Reviews by Joe Petrulionis Back Arrow for Previous Page or Joe’s Home Page
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4. Classic Pieces B. New Editions
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Edited with an Introduction by M. K. Joseph. Oxford
University Press. 1969 (Reissued in the Oxford World Classics paperback, 1998).
Amazing
Competence of the Monster: Liberals Encounter Revolutionaries (or
Liberals and Counter-Revolutionaries).
By
Joe Petrulionis
Helpful
front matter includes Joseph’s context-packed introduction, Textual Notes,
Bibliography, and a “Chronology of Mary Shelley.” Ok, so back to the story line!
Friedrich
Nietzsche recalls Napoleon Bonaparte’s exclamation, “Voila un home!” after the Emperor’s first meeting with Johan
Wolfgang von Goethe (in Beyond Good and Evil). In his early forties during the French
Revolution, Goethe had been groomed to the literary fashion of the rational,
repressed, and scientific Enlightenment. Yet it may be easier to classify
Goethe with a later generation, the sensitive, dark, and emotional Romantic
Movement. Writing in the 1880’s, Nietzsche situated Goethe as a proxy for a
rising “spirit of Germany.” The ultimate imperialist, Napoleon, had come face
to face with this spirit and was impressed to find a man where he “expected
only a German.”
But
during the earliest decades of the century, the romantics still considered
Bonaparte to be a defender of the revolution. A corollary moment was frozen in
time by Mary Shelley. When the liberals of the enlightenment looked into the
face of the radical revolutionary, presumably a monster of their own creation,
their response was horror. More important to the point, when a romantic
novelist observed this interaction between liberal and radical, what did she
perceive? Mary Shelley watched this encounter seeing a frightened and
untrustworthy element, the enlightened liberal, who underestimated the value
and humanity of his own creation. Shelley accuses these liberals of abandoning
the revolution at its most vulnerable stage. If the enlightened liberals did
not deserve retribution, they would receive it nonetheless.
Social
revolution, one foreseeable outcome of Enlightenment ideas projected onto the
surface of aristocratic hegemony, might be blamed by the threatened for chaos,
suffering, and mob rule. Yet there is much evidence suggesting Mary Shelley
romanticized the revolutionary hero, and damned the enlightened liberals as a
class of timid and wavering reactionaries.
First, there are contextual clues. Mary Goodwin Shelley, the daughter of
the radical anarchist writer William Goodwin, was herself no moderate.
Biographical details of her travels, associations and the causes to which she
clung indicate very radical leanings. Perhaps more compelling than this kind of
external evidence, the narrative structure of Frankenstein suggests that Shelley offers Victor Frankenstein as an
unreliable eye witness, himself implicated in the tragic consequences he
attributes to the monster.
Initially,
the story of the “monster” is told by Dr. Victor Frankenstein. And Victor’s
narrative is, in turn, relayed by an Englishman, Robert Walton. During the
enlightenment, an eyewitness account by a Doctor of Natural Philosophy endorsed
by an educated Englishman was formidable surety. Yet, a comparison of Victor’s
description of the unnamed “monster” with the creature’s own account provides
more textual clues to Shelley’s attack on European liberalism. Readers could
rightly expect to encounter an awkward, dull-witted, and withdrawn monster. We
are, after all, tricked into this expectation. Shelley provides the first view
of the living creature as it was seen through its creator’s eyes. Frankenstein
recalls that as he awoke from a nightmare:
“I beheld the wretch—the
miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and
his eyes, if eyes they may be called
were
fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a
grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not
hear;
one hand was stretched out seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed
down the stairs” (58)
A reader might reasonably
expect to encounter a character from the early films which were influenced by
the book, a monster of the “OH GOD IT LIVES” variety. Yet in Frankenstein, when the unnamed “monster”
finally steps up to the podium of first person narration in chapter XI, an
abrupt reconsideration is demanded.
“It is with considerable difficulty
that I remember the original era of my being: all the events of that period
appear confused and indistinct. A
strange
multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the
same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to
distinguish
between the operation of my various senses.”
Within two sentences, the
“Monster” has become a someone; “Voila un
home!” This sentient being expresses his individual and singular
experience, the agony and confusion of achieving consciousness in a world of
heat, cold, hunger, thirst, and loneliness. Missing only the sense of taste (a
possible pun on the tasteful attitudes of the liberal classes toward the
revolting workers) the “creature” emerges into the world already fully grown
and alone. The monster’s account provides ample evidence of a deeply feeling,
eloquent, and sensitive human being. And Frankenstein’s broken promise to
provide the “creature” with companionship incited the murderous rampages. Dare
we use the descriptors “Heroic” and “Romantic?”
Despite what a reader may learn from Victor Frankenstein’s
narrative, the “monster” has become competent, articulate, and sensitive. And by comparing this superhuman competence
to the timid and unreliable Victor Frankenstein, we can gain an important
insight into the attitudes Mary Shelley may have held toward both the
reactionary liberal and the emerging revolutionary.
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