In this second of a series of videos on Frankenstein, the first explored the characters of Victor and the Monster, I'm going to look at three key themes within the novel, ambition, death and education. Desperate to acquire an even more detailed insight into these key themes, and to think about alternative quotations which you might memorise and use in your exam, stay tuned. This is Schofield on Shakespeare.
Frankenstein is clearly a novel about the dangers of unchecked, overreaching, overly ardent ambition. At the end of my first video, I suggested that in some ways the novel ends like a Shakespearean tragedy, citing the number of people futilely killed and the overall sense of waste. In a different way, I wonder whether the unusual structure allows another insightful comparison to be made.
Let's just recap this structure. It starts conventionally enough with Walton's letters to his sister about himself, before becoming more complicated with Walton then writing down Victor's story as told to him, but using the first person. A further layer is added when we have Victor narrating the monster's narrative again in the first person, which in turn is written down by Walton. One effect of this structure is that it allows multiple stories to be told, which may be intertwined, such as Frankenstein and the Monster, or may indeed be essentially completely separate, such as Frankenstein and Walter. The author can then consolidate or develop key ideas across the different narratives, potentially resulting in stronger, more compelling thematic messages.
Isn't this what Shakespeare does in King Lear, for instance? In this tragedy, the parallel stories of Lear's relationships with his problematic daughters and Gloucester's with his sons helps illustrate what the consequences can be when a parent expects blind, dutiful obedience from a child but doesn't actually treat them particularly well, or even seem to respect them as individuals. And to return to Shelley's text, the fact that both Wharton and Frankenstein are extraordinarily ambitious which in one case results in futile failure walton and in the other results in death and devastation frankenstein enables the author to emphasize more strongly the perils of unchecked unnatural aspirations let us look more closely at the particular ambitions of these two men walton is an explorer and has embarked upon a voyage to reach the north pole which bafflingly he speculates may not be a seat of frost and desolation, but rather a region of beauty and delight. However, Shelley's imagery at the very beginning of the novel hints not only that his ambitions may be unrealistic, but also that he is somewhat naive and immature to hold them. He writes to his saintly-sounding prim and proper sister, I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited.
These are my enticements, and induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little boat with his holiday mates on an expedition of discovery up his native river. The imagery may be intended to suggest that Walton's excitement is of a kind not experienced since the glorious, unsullied optimism of youth. However, the discrepancy between the image of a little boy, presumably in grey shorts, long socks and with slicked back hair heading on a little adventure on a river and gnarled adults attempting a death and nature defying mission to reach the north pole is enormous the suspicion particularly of the modern reader is already that this walton may be an out of his depth amateur and that his ambitions are wholly unrealistic this this impression is confirmed when we learn that previously he had arrogantly imagined that i also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.
You are well acquainted with my failure and how heavily I bore the disappointment. So Walton wanted to be up there with the epic poets Shakespeare and Homer and was very down on himself when he failed. Could he therefore be a man more interested in eternal fame for its own sake, rather than having the necessary skills and passions to achieve greatness in a particular field? And how about Frankenstein? How does his ambition compare to Walton's?
Well, both men are clearly seeking fame and success of a heroic kind, which will long outlast their lives. Frankenstein confirms the similarities between the scale of their ambitions when he tells his less experienced new friends, you seek the knowledge and wisdom as I once did. Additionally, whereas Walton is at the start of his mission to achieve greatness through discovery, at the beginning of the novel, Frankenstein is at the end of his. And so, is in a position to advise the latter his imagery and exclamations emphasize the extent to which he feels that such ambition could wreak havoc unhappy man do you share my madness have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught hear me let me reveal my tale and you will dash the cup from your lips the metaphor intoxicating draught suggests that those entranced by the prospect of eternal fame those obsessed by the idea of pushing the boundaries of existing knowledge can oh so quickly get unsteadily carried away when under the influence of alcohol our ability to make clear rational judgments can be impaired we can feel excited and more likely to euphorically consider ideas which when sober we would dismiss as foolish or unattainable thus here frankenstein is suggesting that excessively ambitious human beings can act irrationally and in a way which they may well regret during the metaphorical next morning.
The strength of his abhorrence towards excessive ambition is seen through the urgency of his imperatives, hear me, let me, and the violent verb dash, which suggests that he feels great force is figuratively required to enable the overly ambitious to come to their senses. It is clear that Frankenstein is far more skilled than Walton. One is a lauded scientist, and the other a failed poet wannabe explorer.
Thus there is an argument to suggest that we can empathise more with what happens to the former, for at least he had something to be ambitious about in the first place. Whereas Walton's comparative lack of skill, or at least ridiculously unattainable ambitions, is seen in his failure to emulate Shakespeare and Homer. Frankenstein's expertise and aspiration is seen in the fact that that the first, and subsequently only, creature he brings life to mirrors the human form, rather than that of a simpler organism.
