Episode 238 - Transcript

So this episode’s about the philosophical themes of the book Frankenstein by Mary Shelley… and I think out of respect to your time… it's worth it to clear up a few misconceptions, REAL briefly, right here at the start that’ll help frame this whole thing.

First of all, for anyone JUST getting started with this book: Victor Frankenstein’s the name of the scientist that MAKES the monster in this book. The monster is not named Frankenstein. In fact, the monster in the book doesn’t really HAVE a name. Which as we’ll SEE is part of the point that Mary Shelley was going for.

Secondly… I think most people when they THINK of Frankenstein’s monster…they think of this giant green dude, with bolts coming out of his neck, he’s got a bowl cut, and he just sort of lumbers around all stiff moaning at people like he’s some kind of zombie or something. 

Just know: this is a Hollywood thing that’s from when they made the Frankenstein MOVIE in the  1930’s…this is NOTHING like the creature Mary Shelley describes in the book. In the BOOK this creature is articulate, he’s fast, murdering people, planting evidence FRAMING people for murder…I mean the thing climbs up into the alps at one point, and SURPRISES Victor Frankenstein just sitting on a glacier, cause he wants to have a private conversation with him. Just know as we talk about this book that THIS is the ACTUAL kind of monster DEPICTED in the story, Hollywood images aside. 

The LAST thing I want to clear up here…is if you wanted to feel horrible… about how LITTLE you’ve done with your life…fun fact: Mary Shelley WROTE this book when she was 18, 19 years old. 

It was published anonymously at first in the year 1818 when she was just 20. A book by the way, where PARTS of it…were 100 years ahead of its TIME in terms of the philosophy in it being POPULAR to be discussed. A situation that’s pretty unbelievable on its own…and it only becomes SLIGHTLY more believable… when you consider the fact she was the daughter… of Mary Wollstonecraft. Legendary philosopher, we’ve done an episode on her, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, among OTHER things. But the reason I bring it up is because Mary Wollstonecraft DIES, only eleven days AFTER Mary Shelley is born. 

So this is someone that grows up without a mom, but spends her entire youth ADMIRING the work that her mother did. Her FATHER turns out was a famous writer as well in William Godwin. 

And again as an 18 year old person on this planet…Mount Tambora erupts in Indonesia when she’s 18 and while people are staying indoors a lot because of the after effects of that eruption…to get rid of the BOREDOM… she has a competition with some friends about who can write the scariest story…and   what SHE writes as her entry into this…is the first draft of Frankenstein…considered by MANY to be NOT ONLY the first sci fi novel ever written…but also without QUESTION one of the classic works of philosophical literature that everybody needs to read if they’re INTO that kind of thing. 

Now I SAID this book is published in the year 1818…but an important thing to note is that Mary Shelley made some REVISIONS to the book when she was 34 in the year 1831…and we’ll talk towards the end of the episode about those changes and what she was going for, but for right now… we’re just going to focus on the story and philosophy of the original version of the book, which has become the more POPULAR version RECENTLY, among fans and scholars of Mary Shelley. 

The story of the book begins of ALL places…in the Arctic, close to the north pole. An explorer named Robert Walton is trying to GET to the North Pole when his ship, along with him and his entire crew, get trapped in a block of ice, in the water, and they need to wait for it to melt for the ship to be able to move. 

Now while they’re trapped here, in the distance… Walton sees something HUGE, riding a dogsled across the snow, he has NO idea what this thing is. And shortly after he comes across Victor Frankenstein laying on a floe of ice, he’s VERY close to death. So he pulls him aboard the ship…puts a blanket around him…and says, uh HOW did you even GET out here? What HAPPENED to you? What’s your STORY?

And Victor, starting to warm up a bit… decides he’s gonna TELL him his STORY…because he says maybe it will save WALTON, from making the same mistakes that HE made. 

Victor Frankenstein starts by telling him about his childhood. He was raised by a loving, pretty NORMAL family in Geneva, Switzerland. 

And from a very early age he grew up living in his house alongside a girl named Elizabeth. 

