Presumably all that Mary Shelley imagined when she first conceived the plot was a scientist chap who makes a man-creature-thingy which then goes around wreaking havoc and murdering all and sundry. The elaborate sub-plots, characters etcetera were all developed as she wrote. I may be wrong, but I doubt it. And where does all this stuff begin? Chapter Five. So where is the entire plot brought up from its knees to full height and drama? Chapter Five. And which is the most important chapter in the novel? Chapter Five.
From the first paragraph we are thrown into a world of fast paced action. The monster lives. None of that “I plugged Wire X into Socket 3, Wire Y into Socket 11, connected the inter-communicational cord to the conjoined lever, handled the stick and turned on the power…” stuff – no, no! We aren’t treated to any sort of explanation as to how it works. Just death, ‘instruments’, life. ‘Instruments’, death, life. Death, life. ‘Instruments’, life. Life. “I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”
To change the subject a wee bit, if I had created a man-thing, even from dead bodies, I would try to love it. I mean to say, I created the dashed thing in the first place! But not so Victor Frankenstein. Oh, no. The poor sausage didn’t give a thought to whether his creation was of a well meaning ugliness or nasty ugliness. Ugliness was, to Frankenstein, the be all and end all, alpha and omega and… hm. Well, maybe tricolons can be a bit overused! In short, he didn’t love it. This is evident in his reaction to Mr. Monster: the ‘wretch’, with his ‘yellow skin’ and ‘straight black lips’ forming a ‘horrible contrast with his watery eyes’ and ‘shrivelled complexion’ was enough to send him galloping out of the room to the sanctuary of his bedchamber.
Later on during the night, Frankenstein is stopped from knitting up the ravell’d sleeve of care - as Macbeth would say - by the entrance of his creation. Paying a moonlit visit to his newfound mummy, daddy and god, the poor thing (and this isn’t perfectly clear from Frankenstein’s narration) tries to make friends with his master. He tries to speak, to smile and to touch him… unsuccessfully of course. For dear old Victor is terrified. A ‘cold dew’ is covering his forehead, his ‘teeth chattered and every limb convulsed’. In short, ‘the dim yellow light of the moon’, in illuminating the ‘demoniacal corpse’, had made a ghastly error. No longer just revolted with his creation, the sight of the frightful thing appearing suddenly on him like that made him petrified and cast him into the very agonies of terror. It made him feel like a little boy in an aeroplane who, finding an ugly elongated black object on his seat, decides that it might be quite fun to try to drop it down somebody’s chimney. Throwing it out of the window is the work of a moment, and remorse only sets in when he sees half of London vanish in a cloud of smoke.
Just like that little boy, he was overawed by the mere appearance of things. He allowed what he saw to influence his usually ice cold and shrewd judgment. He presumed that because he had blown up the House of Lords he had done wrong. But really, if he looked down underneath the cloud and the debris, he would have found a spark of goodness even in this, the worst of worst disasters. I don’t think that bombs are as nasty as they are made out to be. I don’t want one dropped on me admittedly, but just think of all the good one would do to the centre of London! Those ugly concrete towers, which can’t be knocked down because they would be a health and safety hazard, would all be swiftly and cleanly removed. The population problem – a few bombs would reduce our national head count quite a bit, and then we’d be able to welcome with open arms any immigrants, thus avoiding nasty, vulgar international brawls. And the best point of all: if the House of Lords was blown up, the House of Commons would have gone too.
So you see, Frankenstein was acting as superficially is it is possible for man to act. Clearly a shallow and vain man himself he is painting everyone with the same brush – the brush of good looks. The only one he failed to paint was the one whom he himself created. And that is the monster in a nutshell – Frankenstein’s creation; not very artistic. One can imagine the passport profile… or perhaps it’s best not to.
