Mary Shelley - Frankenstein

Jon and I meant to read Dracula and Frankenstein back-to-back. He read Frankenstein first while I read Dracula. Which, as you know, I regard as one of the Greatest Books of All Time. And now we have swapped books. Jon doesn't like Dracula; he says Frankenstein is a lot better. I on the other hand, do not like Frankenstein.

Okay, it's pretty good for a 19-year-old's work. I mean at age 19 I was too emo and girl/boy-crazy to string a narrative together, so. I certainly wasn't attached to a famous poet or hanging out at Lord Byron's house like Mary Shelley. By the way, in her notes she wrote that Percy Bysshe Shelley kept egging her on to publish and become a famous writer. How fucking annoying is that!? I'm sure he meant well, but... gross. 

Frankenstein is a sandwich in 3 volumes. The meaty bit is Vol. 2, where the Creature tells his story. This is encased in stale bread - 2 volumes from Victor Frankenstein's perspective. He's such a boring character. Just whinging all the time omg. 

I now also began to collect the materials necessary for my new creation, and this was to me like the torture of single drops of water continually falling on the head. Every thought that was devoted to it was an extreme anguish, and every word that I spoke in allusion to it caused my lips to quiver, and my heart to palpitate.

List of characters who suck:

• Victor Frankenstein - he's a whiny and irresponsible shit
• His foster sister/wife Elizabeth - female NPC with no will or desires of her own
• Justine Moritz - another female NPC
• Victor's little brother - I forget his name - he was a shit to the Creature so he deserved to be killed anyway
• Henry Clerval - NPC
• Victor's father - unloveable and emotionally unavailable father constantly telling Victor to stop being a whiny shit
• peasant family that the Creature observed for a year - boring, except the son with his oriental fetish for his Christian Arab girlfriend (gag)

A note on the female characters....

Elizabeth is so boooring. There was a moment in Vol. 1 where she became a little philosophical after Justine Moritz was found guilty:

Alas! Victor, when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?

But this quickly subsided and she went back to needlework and quietly waiting for her idiotic intended to return and finding all children equally angelic and delightful. I wondered how this character could come from the daughter of a feminist and a socialist, but I read that Mary Wollstonecraft died shortly after giving birth to Mary. 

After page after page of angelic blond children/women I was relieved to meet Safie, the supposedly spirited Arabian (she didn't faint when she saw the Creature, only ran away). We're told that Safie's mom was a Christian Arab, 

She instructed her daughter in the tenets of her religion and taught her to aspire to higher powers of intellect and an independence of spirit forbidden to the female followers of Mahomet. [... Safie] sickened at the prospect of again returning to Asia and being immured within the walls of a harem, allowed only to occupy herself with infantile amusements

Ha. Little did she know good Christian women like Elizabeth and her goody-two-shoes sister-in-law are just as infantile.

The only character who's interesting is of course the Creature, possibly because he's the only one who read books (Paradise Lost, The Sorrows of Young Wether, and Plutarch's Lives). I fully support his vengeful killing rampage - I only wish he didn't have to whinge about it. Like father, like son.

A frightful selfishness hurried me on, while my heart was poisoned by remorse. Think you that the groans of Clerval were music to my ears?

said the Creature. I wish they were!