Now this is one of those differences between the 1818 version of the book and the 1831. In the ORIGINAL version… Elizabeth is his cousin, who his parents took in and raised as though she was their own daughter. The reason this MATTERS… is because Victor eventually falls in LOVE with Elizabeth years later…and being his COUSIN…you know, the average crowd READING this book in 1818 didn’t LIKE that part of the story very much. There was some backlash from people and so Mary Shelley changes Elizabeth to just an ADOPTED daughter in the later version, and this seems to go over a bit better. 

Anyway Victor CONTINUES with his story… and he says AS he started getting older…he started to become FASCINATED with natural philosophy and the occult. He reads everything he can get his HANDS on about it— and this interest GROWS in him… until just before his seventeenth birthday…when his Mom catches scarlet fever, and tragically DIES right at this major, formative moment in his life. 

Victor is HEARTBROKEN by this. At FIRST he doesn’t really know what to DO with himself. But after thinking about it and with all this going ON in his life… Victor decides he’s going to go to university in Bavaria, and finally get started on his FORMAL education…in the sciences. 

Now ONCE he gets there…this passion… he has for the MYSTERY of the natural world…combines with a TEACHER that he gets assigned to that REALLY inspires him… and all this LEADS him MORE down the road of studying CHEMISTRY, and more SPECIFICALLY to him trying to find the SECRETS to what life IS. 

And after studying for years…he thinks he’s finally DONE it. He finally discovers… what he calls in the book “the principle of life”. 

See in HIS mind: he MAY have just discovered what it TAKES…to CREATE that spark of life that makes it ALIVE, and then put it INSIDE what would OTHERWISE be just dead, inert matter. 

Only thing left to DO for him it seems…is to try it OUT and see if he’s right…I mean from HIS perspective… if he IS right here…he could be the one to give birth to an entirely new SPECIES. This DISCOVERY would change the entire WORLD. 

So he starts collecting body parts from dead bodies at charnel houses. He collects organs from animals at slaughter houses. IN TOTAL SECRECY, ALL while he’s STUDYING at this university… he pieces this creature together from ALL these different SOURCES. 

Finally the big day arrives where he’s going to breathe LIFE into this thing and see if his research is correct. 

And the description in the book of exactly HOW he brings the creature to life is pretty vague, and this is on PURPOSE for Shelley. For anyone out there CURIOUS about how electricity became the common way this is depicted…in the 1831 version of the book she talks in the introduction briefly about galvanization, or ELECTRICITY, as BEING A method people might USE. 

But in the actual BOOK…it’s funny there’s very little REFERENCE to how this creature’s ACTUALLY brought to life.

And that’s partially because the REAL significant thing that’s going ON in this moment for Shelley…is that ONCE Frankenstein brings this creature to LIFE…he doesn’t have the feeling that he expected to have: he doesn’t feel TRIUMPH, like yay, it’s ALIVE, I’ve DONE it after years and years of research. 

No, his FIRST feeling upon LOOKING at this THING…is that he’s horrified. Disgusted by it even. So he runs OUT of his laboratory, the lab is IN his apartment in the book… he runs into the room where he typically sleeps, he paces around a bit, and then he collapses on the bed fully clothed and falls asleep completely exhausted. 

While he’s asleep he has a nightmare… where in this nightmare that woman that he’s in love with, Elizabeth, transforms into the corpse of his dead mother… he gets JOLTED AWAKE by the dream…and what does he see but this creature, FROM the LABORATORY…is now at the foot of his bed staring at him, reaching out to him. He SPRINTS out of the building and spends the rest of the night pacing back and forth in the courtyard in front of his apartment. 

The next morning his friend arrives… he goes BACK into the apartment… and the creature’s gone. And it’s at THIS point that he BEGINS the process… of trying to FORGET that any of this stuff he’s DONE has ever happened. 

So this puts us at a very good spot in the book… to talk about what Mary Shelley has been going for so far in it. 

One of the most foundational things to understand about the PHILOSOPHY she’s referencing, that will set you up well to understand the REST of the points she’s gonna make…is the presence of two different, dominant attitudes, of two different eras, that when they co-exist together in the situation of Victor Frankenstein, potentially become very dangerous. 

Mary Shelley’s living at the beginning of the 1800’s. And if you were TALKING to people during this time, depending on who you’re speaking with, you’ll see BOTH… the attitudes of early Romanticism…AND the attitudes that emerged out of the Enlightenment and all the scientific progress going on. 

