of my eyes, there’s just one thing I need to do first, and that thing must happen … in England. And might take a year or two, who knows. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, everything seems to have a very relaxed pace in eighteenth-century Europe.)
Viktor gathers up Clerval, whose life plans always seem to conveniently map onto Viktor’s whims, and a long travel montage ensues, complete with far more musings on English history than you’d expect from a Swiss character. Did you know that the city of Oxford was the last remaining stronghold of Charles II when the rest of the country had defected to Cromwell? Apparently, Dr Frankenstein knew this. And now, so do I.
Viktor and Clerval arrive in England, and are invited by a mutual friend to visit Scotland. Here, in rural Scotland, Viktor finds himself a suitably-isolated island (and the right amount of corpses) and gets to work.
He is sitting in his laboratory one evening, thinking about his work, when a strange and novel thought occurs to him: what if the monster and its new girlfriend breed? Might not this new race of horrible beings become an enduring blight on humanity? Might not Frankenstein’s own legacy thereby be tarnished?
My literal very first thought when he originally agreed to whip up a feminine counterpart for the monster was: make sure she doesn’t have a functioning womb, obviously. Yet somehow Dr Viktor Frankenstein, the pride of Ingolstadt University’s science department, doesn’t think of this once in the several months that he spends travelling across Europe and also making a human body. Nerves, I guess.
At this precise moment in the narrative, the monster decides to drop by and see how his lady love is coming along. Viktor, consumed by a fit of vicious defiance, decides there is no way he’s creating another one of these things, agreement be damned. He tears the partly-assembled female to shreds while vindictively staring the monster right in the eye. The creature threatens to repay this perfidy, and retreats. Viktor decides to go for a little boat ride to calm down.
He falls asleep on the boat, and is somehow carried across the sea to Ireland. The townsfolk receive him with hostility, and Viktor doesn’t understand why. It turns out that last night some witnesses found a corpse by the shore, and noticed a suspicious figure in a boat rowing away from the scene. Viktor is an unknown traveller, and also in a boat; thus, conclude the villagers, he is probably the killer.
The corpse turns out to be Henry Clerval, Frankenstein’s bestie, and Viktor spends a while freaking out in prison until the magistrate tracks down witnesses from that little Scottish island who furnish him with an alibi. How the monster managed to plant Clerval’s corpse near a specific village in Ireland and then arrange for Viktor’s boat to be blown by a storm over the waves to that particular village is never explained. Onwards.
Viktor returns home to Switzerland, and weds his adopted sister. He goes everywhere now with pistols and a dagger. On the night of their union he is particularly on-guard. “I will be with you on your wedding night,” had been the very last thing which the creature had told him. Viktor takes this to mean that the creature would kill him on his wedding night, and it never even crosses his mind that the intended target might be his beloved. He makes sure to put his new wife to bed early so as to spare her delicate sensibilities the burden of having to see his imminent brutal fight with the monster. As he is uselessly pacing the hallways of their honeymoon villa, he hears a shriek from the bedroom. It’s exactly what you think.
After this tragedy, Frankenstein’s father wastes away and dies. Viktor visits the cemetery and makes an oath not to rest until either he or the monster is dead. The monster emerges from the gloom, overjoyed to hear this vow, and thus begins the final act: an absurd game of cat and mouse where the fiend continually flees before the furious form of Frankenstein, taunting him all the while with the vain prospect of vengeance. Remember: we’ve established earlier that the monster moves at superhuman speed. It is also largely immune to the elements, and can subsist on very little food. Thus, the whole game is basically a way for the creature to torture the doctor to death. The monster deliberately chooses rough and punishing terrain, so the whole exercise will suck more for the doctor. He even leaves clues as to which way he’s travelling to forestall the possibility of Frankenstein losing the trail and giving up. Eventually, as they are chasing each other through the wastelands of northern Russia, Frankenstein is cast adrift on a loose piece of ice, and rescued by a passing ship.
Dr Frankenstein tells his whole sad tale to the Englishman captaining the vessel. This Englishman conveys the tale in letters to his sister back in England, and these letters to the sister constitute Mary Shelley’s frame narrative for telling us the story. After Viktor dies, the Englishman witnesses the monster enter the cabin containing the body and speak some final words to Frankenstein’s lifeless form. The creature then promises to make his way to the north pole, and there burn himself alive, so that his corpse “may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create another such as I have been”. Basically, the exact opposite of leaving his body to science.
The monster leaps out of the cabin window, and floats away on an ice raft. The end.
Now for everyone’s favourite game: What Is This Book’s Relevance To The Modern Rationalist Reader? It’s a bit of a stretch here, but we’ll try.
One of the questions explored throughout the book is to what extent Dr Frankenstein is culpable for the monster’s crimes. There are times when Viktor explicitly proclaims himself innocent, but at other moments his heart clearly seems heavier for the weight of bringing to life such a being.
I guess there’s an analogy to modern AI research here. The scientist at the very forefront of human knowledge, consumed by the possibility of creating something entirely new, might not even consider whether or not he should create it.
This actually feels … really on point. I am not a scientist at the cutting edge of anything, but I can relate to the sense of having a burst of inspiration which so captivates me that it manages to almost entirely cloud out any considerations of “ought”. I guess the lesson is: don’t rely on the people who are developing AI to take care of their own AI safety research.
Meditations on Moloch illuminated the possibility of AI researchers pushing recklessly ahead so as to avoid losing the machine-learning race to China, or to the tech company next door. Now we have another consideration, grounded in the sort of psychological observation that classic literature excels at: when someone is on the verge of a breakthrough, the pull of the breakthrough itself can be so strong as to overpower any prudent caution.
V.
