Mike Hilbert
ENGL 521
Final Seminar Paper Draft 1
Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein: The Successes and Failures of Creation in and of
Frankenstein
There have been numerous attempts to theorize and explain why Mary Shelley’s novel
Frankenstein has been a dominant force in the canonized literature of the early 19th-century. The
novel is read, discussed, written about, and speculated over in and out of the university. Each
scholar or admirer of the novel has his own idea of what makes the novel a unique part of Gothic
literature, even in the 21st-century when the science of today has made the science of the novel
obsolete. Attempts have been made to trace the Frankenstein myth to its origins, and while much
fact has been recorded on the subject, interpretations of the tale seem endless. Critics have
speculated and written about to what extent Frankenstein can and should be interpreted. Is it
simply a cautionary tale about the dangers of ambition, or is it something more? Is it a story
about the delicate relationship and the interplay between human nature and Mother Nature, or
does the meaning go deeper? And if these questions can be easily answered, should they even be
explored? The story of how the tale came to be is an important piece to the understanding of the
novel. Indeed, it’s true the novel came about as part of a prolonged game. To combat the
boredom and unproductive grasp of a “wet, ungenial summer in the Swiss Alps,” Mary Shelley
and friends attempted to write a “ghost story” within the span of a few days. With this
background in mind, more questions of interpretation arise. What is the balance between brilliant
mind and happy chance? In other words, how much of Mary Shelley’s novel is a result of the
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complexities of a mind overflowing with ghostly apparitions, dark dreams, scientists in lab-coats
wielding “the instruments of life,” and death; and how much is attributed to a fertile mix of
place, time, company, and moment? Regardless of the reason for the creation, the assumption
can be made of the inexhaustible nature of the novel.
In a book of essays titled The Endurance of Frankenstein, several scholars present a
patchwork of ideas and theses attempting to explain the timelessness of Shelley’s novel. In his
essay “Godlike Science/Unhallowed Arts: Language, Nature, and Monstrosity,” Peter Brooks
suggests that in Frankenstein “we find the logic of desire in literature, desire of the text and for
the text” (Levine and Knoepflmacher 220). To brooks, the novel serves as a “promise of a
transcendent signified, and leaves us on the threshold of pleasure” through its use of language
and signs.
To Philip Stevick, author of the essay “Frankenstein and Comedy,” the novel is timeless
and so beloved because of “its capacity to provoke laughter” (Levine and Knoepflmacher 221).
He argues that despite the seriousness of the content and verbal texture of the novel, “to describe
the comic power contained in Frankenstein is not at all irreverent” (Levine and Knoepflmacher
239).
And lastly (of course, the list of readings is extensive), William Nestrick argues in his
essay “Coming to Life: Frankenstein and the Nature of Film Narrative” that Frankenstein lives
on in popular culture because of its “emphasis on the magic act of creation,” an act that has
extended its magic into the world of films. Film adaptations of the novel succeed at reanimating
the story while adding flavors of the technology, science, and imagination of the present day.
Regardless of the amount and range of interpretations of the novel, it is safe to assume
there will always be a new lens through which to view the creation; a new way to reanimate and
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add spark to the almost 200 year-old Gothic tale. All the above mentioned readings are sound
and enjoyable, each one adding spice and perspective to the Frankenstein conversation that never
seems to end or reach a low point. In this paper, I wish to add my own interpretation and insight
as to why Frankenstein continues to be studied some 200 years after its publication, why it might
not have been so well-received as a work of fiction in the early 19th-century, and its role as a
creation of the mind. To frame this argument, I will primarily use the arguments and ideas of
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno from their article “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment
as Mass Deception.” In the article, Adorno and Horkheimer claim that “Culture today is infecting
everything with sameness,” and that culture and consumers have grown to be “homogenous,
well-organized complexes” who “demand reproduction processes which inevitably lead to the
use of standard products to meet the same needs at countless locations” (Adorno and Horkheimer
94-95). In short, their argument is that there is nothing original. It is important to note that
Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s essay was written over 100 years after Frankenstein was published,
and some might argue that its ideas do not apply to an older text such as Frankenstein. However,
this paper will show (using the original criticism of the novel at the time of its first publishing)
that the arguments and ideas Adorno and Horkheimer have about the culture class and the
originality of art do indeed apply to Frankenstein as an art form, and prove that the endurance of
the novel as a creation of the mind can be owed to the originality of the novel—an originality
that continues to transcend both genre and time constraints.
In addition, I will compare Mary Shelley’s creation (the novel) to the creation of Dr.
Frankenstein (the monster), and, again using Adorno and Horkheimer, show why one has lived
and thrived as a critical piece of canonized literature while the other was nothing more than a
representation—an unoriginal piece of art destined to fail. Adorno and Horkheimer state that “in
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light music the prepared ear can always guess the continuation after the first bars of a hit song”
(99). Frankenstein’s monster as a creation can be explored and thought of in the same way. I will
argue that since the actual creation of the creature and the eventual product of Frankenstein’s
work did NOT bring about something original, the “product” turned out to be a failure.
Frankenstein himself even shunned his product shortly after he gave it life. My argument will be
that Frankenstein saw the unoriginality of his work (since a human body with feelings and
eventual eloquence and compassion had already been made) immediately after life was given,
and that this unoriginality was a primary reason for Frankenstein to abandon his creation.
Originally, and before the creature is contaminated by the human race, he is a compassionate and
loving creature who might have in other circumstances added something substantial to the world
of humankind. The creature realizes he is not an original creation and that he is also capable of
creating all the ugliness and hatred he has been subjected to. Once he comes to his realization of
his status as HUMAN, he is unimpressed with himself as a creation. All of this is because his
body and mind are not original or that much different from the natural human body. He is a
imitation and a representation. Only an unoriginal work of art.
