Previously on: we have been introduced to Victor Frankenstein’s family and adopted notsister (who later turns into his cousin), discovered that everything is all about Victor all the time no matter what, and with a cursitory eye o’erglanced the beginning of his intellectual journey (dude reads books, gets REALLY into a field of study, and then decides it’s all bullshit and he wants to do something else instead, rinse & repeat).
While everything is all about Victor, he himself never actually takes responsibility for any of the things he does; they happen to him, somehow. For example, Chapter 3 begins with the following:
When I had attained the age of seventeen my parents resolved that I should become a student at the university of Ingolstadt. I had hitherto attended the schools of Geneva, but my father thought it necessary for the completion of my education that I should be made acquainted with other customs than those of my native country. My departure was therefore fixed at an early date, but before the day resolved upon could arrive, the first misfortune of my life occurred—an omen, as it were, of my future misery.
He didn’t have a passionate desire to study at Ingolstadt, you see. It was decided by other parties that he should go. The misfortune alluded to is the notsister catching scarlet fever and being nursed by Mrs. F who promptly comes down with it herself and proceeds to die (the notsister pulls through). Before she croaks, Mrs. F gets down to some serious guilt-trip matchmaking:
On her deathbed the fortitude and benignity of this best of women did not desert her. She joined the hands of Elizabeth and myself. “My children,” she said, “my firmest hopes of future happiness were placed on the prospect of your union. This expectation will now be the consolation of your father. Elizabeth, my love, you must supply my place to my younger children. Alas! I regret that I am taken from you; and, happy and beloved as I have been, is it not hard to quit you all? But these are not thoughts befitting me; I will endeavour to resign myself cheerfully to death and will indulge a hope of meeting you in another world.”
Who talks like that on their deathbed? The entire Frankenstein clan exudes drama through their pores in a practically visible concentration. Victor editorializes a little on the subject of grief, coming to the conclusion that eventually it stops being a necessity and starts being an indulgence.
Having successfully begged his dad for an extension on his departure, Victor now finds himself sitting up with bosom friend Henry Clerval the night before he leaves. Clerval had wanted to go to Ingolstadt with Victor, but his dad has other ideas:
He had endeavoured to persuade his father to permit him to accompany me and to become my fellow student, but in vain. His father was a narrow-minded trader and saw idleness and ruin in the aspirations and ambition of his son. Henry deeply felt the misfortune of being debarred from a liberal education. He said little, but when he spoke I read in his kindling eye and in his animated glance a restrained but firm resolve not to be chained to the miserable details of commerce.
They are unable to tear themselves apart, y’all, nor yet to utter the word “Farewell”, except then they do exactly that. Sometimes I don’t know what Victor wants the reader to take away from these little excursions.
The next day everything is aaaaallll about Victor as he ponders his upcoming experiences:
I threw myself into the chaise that was to convey me away and indulged in the most melancholy reflections. I, who had ever been surrounded by amiable companions, continually engaged in endeavouring to bestow mutual pleasure—I was now alone. In the university whither I was going I must form my own friends and be my own protector. My life had hitherto been remarkably secluded and domestic, and this had given me invincible repugnance to new countenances. I loved my brothers, Elizabeth, and Clerval; these were “old familiar faces,” but I believed myself totally unfitted for the company of strangers.
Because he’s special, you see. He is a special boy. I get the anticipation and apprehension – everyone felt like that going away to college – but not the I don’t wanna make new friends bit. Then, as usual, he changes his mind:
Such were my reflections as I commenced my journey; but as I proceeded, my spirits and hopes rose. I ardently desired the acquisition of knowledge. I had often, when at home, thought it hard to remain during my youth cooped up in one place and had longed to enter the world and take my station among other human beings. Now my desires were complied with, and it would, indeed, have been folly to repent.
