Frankenstein Books I and II

All of us know the story of Frankenstein -- or do we? Some of our collective memories come from the James Whale film of 1931, which introduced Boris Karloff as the Monster, or its descendants and parodies, such as Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein of 1974. Every year at Halloween, there are any number of young monsters at our door, and the image is deeply ingrained into our popular culture. From Frankenberry cereal to Herman Munster; from Edward Scissorhands to the Terminator, the image of a terrifying man-made man seems to haunt our technological era. But how many know the story of the original novel? Written by Mary Shelley when she was only eighteen years old, and published anonymously in 1818, it gives us a very different "monster," one who can talk eloquently, argue philosophy, and revel in the poetry of Milton. It also gives us a rather different Victor Frankenstein, a haunted, romantic soul whose quest is inspired by Albertus Magnus and Cornelius Agrippa. It's a story which has never fully been brought to film or television, and thus a surprise to many of its readers.

For our purposes, though, it's the other mad genius of the novel -- Captain Walton -- with his obsession with the polar regions, and with the discovery of the fabled "Open Polar Sea," who commands our attention: 

I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible; its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There — for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators — there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be without example, as the phaenomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitudes. What may not be expected in a country of eternal light?

 This surely alludes to the then-current notion of there being an "Open Polar Sea," a body of warmer water imagined as being just behind the "ice barrier." The idea has a long history stretching back to Dutch navigators in the seventeenth century; by 1818 it had been revived, due in part to reports by the whaling captain William Scoresby that the ice near Greenland was unusually scarce the year before. Captain Walton's fervent belief in a thing he cannot see -- along with his conviction that finding it will be of inestimable value to humanity, parallel Victor's notions about creating human life.

Walton never does get to see it -- but Victor witnesses his creation, though his first act is to abandon it. When the two finally meet again in Chapter III of Book II, the Creature tells his own story; unlike the grunting, flat-headed figures of most Frankenstein films, this creature is as eloquent, as sensitive, as impassioned as his Creator. He narrates his own accidental discovery of the horror his appearance instills in humans, along with his discovery of those texts which he will make his own: Milton's Paradise Lost, the Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans by Plutarch, and the Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe. Added to this condensed store of knowledge, in time, will be Volney's Ruins of Empire (used as a schoolbook in the cottage) and the crumpled notes which the Creature himself unthinkingly brought with him from the scene of his creation, which later reveal Victor's name.

Our two parables run alongside one another, withe the Creature explaining his wretched history, and Frankenstein -- after a brief bout of cooperation -- once more fleeing him. It's the third book which will bring their tales back together -- and unite the realm of human subcreation with that of the exploration of the remotest regions of earth.