While on the subject of Frankenstein-the-man, perhaps a brief character study wouldn’t be out of place…? A Genevan and from a wealthy family, skipping lightly over his early childhood, through the death of his mother and his romantic entanglement with adopted ‘sister’ Elizabeth, we find ourselves at Ingolstadt, a particularly outlandish university of the times. It is here that he creates the monster. Throughout the rest of the novel, every single member of his immediate circle will die, either at the hand or through the mechanisms of his creation. From his father to his servant-girl; from his close friend to Elizabeth (now his wife); and finally to his own death and the monster’s suicide, his very life is haunted with dead bodies. It seems that his destiny is to be an impromptu curse upon whomever he knows; an undertaker’s dream.
Oddly enough, this very fact gives us a huge insight into his character. One of his peculiar traits is to constantly refer to his destiny. When his brother William has been murdered and the servant Justine is about to be hanged he is tossed into the depths of self pity. “Despair!” he cries. “Who dare talk of that? The poor victim, who on the morrow was to pass the awful boundary between life and death, felt not as I did, such deep and bitter agony.” And really he is right. Justine will know no more, at least not in this world, whereas Frankenstein has an awful lot still coming to him before he dies. Of course, he doesn’t know this yet and is only guessing but that only goes to prove that he is accepting fear, pain and terror as his due. He was going to be killed. That was what he told himself and that was what he believed. Later on in the novel he says “…the hour fixed for my destiny. In that hour I would die…”
All this is very interesting, but what does it have to do with Chapter Five? The opening paragraph of Chapter Nine sets it quite nicely: “I had begun life with benevolent intentions, and thirsted for the moment when I should put them in practice, and make myself useful to my fellow-beings. Now all was blasted: instead of that serenity of conscience, which allowed me to look back upon the past with self-satisfaction, and from thence to gather promise of new hopes, I was seized by remorse and the sense of guilt, which hurried me away to a hell of intense tortures, such as no language can describe”. He felt ruled by what he saw as his destiny, and indeed the novel does go quite a way to supporting this idea. Basically, his feeling was that whatever he thought, said or did the same thing was always going to happen. However he treated his creation, the future could not be changed. The monster would turn bad. Frankenstein would die.
All that is contrary to the opinion held by many that Frankenstein should be responsible for the monster. Just in passing, how ridiculous is it to hold opinions on what fictitious characters should have done? After all, if everyone in the novel was perfectly moral and upright there wouldn’t be a plot! Unless it had been decreed by fate and nothing that anyone could do would be able to stop it… No. The entire plot hinges around two things: the existence of the monster; the monster’s desire for companionship. Both of these things cascade dramatically off Chapter Five. For the first one at least, it is blatantly obvious why – I mean to say, if the monster hadn’t been created it wouldn’t exist. The second point however is the start of the main theme for the entire tale. Frankenstein shuns his ‘son’; his ‘son’ goes off to find a friend. He finds a cottage in the woods. And in the cottage is a family with a blind old man.
Clearly a creature of intelligence, the monster realises that his only chance of friendship is with this poor disabled chap in his lonely house. One day he finds him alone. He enters the hut. He asks for friendship… well, sort of. Everything seems at first to be going bumps-a-daisy. Unfortunately it then shoots downhill like a shoved nun – it went black then white then black then white… White points were that the old chap seemed to like him. Black points were that the rest of his family came back, took the monster at ‘face’ value (titter, titter) and turned him out into the outer darkness, where there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth. And why? He hadn’t explained his problem fully to the old man. He dillied. He dallied. And in the end he lost out. He gave a great introduction to his speech, but circumstances stopped him from reaching the res. Finding himself once more friendless and in the cold he starts out upon his mad quest for friendship and revenge. If Frankenstein had loved him in the first place, none of this would have happened.
Chapter Five, therefore, is the starting point for many of the novel’s intricacies. However, it is also the start of something which was new at the time, something which made the novel a sure-fire winner: Gothic Horror. Chapter Five is the first – if not only – chapter in Frankenstein which is pure Gothic Horror in the true sense of the phrase. Every line – nay, every word – oozes Gothic and every second word perspires horror. Take the first sentence for instance: “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.” Whoa! Even the first eight words would have done. “It was…” Instantly we are cast into a state of apprehension. That word “it”: a true stalwart of the English language, used thousands of times per minute across the whole globe and yet sadly neglected in most analysis of texts; oh, unhappy ‘it’! For underneath that shabby exterior lies a wealth of meaning, emotion and indeed power. Specifying the definite, announcing fact, preparing the way for revelations, ‘it’ does it all. And now couple these startling two letters to the three letter word ‘was’…: ‘it was’. Not great to look at admittedly, but it is a sure sign of better things to come. A more dramatic way of introducing a subject has yet to be imagined.