For example, Romantics will often have a sense of WONDER about the natural world. They’re AWESTRUCK by it. They’ll go on a hike, they’ll see a beautiful view of a mountain…and they’ll be overwhelmed by the power and mystery of the natural world that they recognize they’re just a small part of. 

Now for Shelley very DIFFERENT from this… was the inspired attitude of the Enlightenment, ESPECIALLY in scientists like Victor Frankenstein. THIS is more of an outlook…where NATURE is something that’s within our GRASP if only we get clever enough and do the work. If I keep running experiments and STICK to the scientific method…then through JUST my rational faculties alone, I might be able to MASTER nature, and HARNESS it to the benefit of PEOPLE. 

To Mary Shelley: neither ONE of these ways of looking at things is BAD. It’s NOT even necessarily bad for the two of these to MIX in a single person. But in the case of Victor FRANKENSTEIN, and the SPECIFIC situation he PUTS himself in…the two of these combined DO, end up producing things HORRIBLE for the people around him.

He has all the WONDER, about NATURE as this AMAZING THING filled with MYSTERIES and TREASURE to be DISCOVERED…and he has ALL the scientific spirit and ABILITY…to MASTER it and BRING it under his control. 

And when this combination goes on…in someone like Frankenstein, who sequesters himself off from the public and from his colleagues and CREATES this creature WITHOUT the checks and balances of a community…well this LEADS in the book to him creating a monster, that ends up going around and MURDERING innocent people. 

In other words: she’s saying scientific and technological PROGRESS…ALWAYS needs to be done alongside an ETHICS, that considers HOW this creation is going to IMPACT the community it’s being RELEASED into. 

Something that isn’t standard KNOWLEDGE about this book is that the full TITLE of the book was actually: Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. That’s the FULL title of the book.

Prometheus being a reference to the story from Greek mythology, of the titan Prometheus, who defies Zeus and steals fire from him and gives it to the humans to make their life better. Zeus doesn’t like that Prometheus DOES this…and so he PUNISHES him by chaining him to a rock, and having an eagle…eat his liver every day, which then regenerates, and then the eagle eats it AGAIN, the NEXT day. 

Certainly some creative justice going on there. But the POINT that Shelley’s making is that Victor Frankenstein wants to DO science and get ACCESS to this INCREDIBLE ability to of being able to BREATHE LIFE into things. And that JUST like PROMETHEUS…he’s gonna pay a PRICE when he decides to do this in an isolated and reckless way. 

Keep in mind: galvanism and running electricity through people…was CUTTING edge science and technology during the time Shelley is writing this book. There are these famous experiments that were run PUBLICLY around this time…where people would take the BODY of a person that was executed, run electricity through it… and it was INCREDIBLE to them that this dead person would start convulsing, their face would start scrunching up like they were alive…it’s a horrific thing for us in OUR time to imagine but to THEM: it was ALMOST like what was MISSING for life to BE there…is JUST the right electrical CHARGE… applied to JUST the right AREA. 

And while THIS was the state of the art science and tech going on in HER time…the point she’s making in this BOOK applies to ANY generation’s cutting edge stuff, to things that push the boundaries of what human beings can DO. 

Remember the episode we did on Bruno Latour…and how he CRITIQUES this idea that people often just throw around CASUALLY…that technology is not something that’s good or bad. Technology is NEUTRAL, it’s just a TOOL. It’s the PEOPLE that USE the technology for bad things…THAT’S where the real problem is we should be focusing on.

And remember Latour says this MAY not be the right way to be looking at it. That when a technology is created…it carries WITH it…a kind of latent morality, embedded into the POTENTIAL of the technology itself. And that MORE than that, we always need to be examining these inventions ETHICALLY, if we want to be doing things responsibly. 

For example if in my GARAGE…HIDDEN away from EVERYBODY…I create something that 3D prints deadly viral pathogens that target the human immune system and its weaknesses…is that a morally NEUTRAL piece of technology? Is nuclear power, or facial recognition technology, SIMPLY morally neutral? OR… do they CARRY with them consequences on the community they’re released into that need to be weighed against an ethics?

