The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Mary Shelley · a novel in three volumes, framed by letters · published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818 by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones, with a dedication to William Godwin and a preface by Percy Bysshe Shelley · scored on the 1818 text, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Gothic novel moved from the supernatural to natural philosophy; novel of ideas and persecution; creation story told from the side of the made
Mythos
Prometheus, the fire-bringer punished; Milton’s Adam reproaching his maker and Milton’s fallen angel; a Genesis in which God flees the garden; the made being who turns on the maker
Phase
From the explorer’s letters on his way north, through the maker’s life from Geneva to Ingolstadt, the creation on a night of November, the pursuit across Europe and into the ice, to the creature borne away on the waves
Presentation
Fiction; four letters from Robert Walton to his sister Margaret Saville, Victor Frankenstein’s narrative in three volumes, and Walton’s closing letters; the creature’s narrative told within Victor’s, and the cottagers’ and Safie’s story within the creature’s; an epigraph from Paradise Lost
Register
From Walton’s eager letters and Victor’s Latinate lament, pitched at one register for long stretches, to the creature’s speeches, which have a rhetorical force the human speakers lack, and the landscape set-pieces of the Alps and the Arctic
Scale
Three minds from within, one family and one household of cottagers, a university, a trial, and Europe from the Alps to the north pole
Governing Proposition
An explorer bound for the Arctic meets in the ice a dying man, Victor Frankenstein, who tells him how he made a living being and fled from it on the night it opened its eye; at the centre of his story the being itself speaks, of how it learned what a family is by watching one through a chink in a hovel wall, and of how every face it turned to fled or struck it, until it turned on those its maker loved. The wager of the novel is that a being made and then abandoned is made monstrous by the abandonment; that the maker’s crime is his flight from responsibility, not his ambition alone; and that knowledge pursued in solitude, for glory, cuts its seeker off from every bond that would have checked it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book comes with three thresholds before its first word of story. The subtitle names Prometheus, the fire-bringer who was punished for his gift. The epigraph, from the tenth book of Paradise Lost, is Adam’s reproach to his maker: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man?” The dedication is to William Godwin, the author’s father, whose novel of ideas and persecution, Caleb Williams, stands behind the book; the preface was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was begun at Geneva in June 1816, when Mary Godwin was eighteen, finished in 1817, and published, without her name, when she was twenty.
It opens in letters. Robert Walton, an explorer bound for the north, writes four of them to his sister, Margaret Saville, from the start of his voyage: he is ambitious, and the voyage is his bid for glory. In the ice he meets Victor Frankenstein, a dying man who sees in the explorer his own fault. The rest of the book, until Walton’s closing letters, is his story, told to the explorer to warn him.
Victor begins with a household. In Geneva his gentle father, Alphonse, and his mother keep a family that takes children in: Elizabeth, in the 1818 text Victor’s cousin, and Justine, a servant. The mother dies. He goes to the university at Ingolstadt, where he studies under Krempe and Waldman, and the old masters, Agrippa and Paracelsus, are set against modern chemistry. He works alone, apart from every bond he has, and he finds the means to give life.
Movement II
The creation is given in one of the book’s famous sentences: “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils” (I.4). By the glimmer of the half-extinguished light Victor sees the dull yellow eye of the creature open, and he flees from the bedside. That is the crime the book will judge. It is not that he made a being, though the making was done for glory and in solitude; it is that, having made one, he leaves it to whatever the world will do to it.
The being is never named. Victor calls it daemon, fiend, wretch and monster, and the book follows him in all four until the creature speaks for itself. The source of the terror is the novel’s first departure from its inheritance. The Gothic of Walpole, Radcliffe and Lewis summoned its horrors from the crypt and the supernatural; this one is made in a laboratory, from the natural philosophy of Galvani and Davy.
Then the consequences, before the reader knows whose they are. The child William, of the household, dies; a locket is found on Justine, and she is tried and hanged. Her trial is the book’s one long look at the justice of the state, and it is the justice of an error. Victor goes up into the Alps, by Chamonix and the Arve, to the ice.
