Frankenstein's Brain

Puzzles and Conundrums in Mary Shelley's Monstrous Masterpiece

Jon Sutherland

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785784095
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

200 years on from the first publication of Frankenstein, John Sutherland delves into the deepest, darkest corners of Mary Shelley's gothic masterpiece to see what strange and terrifying secrets lie within.Is Victor Frankenstein a member of the Illuminati? Was Mary Shelley really inspired by spaghetti? Whoever heard of a vegan monster?Exploring the lesser-known byways of both the original tale and its myriad film and pop culture spinoffs, from the bolts on Boris Karloff's neck to the role of Igor in Young Frankenstein, Frankenstein's Brai n is a fascinating journey behind the scenes of this seminal work of literature and imagination.Includes a unique digest by the Guardian's John Crace.

II.
THE STORY

What is the point of Captain Robert Walton?

The story opens with the explorer Captain Walton on his ship, within tantalising distance of the North Pole, witnessing a giant heading north at high speed in his sled over the ice, then, shortly after, an exhausted pursuer whom Walton will rescue and who, as he convalesces, will tell his extraordinary tale.

In her retrospective 1831 preface Mary Shelley recalled the dream which enabled her to join the narrative game in the parlour. And, posterity would think, go on to win:

Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. ‘I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.’ On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words, It was on a dreary night of November, making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.*

The stories which the quintet exchanged among themselves (two, those of Byron and Shelley, soon discontinued, Claire’s never begun) were necessarily brief – at most, 90 minutes reading aloud.† The Ur-Frankenstein which Mary recalls must have hooked the first listeners with its opening line: ‘It was on a dreary night of November’.

A ‘three-decker’ (three-volume novel) such as that which the two Shelleys (he adviser and agent, she author and scribe) launched on the world on New Year’s Day, 1818, was bulkier by magnitudes than what had thrilled the company at Villa Diodati. It was a commercial imperative for ‘library editions’ to be fat books. Two layers of padding were added in the published novel, delaying the line about the dreary night until a few chapters in. One layer is the prelude describing Victor Frankenstein’s Genevese background, his mother’s death, and his discoveries at Ingolstadt.

Wrapped around the whole of the three-volume narrative is an epistolary frame, in which Robert Walton recounts to his sister Margaret (will she ever receive the letters?) how his voyage into the Arctic deeps is progressing. Nothing much to report except icebergs, a homicidal giant, a dying scientist and a mutiny among his men who really can’t see the point of going to the ends of the earth for the pittance Captain Walton is paying.

The Walton frame helps swell the wordage as library readers required and with its implied myth and symbolism enriched the narrative. Mary’s understandable ignorance about life on the ocean wave leads to an occasional lapse. But research in books plugged most of the gaps. Immediately after Villa Diodati her journal for 16 November 1816 records ‘read old voyages’ – about the North West Passage and polar magnetism, ‘the wondrous power which attracts the needle’, one guesses.

The Walton frame raises a teasing puzzle: why does everyone go north in this novel? Why does it all end up the pole, so to speak, in blinding midnight sun? There is an unexplained geomagnetic pull straining the whole narrative and attracting all the main characters due north like a flock of instinctively migrating birds.

Why, one goes on to ask, does the Creature, of his own free will, go to the polar north to destroy himself by fire? It has been hinted that he – a giant – is of a kind with the pagan Norse ‘frost giants’. If there is one thing in his short life Victor’s giant loves and feels at home in, it is frost and ice.

Relevant here is Abigail Heiniger’s explanation of the Nordic myth:

Frost giants are not a part of the Norse pantheon in Valhalla. Rather, they live on the fringes of the world of men in a realm called Niflheim; it is a world of ice and mist separated from the human world by forests and mountains.‡

The Creature’s implied intention, once he reaches the pole, is to find or create his Niflheim (mist home) and die in its sacred chill.

Why, though, does Victor, a delicate fellow not built for cold and hardship, follow his Creature through Siberia to the farthest North, after performing his final act of life-creation in the northernmost tip of Britain, the Orkneys? Victor has not a hope in hell (or the Norse ‘Hel’)§ of killing the Creature, his avowed motive. The Creature has a sword, a gun and pistols, which he has used to purloin his sledge, provisions and dogs from terrified Inuits. Victor has come by his gear more decently but evidently forgot his dogs’ provisions. All but one die (but oddly the single starved beast is still capable of pulling Victor’s sled).

