in the light of my own vampire - Frankenstein as doppelganger novel

Shelley’s lack of narrative sophistication drove me crazy, as it always has.  I mean the times when Shelley loses control of her three-level narrative frame, when she forgets Victor Frankenstein is not English (II, 6), or inserts pointless digressions, like the digression on farming (I, 5, “A farmer’s is a very healthy happy life,” etc.), or travelogues, like the idyll in Oxford (II, 5, “The colleges are ancient and picturesque; the streets are almost magnificent,” blah blah blah).

But who is in charge here, Shelley or me?  I’m the reader; I’m in charge.  It took some work, but I found the novel I enjoyed more.  It’s Frankenstein as a doppelganger story, the cousin of what E. T. A. Hoffmann had recently written in The Devil’s Elixir (1815-6) and other stories.

Victor is insane and a) there is no monster, or no monster besides himself, or else b) the monster he creates is somehow a version of himself.  He has imprinted his brain patterns on it, or split his personality, or something like that.  Like when the Hulk and Bruce Banner are split apart.  Like in the Buffy episode where Xander is separated into Strong Xander and Weak Xander.  The Victor who narrates is the weak version of himself.  This explains why when his experiment succeeds he immediately freaks out and abandons his poor monster, who could use some guidance and training at that point.  They need to practice their act (that’s a video link).

Here is the first place I noticed Victor stating this idea directly.  His younger brother has just been murdered by the monster – by some monster:

I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed with the will and power to effect such purposes of horror, such as the deed which he had now done, nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose form the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me.  (I, 6)

Victor becomes more openly insane as the novel progresses:

All pleasures of earth and sky passed before me like a dream, and that thought only had to me the reality of life.  Can you wonder, that sometimes a kind of insanity possessed me, or that I saw continually about me a multitude of filthy animals inflicting on me incessant torture, that often extorted screams and bitter groans?  (II, 6)

The cemetery scene near the novel’s end, which is also the beginning of the final chase, (II, 12) is pure Hoffmann.

I was answered through the stillness of night by a loud and fiendish laugh.  It rung on my ears long and heavily; the mountains re-echoed it, and I felt as if all hell surrounded me with mockery and laughter.

Perhaps Victor did build a corpse-monster, but is that what he is pursuing now?  The novel turns into a fantasia of motion, a blur of geography and dream.

At the end, as Shelley shifts back to the basic frame, both Victor and the monster, a few pages apart, compare themselves to Milton’s Satan.  Victor hoped to be God, but “’like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in eternal hell.’”  The monster merely hoped to be Adam:

“I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and majesty of goodness.  But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.”

The novel I read is even farther from the novel James Whale filmed, but it solves, or eludes, the problems with the narration.  It is not quite as funny as the more literal Frankenstein.

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.

Best Books of the Year - 1818

1818 was one of the greatest literary years of the 19th century. It saw the publication of two Jane Austen novels, Persuasion and, sadly, Northanger Abbey (sad, of course, because it was only published as a result of Austen's death). Walter Scott published The Heart of Midlothian, one of his best books. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, a novel so rich in ideas that I forgive its infelicities. Finally, Thomas Love Peacock wrote Nightmare Abbey, which is not what it sounds like.

Meanwhile, Byron, Keats, and P. Shelley were all in peak form. Byron published the Venetian adultery comedy Beppo, not a favorite of mine but enjoyable for its light touch. Keats published the long, mythical Endymion, very far from a favorite. For P. Shelley, it was a highly productive year, but for most of us only one poem will really matter: "Ozymandias."

It's funny how central Percy Shelley is here. Besides his wife's book, Byron and Keats and Peacock were close friends, and Shelley is even the central character of Nightmare Abbey, a tiny little novel-like thing that should be read more:

"When Scythrop [that's Shelley] grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head: having finished his education to the high satisfaction of the master and fellows of his college, who had, in testimony of their approbation, presented him with a silver fish-slice, on which his name figured at the head of a laudatory inscription in some semi-barbarous dialect of Anglo-Saxonized Latin." (Ch. 1)

So that's five novels with some life today. Two (Persuasion and Frankenstein) are among the best of the century. Two, by coincidence, are Gothic parodies with "Abbey" in the title; one of these is sadly neglected. And major work by three great poets. This did not happen most years. Note that if magazines back then published "Best Books of the Year" lists, the only one I'm sure would make the lists is Walter Scott's.

