How to start writing about one of the most famous books in literature without it sounding like an English essay? I suppose not spending precious moments deconstructing the text. It’s been done a thousand times over! With all the energy spent on analysing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it’s a wonder the book itself doesn’t jump off the shelf screaming ‘IT’S ALIVE'!’".
That’s not to say it shouldn’t have been or continue to be scrutinised with the intensity of a 4th year anatomy student. But we, or at least, I am not a scientist. I am a reader who prefers to explore feeling. How did a book make me feel? What emotions were provoked by the writing?
Over the years Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has made me feel inspired, furious, envious (who could ever match that originality?!). It made me fall in love with poetic writing laced with multiple meanings. It made me laugh (Gene Wilder’s Young Frankenstein is one of my favourite films of all time). It showed me that even horror can be beautiful, and that the idea of good and evil is complex and undefined. That judgement of difference is weak and that above all, empathy is the most important aspect of humanity.
All this from a story about a 19th Century, obsessed, arguably hysterical male doctor? A story about the very embodiment of Gothic era masculinity? A story, a work of art, written by a woman of such a uniquely creative mind living in the biggest cliche of our lives - a man’s world. Even the monster is named after a man. Did Mary Shelley feel that same anger as the monster did when her book was published without her own name? Did she tremble in the years that followed as her life echoed her story?
Though on the surface Frankenstein is a story about men (and I am not the first to debate whether that God-like feat accomplished by Dr Frankenstein was the ego rubbing that led to the novel’s popularity), it’s impossible to ignore the multifaceted prose and history that contribute to it being an intensely Feminist work. Mary Shelley was, after all, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. Could this work be her monster? Her creation, sewn together from the pieces of furious ideological thinking her mother left her?
Frankenstein is an emotional, tactile novel. You read it and sense the icy finger of lonely desolation on your nape. A women, almost alone in a thundering Swiss cabin. You can taste the bitterness of rejection and paranoia. To be in love with a man like Percy Shelley! But in reading Frankenstein, you also experience the warmth of birth and love. The pleasure of the acquisition of knowledge. The sublime feeling of reading what truly is a work of art - the words of a woman of incredible talent. To me, Frankenstein is the greatest example of classic English Literature. The layers and nuance mean that it reads differently each time it is approached. It was, and in many ways still is, way ahead of its time in content and technique. It’s political, allegorical, thrilling, intelligent and quite simply, beautiful. It made me feel something. It made me feel everything.
Blog post written by Sophia Vassie of Bin Chicken Books, which you can follow on Instagram and Facebook.