To Mary Shelley: we can’t just think of SCIENCE as pure method. And we can’t just think of technology, framed ONLY in terms of how it makes people’s LIVES more convenient. Facial recognition tech…yeah, it may make it take two seconds less for you to be able to get into your phone. But what are the OTHER, possible applications of facial recognition? This NEEDS to be something that’s ALWAYS MEDIATED…by ethics and community. 

And when you CONSIDER…the similarities of how certain AI companies do business these days…to the way Victor Frankenstein created this creature alone in his apartment. 

I mean, in the name of securing the rights TO the technology and doing good BUSINESS…the AI company will SEQUESTER themselves off, NOT be transparent, have EVERYBODY sign an NDA…and they’re CREATING something that in the case of AGI…is AIMING to CREATE, an entirely new SPECIES, that potentially carries RISKS to the seven billion OTHER people that live in the WORLD that technology is going to be released INTO. 

As MANY have already SAID over the years, but illustrated very CLEARLY in this book: we may be creating a monster…in the same way Victor Frankenstein did. Again, one made POSSIBLE only by the innovation process being DIVORCED from ethics and community.

And THIS is one of Mary Shelley’s big points here: she’s NOT against science. And she’s NOT against Romantic wonder. She’s against the arrogance of cordoning yourself OFF, creating PROBLEMS that WOULDN’T exist if you HADN’T cordoned yourself off…and then when the problems start showing up in peoples LIVES…then NOT taking responsibility for WHATEVER it is that you created. 

Cause there’s a whole other layer to the FALLOUT of all this done by Victor Frankenstein. You know in the book…AFTER this night in the laboratory…HE just tries to go on with his LIFE…trying to IGNORE the fact that there may be this CREATURE he created out there, lurking around doing God KNOWS what. 

But this CREATURE…is a fully capable BEING it turns out. One that just has to go out on its OWN… and try to figure things out the best it can. Remember the creature follows Victor up into the Alps so he can have a conversation with him…and he TELLS Victor what his LIFE was like after the day that he abandoned him. 

At first he went out into the woods, hiding, not knowing really what to do. At a CERTAIN point he realizes he’s gotta eat…but he couldn’t IMAGINE taking the LIFE of another creature. 

So IMPORTANTLY here for Shelley, the creature BEGINS his life essentially as a vegetarian that’s living out in the woods. Over time he comes across a family called the De Laceys. They live in a rural situation, kind of like a farm, and the FATHER of the De Lacey family is COMPLETELY blind it turns out. 

The creature sits just outside of view…and watches them for MONTHS. He listens to them interact with each other. He pays attention and LEARNS as they’re teaching someone from another country, how to speak and read and all the rest of it. He collects firewood in his spare time just to help the family out…eventually he even starts to read books. He reads Plutarch. He reads Milton’s Paradise Lost. 

He COMES to have an appreciation of ART and philosophy and all that humanity has to offer. One day he gets up his courage…and when all the kids are gone and there’s just this old blind man De Lacey sitting at the house alone…he goes up and starts talking to him. 

Now obviously the guy can’t SEE that who he’s TALKING to is this sewn together, monstrous looking creature, so he ends up liking him. A lot. Real social BUTTERFLY Frankenstein’s monster turns out to be. 

But then as SOON as the KIDS get home they SEE this MONSTER thing talking to and hanging around their dad…they INSTANTLY reject him. They yell at him.. They start physically, attacking the creature and as he runs away and goes BACK into the woods he starts to realize: that he’s NEVER going to be accepted by humanity…NEVER gonna happen JUST because of how he LOOKS. 

This feeling turns into ANGER…which then turns into RESENTMENT…for the creator in Victor Frankenstein, that SELFISHLY brought him INTO this world against his will…HE had no choice in the matter. And then he ABANDONED him on DAY ONE…not giving him ANYTHING in terms of care, education, identity, recognition. He DEPRIVED him of all these things…SIMPLY because he didn’t expect to FEEL the way he did when he CREATED this thing. 

Now OF COURSE this is a metaphor for the responsibility scientists and people that produce technology have to not ABANDON their creations, ethically. But this is JUST as much a criticism by Shelley of the way that PEOPLE…often abandon other PEOPLE who are their creations. Not the LEAST of which when it comes to making babies, who equally didn’t choose to be born…who are similarly CREATURES, that someone might ABANDON, because the feeling they had now that they’re HERE… is not the one they EXPECTED to have. 

