Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: A Novel on Obsession

Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein deals with obsession on many levels. Critics and scholars have been obsessed with the novel since its publication. Early criticism responded positively to the tale but unfavorably to Mary Shelley. The English literati disdained female writers and their subject matter, which helped lead Jane Austen to pen her impassioned defense of novels in Northanger Abbey. The critical work on Frankenstein includes queer readings, ecocritical readings, and postcolonial readings. In the last thirty years or so the criticism on Frankenstein has come full circle. Initially, the fact that a woman wrote Frankenstein was a hindrance for it, but more recently, Shelley's authorship has been considered one of the novel's strengths.

A trend that one can see develop in novels in the Regency period is a movement toward psychological realism. Shelley uses Walton's letters to reveal that his obsession with the secrets of magnetism developed from reading travel narratives as a boy. Similarly, Victor Frankenstein's obsession with discovering the secret of life stems from his reading of pseudo-scientific and occult books in his youth. Walton puts his own life and the lives of his ship's crew in order to discover the secrets of magnetism. Walton's father, on his death bed, forbade Walton from ever going on his own explorations, but his father's death grants him greater liberty to pursue his obsession. The one source of comfort to Walton as his ship sits stranded in the ice are the letters he writes to his sister. The bond of family has the ability to comfort. The neglect of family has serious negative consequences.

Victor realizes his dream when he gives his creature life, but his creation's misery becomes the source of his own as the creature picks off Victor's family and friends. As Victor labors furiously to bring his creation to life, he neglects his family. They have to send one of Victor's boyhood friends to check up on him. His rejection of his own "son," the creature, leads to the greatest misery in his life. Victor grants the desire of his pitiful creature for a mate, but changes his mind near the last minute and destroys the unanimated body. The creature at that moment becomes the monster as he vows to make Victor feel the same misery he feels.

I hesitate to call Frankenstein's creature a monster because he comes across as somewhat enlightened. He's a vegetarian. He doesn't drink alcohol. He helps out the family living in the shack. Except for murdering people, he's a pretty sympathetic character. He has no real defect of character. People have a visceral reaction upon seeing him. They don't really think about it, they either attack him or run from him. Perhaps it's his own reading that gets him in trouble as well. As the creature reads Paradise Lost, he identifies with Satan more than Adam, so he imagines himself molded after Satan. Victor's rejection of the creature plays into the creature's reading of Paradise Lost and the creature's identity.

The range of possible interpretations makes summing up the moral of Frankenstein difficult. Is reading unsupervised as dangerous as letting your kids play Grand Theft Auto 4? Literacy has a double edge in Shelley's tale. The embeding of the creature's own creation, his tale, within Victor and Walton's tales makes him at least textually close to two other human beings. At the same time, Shelley points to reading as the source of her characters' obsessions. The depth of Shelley's apparently simple narrative will continue to obsess readers for years to come.