You see what I mean about the flip-flopping? It’s kind of his signature thing, that and being the center of attention. He eventually gets to Ingolstadt and finds his dorm room, and the next day meets his professors, some of whom have zero patience for his nonsense:
The next morning I delivered my letters of introduction and paid a visit to some of the principal professors. Chance—or rather the evil influence, the Angel of Destruction, which asserted omnipotent sway over me from the moment I turned my reluctant steps from my father’s door—
NO IT DIDN’T, YOU MADE YOUR DECISIONS YOURSELF, QUIT BLAMING ANGELS OF DESTRUCTION FOR YOUR OWN ACTIONS
led me first to M. Krempe, professor of natural philosophy. He was an uncouth man, but deeply imbued in the secrets of his science. He asked me several questions concerning my progress in the different branches of science appertaining to natural philosophy. I replied carelessly, and partly in contempt, mentioned the names of my alchemists as the principal authors I had studied. The professor stared. “Have you,” he said, “really spent your time in studying such nonsense?”
I replied in the affirmative. “Every minute,” continued M. Krempe with warmth, “every instant that you have wasted on those books is utterly and entirely lost. You have burdened your memory with exploded systems and useless names. Good God! In what desert land have you lived, where no one was kind enough to inform you that these fancies which you have so greedily imbibed are a thousand years old and as musty as they are ancient? I little expected, in this enlightened and scientific age, to find a disciple of Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus. My dear sir, you must begin your studies entirely anew.”
BURN. I am willing to believe that up until right now nobody has ever called Victor Frankenstein on his bullshit. Granted it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t have a tutor who could have dissuaded him from pursuing the alchemy thing, but still, having all his ~brilliant studying~ dismissed like that has got to feel kind of tingly. (Here we can see the glint in Mary Shelley’s eye through the words.)
Krempe gives him a syllabus and book list and class schedule and tells him to bugger off, which he does, not butthurt at all:
I returned home not disappointed, for I have said that I had long considered those authors useless whom the professor reprobated; but I returned not at all the more inclined to recur to these studies in any shape. M. Krempe was a little squat man with a gruff voice and a repulsive countenance; the teacher, therefore, did not prepossess me in favour of his pursuits.
See that? He just decided not to go to class because he doesn’t find the professor attractive. I don’t know how things worked at Ingolstadt but in general you can’t exactly just decide you don’t want to go to class if you hope to actually earn a degree. The best reading I can put on this situation is a sort of drop/add period before the semester actually begins, but it’s a stretch.
Having demonstrated his breathtaking powers of Bad Decisions, Victor now editorializes about his own course of study:
As a child I had not been content with the results promised by the modern professors of natural science. With a confusion of ideas only to be accounted for by my extreme youth and my want of a guide on such matters, I had retrod the steps of knowledge along the paths of time and exchanged the discoveries of recent inquirers for the dreams of forgotten alchemists.
But that’s okay, because, y’know, he never really liked the new stuff:
Besides, I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand; but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.
And thus he proves me wrong in a previous chapter, where I called him a born scientist driven by the need to understand how things work. He’s not; he’s driven by the force of ambition, he wants to master all the things and bend them to his will, not figure out what makes them tick. “Chimeras of boundless grandeur” are useless in terms of science, dude, but reality is the opposite of worthless. The visions are annihilated not because scientists want you to have a sad; they are annihilated because they are found to be inaccurate, and every discovery along the way opens up more questions than it answers. That’s not a reduction of the wonders of nature; that’s the beauty of it.
(I am reminded parenthetically of a bit in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency which little me was passionate about hating, because back then I was insistent that I did not wish to be a scientist and that describing the natural world in terms of numbers was a reduction, a lessening, not a beauty. Old me is both impressed at little me’s capacity for priggish determination and embarrassed about having been that vocally wrong about things.)
Anyway, Victor gets around to eventually considering going to a class:
I thought of the information which M. Krempe had given me concerning the lectures. And although I could not consent to go and hear that little conceited fellow deliver sentences out of a pulpit, I recollected what he had said of M. Waldman, whom I had never seen, as he had hitherto been out of town. Partly from curiosity and partly from idleness, I went into the lecturing room, which M. Waldman entered shortly after.
