Why Frankenstein is the novel we need right now!

I’m still staggered by the fact that Mary Shelley wrote this book when she was eighteen! I think back to what I had achieved by this age and come up with very little to show for it… How could such a complex novel of ideas come from someone so young? Perhaps it has something to do with her parents; being born into a family of radical thinkers might well inspire some pretty deep thoughts in a child. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of Female Rights at a time when society thought women’s brains just couldn’t cope with anything too complex. Meanwhile her father, Godwin, was a renowned philosopher, anarchist and thinker who thought we would be better off returning to our natural roots.

In any case, Shelley’s creativity also stemmed from some pretty tragic personal circumstances; her mother died a few days after giving birth to Mary and she used to spend a great deal of time by her graveside and occasionally spent the night there. Through Percy Bysse Shelley’s adoration of her father’s Romantic-leaning work, she met and fell in love with this radical and political poet – who was married at the time – and they set off on a whirlwind tour of Europe hanging out with the likes of Lord Byron. It was, famously, Byron who suggested the ghost story competition in which Frankenstein was conceived. This during what was known as ‘the summer of darkness’ as an eruption in Indonesia unsettled weather conditions meaning that Lake Geneva was almost permanently dark with inclement rains and storms.

The themes of the text don’t just reflect her life but they also reflect the thinking of the time and – better still – allow us modern readers a chance to reflect on some of the problems we face today. This is precisely the reason why books are so important to us; they help make sense of things.

Right now we have experienced quite a global swing to the right, politically. All over the world, it seems, we are voting for leaders with traditional and often scary views. At the time of writing, the USA is just about to decide where to go and the closeness of the election 2020 is still pretty worrying.

Not only that, we have experienced debates over climate change, water supply, oil, melting polar ice-caps and have seen an amazing advance in technology, medicine and engineering.

While those last three seem universally good, there is a bit of a problem: ethics. Are we sure that driverless cars are safe? Are we happy that our food is manipulated in order to make it more efficient? Is it a universally good thing to preserve life even when the quality of that life is negligible?

These are difficult questions that we quite rightly ask ourselves and ponder, never quite being sure what the right answer might be. But, I hear you ask, what is the relevance to Frankenstein?

Well, dear reader, in my opinion, the text asks exactly those questions, too. Let’s take a look at the text. And if you need a summary, here is a good one. The fact that Victor (who is not a Doctor) immediately after his mother dies, rejects the Romantic notions of nature and decides to create for himself a creature that when finally realised terrifies him so much that it causes immediate moral and mental breakdown. Surely, this is a code for the unbounded scientific problem: just because we can, does it mean we should?

The text deals with key themes of birth, creation and fatherhood. Victor at first sees his creation as his child but is soon horrified by the monster he has created. So far, it’s easy to see the text as a warning against scientific excess. However, the text is not so two-dimensional. The rejection of the monster sets it on a path of revenge and retribution. He spends some time observing a family and not only does he learn to read and to appreciate language, he also learns how to love and also how to hate. Because of his different appearance, he is eventually rejected by everyone he meets, including a man whose daughter he has just rescued from drowning; no matter what the monster does, he is rejected and scorned.

The text, then, is also a treatise on otherness and the way we treat those who are not in our club. We might reflect on current matters of race and how attitudes rear their ugly heads when we debate immigration. I have noticed, post-Brexit, a certain acceptability around prejudicial remarks. These comments were on their way out five years ago but now seem to be de riguer, sadly. Trump has made discrimination okay but we must all resist the temptation to succumb to easy answers about questions of identity. Shelly, too looks at the consequences of social rejection and it’s not pretty. The monster decides to use its power not for good but for evil and he sets off on a trail of revenge, killing Victor’s younger brother, best friend and bride and being responsible for the wrongful execution of the family’s maid. Ultimately, Shelley serves up a lesson in how not to treat people. As if to underline this point, the narrator (an explorer called Walton) upon first seeing the monster notes him as a savage from an undiscovered island.

Furthermore, the novel focuses on the beauty of nature but also man’s abandonment of it. Victor spurns the natural world in favour of his scientific study and although it has a significant pull on him, he mostly chooses to ignore its healing and soothing powers. In his arrogant quest for greatness, he turns his back on all that is good and is justly punished for it. Perhaps we all need to appreciate the world around us just that bit more.

Finally, in the case of this piece anyway, they is the troubling presentation of women in the text. Shelly gives us a litany of passive females who all seem to die in the service of others as if they only really exist by association to their role of servitude, obedience and goodness. Why would the daughter of a prominent feminist write such passive figures into her text? The answer is debatable but I have a theory that she is showing the dangers of boxing women into roles. Dig beneath the surface of the text and it’s possible to see the destruction of women: Victor’s mother dies of scarlet fever because she looked after an ailing Elizabeth, herself adopted because she was ‘fair’ and the daughter of a once aristocratic family. The family maid dies being falsely accused of murder but admits to it in the hope that her apparent honesty will be rewarded (it isn’t). Then there is Victor’s female creation that he tears up and dumps into the sea and finally his ever-suffering fiancé, murdered on her wedding night. The plot does not treat women well but at a time when we are just about to see the first female Vice President in the USA, it’s a timely moment to consider the plight for equality of women and to remember that one of Victor’s chief issues is his seeming will to create a world without women.

Therefore, Shelly’s novel offers up the perfect lens through which to consider many of the issues faced in society today. It is so much more than a scary story about a monster, it is so much more than the parodies give it credit for, it is a story about the birth, development and self-destructive tendencies of the human race and it is well worth a re-read.