Vivified by ice, the Creature could swat his enfeebled would-be assassin like a fly. Victor would have a better chance with the polar bears. His rescue by Walton merely postpones his death for a few weeks and renders his ultimate end more comfortable. ‘Ice’ should be the cause of death written on the certificate signed by the ship’s surgeon. Had Victor survived to make it to the pole he would have anticipated by 120 years the first human feet in 1909.¶ Their owners would have been mightily surprised to find a predecessor’s faded Swiss flag fluttering there.

The creator/Creature rendezvous at the pole is mysterious. Another mystery is why has Robert Walton spent the six best years of his life working as a lowly seaman on whalers in order to train himself, and amass funds, to voyage to the pole? He perfunctorily suggests he is looking for the fabled North West Passage.

But Walton’s deeper motive, we deduce, is to touch the navel of the world electrical, to find what turns the compass needle (and in this novel human beings) north. He will know why he has made the voyage when he is there. As he travels north, he feels he is fulfilling something deep in himself:

I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves, and fills me with delight. … Inspirited by this wind of promise, my day dreams become more fervent and vivid. 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.

‘Delight’ is the word. His education, he tells us, was ‘poetry’. Coleridge preeminently. One hears, too, an echo of Wordsworth’s lines on Newton:

The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.||

Walton is as much an adventurer as an explorer.

There was a polar ‘hysteria’ in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars – with all those ships and sailors suddenly lying idle. There were new worlds to conquer. Mary clearly caught the excitement. In 1819, as people were reading Frankenstein, there were five well-funded British polar expeditions. None reached the pole.

Mary’s interest in things polar, as has been said, can be traced back to when, as a nine-year-old, hiding behind the sofa, she heard Coleridge reciting his ‘Rime’ and was caught up, for life, in what Francis Spufford calls ‘the hazy love affair between the ice and the English’.**

Another force pulling everyone magnetically north is to be found in ancient ‘Arktos’ myths, of which the above Niflheim is but one. These myths fantasised what man – were man hubristic enough to try, and lucky enough to succeed – would actually find at the pole.

One principal myth, still believed as late as Elisha Kent Kane’s expedition in the mid-1850s, was that there was a warm ocean up there with geothermal ‘gates’, if only they could be located and penetrated. An Eden, no less.

And what was it that frustrated every expedition made to the pole and kept doing so until the first decade of the 20th century? Was it, perhaps, some energy force – a reverse magnetism? Or was there, as the more devout feared, a divine prohibition against man’s presumption?

As recounted in the ancient pagan Norse poem The Edda, the great Tree of Life, Yggdrasil, is rooted at the North Pole. It is ‘the largest plant in the world’, and man approaches Yggdrasil at his peril. So Captain Robert Walton discovers.

Where did Mary and Percy Shelley learn about Norse mythology? Bishop Percy’s Northern Antiquities (1770) is the answer. That popular book was on their reading list in 1815, a few months before Villa Diodati. It was a translation of Paul Henri Mallet’s Introduction à l’histoire de Dannemarc (1755). Bishop Percy it was who made Norse runic mythology a vibrant element in English Romantic ideology.

After he has seen the demise of the Creature and Victor, Walton accepts the cosmic prohibition against ‘presumption’ such as his and turns back. He is, he accepts, a mere mortal:

The die is cast; I have consented to return, if we are not destroyed. Thus are my hopes blasted by cowardice and indecision; I come back ignorant and disappointed … It is past; I am returning to England. I have lost my hopes of utility and glory; – I have lost my friend.

Once returned he will live, a sadder and a wiser man, to be united with his sister Margaret.

Was, then, the Walton plot merely narrative bubble-wrap to swell Mary’s kernel story to three volumes? No. It is something worked into the plot which gives Frankenstein a deeper, more resonantly mythic tone. The romance of ice.

* As a brilliant medical student at Edinburgh, John Polidori was particularly interested in somnambulism and waking dreams.

† The length, that is, of Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’, later published more or less in its original reading form.

‡ Abigail Heiniger, as cited above (see page 4).

§ Described in the 13th-century Edda, it is a freezing, not infernal region, under the rule of the synonymously named Goddess Hel.

¶ The 1909 team comprised Americans Robert Peary and Matthew Henson, and four Inuit men. Who was the first among them is disputed. See also Taylor Humin, https://prezi.com/logmjpdbprsv/polar-expeditions-and-mary-shelleys-frankenstein/ and Sarah Moss, ‘Romanticism on Ice: Coleridge, Hogg and the Eighteenth-Century Missions to Greenland’, https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ron/2007-n45-ro...