Boy do I wish I’d been able to wander in and out of lecture halls out of curiosity and idleness when I was an undergraduate. We had to, like, show up at a given time and sit down and take notes –
This professor was very unlike his colleague. He appeared about fifty years of age, but with an aspect expressive of the greatest benevolence; a few grey hairs covered his temples, but those at the back of his head were nearly black. His person was short but remarkably erect and his voice the sweetest I had ever heard.
– notes on the topic of the lecture, Victor, not the professor’s personal appearance. Good God, are you really choosing a major based on the hotness of the teacher involved?
Waldman talks a bit about modern chemistry, and then says a thing that – surprise! – changes Victor’s goddamn mind again:
After having made a few preparatory experiments, he concluded with a panegyric upon modern chemistry, the terms of which I shall never forget:
“The ancient teachers of this science,” said he, “promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera but these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places.
Which is not that different from what I said above, but then:
They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”
Which is precisely laser-focused on the mind of Victor Frankenstein, who wants to understand things not to expand his own knowledge but so he can master the natural world and bend it to his will. This dude had the nya-ha-ha laugh factory-installed, people. The OG Mad Scientist.
Predictably, he responds with it’s beyond my control:
Such were the professor’s words—rather let me say such the words of the fate—enounced to destroy me. As he went on I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being; chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein—more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.
because everything is always, always, always all about Victor Frankenstein
He passes a tumultuous, mostly sleepless night and the next day visits Waldman to ask for advice and guidance, and here is an excellent example of good teacher/bad teacher influence on a student’s future career and academic choices. I don’t disagree with Krempe, but the way Waldman phrases his answer is constructive and supportive instead of dismissive.
I gave him pretty nearly the same account of my former pursuits as I had given to his fellow professor. He heard with attention the little narration concerning my studies and smiled at the names of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, but without the contempt that M. Krempe had exhibited. He said that “These were men to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of the foundations of their knowledge. They had left to us, as an easier task, to give new names and arrange in connected classifications the facts which they in a great degree had been the instruments of bringing to light. The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.”
Waldman welcomes him to the chemistry class roster and reminds him he ought to at least pay some attention to the other branches of science as well, to gain a well-rounded scientific knowledge base, and away goes Victor toward his (dreadful, destructive) destiny.
Chapter 4 begins with Victor throwing himself headlong into his studies (and finding out that despite Krempe’s unprepossessing appearance, he’s actually a good teacher, who’d have thunk):
From this day natural philosophy, and particularly chemistry, in the most comprehensive sense of the term, became nearly my sole occupation. I read with ardour those works, so full of genius and discrimination, which modern inquirers have written on these subjects. I attended the lectures and cultivated the acquaintance of the men of science of the university, and I found even in M. Krempe a great deal of sound sense and real information, combined, it is true, with a repulsive physiognomy and manners, but not on that account the less valuable. In M. Waldman I found a true friend. His gentleness was never tinged by dogmatism, and his instructions were given with an air of frankness and good nature that banished every idea of pedantry. In a thousand ways he smoothed for me the path of knowledge and made the most abstruse inquiries clear and facile to my apprehension.
But we can’t possibly stray from Victor and his amazing genius for too long:
As I applied so closely, it may be easily conceived that my progress was rapid. My ardour was indeed the astonishment of the students, and my proficiency that of the masters. Professor Krempe often asked me, with a sly smile, how Cornelius Agrippa went on, whilst M. Waldman expressed the most heartfelt exultation in my progress. Two years passed in this manner, during which I paid no visit to Geneva, but was engaged, heart and soul, in the pursuit of some discoveries which I hoped to make.
He rhapsodizes about how exciting and fulfilling it is to learn and discover, which is 100% true:
None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder. A mind of moderate capacity –
Oh Victor.
– which closely pursues one study must infallibly arrive at great proficiency in that study; and I, who continually sought the attainment of one object of pursuit and was solely wrapped up in this, improved so rapidly that at the end of two years I made some discoveries in the improvement of some chemical instruments, which procured me great esteem and admiration at the university.
