FRANKENSTEIN recap, Chapters 1 and 2
Victor Frankenstein explains that in fact everything is about him
Previously on: we have journeyed afar through the realms of Frame Story, sailing their boundless deeps to understand that a polar expedition has rescued a mysterious stranger from an ice floe; said stranger profoundly captivates the captain and finally, after much beating about of bushes, agrees to tell him the story of his great and tragic destiny.
(I have elected to use italics to set off the book text instead of the block quote feature. Let me know if you prefer the other version.)
Victor F is not exactly an unreliable narrator; what he is is the epitome of mediocre-white-male overweening confidence, and he also proudly and cluelessly performs a near constant series of self-owns. Everything, including natural phenomena, is all about him. He is the center of the universe, the point around which all else spins. He is the star to every wand’ring bark that looks on tempests, etc. You get the idea.
He begins his tale with a long-winded narrative regarding his (unconventional) family history:
I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics, and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation. He was respected by all who knew him for his integrity and indefatigable attention to public business. He passed his younger days perpetually occupied by the affairs of his country; a variety of circumstances had prevented his marrying early, nor was it until the decline of life that he became a husband and the father of a family.
One of Frankenstein Sr.’s friends falls upon misfortune and has to retire to Lucerne with his daughter, there to live out his remaining sad months in penury. Victor’s dad seeks him out, only to discover he is too late:
Several months passed in this manner. Her father grew worse; her time was more entirely occupied in attending him; her means of subsistence decreased; and in the tenth month her father died in her arms, leaving her an orphan and a beggar. This last blow overcame her, and she knelt by Beaufort’s coffin weeping bitterly, when my father entered the chamber. He came like a protecting spirit to the poor girl, who committed herself to his care; and after the interment of his friend he conducted her to Geneva and placed her under the protection of a relation. Two years after this event Caroline became his wife.
Does that strike you as a little precipitate, not to mention creepy? I find it somewhat creepitudinous. We’re given to understand that Frankenstein Sr. is pretty far advanced in age, and while we’re not told how old the daughter is at the time of her father’s death, it feels like “maybe eighteen-ish”.
Anyway, Mr. and the youthful Mrs. F proceed to have a bouncing baby Victor, upon whom they dote. The fact that Victor underlines the responsibility of parenting, of caring for and guiding a creature you have brought into the world, is somewhat hilarious given later events (and is entirely intentional on the part of the author):
My mother’s tender caresses and my father’s smile of benevolent pleasure while regarding me are my first recollections. I was their plaything and their idol, and something better—their child, the innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by Heaven, whom to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in their hands to direct to happiness or misery, according as they fulfilled their duties towards me. With this deep consciousness of what they owed towards the being to which they had given life, added to the active spirit of tenderness that animated both, it may be imagined that while during every hour of my infant life I received a lesson of patience, of charity, and of self-control, I was so guided by a silken cord that all seemed but one train of enjoyment to me.
Compare this to the monster’s first recollections and his experience with being parented. “What they owed towards the being to which they had given life”, indeed.
Victor’s mother visits a local poverty-stricken hovel, like you do, and comes across a noble waif whom they promptly adopt. Here comes some of the more upsetting language in the novel. You don’t give people as presents, and you don’t own them. Even if they’re very pretty.
Everyone loved Elizabeth. The passionate and almost reverential attachment with which all regarded her became, while I shared it, my pride and my delight. On the evening previous to her being brought to my home, my mother had said playfully, “I have a pretty present for my Victor—tomorrow he shall have it.” And when, on the morrow, she presented Elizabeth to me as her promised gift, I, with childish seriousness, interpreted her words literally and looked upon Elizabeth as mine—mine to protect, love, and cherish. All praises bestowed on her I received as made to a possession of my own. We called each other familiarly by the name of cousin. No word, no expression could body forth the kind of relation in which she stood to me—my more than sister, since till death she was to be mine only.
All of this is being related to us because Victor thinks it is of paramount importance that his audience understand his background and how passionate and dramatic he is. We don’t need to know any of it to understand what he does once he gets to Ingolstadt, but as we’ve tentatively established this dude likes talking about himself. Everything is, after all, about him.
Chapter 2 begins with Victor describing how he and Elizabeth both loved growing up in the gorgeous landscape of Switzerland, and how she was content to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of nature while he wanted to know how they worked. This is entirely relatable. He is a natural scientist, where she is not, and he is not being very condescending about it:
She busied herself with following the aerial creations of the poets; and in the majestic and wondrous scenes which surrounded our Swiss home —the sublime shapes of the mountains, the changes of the seasons, tempest and calm, the silence of winter, and the life and turbulence of our Alpine summers—she found ample scope for admiration and delight. While my companion contemplated with a serious and satisfied spirit the magnificent appearances of things, I delighted in investigating their causes. The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine. Curiosity, earnest research to learn the hidden laws of nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they were unfolded to me, are among the earliest sensations I can remember.
This is a fantastic way to describe the I need to know how it works urge. He’s basically in my head at this point; for once in the novel I sympathize with the guy. Also at this point he meets his close personal friend Henry Clerval:
He was a boy of singular talent and fancy. He loved enterprise, hardship, and even danger for its own sake. He was deeply read in books of chivalry and romance. He composed heroic songs and began to write many a tale of enchantment and knightly adventure.
