Kevin's Watch

duchess of malfi wrote:I have been reading Frankenstein lately, and am finding it to be quite a surprise. Halfway done and loving it.

I think I have seen too many cheesy and bad movies based upon this novel, as my expectations were fairly low.

But this book is turning out to be both very intelligent and very literate. Shelley's prose is a joy to read.

duchess of malfi wrote:Wayfriend, I was surprised in the introduction when they mentioned that this novel is one of the great original science fiction/horror novels - but that Shelley also wrote one of the first science fiction/post-apocalyptic novels where a man is left alone wandering the earth after a plague kills off the rest of the human race.

Murrin wrote:Can I ask which version you're reading, Duchess? I've only read the original 1818 text; I understand that the 1832 revision, which is more widely known, has some significant changes.
A great book, anyhow.

APPENDIX B

The third edition (1831): Substantive changes

This appendix first summarizes the types of change made in 1831, before listing them individually.
1. As a more practised, polished writer, MWS regularly ampliphies descriptive passages or introduces reflective ones. She gives Frankenstein and to a lesser extent Walton an inner life and a conscience. The most extensive and significant changes occur at the beginning (the most crudely written part of the 1818 text): the first chapter is sufficiently amplified to be divided into two chapters. By the standards of early Victorian literary taste, and still by many standards, these changes enhance the book.
2. The characters of Walton, Frankenstein, and Alphonse Frankenstein are all softened, made more sympathetic and admirable. Walton acquires a gentle, almost feminine character, literariness, and an even greater propensity than in 1818 to hero-worship Frankenstein. Alphonse Frankenstein is still old when he marries, but much haler than before, and his marriage is in 1831 an ideal one. But the most significant changes occur in the narration of Frankenstein, who is partly absolved of blame for his early errors (now put down to bad influences), yet also reproaches himself more than in the first version.
3. Frankenstein's education is heavily rewritten. As before, it is largely scientific. But the family's ignorance of science is now stressed, so that the young boy is left to his own devices, and his involvement with Renaissance science or magic becomes a childish enthusiasm. A stranger teaches him about electricity, not his father (who thus escapes the blame too). The first identifiable villains in this version of the story are his teachers at Ingolstadt--a notoriously unorthodox university--who teach him bad knowledge.
4. Partly via Walton, Victor Frankenstein's character is now built up as admirable. His own description of his early craving for knowledge becomes desire for the ideal--a quintessentially Romantic search for 'the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man...the metaphysical, or, in the highest sense, the physical secrets of the world'. These lines are key ones, for they deny the more consistent links of the original Frankenstein with materialist science. MWS takes other steps to disengage from naturalism, e.g. 'the monstrous Image which I had endued with the mockery of a soul still more monstrous' (III. iv; 1831, xxi). And, lest his antisocial feelings after the Irish expedition should seem to be condoned, 'Oh, not abhorred! they were my brethren, my fellow beings, and I felt attracted even to the most repulsive among them, as to creatures of angelic nature and celestial mechanism' (III. v).
5. Frankenstein is given an explicitly religious consciousness. At the point in his boyhood when he becomes disillusioned with science, he (1831) observes, 'it seems to me as if this almost miraculous change of inclination and will was the immediate suggestion of the guardian angel of my life'; conversely, on arrival at Ingolstadt, it is the angel of destruction that leads him to M. Krempe. And, 'I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy' (I. i and ii). Extensive additions to II. i sacralize Nature in a style new to the novel. Almost all the substitute passages in Vol. III soften and Christianize Frankenstein's character, toning down the severity of the portrayal in 1818.
6. A number of scientific passages are either cut, like the seemingly innocuous description of Franklin's famous experiment with electricity (I. i) or transvalued. His youthful flirtation with Renaissance magic becomes equated with 'natural history' generally, now defined pejoratively--'I...set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation.' When he gets to Ingolstadt his reconversion to natural science is represented as regression, 'a resolution to return to my ancient studies'. The 1831 reader is allowed to think that the faculty at Ingolstadt in the 1790s, even the previously sympathetic Waldman (I. ii. 30), were indeed teaching arcane magic under the name of natural science.
7. The family and their blood-ties are carefully revised (I. i). Elizabeth is no longer F's first cousin, but a stranger. A lesser theme hinting at incest is thus removed; even so, a 'dearest' in Elizabeth's letter (III. v) is scaled down to 'dear', and another in her letter of I. v. 48 omitted. The suggestion in 1818 (I. v. 44) that the boy Ernest was sickly as a child has also been dropped. Taken together with the improved health of Alphonse, these changes remove the theme of an aristocratic family's degenerative state which was originally so notable in the first and third volumes.
8. Two emphatic pronouncements by Elizabeth, developing Godwin's critique of the administration of justice (I. v. 48 and I. vii. 67-8 ) are omitted.
9. Clerval is preparing (1831) to become a colonial administrator (I. v. 49, III. ii. 137 and iii. 147-8 ); several remarks in 1818, and the Safie theme, imply disapproval of colonialism.

Tulizar wrote:Interesting. I didn't realize there was a revised Frankentstein. I'm not sure which edition I read, but, after reading Murrin's post, am inclined to believe it was the first edition.

I definitely recall Victor almost washing his hands of his creation. I thought he came across as uncaring and almost arrogant.

Wayfriend wrote: Yes, Shelley is certainly a "founding mother" of science-fiction. And her approach - using science as a vehicle for exploring what it means to be human - is what I consider science fiction to be ultimately "for". As opposed to, say, "Transformers". I just don't like her prose, sorry.

duchess of malfi wrote:Wayfriend, it is OK that you do not like her prose style. I have a similar problem with most of Charles Dickens' writings.

Matthias wrote:Does anyone else but me think that Frankenstein was a depressing read? Good book and good prose, of course, but the main character seemed to be always down in the dumps. My stomach felt like it was the heaviest thing in my body while I read it.

Orlion wrote:God creates man, finds him repulsive, casting him out of his precense. Due to this exile, man performs crimes that God finds to be intolerable. God attempts to destroy man while man fights against God. Conflict ultimatily destroys both