Recent Reads - Frankenstein

This post contains affiliate links - using affiliate links from Just A Second helps supply books and coffee.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley -  The opening chapters of this classic are a series of letters from Captain Robert Walton to his sister. Walton is on a ship headed - as he hopes - to the North Pole, because his ambition is to explore that area and to learn more about its magnetic properties. He sets the scene and then tells her about an unusual passenger he has taken on. While attempting to sail through the ice-blocked sea, he takes on a man that has been traveling by dog sled. This is the introduction to the sickly and almost frozen Victor Frankenstein. As the two men get to know each other and Victor starts recovering his strength, he tells his story and Walton records it.

Walton's account then transitions to the first person as he records the memoir Victor shares. Victor tells of his growing up years and his family, and his eventual arrival at university to study science. He has been fascinated with invention and biology, and his ambition is focused on the emerging knowledge of electricity and whether it is possible to use electricity to reanimate a corpse. Victor secretly toils at collecting and sewing together body parts and then comes the fateful day when he activates the charge, and the oversize human-like body he has put together does in fact come to life. But instead of feeling triumph and caring for the creature as he had planned, he is instead horrified and repulsed. In fact he spends two years denying the reality of what he had begun and pretending the monster does not exist.

Exist the monster does, however, and Victor finds it out when his younger brother is murdered, and he realizes that the monster was the killer. Things go from bad to worse as the monster takes more lives, until finally Victor confronts his creation high on a mountain. There the monster pleads his case, and tells Victor his story. Upon awakening to life and finding no help from his creator, the monster flees and is met with horror and violence whenever he is seen by humans. He finally takes refuge in a little lean-to where he spends several months observing the family that live in the cottage. In this way he is educated, and he learns about human relationships. However, when he tries to befriend the cottagers, the reaction is once again disgust and violence, so the monster destroys the cottage and vows to find his creator and take revenge.

The monster demands that Victor make a wife for him, and at first Victor agrees, but after moving to a remote island for this task he fears that even more evil could result and destroys the female before she is animated. The monster retaliates by taking more lives of Victor's family, and finally Victor determines that he must hunt down the monster and destroy it himself. It is on this chase that he is found by Captain Walton, and after the entire story has been told, it also ends aboard the ship.

I read this novel and studied it along with students in my high school literature co-op class, and we had some lively discussions about Victor's actions, strengths, and weaknesses; and about whether he had any responsibility to the monster he created.

Our discussion and study was guided by the textbook Illuminating Literature: Characters in Crisis from Writing with Sharon Watson.

This is re-read for the Modern Mrs. Darcy 2020 Reading Challenge.

 ©2008-2020 Just A Second. All rights reserved. All text, photographs, artwork, and other content may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written consent of the author. http://justasecondblog.blogspot.com/ 

 We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.