Frankenstein also deals with the fear of Shelley herself, and she comments upon the catharsis of her novel, “what terrified me will now terrify others.” Victor refers to his sordid “workshop of filthy creation”, which symbolises the womb. Feminist criticism, such as that of Ellen Moers has seen Frankenstein as a ‘birth myth’. Shelley’s knowledge of birth was limited to disastrous consequences- such as her mother dying giving birth to her and the death of her own baby. Victor’s terrible nightmare after the monster’s creation seems to support the idea that he is scared by normal reproduction. When he attempts to kiss Elizabeth, she turns into a corpse, the corpse of Victor’s mother. Victor has gone to great lengths to produce a child without Elizabeth’s assistance and in the dream, through which Victor’s fears are best expressed, to circumvent her and make her unnecessary is to kill her and kill mothers altogether. The 1931 film of Frankenstein, provides an explicit picture of Victor ‘giving birth’ to his monster and circumventing the normal channels of procreation. Like a newborn child, the naked monster emerges from the amniotic fluid, misshapen and shrivelled and stretching out one hand to Victor. This is a poignant gesture, but one which also repels both the audience and Victor himself, seeing such a hideous beast depending upon him, retreats in horror.
From a sociological perspective, there is much to fear in Frankenstein. Shelley provides the reader with a critique of society, through which she shows how initially benevolent natures can be perverted through socialisation. In the story of the DeLaceys, in the treatment of the creature and in the trial of Justine, human injustice is repeatedly emphasised. Shelley represents the home as a paradise, but she also highlights its insularity. Anything that is considered a threat is excluded. The DeLaceys appear to be paragons of virtue: noble, hard-working, affectionate and moral. But even these individuals cannot challenge a corrupt society and despite their benevolence, they immediately reject the monster when they see him. William’s subsequent rejection of the monster reveals how quickly children are educated in society’s shallow prejudices. As Elizabeth observes after the execution of Justine, “men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood.” The idea that society is monstrous is one of the key themes of the novel, yet ironically society rejects the monster. Shelley uses the monster as her mouthpiece in her critique. Aided by the literature he finds, the monster manifests into a rational and eloquent human being, thus blurring the distinctions between the human and the non-human. In Gothic fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a monster was included in the text only to distinguish good from evil. Shelley, however, challenges the very notions of monstrosity and humanity. Although the creature’s appearance may be horrific and his conception through unnatural means, he is far more natural and humane than his ‘father’ who rejects him, the villagers who stone him and the father who shoots him. The monster only begins to demonstrate violent behaviour when he is exposed to the viciousness of human society. He perceptively links the fallibility of humanity with the injustice of society when he comments to Victor: “You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!” Shelley scares the reader into acknowledging society’s corruptness and leaves the question hanging: can we ever make a clear distinction between the monstrous and the human?
Frankenstein is a purposefully scary cautionary tale. Challenging God brings terrifying results and the monster is a parody of the beauty of Adam and Eve. Margaret Homans believes that God produces beauty but Victor’s male circumvention of the maternal creates a monster. In Chapter IV Victor instructs the reader to “learn from me…. At least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.” In Chapter X he bemoans “Alas!....If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst and desire.” The original Prometheus was punished for presuming to usurp the role of God and create life. However, the reader is most affected by the modern Prometheus’s shockingly heartless refusal to nurture and tend to his creature, as vulnerable as a human baby. Victor’s inability to recognise his role as protector of the monster and the monster’s subsequent downfall is bitterly exclaimed by the monster: “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel.” When the monster murders Elizabeth, he is only doing what Victor has done to him, in destroying the miserable creature’s future wife.