Victor’s desire to learn is not focused indiscriminately: he knows what he wants to pursue. At least he thinks he does.
I confess that neither the structure of languages, nor the code of governments, nor the politics of various states possessed attractions for me. It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.
And just when I’ve developed some actual fellow-feeling for this dude he brings it right back around with a little editorialization (in case we’ve forgotten that everything is all about him):
I feel exquisite pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self. Besides, in drawing the picture of my early days, I also record those events which led, by insensible steps, to my after tale of misery, for when I would account to myself for the birth of that passion which afterwards ruled my destiny I find it arise, like a mountain river, from ignoble and almost forgotten sources; but, swelling as it proceeded, it became the torrent which, in its course, has swept away all my hopes and joys.
In the back of Victor Frankenstein’s head there is a constant, neverending whisper, and it sounds like this:
Me me me me me me meeeeeeeeeee
For one thing, no they jolly weren’t “insensible” steps, every action he took was a choice he made. For another, the only thing that ruled his destiny was Victor Frankenstein himself, not some external motivating force. He didn’t have to spend months stealing bits of corpses and sewing them together. He didn’t have to run away once he realized hey maybe that wasn’t the smartest shit I ever did in my life. He didn’t have to do any of it; every last thing was a choice.
He continues not to take responsibility for things, blaming his dad’s attitude toward the work of Cornelius Agrippa for his personal decision to get really into it (to be fair, telling someone not to read something is the best way to get them to read it):
If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded and that a modern system of science had been introduced which possessed much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical, under such circumstances I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside and have contented my imagination, warmed as it was, by returning with greater ardour to my former studies. It is even possible that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin. But the cursory glance my father had taken of my volume by no means assured me that he was acquainted with its contents, and I continued to read with the greatest avidity.
He devours Agrippa and Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, rolling around gleefully in their ideas (so far divorced from the unsatisfactory current state of knowledge, which he thinks is severely lacking):
I read and studied the wild fancies of these writers with delight; they appeared to me treasures known to few besides myself. I have described myself as always having been imbued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature. In spite of the intense labour and wonderful discoveries of modern philosophers, I always came from my studies discontented and unsatisfied. Sir Isaac Newton is said to have avowed that he felt like a child picking up shells beside the great and unexplored ocean of truth. Those of his successors in each branch of natural philosophy with whom I was acquainted appeared even to my boy’s apprehensions as tyros engaged in the same pursuit.
The untaught peasant beheld the elements around him and was acquainted with their practical uses. The most learned philosopher knew little more. He had partially unveiled the face of Nature, but her immortal lineaments were still a wonder and a mystery. He might dissect, anatomise, and give names; but, not to speak of a final cause, causes in their secondary and tertiary grades were utterly unknown to him. I had gazed upon the fortifications and impediments that seemed to keep human beings from entering the citadel of nature, and rashly and ignorantly I had repined.
But here were books, and here were men who had penetrated deeper and knew more. I took their word for all that they averred, and I became their disciple. It may appear strange that such should arise in the eighteenth century; but while I followed the routine of education in the schools of Geneva, I was, to a great degree, self-taught with regard to my favourite studies. My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child’s blindness, added to a student’s thirst for knowledge.
And here we come to the first intimation of his I MUST CONQUER DEATH thing:
Under the guidance of my new preceptors I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life; but the latter soon obtained my undivided attention. Wealth was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery if I could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!
What, indeed. Here in the narrative we come across one of his (many) abrupt volte-face turns, triggered by witnessing a dramatic lightning strike. All at once he determines he is no longer into philosopher’s stones and the elixir of life, he wants to do math instead:
Before this I was not unacquainted with the more obvious laws of electricity. On this occasion a man of great research in natural philosophy was with us, and excited by this catastrophe, he entered on the explanation of a theory which he had formed on the subject of electricity and galvanism, which was at once new and astonishing to me. All that he said threw greatly into the shade Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, the lords of my imagination; but by some fatality the overthrow of these men disinclined me to pursue my accustomed studies. It seemed to me as if nothing would or could ever be known. All that had so long engaged my attention suddenly grew despicable. By one of those caprices of the mind which we are perhaps most subject to in early youth, I at once gave up my former occupations, set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation, and entertained the greatest disdain for a would-be science which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge. In this mood of mind I betook myself to the mathematics and the branches of study appertaining to that science as being built upon secure foundations, and so worthy of my consideration.
“Caprices of the mind” is a little hilarious.
Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by such slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity or ruin. When I look back, it seems to me as if this almost miraculous change of inclination and will was the immediate suggestion of the guardian angel of my life—the last effort made by the spirit of preservation to avert the storm that was even then hanging in the stars and ready to envelop me. Her victory was announced by an unusual tranquillity and gladness of soul which followed the relinquishing of my ancient and latterly tormenting studies. It was thus that I was to be taught to associate evil with their prosecution, happiness with their disregard.
everything is all about Victor, check
It was a strong effort of the spirit of good, but it was ineffectual. Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction.
EVERYTHING IS ALL ABOUT VICTOR, his destiny is too strong, it wasn’t his fault it wasn’t his fault it wasn’t his fault it was destined to be, you guys.
Next time: Victor Frankenstein goes to college, refuses to attend lectures unless he personally finds the professor physically attractive.