Movement III
On the Mer de Glace below Mont Blanc a figure bounds over the crevasses toward Victor across the ice, and demands to be heard (II.2). This is the centre of the book, and its form: at the place where an omniscient novel would describe the monster from outside, this one hands him the voice, and Victor must sit and listen. The creature speaks for chapters. He is the most persuasive speaker in the book, and his case is the book’s own: “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend”, and “Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”
He tells how he first learned the seasons, and then a family. From a hovel he watches the De Laceys through a chink in the wall: the blind old man and his son Felix, poor and in exile. A stranger comes to them, Safie, whose history of a father’s ingratitude and a merchant’s betrayal is told in summary, and whose escape from her father’s tyranny into a chosen family is a counter-image of the creature’s own. The lessons given to her teach him French. He learns from Volney’s Ruins, and finds a portmanteau with Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives and Werter. Milton he takes for a true history, and he finds himself in it twice: “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel.”
Then the hearings are tried. He speaks to the blind De Lacey alone, and the old man hears him kindly; the sighted son, Felix, sees him and beats him. It is the one granted hearing in the book, and it ends at the sight of him. He saves a girl from drowning and is shot for it. He meets the child William, who calls him an ogre and names his father. In the pocket of a coat he finds Victor’s journal, the record of his own making. He ends his story with a demand: a mate, made by the same hand.
Movement IV
Victor agrees, and delays. He travels through England with his friend Clerval, whose goodness the journey exists to show, staying at Oxford and in Cumberland, and then goes to Orkney to do the work. The reader knows the promise has been made; the English journey is the delay before it is kept or broken. It runs long for what it carries, and the book’s proportions are most charged here.
In a hut in Orkney he has half made the female when he sees the creature watching at the window, and he tears her apart before its eyes. The creature makes him a promise in return: “I shall be with you on your wedding-night.” Victor lands in Ireland, where Clerval’s body is found on the shore, and comes before an Irish magistrate. The creation night has a pair now in the book’s design: the torn female, and the bride to come.
Victor marries Elizabeth. At Evian, on the wedding night, her body lies on the bridal bed, and the creature grins at the casement. The book has kept its symmetry, the night of making and the night of the bride, and Victor turns from the maker who fled into the hunter who pursues. He follows the creature across Europe, at a speed no physics in the book accounts for, into the north and onto the ice.
Movement V
The story comes back into the frame. Victor has told it to Walton on a ship locked in ice, and his own voyage into the ice has met the explorer’s. He dies aboard, and Walton, who has heard the warning and is the second Victor in the book, turns his ship south. Whether he has learned anything, or has only been stopped, the book leaves open.
Then the creature comes aboard. Walton finds him over his maker’s corpse, weeping, and he speaks to the explorer as he once spoke to Victor, of what was done to him and of what he did. It is a second hearing at the end, and a second listener, and Walton, like Victor, hears a voice the book has made more eloquent than its human speakers. On the ice at the north pole, he promises, there will be a pyre.
The last sentence is his departure, in Walton’s words: “He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.” The book does not show the pyre. In 1831 Mary Shelley revised it for one volume, made Elizabeth a foundling rather than Victor’s cousin, laid a darker fatalism over Victor’s telling, and added an introduction on the ghost-story contest at the Villa Diodati in June 1816; that revision is the book’s later life, not the book. The myth went on without either text, on the stage within five years and in the cinema after, often under its maker’s name.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is compelled. The argument needs every layer of the frame: Walton’s ambition at the outside, Victor’s confession within it, the creature’s voice at the centre, and inside him the cottagers, through whom he learns what a family is by watching one through a chink in a hovel wall. Remove a frame and the argument loses a term. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, with The Made, is the material between the necessary scenes. Victor’s lamentation repeats itself in a vocabulary of despair that barely varies from the second volume to the third; the journey through England with Clerval, at Oxford and in Cumberland, runs long for what it carries; and Safie’s history is a novella’s worth of plot told in summary. The parts are required; their proportions are not always.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a being made and then abandoned is made monstrous by the abandonment, and the maker’s flight from responsibility, not his ambition alone, is the crime. The creature says it plainly, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend”, and the book shows the claim as well as stating it: he saves a girl from drowning and is shot for it; the blind De Lacey hears him kindly and the sighted son beats him. Beside it stands a second disclosure, that knowledge pursued in solitude, for glory, cuts its seeker off from every bond that would have checked it, and Walton is warned with Victor’s life. Held off the top because the moral is partly argued by the speakers, and the social disclosure (class, Safie’s escape, the justice that hangs Justine) is sketched rather than developed.