This has all been awfully British. What else was going on? In America and pre-Romantic France I will go ahead and say, confidently, nothing. In the German principalities, there was quite a lot, although Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann seem to be between books this year. Either one may have been, and probably was, publishing in journals. Giacomo Leopardi was writing his Cantos and essays at this time, I am sure, but I have never sorted out his confusing chronology.

Still, there aren't that many years in the 19th century which contain five still-read novels from all of Europe, so I don't fell too bad about ending my researches here.

Nevertheless, I put an engraving of Francisco Goya's 1818 The Giant up top, just to make the year a little less British.

The Watched Plot, Continued - Reader, I m****ed h*m

Although I have not read Jane Eyre, I know, through cultural osmosis, I guess, the entire story, including the last line* and the genuine “the ghost is actually a man in drag”-style plot twist. I know more about it than about any other major novel I haven’t read, except, possibly, David Copperfield (from a stage version at the Steppenwolf in Chicago) and Les Miserables (from the Jean-Paul Belmondo movie, the one set during World War II).

Has Jane Eyre’s pleasure been spoiled for me – no, I reject spoiled, I know that - say, blemished, or even appreciably diminished? Does it matter? I have strong, strong doubts. Surely Charlotte Brontë is a good enough writer to direct my response to where she wants it. I want to note that Jane Eyre’s plot twist is the actual title** of one of the most read and assigned books of feminist criticism, so I cannot be entirely alone here.

Dorothy W left a comment yesterday pointing out that there's an entire class of novels that have been so fully absorbed into the culture that a clean first reading is almost impossible: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, The War of the Worlds, A Christmas Carol. Almost any famous fairy tale. Frankenstein has to be just about the worst, or best, case. How many first-time readers miss the actual story on the page in front of them while looking around for Igor and the pitchfork-wielding peasants and "Puttin' on the Ritz"?

Another example. The Hudson Review published, last fall, two first-rate excerpts from the Pevear and Volokhonsky War and Peace. One scene, one of the novel's half dozen greatest, involved the death of a major character. The assumption is that the magnificent details of Tolstoy's art override any objections. Still, they could have chosen a different scene.

I didn’t mind revealing that Little Nell dies at the end of The Old Curiosity Shop. For one thing, Oscar Wilde’s comment on her death may at this point be more famous than the novel itself. (A typical response to Wilde is probably "Wait, which novel has Little Nell?" Or "Who is Little Nell?").

Second, Nell’s death is not really what one would call a plot twist. Any attentive reader can see it coming from at least the halfway point of the book. Dickens in fact received a steady flow of letters begging him to let Nell live. These were not necessarily the most sophisticated readers, and they understood the foreshadowing easily enough.

Third, I don’t expect many of my readers to actually read the thing themselves, and those who do either aren’t reading for the story, which is not in and of itself worth the trouble. More on that tomorrow, maybe.

And here’s the thing – I was affected by Nell’s death anyway, in spite of everything. Almost physically affected, with a little emotional jolt. The final scene is a materpiece of pace and tension. Our taste for the sentimental may not be what it once was, but Dickens knew what he was doing. I know I won't have the same response on a second reading - I'll be poking around to see how he did it - but it was not the "what" that was important. It was the "how".

Who killed Roger Ackroyd? Who cares? That's another one I haven't read yet somehow know the twist. Still, I promise, I won't tell you. Unless I have a really good reason.

* Update: first line of last chapter, not last line. My excuse: "Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance." Thanks to Imani.

** No, the title isn't Jane Eyre's Plot Twist. It's the plot twist of Jane Eyre. No, not The Plot Twist of Jane Eyre. Look, I'm trying not to give it away.