Scholars of Shelley will sometimes say…that the whole experiment that Victor Frankenstein RUNS…is an OVERLY masculine attempt to USE domination over nature, to REMOVE maternal care and the woman, from the whole PROCESS of creating a being. And not only that: that this is what HAPPENS when you try to REMOVE that whole side of things: Victor Frankenstein ends up being both a horrible FATHER…AND a horrible mother to this creature. 

That there IS no lone, heroic GENIUS that’s going to be able to step in and REPLACE the need for what COMMUNITY does for people, and the near constant CARE that something needs. 

The other conversation to HAVE here, RELATED to how we can’t remove ETHICS from the process of CREATING something…is if you bring a child into this world for example, then abandon it, and then 20 years later you get mugged at the ATM for $80, and it’s YOUR CHILD that just MUGGED you…are you morally responsible for the consequences of you ABANDONING that creation all those years ago? For what happens when YOUR CREATION…doesn’t HAVE responsible GUIDANCE? 

How about the creations of people that make technology, are THEY responsible if they act recklessly?

Mary Shelley is getting us to question the moral DUALISM we often operate under, ESPECIALLY in liberal society that’s so focused on individualism. You know, we’d like to say that everyone is their own individual person. Should your KID do something, well that’s a bad seed. There’s nothing you could’ve done about it as a parent. 

But as we hear a little more of the story: ARE the creature’s ACTIONS…REALLY so clearly SEPARATE… from VICTOR’S actions of creating something so powerful and then NEGLECTING it so severely?

See a few months before the creature meets Frankenstein up in the alps and tells him about his life…it’d been about a year and a half since that NIGHT when Victor brought this thing to life…and HE’D heard absolutely nothing ABOUT it for that whole time. Had to have figured the creature was dead, captured, I mean SOMETHING must have happened to it. But one day out of the blue he gets a letter from his Dad…telling him that his brother, William, had just been murdered. 

Obviously this comes as a SHOCK to Victor. And shortly after he returns BACK to Geneva to attend the funeral, SEE if he can help his family at all. 

And the night he GETS there…it’s RAINING really hard, it’s a THUNDER storm and it’s LATE at night, DARK outside. As he’s looking over at the ridgeline outside near where his brother was murdered…lightning goes off nearby, it lights up the area for a second…and Victor SEES the CREATURE, HE created, LURKING over on the rocks. 

Of COURSE what he suspects here is the worst, and it ALSO ends up being the truth. The creature has KILLED his brother William…and he DID it out of vengeance for what Frankenstein has done to him. 

What’s WORSE than that: is that nobody’s IGNORING the fact that a person was MURDERED here. And as the police conduct the investigation INTO the murder…they search the belongings of a woman named Justine who WORKED in William’s house as a servant…and in her clothes they find the golden locket, that William usually wore around his neck. The creature had PLANTED it there…just to FRAME Justine. 

Now her being poor and IN possession of the locket…doesn’t really LOOK too good to the eyes of the court that’s holding her trial. She gets PRESSURED…into CONFESSING to the murder even though she didn’t DO it…and so they sentence Justine to the death penalty, as Victor Frankenstein watches from the sidelines sick to his stomach. I mean not ONLY does he now have his BROTHER’S death he feels responsible for…but now an innocent WOMAN’S gotten caught up in the mix as well. 

Now, this turn to VIOLENCE by the creature in the book…is something that’s been STUDIED a LOT by scholars of Mary Shelley’s work. 

Again, the creature BEGINS its life not wanting to hurt ANYTHING. It’s a vegetarian that collects FIRE wood for people just to be helpful. TOTAL nerd. Just kidding, anyway it’s NOT until… it starts trying to talk to PEOPLE…who then OSTRACIZE the thing and consider it to be a MONSTER…it’s ONLY THEN that the CREATURE turns angry, resentful, and then resorts to VIOLENCE as a way to get social recognition from his creator. 

None of this is an accident in the story that Mary Shelley’s writing here. 

When the creature describes its experience to Victor…and it resembles, EXACTLY the kind of experience you’d expect a normal HUMAN to have…readers of this book are INSTANTLY forced to consider at a deeper level, what constitutes PERSONHOOD. 

