Review: Frankenstein

Frankenstein Review – I love Halloween, and often have tried to get in the right mood for it by reading some books with monsters or other scary themes. Among these, always, are Frankenstein and Dracula.

Well, this year, I actually remembered to do it, and started reading both on Halloween night. I had already read Frankenstein years ago, as a college requirement, and loved it back then. Understanding that you can get entirely different readings depending on the time of life that you read it, because things can be entirely different, and thus so can what you pick up in the reading, I decided to go ahead and reread it.

Now, Dracula is another matter. I had tried a couple of times before, and always seem to lose momentum after maybe one hundred pages. Those first hundred are really quite captivating, but then it seems to slow down, and I lose track, admittedly.

Frankenstein, however, never really seems to slow me down. Despite it's age, Frankenstein is a book filled with imagination and contemplation of large issues with huge ramifications. In many respects, it is as relevant now as then, when it was first written. It is far, far more than a book merely about some mindless monster wondering around aimlessly and looking to do people harm. I hope that it hardly needs mentioning that Frankenstein is the name of the mad scientist who creates the creature, and not of the creature itself.

In truth, Frankenstein has so many relevant issues to our modern world. From the potential pitfalls of taking too many liberties with experimenting with nature and life the way that we have always known it, to human blindness to one's own irrationality, then to a lack of ownership towards the situation that people may create, to a world of overpopulation and the increasing scarcity of open space, to simple human warmth and acceptance, of kindness that we all too often show is rather selective to those closest to us, and our unwillingness, collective and individual, to accept, let alone embrace, something or someone entirely different.

My first reading of this book was quite different then this most recent one. First of all, I was in an entirely different place in my life at the time then I am now. I was younger, obviously, and still a college student. I read it during the heat of summer, a very hot and humid summer, way back in 1999. This time, I read it as a full-grown man in his thirties, a father, and during the season when the days are shortening and both the leaves and the temperatures are dropping quickly. Plus, experiences inform you at different times of life, and so the thirty something  year old version read the book entirely differently, and I will even take the liberty of assuming that I picked up on certain elements of the book that I had not been capable of yet while in my twenties. That was well over a decade ago, remember!

Back then, I was amazed at how relevant it seemed, and at a time when I was only beginning to understand the issues concerning overpopulation in the world and how it was transforming modern life, this book seemed to be laden with references to it, with varying degrees of subtlety. Ironically, I am more aware now than ever of the issues regarding overpopulation, and yet, this did not seem to be as prominent in the book as I had remembered it. At least not directly, like the last time I read it (although that may be because of the professor that I had at the time).

Mostly, I was struck this time by the constant examples of blind arrogance by the narrator and main character, Frankenstein himself. He initially thinks up the plan of creating life from nonliving matter, but never asks the one question that should have been foremost on his mind: is that even a good idea? He at one point claims that he collected the best, most beautiful material, and yet, almost immediately after giving his creature life, he is not so much amazed by his own success, as horrified at the horror and ugliness of his creation. So horrified is he, in fact, that he literally runs away, and then mostly stays away until the creature has gone. A classic example of "out of sight, out of mind". What he created will be someone else's problem, but not his.

Later, once the creature has rather impressively fostered his own intelligence and intellectual abilities, he returns to confront his creator/master. But Frankenstein is still too horrified, and only views his own creation as an evil, largely. He never takes full ownership until it is much too late. When the creature specifically threatens that he will be with Frankenstein on his wedding night, even after mentioning that he would never be able to kill Frankenstein himself, still Frankenstein's arrogance and blindness shine through. He breaks into tears at the thought of his poor wife having to go through life alone without him, never recognizing that perhaps it is her that the creature will be targeting, until it is obviously much too late.

This is a story of human arrogance and blindness, and of the unintended consequences that we choose not to see or recognize until it is much too late. Perhaps Mary Shelley herself would be horrified at how her work would later take on a life of it's own, completely separate and hardly bearing any resemblance to her original work, thus proving her own point, ironically. Certainly, in this world the way it is now, Frankenstein seems applicable and relevant as ever, and we could do worse than revisit a classic story that is all too often itself misunderstood.