But first, I will attempt to show how the novel as a creation of the mind is, unlike the
monster of the novel, an original work of art. Samuel Vasbinder’s book Scientific Attitudes in
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein offers a great list of the main criticism of Frankenstein when it was
first published. His claim is that the amount of criticism received was a product of four main
ideas:
“the Gothic base of horror upon which the story is laid; the Promethean, Miltonic, and Faustian
motifs present throughout the book; the peripheral literature that seems to have offered a creative
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impulse to the story; and the biographical element of the novel which sees Frankenstein, the
Monster, and Henry Clerval as the alter egos of Shelley” (Vasbinder 5).
For the purpose of this essay, and because I am attempting to prove the originality of
Frankenstein as a product of artistic creation, I will offer only criticism that addresses the
“Gothic base of horror upon which the story is laid,” and “the peripheral literature that seems to
have offered a creative impulse to the story.” The Edinburgh Magazine first conceded that the
novel had “a…power of fascination” and “a harsh and savage delineation of power” (Vasbinder
6). However, the final review of the book was an attempt at fault-finding. It reads:
“It is one of those works, however, which when we read, we do not well see why it should have
been written; for a jeu d’espirit it is somewhat too long, grave and laborious, and some of our
highest and most reverential feelings receive a shock from the conception upon which it turns so
as to produce a painful and bewildered state of mind while we peruse it” (Vasbinder 6).
And similarly, another review in the Gentleman’s Magazine reads:
“This tale is evidently the production of no ordinary Writer; and though we are shocked at the
idea of the event on which the fiction is founded, many parts of it are strikingly good, and the
description of scenery is excellent” (Vasbinder 6).
It is interesting to note how, almost as a thesis of the Gentleman’s Magazine review, the author
found it necessary to praise the description of scenery. Early critics of the novel saw it only for
the descriptive nature of the nature within the story. Because of its originality and departure from
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some of the normal conventions of novel writing in the early 19th-century, the novel was not well
received. This is in part due to the originality of the prose and style.
Just as interesting is the use of the words “shock” and “shocked” in both the Edinburgh
Magazine’s and Gentleman’s Magazine’s criticism. Why did early critics and reviewers of the
novel receive such a shock? The answer must be found in the originality of the style and content
of the book. Adorno and Horkheimer call it a “struggle with tradition” (103). In music, A and H
claim that the “great artists have been mistrustful of style” thus making their music original
forms of art (A and H 103). This holds true in literature as well. Because the style of
Frankenstein as a work of so-called Gothic fiction in the early 19th-century is so different from
other similar works of the day, the novel was, at first, a monstrous patchwork of ideas and
dreams produced from a summer in the Alps with little more than ghost stories for company. The
reason for the “painful and bewildered state of mind” has little to do with length and content, but
more to do with the original style, the non-repetitious ideas, and the new and terrifying
possibilities of the novel.
The novel as a work of the Gothic fiction genre was also called into question. It wasn’t
until 1921 that the first review of Frankenstein as legitimate art form was published. As an
attempt to categorize and synthesize traditional and non-traditional works of gothic and terror
fiction, Edith Birkhead’s book The Tale of Terror draws attention to Frankenstein as such.
Speaking about the gothic in Frankenstein, Birkhead asserts that
“It is evident from the records of her [Shelley’s] reading that the novel of terror in all its guises
was familiar to her. She had beheld the majestic horror of the halls of Eblis; she had threaded her
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way through Mrs. Radcliffe’s artfully constructed Gothic castles; she had braved the terrors of
the German Ritter-Rauber-und Schauer-Romane; she had assisted, fearful at Lewis’s midnight
diablerie; she had patiently unravelled the ‘mystery’ novels of Godwin and of Charles Brockden
Brown” (qtd. in Vasbinder 9).
However familiar Mary Shelley was with Gothic traditions and mystery novels, it is easy to see
how she began to step away from the beloved and certainly mass produced “shrieking chorus of
malevolent abbesses, diabolical monks, intriguing marquises, Wandering Jews and bleeding
specters” of Gothic convention (Vasbinder 9). And so, in a fruitful attempt to simply imitate but
not reproduce a Gothic novel that contained all the horror and awesomeness without the overly
done traditions of a gothic fiction past, Mary Shelley created her monster.
Successful as Shelley was at creating something that produced horror without tradition,
her success went unnoticed. According to Birkhead, Frankenstein fails because it “is obviously
the work of an immature writer who has had no experience in evolving a plot” (qtd. In Vasbinder
9). Apparently, the main flaw in Frankenstein could be found in a lack in the plot, or a lack in
the common Gothic conventions of fiction of the day. Because of this assumption, the novel was
to be judged faulty, and inherently lacking. The book should fit into the prescribed class of
Gothic horror fiction of the day, but it does not. However, Birkhead does acknowledge the
success of the novel as a scary story by claiming that it “still has power momentarily ‘to make
the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and to quicken the beatings of the heart’”
(qtd. in Vasbinder 10).
All of this is not to prove the point that Frankenstein is a novel lacking tradition, plot,
and convention, but to illustrate how original the piece of art was. To A and H, an unoriginal
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piece of art will require that “The spectator [or reader] must need no thoughts of his own: the
product prescribes each reaction” (A and H 109). Birkhead’s call for a more traditional
Frankenstein and claim that the novel is faulty as far as conventions go prove that Shelley’s
novel is an original creation of the mind—perhaps one that was well ahead of its time.
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