Mary Shelley has gotten people thinking EVEN back in the 1800’s…about how EVEN if someone APPEARS in a certain way…their appearance, their immutable characteristics they were born with, is this enough for us to ASSUME that this person is a monster?

The trial of Justine in the book is often seen as an EXTENSION of this exact metaphor. Cause think of what’s going on in the courtroom: in a supposedly NEUTRAL setting, where we’re gonna leave NO STONE UNTURNED until we FIND OUT exactly what HAPPENED in the eyes of the law…the mere, APPEARANCE, of Justine as a poor woman who HAD the locket in her possession…JUST THIS was enough for the courts to ABANDON…what they CLAIM is their highest IDEAL in delivering unbiased justice. 

And to Mary Shelley: this can happen in SCIENCE, if the community assumes every experiment is a neutral, unbiased method. This can happen in technology when people mistake the inventions as being neutral TOOLS. 

The POINT is: think of what happens…when a group based on immutable characteristics are OSTRACIZED by the public… and labeled as sub-HUMAN in some way. 

And by the way this point she’s making doesn’t have to go on simply at a GROUP level: remember, the creature from the BOOK is an individual. Imagine a single KID… being raised in a home…that OSTRACIZES them. DENIES them care, education, recognition in the SAME WAY. Would you be surprised if that KID…grew UP to resent the world they LIVE in. 

You might say…that the PARENTS owed this kid MORE than that treatment, right? And maybe you’d say you see her point about moral dualism there: that yeah, the parents ARE morally responsible in some way… if their negligence creates a monster. Don’t have KIDS…if you don’t want to RAISE those kids, you may say.

But does this same RESPONSIBILITY, extend to society? This is a real question she’s EXPLORING here in this book.

Imagine a group…that’s committing violence at disproportionate rates. Now consider is this ALSO a group…that is being TREATED by the society they live in…like they’re sub-human in some way. Like they OWE people something. Like they don’t deserve recognition, at the same level that OTHER groups do in that SAME SOCIETY. 

A popular reading among scholars of this book…is that make no mistake, Mary Shelley is certainly INCLUDING all this in the book…to reference to the treatment of women in the 1800’s when she was writing…but they’d also say make no mistake…her POINT here is about a phenomenon that’s much LARGER than just women in the 1800’s…it’s one that REPEATS itself throughout history with DIFFERENT groups OTHER than just women. 

Whenever society OSTRACIZES a group…USUALLY feeling MORALLY SUPERIOR to this group the WHOLE TIME THEY’RE DOING it…don’t be surprised if some MEMBERS of that group respond with anger, and then resentment, and even eventually VIOLENCE like Frankenstein’s creature does. 

Is it WISE for a society to PROVIDE people guidance, and a PLACE in that society… REGARDLESS of what they look like. DOES a society have an ethical obligation to give its members social recognition like that, because the consequences of NOT doing it are so dire?

Because after murdering his brother…the creature talks to Frankenstein and tells him look: I REALIZE…I’m NEVER going to be accepted by people. I’m never gonna have my own PLACE in this world.. But YOU as my CREATOR, kind of do OWE me something here. 

Since you gave birth to ME as the FIRST member of a new species…you gotta GO back into the lab and make me a FEMALE version of whatever it is I am…and look: if you DO that I PROMISE you hand to richard dawkins…that I will disappear with her, we’ll go to South America, live in the woods or something and we will never bother another human being ever again. 

To which Frankenstein of course says YES. You know, making almost the EXACT same mistake he did before: bringing yet ANOTHER creature into existence, without their consent in the matter, and THIS time essentially SENTENCING this one to be the ROMANTIC partner of this OTHER thing he created…

But anyway, he agrees to DO it. 

Gets back to work in a NEW lab, starts putting this other creature together…and he starts to have DOUBTS, about whether what he’s DOING here is really the right decision. 

After all he thinks: what if he just creates ANOTHER one of these…and now there’s TWO of these things out there murdering people. What if the two of these things BREED with each other…and all of a sudden we have a whole VILLAGE of these things wreaking havoc on people. Also we CAN’T IGNORE the fact he thinks that the creature SAYS… he’s gonna move out into the woods and not bother anyone…but how is any of that really ENFORCEABLE by Frankenstein? I mean the fact is: he has ZERO RECOURSE should this creature not keep his word there. What if he’s just gonna keep getting BLACKMAILED by this thing?