Bully for you, but it gets better: after those two years he’s like “I guess I learned all I’m gonna learn from you guys, seeya, gotta bounce” instead of his professors awarding him a degree or anything so plebeian and ordinary.
When I had arrived at this point and had become as well acquainted with the theory and practice of natural philosophy as depended on the lessons of any of the professors at Ingolstadt, my residence there being no longer conducive to my improvements, I thought of returning to my friends and my native town, when an incident happened that protracted my stay.
And at this point we move into the second phase of Victor the Undergraduate: The Question of Life. He never actually describes the single incident that happened or how it protracted his stay; he just starts thinking about life and death and how they work and what their limits are. This paragraph condenses a hell of a lot of things into one smallish chunk of words; it’s not clear how long the timeframe is from start to finish.
Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed? It was a bold question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery; yet with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries. I revolved these circumstances in my mind and determined thenceforth to apply myself more particularly to those branches of natural philosophy which relate to physiology. Unless I had been animated by an almost supernatural enthusiasm, my application to this study would have been irksome and almost intolerable.
This is because he’s studying life by breaking into tombs and charnel-houses and so on in order to observe the process of decay. Because he has such a well-trained and orderly mind (and intestinal fortitude) Victor is unmoved by the horrors of decomposition where a lesser man would have fainted with nausea. This is not a good thing, because it means he somehow does not twig that the project he will shortly embark upon is totally insane.
My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.
Because everything is ~all~ about you, Victor. You you you you. Try and keep up?
Remember, I am not recording the vision of a madman. The sun does not more certainly shine in the heavens than that which I now affirm is true. Some miracle might have produced it, yet the stages of the discovery were distinct and probable. After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.
Rule of thumb: If you have to step out of your own narrative and explain to your audience that you are not a madman, there are very likely to be some significant concerns regarding your scientific process.
He addresses the captain of the good ship Frame Story, who is hanging on his every word:
I see by your eagerness and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted; that cannot be; listen patiently until the end of my story, and you will easily perceive why I am reserved upon that subject. I will not lead you on, unguarded and ardent as I then was, to your destruction and infallible misery. Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.
It’s the “Do not attempt to play God” bit from every bad sci-fi movie involving giant ants or similar: a classic for a reason.
We now approach the main problem Victor faces with his new knowledge: what should he DO with it? The answer, of course, is “nothing,” or “share it with the scientific world,” but he chooses a different path.
When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands, I hesitated a long time concerning the manner in which I should employ it. Although I possessed the capacity of bestowing animation, yet to prepare a frame for the reception of it, with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour. I doubted at first whether I should attempt the creation of a being like myself, or one of simpler organization; but my imagination was too much exalted by my first success to permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man.
“I doubted, but then I was like I’m too awesome to fail so I went ahead anyway”
The materials at present within my command hardly appeared adequate to so arduous an undertaking, but I doubted not that I should ultimately succeed.
Because he is Victor Frankenstein, and the backbeat of his existence goes me me me me meeeee.
I prepared myself for a multitude of reverses; my operations might be incessantly baffled, and at last my work be imperfect, yet when I considered the improvement which every day takes place in science and mechanics, I was encouraged to hope my present attempts would at least lay the foundations of future success. Nor could I consider the magnitude and complexity of my plan as any argument of its impracticability. It was with these feelings that I began the creation of a human being.
He’s that guy who, in the group project, comes up with the worst possible plan to achieve the goal and insists it’s going to work, seriously guys, it’ll be totally fine, I promise it’ll work, and gets all butthurt when everyone else isn’t super excited about his amazing plan, and of course it fails the second the experiment begins and everyone else in the group is like WE TOLD YOU SO
Only this dude doesn’t have a group to tell him so. He works alone, because he is so gonna get in trouble for unlicensed corpse removal.
As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large.
THAT’S NOT HOW THAT WORKS
THAT’S NOT HOW ANYTHING WORKS
A DUDE 8 FEET TALL IS STILL GOING TO HAVE VERY TINY CAPILLARIES AND ALVEOLI AND SO ON
Also, if you want to make a huge man out of bits of ordinary men, how the hell are you doing the size-up thing in the first place? You did NOT clear this with the Ingolstadt University IRB.
