Frankenstein

Few creatures of horror have seized readers’ imaginations and held them for so long as the anguished monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The story of Victor Frankenstein’s terrible creation and the havoc it caused has enthralled generations of readers and inspired countless writers of horror and suspense. Considering the novel’s enduring success, it is remarkable that it began merely as a whim of Lord Byron’s.

"We will each write a story," Byron announced to his next-door neighbors, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley. The friends were summering on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland in 1816, Shelley still unknown as a poet and Byron writing the third canto of Childe Harold. When continued rains kept them confined indoors, all agreed to Byron’s proposal.

The illustrious poets failed to complete their ghost stories, but Mary Shelley rose supremely to the challenge. With Frankenstein, she succeeded admirably in the task she set for herself: to create a story that, in her own words, "would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror -- one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart."

Mary Shelley

Frankenstein

or the modern Prometheus (1831 edition)

ePub r1.0

Titivillus 07.12.16

Título original: Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus

Mary Shelley, 1818

Diseño de cubierta: Titivillus

Editor digital: Titivillus

ePub base r1.2

Note

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, by her own account, was “the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity,” Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Although her mother died eleven days after her birth, Mary was profoundly influenced by Wollstonecraft’s reputation and writings. Godwin, who encouraged his daughter’s intellectual development, was an emotionally distant parent, and Mary’s own reminiscences of her childhood acknowledge an “excessive and romantic attachment” to her father, perhaps born out of his neglect.

At the age of 16, Mary eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was married at the time to Harriet Westbrook. In December 1816—following the suicide of Shelley’s first wife earlier that month—the two were married. Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein, her first and arguably best work of fiction, earlier that same year, when she was not yet nineteen years old.

Though in some ways an immature work, the novel has a complexity that attests to the author’s talent. The plot itself centers on the theme of the overreacher, as the novel’s subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus,” implies. Both Captain Walton, who records Frankenstein’s story, and Frankenstein himself seek to immortalize themselves through their scientific discoveries. But while their ostensible motivation is the good of humanity, the novel serves as a cautionary tale against overweening presumption. Though Victor Frankenstein may be the eponymous hero of the work, it is his creation—“the miserable and the abandoned … abortion”—that compels our attention. Frankenstein’s rejection of the monster and its subsequent search for a sympathetic community reveal Shelley’s concern with the effects of isolation. Despite her age’s romantic idealization of alienation, Shelley’s monster testifies to its destructiveness on an individual and social level. Much more than the horror story embraced by popular culture, then, Mary Shelley’s novel is a forceful social, political and psychological commentary.