He starts to realize oh wait: maybe I AM just doing the same thing as before and maybe the BEST decision I can make at this point…is just to END this whole process right here. 

He’s CONFLICTED about it, he THINKS about it for a while…until on one of the nights he’s WORKING in the lab… he looks out his window…and who does he see there but the creature, standing there, peering through the window, he feels like he’s SUPERVISING him doing his work. 

This becomes the last straw to Victor Frankenstein. He starts to feel USED. He feels like this thing is holding him hostage, and that now the power dynamic has FLIPPED… to where at FIRST he CREATED something…and NOW he’s just OBEYING… whatever his creation tells him to DO. 

Which for whatever it’s worth: welcome to having KIDS Victor Frankenstein. 

Anyway he gets mad and in front of the creature, he TEARS APART this female creature he was working on…screams at him that he refuses to work on it anymore.

To which the creature replies: I’ll be with you on your wedding night. Then he disappears.

Shortly after this whole event…one of Victor’s closest friends gets murdered. He knows it’s the creature that did it. Shortly after THAT he asks Elizabeth to marry him…and on his wedding night he REMEMBERS what the creature told him…so he ARMS himself EXPECTING the creature to come and try to kill HIM…but INSTEAD the creature kills Elizabeth. Leaving Victor in absolute MISERY as he sees all the people CLOSEST to him, DESTROYED by his past mistakes. 

At this point he vows to KILL the creature. I mean what else is left for this guy to do with his life? He tracks the creature north into the mountains, and eventually all the way to the arctic, where he finally gives up and lays down on an ice floe to hopefully be able to die in peace. And that’s when Robert Walton, the explorer from the beginning of the book, FINDS him and asks him to tell his story.

Victor dies after he TELLS Robert all this stuff. Then Robert FINDS the creature, GRIEVING over Victor’s body. It swears to Walton that it’s going to end its life…that its purpose is complete… and then it takes off into the distance and that’s the last we hear of it. 

Couple things to note here towards the end of this that are worth mentioning. 

If you noticed that there are a lot of WOMEN in this book that get killed or convicted or ripped apart while CONSTRUCTING them even…there’s a LOT of feminist READINGS of this book that say this was DELIBERATE by Mary Shelley. That science is coded as masculine. Nature is coded as feminine. And that WHEN, masculine projects are carried OUT in the world WITHOUT the moral accountability discussed so far…it’s not JUST potentially damaging to the community…but specifically WOMEN, become disposable and killable in the NAME of the project…at a disproportionate level. 

ANOTHER thing to mention is that if you read this book because it was assigned to you in school or something…it’s likely you read the 1831 version of the book that Mary Shelley made those revisions to that we talked about before. 

In terms of WHY she made these revisions then…well, most people think the ANSWER to that can be found by looking at the specific things that she changed. Most notably: she changes the whole TONE, SURROUNDING the THINGS that Victor Frankenstein DOES in the book…and after the revisions she frames them more in terms of this all being his FATE…DETERMINISTIC and OUT of his CONTROL…INSTEAD of this being a matter of his own free will.

People think she MADE this change because of the tragedies that happened to her in her OWN life during this time. 

I mean between 1818 and 1831…in this time span she loses two of her children. Her husband dies. She suffers from depression and gets really bad recurring headaches. She’s a single MOM that’s trying to deal with ALL of this…while ALSO trying to be a world class writer. 

The common theory is that by the time she got to this point where she’s making revisions…she just felt much more STRONGLY that the events that are thrown your WAY in a lifetime, DEFINE a lot of what you DO, and that she wanted this to be more EMPHASIZED when it comes to the events of VICTOR’S life in the book. 

Anyway, I hope this guide helps you if you decide to read the book. It’s not that long of a book. Highly recommend it myself. 

Looking forward to having the discussion with all you fine folks on Patreon, and learning some more from the good people that listen to this show.. Thanks to everyone that supports the podcast in ANY way that you do, could never do this without you, and most of all:

Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.