Thursday, June 16, 2016

A more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined - Mary Shelley educates her monster

Today is the 200th anniversary of not the publication (1818) but the conception by the 18 year-old Mary Godwin of Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus.  Godwin, her lunatic sister, her deranged boyfriend, the most famous poet in Europe (also mad), and some non-entities were celebrating the holiday by reading their favorite passages of Ulysses to each other; creative types, they decided to come up with their own Greek-mythology derived episodes, two of which were published and are read to this day, even though Polidori’s Vampyre is terrible and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is also often terrible.

And at other times it is not.  It has a perfect last line, for example.

It is so rich with ideas.  Many books of the type – Dracula, for example – contain a concept so rich that it generates variations and retellings almost spontaneously, and Frankenstein has that kind of strength.  But it also is full of ideas as such, the product, I assume, of Shelley’s extraordinary education.  She would have been not just unusually well read, but would have read unusual things, and had the gifts to strap it all together.

Shelley had been reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau, certainly.  Frankenstein was created in Geneva, Rousseau’s birthplace; the novel of the name is full of Rousseau.  Sometimes Shelley is imitating Rousseau, as in the tedious early family scenes, which could be from Julie, or the New Heloise (1761).  The novice novelist needed a model, so she picked one of the four greatest novels ever written, as is only natural.

More fun is the argument or play with Émile, or On Education (1762) and other educational theories.  Victor Frankenstein, out of a weakness of character, builds and animates a corpse-monster only to immediately abandon it on aesthetic grounds.  The creature is thus responsible for its own education.  My favorite part of the novel has always been the Education of the Monster, the exact center of the novel, as the monster, with the help of some eavesdropping, teaches himself everything – language, philosophy, history, literature, social sciences, etc.  He is Rousseau’s ultimate and ideal experiential learner.

“These wonderful narrations [from world history] inspired me with strange feelings.  Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?  He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle, and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike.  (Vol. II, Ch. 1)

When he finally acquires some books of his own, they are “Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter,” which he reads again and again.

“But I thought Werter himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no pretension [!], but it sunk deep.  The disquisitions upon death and suicide were calculated to fill me with wonder.”  (II, 3)

The one thing the monster apparently does not learn is how to understand literary irony.  This sincere misreading of Goethe is going to cause problems later.  The use of Paradise Lost is a more ingenious and more necessary to the novel (is the monster more like Adam, or Satan?) but the self-pitying Werther monster makes me laugh more.

Dolce Bellezza put up a Frankenstein post earlier today, as did Nonsuch Frances, and she has more to come.  I will have one more, too, where I pretend that Frankenstein is the E. T. A. Hoffmann story that it could have been, and almost is.

18 comments:

  1. Let's see; what could be more fun than quoting favorite passages of Ulysses when sitting with friends on a dreary summer night? Maybe if the monster was sitting with them, sharing his insights as well? He seemed awfully erudite at times for someone with no formal education. How about when he was observing the family in the cottage and just taught himself another language so he could communicate with them? I bet he'd be able to quote James Joyce verbatim with the intellect Shelley endowed upon him.

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  2. He learns awfully fast, doesn't he? Learns to read and jumps straight to Milton. Milton in French translation, I guess.

    I had completely forgotten, because it is preposterous and therefore hard to remember, the whole business about the Turkish princess and how important he is to the monster's education. Like the poor monster has stumbled into another novel.

    Frankenstein is a great classical of pedagogical literature.

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  3. You'd think I'd have thought of that myself, being a teacher as I am, yet I was too absorbed in discovering that Frankenstein was himself a monster.

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  4. Well, you do not have my preoccupation with the strange genre of the novel of educational theory.

    I'll note that Rousseau, in Confessions, describes how he and his partner left each of their babies - as many as five, perhaps - at an orphanage.

    Victor as monster, and the monster as monster - that's what I hope to write about today.

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    1. THAT is what the whole novel is about to me. (Monster to monster theme.)

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    2. When I read it three years ago, I thought it was about man as monster, and God as monster.

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    3. I can never see God as monster for to me that implies He is evil, but there certainly was a lot of animosity expressed toward the idea of Creator.

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  5. Victor aspires to Godhood, but discovers that he is Satan; the monster only wants to be Adam, but instead becomes Satan. Relevant quotes in new post.

    God, when he sculpted Adam, was made of tougher stuff than Victor. He did not shriek "How hideous" and swoon.

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    1. Or, in my opinion, reject what He created.

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    2. So failed gods or variations on the divine (as Satan is a failed arm of divinity). But being false gods, having presumed to have powers not theirs, they cannot deal with the fallout of their presumptuousness. They lack the ability to even fail stylishly.

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    3. Yes, exactly. Satan aspires to Godhood and in the process discovers that he is Satan - an all-too-human story.

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  6. When the God of the Hebrew Bible rejects something, he does it with vigor. Flaming swords and cataclysms and so on.

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  7. In the Greek story (which I'm sure Mary also had in mind), Prometheus rebels against Zeus by creating man. So, one god creates man, and another god rejects man. Polytheism gives you more characters to work with.

    Percy's "Prometheus Unbound," a couple of years later (I just read it; it's wild!), explicitly conflates Prometheus with Satan (rebelled against authority) and Jesus (suffered for humanity. He seemed to think that was the ideal combination.

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  8. Yes, exactly. I have neglected the Aeschylean side of the symbolism.

    I am not an especially good reader of Percy, but yeah, "Prometheus Unbound" is something else.

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  9. I'm not sure if I'm a good reader of Percy. I think sometimes Percy wasn't a good writer of Percy either. I find I sometimes enjoy him more if I read his works as improvisations. Go, man, go!

    Incidentally, Mary listed what she and Percy were reading every year (in the notes to his poems). In 1816, they were indeed reading Aeschylus, Rousseau, and Milton, among others.

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  10. A proto-beat, there is definitely a dose of that in Percy.

    Why doesn't my edition of Shelley's poems have those almost too interesting notes?

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  11. They're in the Oxford edition. But here they are online, for your convenience. The notes on what the little lovebirds were reading are in the notes for the shorter poems, arranged by year: http://www.fullbooks.com/Notes-to-The-Complete-Poetical-Works-of.html

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