But the beauty of ‘it was’ is in its power. Not only does it display the blatantly obvious influences detailed above, but it also maintains an ominous subtlety – the sinister use of the past tense. It isn’t, it was. As thoroughbred Brits we tend to use the present tense for happiness and the past for despair. This is, no doubt, because the present is unchangeable, exhaustible and should be enjoyed while it lasts whereas the past is full of death, darkness and, as Frankenstein would say, despair. Consequently, when a member of the British public reads those formidable and menacing words ‘it was’ he is much inclined to close the curtains, pull his head under the covers and generally get ready for a terrifying introduction, excursion or climax as the case may be.
I could rhapsody forever about the cunning Mary Shelley showed by employing such a skilfully crafted weapon as ‘it was’ to open her fifth chapter, but time marches on and so must I.
‘A’, when used in the right place and at the right time, can be extremely powerful. It is, after all, the indefinite article and should not be overlooked. But as I am at nearly 2,800 words already I think that maybe I should skip it… just this once, though. And so we come to the fourth word of our little clause: ‘dreary’. Now we’re getting somewhere! ‘Dreary’ is the quintessential gothic word, the champagne of an authoress’ vocabulary, the Dior of her dictionary and the Wensleydale of her text (for the uneducated amongst you, Wensleydale is a cheese highly admired in the better circles but often underrated by the general public). Just say it slowly to yourself; savour the subtle nuances of dreadfulness, the nutty shadows of despair; roll it around your mouth as if you were a snooker table and it a ball; then elongate that ‘ear’ until the floor starts to shake and the smoke alarms to ring. Now you have experienced dreariness.
The fifth word: ‘night’. Night is the opposite of day and day is light. Therefore night must, by association, be the opposite of light - dark. And dark is scary. So scary that people are afraid of it. So scary that life tends to cease until it is done. So scary that vampires actually like it.
But Mary Shelley is not satisfied with mere drear or just night fright – she is after something more emotive to preface her revelation. Effectively she wishes to make a ‘very, very shocking’. The word she uses instead of ‘shocking’ has yet to be revealed, but she has demonstrated unnaturally gifted skills of rhetoric by substituting her ‘dreary night’ for ‘very, very’. Those two atmospherically synonymous words act just to emphasise what is to come – her substitution for ‘shocking’.
‘…in November…’ “Is that it?” I imagine you cry. Yes, it is (for now at least). Isn’t it enough? In an attempt to provide an atmosphere of Gothic Horror, November is always the novelists’ Holy Grail. The small fry set their tales in Summer and Spring; the established in Winter. Only those authors who demonstrate clear skill are allowed to write about November. ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ Keats dubs Autumn in his ode praising it, and in some respects he is right. But anyone must admit that it scales far above Spring’s gambolling rabbits, Summer’s gay flowers and Winter’s crisp snows when it comes to drear. And why November? Surely September, with its harvests and haystacks, couldn’t be the setting for a chilling tale of death? And neither could October, burdened as it is with crisp fallen leaves and festivals. No. November is the answer and always will be for as long as conventions stand.
