Frankenstein

 Canon Press puts out Worldview guides to several classic works of literature. We were gifted a box set of 32 Worldview guides and today I read the first - Frankenstein. 

The author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, was the daughter of Revolutionists Mary Wollstonecraft (widely considered the mother of the modern Feminist movement) and William Goodwin. Both were radicals who firmly supported the French Revolution. Mary became enticed with a married man, Percy Shelley, who left his pregnant wife to be with Mary. Percy's wife would later commit suicide; however, in the name of revolutionizing the moral order particularly in sexual norms, their 'love' could not be chained be previous marital commitments. 

Frankenstein illuminates how Mary began to come to grips with her life's choices and it is written through the pages a point about the frightening judgement of cumulative transgressions. Perhaps sexual freedom doesn't end in liberty of consciousness, but of never-ending guilt. This is a story about the horror of your past growing legs and catching up to you. 

Mary and her Husband both viewed constraints of any passion to be a form of slavery. Percy wrote "Love withers under constraint: its very essence is liberty... How long then out the sexual connection to last....? A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection, would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy y of toleration." And also he wrote, "A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage." - A belief Mary, once having held herself, would lament after being left alone with her two children while Percy pursued sexual liberty elsewhere. She had made her intellectual bed and found it very uncomfortable. 

"The world Mary Shelley made is a world in which a man came under the servitude of a wicked impulse that gave birth to a monster, and its consequences were sin, and ultimately, death. Frankenstein is a world where debts unpaid are paid in full with the blood of the debtors. No other blood will do. There is no cross. There is no atonement. There is no salvation. Just you and the sum of your life's choices. And that is utterly terrifying."

Mary, being left to raise their children alone after Percy galavanted away with another woman, ultimately experienced the loss of all three of her children. She would come to wonder what sin of hers could have merited such punishment. She naturally began to wonder if Harriet Shelley's (Percy's former pregnant wife) death lay at her door. 

The parallels between Mary's own internal struggle with the thought of divine retribution, and Victor Frankenstein's experience of exactly that are quite evident. Frankenstein is not a story about a mistreated, misunderstood minority monster who could have adjusted to society if only given a proper chance and some empathy. As if Grendel too would have behaved had he only been given a cup of mead of his own. It's a story about laying in the bed that you have made, and the frightening judgement of cumulative transgressions - except in this story there is no cross, and therefore it is truly horrifying.