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Height is reached often, in the register of dread and of the sublime landscape. The creation: “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils” (I.4), and the dull yellow eye opening by the glimmer of a half-extinguished light. The meeting on the Mer de Glace below Mont Blanc, the figure bounding over the crevasses toward Victor across the ice. The half-made female torn apart in the Orkney hut while the creature watches at the window. Elizabeth’s body on the bridal bed at Evian, and the grin at the casement. The ship locked in the Arctic ice, and the creature weeping over his maker’s corpse. Held below the top because between these heights the elevation is asserted in Victor’s diction more than earned in the scene, sublime in vocabulary more often than in fact.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth built, not evoked, and built so well that it left the book. The subtitle names Prometheus, the fire-bringer punished; the epigraph names Milton’s Adam reproaching his maker; and the creature reads Paradise Lost as a true history and finds that he is both Adam and Satan: “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel.” These are load-bearing: the middle of the book is a creation story told from the creature’s side, a Genesis in which God flees the garden. Over it the book made a new archetype, the made being who turns on the maker, which every age since has used for its own fear: the factory, the bomb, the gene, the machine. That the myth now stands apart from its text, often misnamed after its maker, proves it was built. Held a step below the very top because the Miltonic scaffolding is in places explicit, a reading list the creature reports.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The inheritance is the Gothic novel of Walpole, Radcliffe and Lewis, the Godwinian novel of ideas and persecution (Caleb Williams), and the epistolary frame. The swerve moved the source of terror from the supernatural to natural philosophy, so that the horror is made in a laboratory from Galvani and Davy rather than summoned from a crypt; and it gave the monster the eloquence, so that the book’s most persuasive voice is the thing it fears. The Gothic villain becomes the narrator’s own creature, and the narrator becomes the villain. The stake was real: an anonymous first novel by a young woman of a notorious household, which reviewers met in part with hostility. Held below the top because the frame and much of the machinery are inherited, and the departure is in premise and voice more than in the form of the novel.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The concentric frames are the argument: Walton writes to his sister, Victor speaks to Walton, the creature speaks to Victor, and the creature watches the De Laceys. At the centre, where an omniscient novel would put the monster’s outside, this one puts his voice, and the reader is made to hear him as Victor would not. The structure is a set of refused hearings around one granted hearing: the blind man listens and the sighted flee. The frame also makes the book a warning delivered and taken, for Walton, a second Victor, turns his ship south. Told in one voice the book would know what happened; told in these it knows what it is to be unheard. Held off the top because Victor must report, nearly verbatim, a speech of several chapters, and the creature’s education is compressed into a contrivance.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: two centuries of readings that have not exhausted it. It has been read as a myth of birth and maternal loss (Ellen Moers, Literary Women, 1976, beside Mary Shelley’s own dead first child); as a woman author’s revision of Milton (Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979); as a myth of the proletariat made and disowned (Franco Moretti); as a critique of masculine science (Anne K. Mellor, 1988); as a text of race and empire; and now as a founding text of bioethics and of the debate about artificial minds. The book holds its questions open: whether the creature is the victim or the murderer of the innocents; whether Victor’s sin is to have made or to have fled; whether Walton has learned anything; whether the creature truly dies. Held a step down because some readings press harder than the text can bear.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is the English novel of its century and, through it, the fiction of Europe and America. The intrinsic force: the book reorganised what the novel of terror could be about, joining the Gothic to the scientific and the philosophical, and it established the scientist whose experiment escapes him, a story that did not exist before it in this shape. Held below the top because its reach runs as much through the myth, carried by adaptation, as through the novel’s method, and the redirection of literary fiction proper is narrower than that of genre. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is widely held the first novel of science fiction (Brian Aldiss’s case in Billion Year Spree, 1973), with a line through Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde; the stage took it within five years (Presumption, 1823) and the cinema made it a founding myth (Edison’s short of 1910, Whale’s film of 1931); and its name entered common speech for any creation that turns on its maker.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over two hundred and eight years, at the low end of the step for centuries and on the widest presence. Form: the text survives whole, in two authorised versions and the edition of 1823, with the manuscript draft extant; two texts are a richness of record, not a loss, and no charge is taken on form. Presence: continuously in print, taught in schools and universities throughout the English-speaking world, translated into most written languages, and adapted in every decade of film and theatre. Fabric: no charge. What holds the figure at the foot of the step is that for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the novel was known more through its stage and screen descendants than read, and its high standing as a novel dates from the 1970s: the text’s presence is in part borrowed from the myth’s. A survival of two centuries does not stand with the millennia.