And so there we go. There are approximately 2,500 words in Chapter Five, each one worth individual and contextual analysis. There are candles and Coleridge, fiends and friends, beds and bodies. But a good start is essential to all things, chapters included. Truly, in eight supposedly simple words Mary Shelley has given her Chapter the greatest beginning it could conceivably have had. And it didn’t stop there. Next morning, Frankenstein runs madly out of his house and goes on to reach safety in his life-long friend Henry Clerval who, by a huge coincidence, happens to be passing. This creates a dramatic plunge from dread to ecstatic tranquillity. “Nothing could equal my delight on seeing Clerval; his presence brought back to me thoughts of my father, Elizabeth, and all those scenes of home so dear to my recollection. I grasped his hand, and in a moment forgot my horror and misfortune; I felt suddenly, and for the first time during many months, calm and serene joy” says Frankenstein. To be honest, I think that this is the turning point in the chapter as far as horrific flair is concerned. Mary Shelley realises that horror by itself will soon become commonplace, and so she throws in a comparison, at the same time giving the impression that the fear is contained within the attic where the monster was created. This is later dispelled, but at the time is a very good way of showing that the panic as for Frankenstein alone and as of yet has not spread to the world in general. It also gives a quick balance to the text, as now we can hear, through Clerval’s words, what Frankenstein looks like to an outsider: using first person narration Mary Shelley has ensured that we only get Frankenstein’s version of events. It is nice to be thus subtly given a control narration just to offset Victor’s natural bias.
When Mrs. Shelley wrote Chapter Five she did not just start her story on the track to success. She created a cult. From the candlelit setting to the way she switches from dark to light (the monster to Clerval) she was copied. But she was not the first. In 1764 Horace Walpole had created the genre Gothic Horror with his The Castle of Otranto. However, although the public bought these new horror novels as though their lives depended on them, ‘serious’ authors despised the style. Until Mary Shelley came along, that is. She showed that Gothic Horror could be taken seriously and could be used as a tool for getting into the public’s imagination. Even though I said earlier that I don’t think that her aim in writing Frankenstein was to condemn the public for the way they were exploiting science, I do believe that she wrote certain social comments into the text as an afterthought. For instance, women’s role in society.
Many people miss the fact that Frankenstein fails at acting both Mother and Father to his creation. Who can say what would have happened if he had just played Father? If someone else had done the maternal stuff leaving Victor to enforce discipline and generally be nice and paternal? Was she saying that, although successful at ‘giving birth’ to the creature he didn’t do any of the other things that a mother would have done? Was that why his ‘baby’ turned evil? “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous” says the monster later on in the novel. Maybe Mary Shelley, a woman herself, was warning mothers to stay at home and nurse their children otherwise they would turn into little horrors? If she was it shows great foresight, as it wasn’t until the Second World War (over 100 years later) that mothers started to work. However, I do believe that if that was what she was saying then she hit the nail on the head: I think that the broken relationships, depressed children and general social chaos around today is mostly down to working mothers.
Somehow I don’t think that Mrs. Shelley was quite saying all that. After all, she didn’t have much experience at that sort of thing, her only child dying shortly after birth. It’s much more likely that she was pointing her finger at science. Chapter Five is very much a chapter of science. It states things. It has a hypothesis, a fleeting glimpse (‘I gathered my instruments about me’) of a method and what is, when you think about it, a pretty obvious result. It is from Chapter Five that disaster springs. Is it from science that all catastrophes leap? Was Mary Shelley writing a strong retort to the scientific obsessions of the time? Her father – William Godwin – was a successful author and radical thinker who knew Humphrey Davy, a chemist who believed that chemistry was the underlying principle of all life. She regularly attended scientific lectures with her husband Percy and consequently was well briefed with the ‘facts’ that modern science had ‘discovered’. Could she have been such a great supporter of scientific advances and yet be aware of and warn against the dangers of incautious fascination? Yes – quite easily. However, she could also quite easily have purely used pertinent facts to give her fantasy a flavour of reality. Was she a socially aware and clear-thinking moraliser or just an authoress with a flair for combining imagination with realism? That is for each and every one to decide individually, there being no clear argument either way. I personally favour the latter alternative as it sounds more like human nature.
If, however, she did write Frankenstein as a social statement then what was the point? Was it worthwhile? Has she been heeded? We have now developed methods of cloning animals. One day these practices may be applied to humanity… Will Mary Shelley’s ‘advice’ be listened to and noted or will science take control? Will life become secondary to technology? Will contemporary scientists act like modern-day Frankensteins? Chapter Five is the diving board from which a tragic tale falls. Will we, as a planet, one day be in our very own Chapter Five?