A Return to Vicarious Reading with Frankenstein
The holiday season is in full swing at my house. Our living room window is aglow with rainbow-colored lights. The tips of my fingers are stained red with food coloring. I’m watching The O.C.’s Chrismukkah episode for perhaps the tenth time this year. Frankenstein is sitting on my coffee table. Which one of these things is not like the other?
Frankenstein has long been one of ‘those books’ to me: an obligation read that clutters my bookshelf, a book that I’ve spent years (sometimes decades) eschewing in favor of more tempting tomes. Ulysses is one of those books. The Alchemist is one of those books. The Age of Innocence is one of those books.
But to one of my fellow book clubbers, Frankenstein is something else entirely – one of his all-time top reads, a book he returns to again and again. And because I take those sort of endorsements seriously, I came back from my Vicarious Reading hiatus earlier than planned to pick up Mary Shelley’s slim volume about a scientist ruined by the monster he created.
The story of how Frankenstein came to be is, well, storied. In 1816, 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft, her lover Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron competed with each other to write the best horror story. Neither Percy nor Byron’s efforts yielded much, but Mary wrote the first draft of Frankenstein that summer. Two years later, it was published anonymously, and became an instant sensation. Today, it remains a cultural force, spawning dozens of film and television adaptations and predicting the rise of the science fiction and horror genres.
Frankenstein is a house of mirrors in book form – a story within a story within a story. A French family’s story as witnessed by the monster. The monster’s story as told to Frankenstein. Frankenstein’s story as relayed to Robert Walton. Walton’s story as written to his sister Mrs. Saville. It’s also hilariously Victorian in its sensibility. Fevers and convalescence figure heavily into the book’s plot. The virtues of a liberal education are extolled. The word ‘wretched’ is frequently deployed.
It’s also unusual in its setting. While our past vicarious picks have transported us to very particular places, Frankenstein traverses the globe. It starts in St. Petersburg but doesn’t stay there – taking readers towards the Arctic Circle before moving south to follow protagonist Victor Frankenstein through Geneva, Germany, Scotland, and just about every European destination in between. Here, the setting isn’t geographical, it’s psychological. We’re spending time in the tortured minds of both Frankenstein and his creation, a monster so hideous that the mere sight of him prompts instant rejection and provokes universal disgust.
Though Frankenstein made for a strange companion to my Christmas cider and gingerbread, this tragic tale packs a lot of punch thematically. Viewed one way, it’s a story about the importance of kinship, a lesson in what can happen when someone’s deep desire for connection and belonging is thwarted. As the creature complains:
“Where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses, or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as then I was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me, or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I?”
“Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone are irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”
It’s also a story about the burden of knowledge and the pain of being human. Again, the creature puts it sagely:
“I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me: I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling.”
To put it simply – this book is dark. Anguish and torture abound. When I was immersed in it, it blotted out the happiness of the holiday season, filling me with painful pricks of empathy and a peculiar sort of despair – the kind that sticks to you through otherwise joyful days.
So is your Christmas so fun you need a comedown? Are you drowning in too much happiness? If so, by all means give Frankenstein a whirl beneath the mistletoe. If not, perhaps best to leave this one until next year.