Deeper analysis of Frankenstein provides the reader with the shocking revelation that Victor and the monster are not the clear opposites of good and evil. Initially Shelley seems to set up a neat seat of oppositions: good and evil, creator and creature, monstrous and human. However, from a psychological point of view, it is not just the external forces of socialisation which turn men to monsters, but the repressed inner workings of their psyche. When Victor revisits the place where William was strangled, Victor seems like a guilt-ridden murderer revisiting the scene of his crime. Victor describes his monster as his “own vampire, [his] own spirit, let loose from the grave”. His hideousness may be seen as the unpleasant externalisation of the repressed part of Victor’s psyche. Victor’s language repeatedly suggests the idea of a doppelganger: “I wandered like an evil spirit, for I had committed deeds of mischief beyond description horrible.” Similarly he speaks of the fiend which lurks in his heart. In Chapter VII Victor comments that “nothing in human shape could have destroyed [William].” However, the monster is intrinsically related to him and this revelation further blurs the boundaries of humanity and monstrosity. When the monster begins his tale there is a role reversal, which shocks even the modern reader. The monster becomes the eloquent ‘noble savage’ which the philosopher Rousseau talked of and it is Victor who “[gnashes] his teeth, [his] eyes [become] inflamed… and [he] ardently [wishes] to extinguish [the monster].” In his desperation, Victor is expressing the murderous tendencies which he is simultaneously condemning the monster for assuming.
Frankenstein was scariest in the decade it was written, as it deals with certain issues around then: “the impact of technological developments on people’s lives and the possibility of working class issues” (O’Flinn.) The monster is a symbol of Luddite vilification. Shelley takes the opinion of the bourgeoisie (which she was part of) towards the proletariat, who they considered to be inherently evil (which she did not believe). The monster embodies the class struggle of that time and Shelley ensures that he exercises with eloquence his free speech, in an attempt to rationalise the fears of her middle class readership and show sympathy for the working class. Paul O’Flinn says that “the monster was manufactured out of the violence and anxieties of the Luddite decade” whose behaviour, like the monster’s, was out of desperation, as employers shamelessly sacked them with the creation of new machinery. Luddism is also portrayed in the sailors; they rise up against Walton who is pioneering scientific development. Walton’s failure to complete his expedition, also deals with the fear of despotism- which is portrayed in Victor, who unleashes the dreadful monster on the world. Democracy, embodied in the group of sailors, maintains peace in society.
What is scary in the original text is not so the case in the productions, which have been adapted to appeal to the fears of society at that time. History means that Frankenstein was scary in different ways in 1931 and 1957, when the two most significant productions were released, than it was in 1818. For example, in 1931, working class discontent was no longer a prime issue, rather the Wall Street Crash had struck just two years previously, the ramifications of which plunged the world into the Great Depression, which it was currently suffering from when the film was released. By 1957, when the ‘Curse of Frankenstein’ was released, there was a shift of fears. The development of atomic and hydrogen bombs and the advancement of science, meant that unlike in 1818, when the term ‘scientist’; had not even been coined, technology now existed which could threaten the very survival of the planet. This topical fear was manipulated through the portrayal of the character of Victor, who unlike in the 1931 film, is “a lethal nutter, an archetypal mad scientist” (O’ Flinn), a ‘baddie’ threatening the world. Now if a film were to be made, the scariest aspect of Frankenstein would be the link made between the prejudice of society in the C19th and the appalling racism that can be found in society now.
From a sociological and psychological point of view, Frankenstein will scare a reader of any generation. However, the modern reader is no longer scared of the gore and agnosticism surrounding the monster’s creation. This proves that there is no eternal facet of our psyche to which horror stories can appeal to. The horror of Frankenstein is not a timeless concept through history; rather it shifts, like a mirror of human evolution. We are culturally conditioned by society in what we find scary. In both the 1931 and 1957 films, the directors of both are aware of the ‘shock factor’ that the images of an explicitly deformed monster can crudely evoke from the graphic, modern audience. This is rather than the more complex issues, vaguely hinted at in the book and which provide a long-lasting unease. In reference to the novel, a central part of Shelley’s thesis is that the monster’s eventual life of violence and revenge is the purely a sociological product of his nurture (or lack of) and without doubt, this is scariest aspect of Frankenstein; the ability of a ‘noble’ yet prejudiced society to convert the monster into a being so horrific.