After having formed this determination and having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials, I began.
But he doesn’t tell us how he collected and arranged those materials and how he prevented them from decaying over the months he spent collecting them. Nor does he vouchsafe where the hell all this is taking place? Is he doing it in his rented lodgings/dorm room? Is there a secret unused laboratory somewhere at the university? How has nobody noticed anything this whole time?
No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.
He seriously thought these things. He seriously thought that sewing a person together out of pieces of dead people would create a new species, instead of a patchwork horror?
(Also I am beginning to think he has daddy issues.)
These thoughts supported my spirits, while I pursued my undertaking with unremitting ardour. My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with confinement. Sometimes, on the very brink of certainty, I failed; yet still I clung to the hope which the next day or the next hour might realise. One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?
Not at all sure I want to know more about the process if it involved cruelty to animals as well as grave robbery.
My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless and almost frantic impulse urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. It was indeed but a passing trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits. I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment.
Okay, so he has a house now, and presumably no one else lives there to notice all the dead people parts coming and going. It is still unclear what the hell is happening in terms of his actual studies.
The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion.
The compartmentalization he displays is impressive. He knows it’s horrible, he knows it’s loathsome, he knows, and yet he still thinks this is going to end well somehow?
Also he hasn’t written home in a while and doesn’t want to while he’s still working on his project:
I knew my silence disquieted them, and I well remembered the words of my father: “I know that while you are pleased with yourself you will think of us with affection, and we shall hear regularly from you. You must pardon me if I regard any interruption in your correspondence as a proof that your other duties are equally neglected.”
I knew well therefore what would be my father’s feelings, but I could not tear my thoughts from my employment, loathsome in itself, but which had taken an irresistible hold of my imagination. I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed.
Definitely daddy issues.
A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.
Victor Frankenstein, breathtaking hypocrite.
But I forget that I am moralizing in the most interesting part of my tale, and your looks remind me to proceed.
GET ON WITH IT
Winter, spring, and summer passed away during my labours; but I did not watch the blossom or the expanding leaves—sights which before always yielded me supreme delight—so deeply was I engrossed in my occupation. The leaves of that year had withered before my work drew near to a close, and now every day showed me more plainly how well I had succeeded.
Which implies that he’s looked at his creature and been satisfied with its appearance, or at least not horrified by it. Also: what the actual hell is the deal with him apparently dropping out of school and somehow still paying rent even though he’s not bringing in any money? How does sewing someone together from dead people take nine damn months?
But my enthusiasm was checked by my anxiety, and I appeared rather like one doomed by slavery to toil in the mines, or any other unwholesome trade than an artist occupied by his favourite employment. Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most painful degree; the fall of a leaf startled me, and I shunned my fellow creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime.
Like, say, desecrating multiple graves? Theft of body parts? Crimes like those?
Sometimes I grew alarmed at the wreck I perceived that I had become; the energy of my purpose alone sustained me: my labours would soon end, and I believed that exercise and amusement would then drive away incipient disease; and I promised myself both of these when my creation should be complete.
Your creation, which is a hideous patchwork of many dead people, that you seem to see as beautiful and successful so far? That creation?
The issue here is that Victor lacks a coherent methodology. Setting aside the fact that none of this could work, there’s the significant issues of preserving the tissue without fixing it in formaldehyde (if you fix it in formaldehyde how the hell are you going to bring it back to life, my dude) and the whole “disappearing from university” thing, not to mention how are you paying for all of this?
Then again, someone who claims to have studied anatomy and physiology not knowing that the tiny capillaries of a very tall man are going to be exactly the same as the tiny capillaries of an ordinary man makes no sense. It’s – just this kind of brick-solid oversight that crashes through the window of suspended disbelief.
Next time: Victor Frankenstein Brings Monster to Life in Super Anti-Climax, Realizes Error of Ways!