He tells Walton, I doubted at first whether I should attempt the creation of a being like myself, or one of simpler organisation. But my imagination was too much exalted by my first success to permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man. Frankenstein has the skill and ambition to go straight in at the top, and it is surely his failure to build up gradually towards creating a human-esque creature, which results in him being so ill-prepared to deal with the consequences of his actions.
So Shelley is not just implicitly criticising excessive ambition, but she is highlighting the perils of ambition and procedures which have not evolved naturally and systematically over time. Frankenstein has leapt immediately to animating the most complex of organisms, and in doing so has entirely neglected key principles of scientific discovery, in which each stage builds carefully and slowly upon previous knowledge acquired, with plenty of time allowed for reflection and evaluation. If he had first animated a dog, say, and found the moronic creature snapping at his heels the whole time, he might well have thought twice about going up a level and then going down a level. to play with humankind. It is his sloppy failure to adhere to scientific principles, fuelled by his manic ambition, which increases the chances of him being unable to deal with his newly animated, needy creature.
So Victor's ambition is excessive, and contributes to him not bothering to adapt a systematic, step-by-step approach to his scientific endeavours. His ambition also regularly makes him ill. At the end of chapter four from volume one, in which Victor describes his obsessive, solitary life as he comes closer to achieving his ambition of creating life, he reveals, every night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most painful degree. The fall of a leaf startled me, and I shunned my fellow creatures, as if I had been guilty of a crime. The simile is apt.
It is because Victor is guilty of a crime. that his natural body is reacting and boiling against him. making him ill.
By attempting to emulate nature or God depending on your religious perspective, Victor is guilty of the heinous crime of assumption, of attempting to break down forbidden barriers. Shelley shows us that it isn't just Victor's own family who would implicitly react with horror at his transgression, but his own inner conscience and human frame. As he nears the completion of his Venus Project, it is no wonder that his health fails him and he feels guilty without quite knowing why. To sum up this exploration of the theme of ambition, Shelley's multiple narrative structure helps emphasize more strongly the perils of unchecked unnatural aspirations. Both Walton and Frankenstein's ambitions stem from a desire to be immortalized, to move beyond the mundane and commonplace routines of ordinary human existence.
However, crucially, whereas Frankenstein does have the skill to complete something extraordinary, the signs are that Walton may not. The novel begins with Frankenstein already having realised the evils of excessive ambition, and so he is in a position to advise his susceptible counterpart, who has not yet ruined his life, and those of his sailors, through his ambitious enterprises. Finally, it is also clear that excessive ambition Particularly those which break fundamental boundaries between man and nature can result in serious illness.
Next theme to explore, death. By the end of the novel, Victor Frankenstein is himself, thankfully, dead. And he has, directly or indirectly, depending on your perspective, caused the deaths of countless others, including Justine, his brother William, his sister-cum-wife, Elizabeth, his best friend Clavel, and his father. But the early stages of the novel recount a death for which, remarkably, he cannot be held responsible at all, and it is perhaps Frankenstein's reaction to this death which is most telling.
As seems to be the case for the majority of the women in the novel, e.g. Elizabeth, Justine, and the woman like Clavel, Frankenstein's mother dies a self-sacrificial death due to her selfless feelings of love for another. Elizabeth contracted scarlet fever, a highly contagious disease, and, against medical advice, Frankenstein's mother insisted on looking and tending for her. As is often the case with these things, e.g. owners going in to rescue drowning dogs from lakes, only to drown themselves, with a dog emerging later a little tired and wet but with tail wagging, Elizabeth got better, but Frankenstein's mother caught the disease and subsequently died.
Here is what Frankenstein tells Walton about the nature of grief. The time at length arrives when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity, and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished. My mother was dead, but we had still duties which we ought to perform.
Whilst the Maxime may be true, death is a part of life, and we do need to move on at some point. Frankenstein's language seems somewhat smug and characteristically self-satisfied. The abstract, generic ruminations about grief and smiles seem pompous, as seen in nouns such as indulgence and sacrilege, and allow Frankenstein to philosophise grandiosely about death in general terms, thus ensuring he can quickly return to getting on with and enjoying his life. Perhaps this is a little harsh. and influenced by later events and reflections.
But nonetheless I do feel these lines give a valuable insight into Victor's character and typical reactions to death. Yes, he feels sad for a bit, but he is quick to move on and focus on the one thing which interests him more than anything else, himself. Within my section on ambition, I talked about the effect of Shelley's use of a parallel narrative in which both narrators, Victor and Walton, are equally ambitious.
