The novel brought me to the sadness and the loneliness surroundings of a creature being abandoned by his creator. The narrative and the characters' growth in the book was amazingly strong which it still lingers in my mind and it still kept me in awe of the way the story was written.
The name Frankenstein will automatically bring our imagination to a huge green monster, tall, with a rusty old nail stuck in its neck with creepy stitches on the skin or similar to the Herman in The Monster TV show. Well, this month, I had learned that Frankenstein was the name of the obsessed intelligent creator who recreates human with the selected body parts and eventually resulted to become a gothic hideous creature.
The story leads me to a huge pool of question of how Mary Shelley arrived at the idea of creating the monstrous world of Victor Frankenstein. She adapted some of her life events, griefs, lost, guilty, romanticism and obsessions. From some of the sources I have read, she seems to be feeling guilty for her mother's death not long after she was born. She portrayed the short terms of mother's love that she could probably long for in Elizabeth's plotlines. The grief for losing people she loved was injected into Victor's character. Her son William died and in the book, William was fictionalized as the little brother of Victor. This has lead to my next theory of an obsession in bringing the dead back to life. So she created Victor as an intelligent and educated person as the creator.
The existence of Robert Walton's character is mere as an intermediary of the narrative presented in epistolary form. The story goes on in Victor's grief and regrets. I admire the way Mary Shelley describes the galvanised corpse incarnated into a spiritless human who later has a desire to learn how to live and desire companionship. At this point, I felt that I am always close to God. Note on the Galvanism - Mary Shelley was seeing the amazing effects galvanism had on dead bodies and thus composed the tale around it. Such an intrigued history of the tale composition. Galvanism was first discovered in the late 1700s. While dissecting a frog, a scientist by the name of Luigi Galvani noticed that if he touched a frog's muscle a certain way, the dead frog's legs would kick.
She compared the difference between the inadequacy of human creation and the greatness of God's creation. There was a comparison made by the creature as he wandered around the hut overlooking the life of a real family with love. He said, "I remembered Adam's supplication to his Creator; but where was mine? He had abandoned me; and, in the bitterness of my heart, I cursed him." It's a comparison! God never abandoned us alone, not even once!
The creature also said that his creation was imperfect and Adam had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the special care of his Creator. The argument continues and I found that the journey was very exciting. The book made me feel, without God, I am nothing.
The book had also convinced me that there is no meaning in the world beyond what meaning we give it. Each existence of human life carries with it a specific purpose and mission that God has planned and established. Indeed, this book is written so delicately and profound with the philosophical point of view for us to think and study in-depth. It's a good thinking book I could say, in a simple language.
Besides, I fell in love with the language, the words and the style of writing were very delicate and captured my heart. Perhaps because I have learned about her mother's death from the historical notes in the preface and online random websites, I felt that Victor's grief over his mother's passing - was a very sad paragraph that it made me cry. If you read the monologue of the creature, the sadness and loneliness that he relayed were truly saddened.
So, who was the real monster then? Was it Victor? The monster that she portrayed as an irresponsible creator. Or the rebellious creature after he was abandoned alone with no companion and affections? It saddened to learn how loneliness could kill a soul. I voted for Victor as the monster.
In another version of Frankenstein the Chronicles that I have watched on Netflix, John Marlott went to see Mary Shelley and he asked her about the book she wrote. He blamed Mary for creating the story as a nightmare for everyone. Mary then said that the nightmare doesn't belong to her anymore. She said, "It's not mine anymore, it's yours."
All I could think was - Are we creating the monsters in us without we've realized it or; the monsters existed in us were inherited from the past that we've created? We are solely responsible for what we've done and what we've believed. A very deep thinking illustration to ponder.
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