Notes on "Frankenstein", 2

To the left, classic monsters....



... and to the right, 21st Century Pixar monsters.




- Walton is very ambitious - he wants to be a great poet in a year, and a great discoverer - he cares more for the greatness than the value of the achievement.

- p36: Shelley calls Frankenstein an "artist" while we'd call him a "scientist" - he wants to be a genius, which can be artistic or scientific. She is analyzing the desires she sees in her own husband, Lord Byron, etc. - they have ambitions that can be dangerous. Victor is the stand-in for the artist, and she'll point out what's wrong with that attitude.

- Why is someone driven to these things? What do they get out of it? What are the consequences? Everyone is consumed with finding a purpose in their life. The notion that one lives for nothing, exists for nothing, is so depressing and discouraging that everyone makes huge efforts to prove their lives have meaning and value. To have no usefulness is to drift in a busy world - it's lonely, and it turns the difference between birth and death into a moot debate. When someone is driven to the kinds of challenges Victor and Walton put themselves to, it is because they see and have learned a lot about existence, and now need a reason to continue existing themselves. Accomplishments are reassurance that you have a place in the world. The consequences, of course, are that one can fail in this ambition as well as succeed.

- The novel analyzes Victor, but in 1831 edition is even more critical, according to the Professor: it shows Victor saying, "I was fated". He lets himself off the hook, not Shelley - part of his problem may be his belief in Fate. FATE EXONERATES YOURSELF - a self-exoneration. In this way, Shelley is still critiquing the Romantic poets, people like her husband.

- How is he being too easy on himself? "I was fated" - word choice makes a difference.

- Victor's childhood: full of people and love and education - it was a wonderful childhood. He sees himself as a creature formed by his parents.

- Alchemy - changing a substance into gold.

- Great Men and men who want to be Great Men; alchemists wanted to be Great.

p29 - Waldman talks about the Great Men, and how modern scientists can, in fact, become Great. p31 - creation of the monster. What is Victor like in creating the monster? RABID.

• Crazed: "I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health."
• G-d-complex: "a new species would bless me as its creator and source" (p34)
• Fated/Doomed: he blames fate for his attraction to a project he knows, on some level, is repugnant. "Every night I was possessed by a slow fever..."
• Let the project take over his life
• His belief and self-confidence boosted by his first success
• Compulsion
• Wants to be worshiped

- By giving you get - real birth

- Victor is immersed in his ego, by and for his ego - exactly what is wrong for artistic creation. Creating art has to come from beneath the ego, from a deeper, more soulful, more androgynous place.

- He's not thinking about whether he should, but whether he can - which is incredibly self-centered and egotistical.

- Speed meant the monster was built in huge proportions - the doctor chose concern of self over his work; he did not think about the quality of life for his creation, only on getting it done as quickly as possible.