I wonder whether there are also parallels that can be drawn between the deaths that occur within Victor's family and that of Justine's. In chapter 6 of volume 1 in a letter to Victor, Elizabeth reveals that the systematic premature deaths of Justine's siblings result in her mother feeling guilty for her treatment towards her over the years, which contributed to Justine moving away to live with the Frankensteins. Elizabeth writes to Frankenstein that The conscience of the woman was troubled.
She began to think that the deaths of her favourites was a judgement from heaven to chastise her partiality. Justine's mother, however, is unable to consistently repress her irritation at her sole surviving daughter, and eventually dies following perpetual fretting. Could it be argued that Shelley is making a general point about the potential consequences of neglectful, undutiful parenting? Both Frankenstein himself and Justine's mother are wholly inadequate parents. Both the creature and Justine are effectively forced to make a new life for themselves, away from their natural habitats shelley shows that there are inevitable often unexplained consequences to such neglectful parenting even if the offspring may experience sporadic the creature or more sustained justine moments of happiness the wide-bred destruction caused by the neglected monster and in a different way the apparently arbitrary deaths of all of justine's siblings seem to appoint to a universe which doesn't take kindly to those who challenge the natural order of things by failing to fulfil their duties as parents so victor's reaction to his mother's death gives an insight into his own self-absorbed character whilst the death of justine's siblings and subsequently her mother hints that neglectful parenting may have horrendous consequences however it is fitting that victor's decision to peer at prod and surround himself with dead bodies as he works to discover the secret to bestowing animation upon lifeless matter ultimately leads to er even more death in chapter four of volume one the disgusting description of frankenstein's filthy laboratory and the items he has to collect makes it clear how he has debased himself with his solitary unhallowed evil quest to create i collected bones from charnel houses and disturbed with profane fingers the tremendous secrets of the human frame i kept my workshop of filthy creation my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment victor's language makes it clear that he now recognises how wrong he was to meddle with death whilst the verb disturb suggests that he knows that his decision to investigate the process of life through dead bodies was unwelcome and disruptive it is the adjective profane used to describe his fingers which is most revealing.
By rummaging through bones, poking dead hearts and feeling corpses, Victor is acting in a disgracefully disrespectful way, not just towards the memory of that dead person but also towards God, the creator of life. Such actions are immoral and offensive. No wonder that his eyeballs figuratively wanted to pop out after witnessing such unnatural and horrifying actions. There is no suggestion here that the end justifies the means, that, in the name of science and future knowledge, Victor is justified in acting as he does. Instead, the overall sense is a filthy debasement, and that no long-term good can come from such disgusting, morbid probing.
This is ultimately shown to be the case. In spite of Victor's creation showing initial potential for benignity, Victor's parental neglect, and the unnaturalness of a creation composed entirely of various dead body parts combined to result in further deaths and the devastation of an entire family. The timing of not just death but also those chosen by fate or god or whatever cause you decide to assign to stay alive can be unfair, random and illogical.
Following his discovery of Clavel's body in chapter 4 of volume 3, Victor reflects on how puzzling it is that he is still alive, in spite of everything his body and mine has suffered. Death snatches away many blooming children, the only hopes of their doting parents. How many brides and youthful lovers have been one day in the bloom of health and hope, and the next to pray for worms and the decay of the tomb?
Of what materials was I made, that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture? Just as his general observations about the nature of death and grief allow Victor to speedily resume a relatively carefree, me-first existence in chapter 3 of volume 1, so here his generic, accurate reflections about the randomness of death have a similar effect. His personification of death allows him to play down his own culpability. It is death snatching away children, rather than his own evil actions resulting in the deaths of all of his family. Note also that Victor cannot resist shifting the focus back to his own pain and suffering.
Look at the repeated first-person pronoun in of what materials was I made that I could thus resist. However the discerning reader is likely to be relatively unsympathetic to these cries for pity and compassion coming as they do from an immoral meddler with dead bodies. and indirectly a murderer. Thus the language Victor uses when referring to death confirms the impression we have of him, someone who rarely takes sufficient responsibility for his actions and instead demands an exhausting inappropriate amount of empathy for his subsequent suffering. To sum up this this section exploring the theme of death, Victor's reaction and language used following the deaths of his mother and Clavel, sum up his pathetic self-absorption.
Although there is some truth in his quasi-philosophizing, i.e. that we do need to move on from grieving for death at some point, and that the random timing of death, or indeed staying alive, can be cruel. On reflection, Victor recognises that his time spent amongst dead bodies was both morally inexcusable and terrible for his physical and mental health. And Shelley shows us that the ultimate consequences of such morbid absorption is even more death.
Finally, through the strange deaths of Justine's siblings and her mother, Shelley may be drawing a parallel with Victor's treatment. of his own creation. Could neglectful parenting regularly result in devastating consequences? Next theme to explore, education.
