Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - part 6

the education of the fiend

Part 6 - the education of the fiend

As Mary Shelley has the fiend tell his story to Victor, maybe she was also thinking of her own young child, growing and learning how to understand his sense perceptions:

“It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct. A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses.”

After fleeing from Victor’s residence, the fiend wandered through the nearby woods, until he found shelter in a hut.

“An old man sat in it, near a fire, over which he was preparing his breakfast. He turned on hearing a noise, and perceiving me, shrieked loudly, and quitting the hut, ran across the fields with a speed of which his debilitated form hardly appeared capable … But I was enchanted by the appearance of the hut; here the snow and rain could not penetrate; the ground was dry; and it presented to me then as exquisite and divine a retreat as Pandæmonium appeared to the dæmons of hell after their sufferings in the lake of fire.”

[Again, Mary is hinting a comparison of the fiend to one of the fallen angels.]

The fiend continued his travels, when he entered a village:

“The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me, until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons, I escaped to the open country and fearfully took refuge in a low hovel, quite bare, and making a wretched appearance after the palaces I had beheld in the village. This hovel however, joined a cottage of a neat and pleasant appearance, but after my late dearly bought experience, I dared not enter it.”

Hiding in this hovel, he would find a small crevice in the wood that covered a former window, where he could observe the comings and goings of the family that lived in the cottage – a young son (Felix) and daughter (Agatha), with their blind elderly father. Another babushka is opened as the story of this family is, unknowingly, told to the fiend, who observed and listened to them.

“I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds ... as there was little to do in the frosty season, he read to the old man and Agatha … This reading had puzzled me extremely at first, but by degrees I discovered that he uttered many of the same sounds when he read as when he talked. I conjectured, therefore, that he found on the paper signs for speech which he understood, and I ardently longed to comprehend these also.”

And so, like a child does, he began slowly to learn and understand their language, and also while listening, to think about himself and about his own situation:

“I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty, of rank, descent, and noble blood. 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? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome … Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?”

We are seeing here, some reflections from Mary upon her father’s ‘Political Justice’ and the question of one’s recognition in society, that depended upon one’s wealth and one’s accepted social standing – something that was quite pronounced at that time, and it seems, still today!

One night while wondering in the neighboring woods looking for food, the demon found a portmanteau containing some books – ‘Paradise Lost’, ‘Plutarch’s Lives’ and ‘Sorrow of Werther’, that he then studied, again with a concern for his own self:

“As I read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read.”

‘The Sorrows of Werther’, was Goethe’s first novel (and the one that would make him famous, and that he would later regret ever writing). It was a story of the romantic Werther’s failure in his career due to his lack of upper class and social standing, and of his unrequited love and fateful melancholy. The fiend would see Werther’s life as similar to his own – and his wish that he too could be accepted - by his ‘family’.

“The gentle and domestic manners it described, combined with lofty sentiments and feelings, which had for their object something out of self, accorded well with my experience among my protectors and with the wants which were for ever alive in my own.”

Plutarch’s ‘Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans’ contained the stories of the founders of the ancient republics. From Werther’s imaginations, the fiend learned ‘despondency and gloom’, while from Plutarch, he learned ‘high thoughts’:

“He elevated me above the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to admire and love the heroes of past ages … I read of men concerned in public affairs, governing or massacring their species. I felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice, as far as I understood the signification of those terms, relative as they were, as I applied them, to pleasure and pain alone.”

Mary was showing us the problem of education that lacks a higher understanding - a poetic understanding, that must therefore only rely on our primitive sense of pleasure and pain.

Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ and the story of the fallen angels brought up again this contrast with the fiend’s own life:

“Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.”

But because he lacked a higher (poetic) understanding of his emotions, he only understood them with respect to pleasure and pain, and this lack of being accepted (like today’s wanting to be popular) instead a feeling of envy arose, that lacked any self-esteem, and that grew into a hatred of his creator, Victor:

“Hateful day when I received life! Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred … No Eve soothed my sorrows nor shared my thoughts; I was alone. I remembered Adam’s supplication to his Creator. But where was mine? He had abandoned me, and in the bitterness of my heart I cursed him.”

This is when he decided that he must plot a way to be accepted by his ‘family’ – social acceptance, something that Werther had failed to do.

“These were the reflections of my hours of despondency and solitude; but when I contemplated the virtues of the cottagers, their amiable and benevolent dispositions, I persuaded myself that when they should become acquainted with my admiration of their virtues they would compassionate me and overlook my personal deformity. Could they turn from their door one, however monstrous, who solicited their compassion and friendship? I resolved, at least, not to despair, but in every way to fit myself for an interview with them which would decide my fate.”

[next week - part 7 - the fiend’s plan of revenge]