KOCHI: On a cold evening in 1816, Mary Shelly, her husband and poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their guest Lord Byron decided to have a competition to see who could write the best horror story. The 18-year-old Mary came out as the victor who wrote the story of Victor Frankenstein, a natural philosopher, who created a monster from the cadavers he collected. Later, in 1818, the novel ‘Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus’ was published without the author’s name to huge popularity and critical acclaim and many assumed it was written by her husband.
The novel with beautifully written prose, which might appear dreary and slow-paced according to modern standards, starts at the north pole in a boat stuck in ice. It’s here Victor Frankenstein meets Captain Robert Walton. He is on a journey to chase after the nameless monster he created. Victor who in a bid to beat mortality pieced together cadavers and created a human-like creature.
The moment the eight-foot-tall being opens his eyes, Victor is suddenly hit by a profound loathing at his creation, whom he calls an ogre, a monster, a wretch etc throughout the story. Victor’s feeling towards his invention quite resembles Oppenheimer’s, the father of the Atomic Bomb, when he witnessed the destruction caused by the bombs in Japan. A classic case of technology becoming destructive.
The story is told by multiple protagonists. The narration starts with Captain Robert. He is recording his journey in letters to his sister, who never appears in the novel. The letters shed a light on his plight and fear of failure. The main protagonist or the hero of the story is Frankenstein himself who narrates his story to the captain while recovering from near death on the boat. The novel later provides a brutal and heart-wrenching story told by the monster to Victor while they met in the past.
The novel, arguably the first science fiction novel and simultaneously a gothic horror novel recounts the tragedies of overreaching dreams and the dangers of playing ‘God’ as well as the abandonment issues of a child and quest for acceptance and revenge by an adult monster. A world in which the women are on the fringes and are never at the centre even at the moment of their death.
Shelly’s monster is huge, agile and intelligent with a thirst for knowledge with clear political ideas about the world he occupies. The abandoned monster describes his early life as a child, who learns the words of humans, reads the words of men, observes and studies the feudal and unjust patriarchal society around him. Later when he finds the journals of Victor, the scientist who created and then abandoned him, vows revenge and proceeds to kill every loved one in Victor’s life. He later asks his creator “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?”
Shelly wanted her readers to pity the monster, who was a product of neglect. She also tries to shed light on a world where women are absent. And her own life — a teenage mother who lost her child and is nursing another — undisputedly helps her writing. In her life, she struggled to find respect and recognition in society which slut-shamed her for her life choices.