Early on in the novel it becomes clear that a young person being given too much free reign in education can be unhealthy and lead to ardent, unnatural, disproportionate passions. In letter one, Wharton confesses You may remember that a history of all the voyages made for purposes of discovery composed the whole of our good uncle Thomas's library. My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading.
These volumes were my study day and night. Unsurprisingly, partly as a result of these unchecked absorptions, Walton eventually makes the decision to embark upon his foolish voyage of discovery, which will quickly lead to him unnecessarily risking the lives of himself and his fellow sailors just arguably for the sake of a cheap ego boost it is surely the lack of a balanced education with appropriate guidance from someone older more experienced and more knowledgeable which results in walton coming up with such unrealistic cack-handed proposals for occupying his time as well as this ridiculous voyage to find some illusory paradise in the arctic he also believed for a whole year that one day he might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated. In a similar way, the life of Walton's idol, Victor Frankenstein, is blighted by having far too much freedom and insufficient guidance during his early education. He comes across a book written by Cornelius Agrippa, an early 16th century magician and occult scientist interested in investigating nature and natural processes.
His father cursorily dismisses the writer and the book, as sad trash, but fails to explain why, resulting in the son eagerly devouring this book, and afterwards Agrippa's complete works. The older, wiser, scarred-by-experience Frankenstein reflects that if his father had explained his reasoning in careful detail, he would have listened. He goes even further when he tells the subsequently scribing Walton, It is even possible that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin."Although Frankenstein went on to himself dismiss many of Agrippa's arguments at university, it would appear that this unstructured, unchecked period in which he pored over authors keen to penetrate the secrets of nature had a formative effect on his mind and ambitions. It helped foster his own solitary academic interests and ambitions, leaving the older Frankenstein forced to acknowledge its role in the world of the in propelling him fatally to his later ruin Frankenstein's further reflections makes it clear just how potentially confusing unfiltered exposure to published scientists can be for a young intelligent learner he reveals I was occupied by exploded systems mingling like an unadept a thousand contradictory theories and floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious knowledge guided by an ardent imagination and childish reasoning the adjective exploded emphasizes that the exciting theories he used to read about have been vigorously disproved yet without a guider or teacher to explain this to him he is left to flounder to struggle violently and clumsily there is a huge amount of information out there but for young isolated learners it can feel like a large area of soft wet land into which we can potentially sink without direction as to where we should focus our attentions we can feel lost bewildered and utterly out of our depth In my earlier video on Frankenstein exploring Victor and the monster, I drew attention to the similarities between the two. Both appreciate the beauty of nature, both gnash their teeth and get angry when thinking of the other, and both have enormous appetites for learning during their formative years but have to some extent been compelled to self-educate. Yet whereas Victor's lone wolf education leads to misdirected channels of investigation and malign consequences, You might argue that the reverse is true for the monster. In Chapter 5 of Volume 2, he hears Felix instructing Safi on Volney's ruins of empires, and in general on society, which leaves him aghast at the systems of class and wealth. He tells Frankenstein about his reflections. The words induced me to turn towards myself. I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow creatures were high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these advantages, but without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few. And what was I? These words emphasise that human respect is earned not through an individual's actions, but by being born into a family deemed as of high class, and by being wealthy. So do we need to modify the previous statement about the effect of of the monster's self-education being positive. Yes, it is positive that his education has propelled him towards the truth about humans and human systems, i.e. that the class system is fundamentally unfair and arbitrary. However, for the monster, the acquisition of this knowledge can only cause misery and leads inevitably in him concluding that a being such as himself can never be accepted, can never be loved. That due to society's prejudices his life must inevitably be one of isolate and wretchedness his rhetorical question is heart-breaking as it dawns on him to ask was i then a monster a blot upon the earth from which all men fled and whom all men disowned so the irony is that although the monster's new-found knowledge has the potential within the right hands for far more good than victor's unnatural morbid knowledge of animating dead matter The consequences of both are the same, misery and destruction. With the metaphorical door towards society and companionship slammed into his face by both Victor's parental neglect and subsequent refusal to provide a female partner and skewed societal values in general, the monster feels that he has no choice but to embark upon his furious deadly quest for revenge. To sum up this section exploring the theme of education. Shelley shows us the potentially devastating consequences of the intelligent being given too much free reign and insufficient guidance in education. Frankenstein himself recognises that this boundless freedom within his learning played a defining role in him making the tumultuous decision to explore the processes of life and death. Shelley also emphasises just how vast the world of ideas and theories can be. Such a landscape can be bewildering for a passionate young learner, leaving them quickly out of their depth. Finally, through her portrayal of the monster, Shelley suggests that education has the potential for so much good. He learns not just about social injustice, but also about the enormous human potential for feeling. But unfortunately, due to his terrible isolation, this only leads to despair and terrible violence. Well hello, this has been a Schofield on Shakespeare production exploring the key themes of ambition, death and education in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Many thanks for watching.