Gothic Will

This is another book I really enjoy. I’ve read it several times for various classes and I’ve taught it once to an Honors English class. Until this seminar I didn’t even realize that there was an earlier version. The versions I’ve read and worked with have always been the 1831 version. I know that some people have a problem with the overblown language and the general perceived faults that come in a Gothic and  Romantic work. I like how the book incorporates so many different issues and themes. No matter how many times I work with it there is something new or different to focus on. I especially groove on the links between this and Paradise Lost. Like so many other people, I’m a little in love with Milton’s character, Satan, and seeing echoes of him throughout the novel is amusing.

Of all the themes and motifs that the book contains one that hit me harder than normal was the idea of “will”. This time, and it may be the difference in edition, it felt like the book was a novel about will. Frankenstein gets into trouble because of his desire to go further than any other man in science (natural philosophy?). He essentially brings the monster into being through an excess of will. After Victor rejects the monster that excess of will then rebounds on him through the monster’s attacks on his loved ones. At the end of the novel, when Walton confronts the monster about his heinous actions, the monster replies that he was in agony as he committed those crimes yet something still urged him on. To my mind that “something” could only be his will. This reminded me of two things from other books. One was the character of Clithero from the novel Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown and the other was The Lord of the Rings. In Edgar Huntly, the character Clithero is this man who through an unfortunate event becomes obsessed with killing his benefactress and her daughter. When he thinks them dead or out of his reach he behaves fairly normally. Once he realizes that they are living nearby he turns into an unstoppable fiend bent on their destruction. He has less motive for causing  pain than Frankenstein’s monster but the idea of unstoppable drive is what reminded me of him while I was reading Walton’s interview with the monster at the end of the novel. The other thing the willful monster reminded me of was the part of The Lord of the Rings where Saruman’s operation for creating the Uruk-hai is discussed. There is a stark contrast in LOTR between Sauron’s forces who use “unnatural” means to gain the advantage in the war for Middle Earth and the “good guys” who are more aligned with the “natural” world. The scene at Isengard brings to mind the archaic definitions of the word “machine”: 1a. a constructed thing, 1c. a military engine. It is senseless, mindless, ceaseless industry and activity. This too seems like an embodiment of an excess of will, although I’m guessing it has much to do with Tolkien’s criticism of the industrialization of the modern world.

One other thought that kept popping up was that I wonder what a post-colonial reading of the novel would look like. The other times I read this book was in my high school AP English class and during my undergrad work so my exposure to the criticism of Frankenstein isn’t extensive. For some reason the idea of reading this book in terms of colonizer and colonized was smacking me over the head like a two-by-four. I was also seeing parallels between the framed narrative in this novel and in Wuthering Heights. I was wondering if the story-within-a-story trope was especially popular during this general literary epoch or if it’s just a popular form for weird English women who like to write weird stories.