Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, October 2023 Book Club Reading

[Falselogic]

Written in 1818 by English author Mary Shelley. Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20.

The story of how Frankenstein came to be is now legend and has grown with each re-telling. The short version is that while traveling through Europe Mary, with her lover and future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Polidori and Lord Byron there was a bet on who could write the best horror story. Mary's contribution was Frankenstein. John Polidori adapted a story that Lord Byron told into the The Vampyre, which some consider the first true Vampire novel. Percy and Byron never finished their contributions.

Must have been quite the trip!

The book is available for free from Project Gutenberg or Standard Ebooks.

 

[Kirin]

Pretty wild when your teenage road trip turns into literally stuff of legend and produces things that enter the cultural canon for centuries to come.

 

[Violentvixen]

I read this back in high school and have never revisited it, I'll try and give it a reread this month and at the least put some comments in later in the month

 

[John]

I’ve never read this before, and like that we slated it for the Spooky Month. Read the first couple “chapters” this morning, didn’t know it was an epistolary novel! That’s a fun framing device that I don’t see that much. The language isn’t too archaic, I noticed it a bit more in the preface and the first letter, but now I’m acclimated.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

One of the things that sticks with me is, though I might be mistaken the book never says the monster is made out of corpses. It sounds more like he made a person from scratch. Are there hints or intimations I missed since I feel like that's canon to basically every version. I could easily be missing it because I often am a poor reader in terms of details.

BTW, shout out to the version that has piece of art by Bernie Wrightson.

Also, I know this is just for the real deal but Junji Ito's comic adaptation is well worth checking out. It's very true to the original and is much more stately and subdued than a lot of his other work.

 

[Eishtmo]

One of the things that sticks with me is, though I might be mistaken the book never says the monster is made out of corpses. It sounds more like he made a person from scratch. Are there hints or intimations I missed since I feel like that's canon to basically every version. I could easily be missing it because I often am a poor reader in terms of details.

No, you're right. That was more an invention of the films than the book itself. In fact, I don't think even Victor knows how the creature was created, it just kind of happened.

 

[estragon]

The novel doesn't linger on the process or remind you of with the creature's visual design in the way that a movie necessarily does anytime the creature is onscreen, but it's there.

The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion.

I checked to make sure this isn't an issue of revision (because there are two different versions with some significant differences), and this sentence is in both the 1818 and 1831 texts.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

I clearly missed this and it actually makes it interesting in a way I don't think most versions actually cover; he's using non-human parts for his monster.

 

[estragon]

I clearly missed this and it actually makes it interesting in a way I don't think most versions actually cover; he's using non-human parts for his monster.

Yeah, part of what marks the creature as unnatural is being made from a mix of human and animal parts.

 

[Violentvixen]

Reading through this I was reminded of an Archie comic I read back when I was a kid. Basically Mr. Weatherbee is incredibly sexist and wants to impress another man with a presentation about poetry, but Ms Grundy is far smarter than him and isn't going to put up with this nonsense and does Frankenstein instead. This comic is how I learned Frankenstein was written by a woman and I liked the comeuppance at the end.

I like that at the end his wife just goes "hell yeah, enough of this shit".

Technically here's a link to the comic but it's part of a 1000 page digest and scrolling through the pages seems to make the site glitch a bit. Fun though!

 

[Violentvixen]

I'd forgotten how at the end of Chapter II he is scared away from biology and only wants to learn math.

It's interesting how the popular version of the monster is that he can't speak or only moans. I remembered he could speak in this but not how eloquent he is. I'd forgotten a lot of the scenes with Felix and language learning too.

 

[Falselogic]

I felt bad for Justine in the narrative. Simply introduced so that something awful could be done to her so that the reader is angry with the Creature, I really do feel like the strangling of the small boy was enough for the character arcs...

The trope of fridging goes back a ways doesn't it?

 

[Purple]

One of the things that sticks with me is, though I might be mistaken the book never says the monster is made out of corpses. It sounds more like he made a person from scratch. Are there hints or intimations I missed since I feel like that's canon to basically every version.

You know what other detail is canon to basically every single adapatation of Frankenstein but isn't in the original book? All of them.

The one that gets me though is how aside from the Junji Ito manga version which actually is totally faithful that I recall, everyone cuts out Frankenstein's incredibly solid pal Henry. It's a really good character dynamic of a sort you almost never see. There's like... Frankenstein and House 2. More people gotta call on the aid of their super chill and loyal friends to deal with their monster problems.