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged on Mary Shelley’s English, with no translation between. The construction is better than the sentences, and the axis stands lowest of the twelve, with The Inevitable. The architecture of frames, the creature’s voice timed to the exact centre, the doubling of Walton and Victor, and the pairings (the creation night and the wedding night, the torn female and the murdered bride, the pursuit into the ice and the voyage into it) are made with real command; the landscape set-pieces of the Alps, Chamonix, the Arve and the Arctic are strong; the creature’s speeches have a force the human speakers do not. Charged: the prose is often stiff, Latinate and overstated, Victor’s despair is pitched at one register for long stretches, the plot leans on coincidence (the journal in the coat pocket, Clerval’s body on the Irish shore, the locket on Justine), and Elizabeth, Justine and Alphonse are thinly made.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the domestic idyll of the Frankenstein household in Geneva, with its adopted children and its gentle father, and the creature on the ice at the north pole promising a pyre. One law governs both: love given or withheld makes what a being becomes, and knowledge without that bond destroys. The Geneva household takes in Elizabeth and Justine; Victor, raised in that love, refuses it to the one being who needs it from him; the De Laceys show the creature what he is denied. The law holds from the first letter to the last. Charged: the book’s physics is loose where the plot requires it. The creature’s speed across Europe, his literacy from overheard lessons, his knowledge of Victor’s movements, and magistrates who move at the story’s convenience ask a tolerance the moral law does not need. Narrow in register, held in law.
Score: 8.4 / 10
For a short novel it holds much in one structure. Consciousness: three minds from within, the creature’s the most fully. The family: the Frankensteins and the De Laceys, adoption, the dead mother, the bride, the child William. Labour and class: the cottagers’ poverty, Felix’s exile, Justine the servant. The state and the law: Justine’s trial and hanging, the Irish magistrate, the Turkish merchant’s betrayal. Science and its institutions: Ingolstadt, Krempe and Waldman, Agrippa and Paracelsus set against modern chemistry. The sacred: a creation myth told from below, with Milton as its scripture. The natural order: the Alps and the glaciers, the Arctic, the seasons the creature first learns. Each order is a version of one question, what the maker owes the made. Held a step down because history and the state are present as episode, and the world beyond the three minds is lightly furnished.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, then Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 9.2 and The Bottomless Well at 9.1. A creation myth told from the side of the made, built on Prometheus and Milton, that left its text and became the age’s figure for the made thing that turns on its maker; a book that joined the Gothic to science and is widely held the first novel of science fiction; a text whole in two authorised versions and continuously read for two hundred and eight years; and two centuries of readings that have not settled whether Victor’s sin is to have made or to have fled.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Made at 8.0. The first is held by the material between the necessary scenes: Victor’s lament repeated in one vocabulary of despair, the English journey with Clerval, and Safie’s history told in summary; the second by the sentences, often stiff, Latinate and overstated, and by a plot that leans on coincidence and thinly made minor characters, against a construction of real command. Next above them, The Inner Law and The Encompassed at 8.4: a moral law that holds from the first letter to the last over a physics loose where the plot requires it, and a world beyond the three minds lightly furnished.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.4, The Made at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, Pressure on Tradition at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.2, The Unconcealment at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by four tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.7, which The Inevitable, The Made and The Inner Law hold down.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published anonymously in three volumes in London by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones on 1 January 1818, with a dedication to William Godwin, a preface by Percy Bysshe Shelley and an epigraph from the tenth book of Paradise Lost. It is scored as the 1818 text, the book as first made and finished, and the text most read and taught now in the critical editions. The second edition in two volumes (1823), arranged by Godwin to profit from Richard Brinsley Peake’s stage version Presumption, and the revised text of 1831 (Colburn and Bentley’s Standard Novels, one volume, with the author’s new introduction) are context, not the unit; the changes of 1831 are named where they bear. Percy Shelley’s revisions in the Bodleian draft, edited by Charles E. Robinson, are part of the one work, made within the campaign of its making, and are credited or charged to the work, not to either Shelley. The language is English, and no translation stands between the reader and the work. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. English is quoted only where its words are certain, briefly; everything else is paraphrased. Citations are by volume and chapter of 1818 for the creation (I.4) and the Mer de Glace (II.2), and otherwise by episode. Facts that could not be verified, among them the number of chapters in each volume, the extent of the creature’s narrative in chapters, the length in words, the wording of the early hostile reviews, the words of Walton’s second letter and the present home of the manuscript, are not given.