From the winding words to the concentration of thought, emotion,
and imagery on every page, Frankenstein
was beautifully written.
But it was also a pain to read.
My copy consisted of 198 pages of small, neat print, and it
took me two weeks to read. Two. Full. Weeks. By the time I had finished, it was
ten minutes past midnight on a school night, and I was physically and
emotionally drained. I read the last line and slammed my book shut. My pride at
finally finishing the novel outweighed any desire I had to sit and think
about the text once I was done. I didn’t so much as pick up another book
to read for pleasure until five days after I had finished Frankenstein.
Later, I began to wonder why I was so willing to stop thinking
about Victor, the Creature, and Captain Walton. It’s not that Mary Shelley did not relay powerful messages about the nature
of mankind in the text; on the contrary, her words were a sobering and hard-hitting portrayal of
loneliness and mankind’s obsession with beauty. The reason I found Frankenstein so excruciating to read is because it felt like Victor's accounts of his thoughts and feelings would never end.
I did not, however, encounter the same problem with the Creature, which is why the book was not entirely lost on me. I pitied the Creature for six
chapters as he told Victor of his life of abandonment, isolation, and
unreciprocated violence; I smiled into the pages of my book when the Creature
found Paradse Lost, Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter on the ground, because I knew that these books
would teach the Creature to express his thoughts; I gasped aloud when Felix
began beating the Creature, because I realized that this act could lead to a
lifelong detestation of humanity on the Creature’s end. And it did.
I was extremely attached to the Creature
throughout the entirety of the novel. By page 14, which was long before the
Creature had even been mentioned, I was already contrasting the way society
treats Victor with the way it would treat a “Monster.” Captain Walton’s
description of Victor as “unequalled for clearness and precision… [and having] a
facility of expression and a voice whose varied intonations are soul-subduing
music” (14) infuriated me, because I knew Walton would never say the same about
the Creature, regardless of the Creature’s eloquence or insight. The
Creature would never be given the chance that Victor was entitled to, because
of man’s inability to go beyond the surface it is unappealing enough to the eye.I realized later that the attachment I felt to the Creature
was founded on the fact that he was still so new to the world; in a sense, the
Creature was a blank slate, and his short-lived mind was never as contradictory
or convoluted as Victor’s, who had been on the Earth for so much longer.
I think that I could have related with Victor a
little bit more, if I had more of a sense of who he really was. My major issue with the writing of Frankenstein is that the reader rarely sees Victor’s raw interactions with the people around him. By
this, I mean that there was not enough quotation mark-laden dialogue. When
there is objective conversation, the reader is given more freedom to make an
assumption of the character and walk away with her own assumption of who Victor
was. I grew tired and felt stripped of my freedom as a reader when all I was given
were Victor’s intimate thoughts and feelings. They reminded me of a secondary
source – one that had been analyzed, modified, and blogged about (heh, heh) with
a definite bias. Although I knew the details of Victor’s youth and the
strong feelings that he associated with it, the story feels incomplete if I can’t
read about Victor's surface-level reactions to the world and the people in it.
By the end of the book, I felt that what I knew about the
two main characters, Victor and the Creature, was off-balance. I knew
everything about the inside of Victor, but very little about how he projects
himself to the world. I could deduct so much more about the Creature, because I
knew how he thought, as well as how others perceived him. There’s a saying that
no one is black or white and that we all consist of gray areas. There is no one on this world who is solidly good or bad, and the more you get to know a person, the harder
it is to see them in one-dimension. If you start from the surface and dig your way down, you’re bound to find something you respect
about them, or at least something you can relate to, even if you start out hating them. If all this is true, how can I help but take the Creature’s side?
No comments:
Post a Comment