Who is Monster, Really
Brushing up against Frankenstein in the cultural milieu had given me the sense that the big lesson of the book was that Humans Are The Real Monsters. Having read the book, I can tell you quite firmly, in fact, that Monster Is The Real Monster. Yes, people are mean to this young earnest monstrosity, bless his heart. But there’s a moment in the book where the creature – who has just spent months studying world history, contemplating the nature of Goodness, and spying on some really decent folk – just straight-up kills a young boy. It’s a little bit unclear whether he strangles the boy by accident; and the monster might be somewhat tilted because the lad mentions being related to Frankenstein Sr (Viktor’s father) … but, after the murder, the monster frames a random sleeping woman for the crime. The monster knows she will be executed for the crime. He does it on purpose.
I thus conclude, ladies and gentlemen of the jury: Monster is Monster.
Here’s something I definitely didn’t expect to be the big lesson of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:
Monster is Incel.
It’s not just that the plot arc goes: monster seeks love > monster fails to find love > monster wreaks havoc. It gets really, really specific.
Let’s read the end of the monster’s monologue to Dr Frankenstein in the alpine hut, picking up just after the killing of the young boy:
“As I fixed my eyes on the child, I saw something glittering on his breast. I took it; it was a portrait of a most lovely woman. In spite of my malignity, it softened and attracted me. For a few moments I gazed with delight on her dark eyes, fringed by deep lashes, and her lovely lips; but presently my rage returned; I remembered that I was for ever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures could bestow and that she whose resemblance I contemplated would, in regarding me, have changed that air of divine benignity to one expressive of disgust and affright.
“Can you wonder that such thoughts transported me with rage? I only wonder that at that moment, instead of venting my sensations in exclamations and agony, I did not rush among mankind and perish in the attempt to destroy them.
“While I was overcome by these feelings, I left the spot where I had committed the murder, and seeking a more secluded hiding-place, I entered a barn which had appeared to me to be empty. A woman was sleeping on some straw; she was young, not indeed so beautiful as her whose portrait I held, but of an agreeable aspect and blooming in the loveliness of youth and health. Here, I thought, is one of those whose joy-imparting smiles are bestowed on all but me. And then I bent over her and whispered, ‘Awake, fairest, thy lover is near—he who would give his life but to obtain one look of affection from thine eyes; my beloved, awake!’
“The sleeper stirred; a thrill of terror ran through me. Should she indeed awake, and see me, and curse me, and denounce the murderer? Thus would she assuredly act if her darkened eyes opened and she beheld me. The thought was madness; it stirred the fiend within me—not I, but she, shall suffer; the murder I have committed because I am for ever robbed of all that she could give me, she shall atone. The crime had its source in her; be hers the punishment! Thanks to the lessons of Felix and the sanguinary laws of man, I had learned now to work mischief. I bent over her and placed the portrait securely in one of the folds of her dress. She moved again, and I fled.
“For some days I haunted the spot where these scenes had taken place, sometimes wishing to see you, sometimes resolved to quit the world and its miseries for ever. At length I wandered towards these mountains, and have ranged through their immense recesses, consumed by a burning passion which you alone can gratify. We may not part until you have promised to comply with my requisition. I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create.”
The language, the tone, even the convoluted reasoning: they sound just like the manifestos of modern incel killers. My intention was to pore over some such manifestos and precisely match up quotes, but I decided against it. I would really rather not read that sort of thing if I can avoid it. The proof is elementary, and left as an exercise for the reader.
There are a couple of parallels that I can sustain without any further research. First, the idea that all women bear guilt because the monster cannot find love. “The crime had its source in her; be hers the punishment!” With that line, he frames an innocent woman for his murder of a child. As easily could one see the line uttered by a man loading an assault rifle, or driving his car into a crowd.
Here’s a grotesque exercise to drive home the same point – imagine the following line from the above passage being spoken into a camera and uploaded to the web shortly before a school shooting: “not I, but she, shall suffer; the murder I have committed because I am for ever robbed of all that she could give me, she shall atone.”
You needn’t change a single damned word.
The other parallel seems minor, but is so uncanny that it bears mentioning. During the long period where the monster is hiding in the villagers’ cottage and spying on them, he notices that one will often spend most of a day in the forest, chopping firewood. The monster then takes to spending his own nights chopping firewood, and leaving it piled up on the door of the cottage for the villagers to find.
On the day he tries to win the fellowship of these villagers, he speaks first alone with the blind patriarch of the family. He asks in an abstract way for the help of the blind man in winning over “some friends”, and in the course of explaining the situation the monster says:
“I tenderly love these friends; I have, unknown to them, been for many months in the habits of daily kindness towards them; but they believe that I wish to injure them, and it is that prejudice which I wish to overcome.”
The creature stops short of claiming just deserts; he doesn’t say “I helped them a lot, and now they owe me”. But in the context of all the other vivid incel-killer language, the mind of the modern reader readily supplies the rest of the implicit dark syllogism.
Perhaps it’s profane to demand practical advice from a hallowed work of fiction. But, having noticed the incel motif, I got to wondering if Shelley had left us any wisdom on how to approach the issue in our own day, when weaponry has moved so terrifyingly beyond Frankenstein’s “pistols and a dagger.”
I gleaned from the tale no specific steps we might take. But Frankenstein has advanced my thinking on the matter in at least one dramatic way. Not because of any particular thing that Shelley writes, but merely because she so accurately describes the phenomenon in 1818. No patience more have I for those who blame porn or video games or fourth-wave feminism or the alienation inherent in late-capitalist society. These may have inflamed the wound, caused it to fester. But the root of the syndrome precedes them all.
He who dreams the incel killer a merely modern menace must awaken to the ancient corpse grinning at his bedside.