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Mary Shelley, Frankenstein – Letter 1 (p.15-18)
Frankenstein is best known in the collective imagination as a greenish, scarred monster, barely literate and not particularly bright. In Mary Shelley’s novel, however, the “monster” is a rather intelligent being, and “Frankenstein” the name of hi...

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Mary Shelley, Frankenstein – Letter 1 (p.15-18)

Frankenstein is best known in the collective imagination as a greenish, scarred monster, barely literate and not particularly bright. In Mary Shelley’s novel, however, the “monster” is a rather intelligent being, and “Frankenstein” the name of his creator, a young Swiss student eager to make new discoveries in “natural philosophy”. His story raises questions about science and progress which must have been worrying early 19th century minds, at a time when the empiricism promoted by Enlightenment thinkers and the development of the industrial revolution opened up new possibilities. These issues are also raised in the novel by the story of Walton, an Englishman bent on exploring the North Pole who comes across Frankenstein, half-frozen, as his ship is stuck in the ice, and listens to the latter’s terrible story. The text we will comment on is the very beginning of the novel; in a letter to his sister dated from St Petersburgh, Walton tells her of the progress of his projected expedition to the North. We will try to show how this incipit fulfils its role as an exposition ( → importance of the reader’s response): if it supplies the information about characters and plot the reader needs and builds up tensions which make him desirous to read more, it also sets the romantic mode that will pervade most of the novel; finally, it sketches an ambiguous scientific project which foreshadows Frankenstein’s own enterprise. I.

An expository letter

The reader of the letter with which Frankenstein opens is immediately drawn into the novel. First, because the letter form, in which the narrator-writer expresses himself in the first person singular and addresses directly the addressee as a “you”, makes the reader feel that he is being somehow apostrophized by the narrator and that the narrative is meant for him. Furthermore, the narrative begins, so to speak, in medias res: Walton seems to be continuing a previous argument he has had with his sister (either by letter or in person) about his desire to explore the North Pole. His sister, we understand, was opposed to a project which she deemed too dangerous; Walton’s design in this letter seems to be to convince her that she was wrong, because there is little danger and because of the usefulness of the expedition. The reader is thus plunged, without introduction, in the midst of an argument which tends to accelerate his immersion in the story-world: there is no descriptive pause which might delay the reader’s engagement with the story, while the mention of danger, coupled with the use of vague, general words (“an enterprise; my undertaking”) creates suspense and arouses the reader’s curiosity as to what this “enterprise” might be. As we read on, we learn more about the nature of Walton’s project: he has travelled from England to Russia to hire a ship and crew to sail to the North Pole, with various aims in mind: he means to explore this unexplored part of the world, but also to find a passage through the Pole to the North Pacific Ocean, and finally to try and find an explanation for as yet unexplained phenomena (magnetism and celestial movements). The adventurous character of this geographical and scientific expedition is, in itself, enough to secure the reader’s attention. But his interest is further spurred by a certain number of tensions which surface in the text: * first, between two antithetic representations of the pole. The common representation is that of a “seat of cold and desolation”, a dangerous place which fills Walton’s sister with “evil forebodings”. For Walton, on the other hand, it is place of light (the sun being “for ever visible”) and “beauty” (the word is used twice, along with “splendour”, “wonders”, and “delight”). * Secondly, between the difficulty of the goals Walton has set for himself (he insists on the uniqueness of the task, which has “never” been done) and his “enthusias[tic]” determination to achieve

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them: will he be able to reach these aims or will he have to turn back to England empty-handed? The reader is confronted with a set of alternatives, failure or success, desolation or delight, that make him eager to know more. The plot is thus summarily introduced in this first letter, in the form of questions and tensions which awaken the reader’s desire to know more. Around this sketch of a plot, the text also provides information on the characters and their background. We learn little about the addressee of the letter, Walton’s letter Margaret: only that Walton seems to be fond of her and that her character seems somehow the reverse of her brother’s: through her concern about her brother’s expedition, she comes across as cautious, caring and practical, while Walton seems on the contrary fearless, curious and fanciful. This gendering of characters and roles (the affectionate woman who stays at home, the enterprising man who roams the world) is typical of the Victorian middle-class idea of “the angel in the house” and Victorian separation of a public and private sphere, which was already on the making at the beginning of the 19th c. In the novel, it is reduplicated in Frankenstein’s embedded narrative, which also opposes a caring but rather impotent female figure who hardly ever leaves the family home (Elizabeth) and a world-roaming hero (F) whose thirst for new discoveries drives him from Switzerland to Germany and eventually to Scotland. Walton’s letter also supplies some information about his family and childhood, in a somewhat artificial manner: “You may remember…” writes W to his sister, for whom this is redundant information indeed. But this expository device, common enough at the beginning of epistolary novels, enables W to present himself. We thus learn that he read much as a child and that his seafaring vocation was inspired by the reading of travel books he found in his uncle Thomas’ library; that his father, and his uncle after his father’s death, opposed his desire to become a seaman, and that he turned instead to poetry; but that a recent inheritance supplied him with the money necessary to pursue his navigating projects, against, we assume, his uncle’s will, unless “good uncle Thomas’ is dead by now. Interestingly, most of these patterns echo similar patterns in Frankenstein’s story which they can be said to foreshadow: the thirst to explore nature born out of book-reading; the fact that this project is thwarted by figures of authority (F is told off alchemy books by his father, then by his teachers at Ingolstadt who direct him towards modern science instead, while Henry Clerval is forbidden to go to university by his father who wishes him to become a merchant) and is pursued at the price of some transgression (W, F and Henry all defy their father’s will, in a sense) which bodes ill for the success of their enterprise. II.

Romantic Themes This rebellion against authority figures, whose best-known symbol is perhaps Milton’s Satan, to which several allusions are made in the novel, is only one of the many romantic themes which can be found in Frankenstein and which are introduced for some, as early as Walton’s first letter to his sister. The most prominent in this incipit, beside the theme of the hero as rebel, are the importance of fancy or imagination, the equation of poetry and science, and the aesthetics of the sublime. Indeed, Walton’s approach to the North Pole and the scientific discoveries he may make there is rather at odds with our contemporary expectations of what a scientist or navigator ought to be. Except for the mention of “Petersburgh” in the dating and at the beginning of the letter, there are no concrete details about the routes he means to take, previous attempts at exploring the pole, or the necessary preparations to be mad against the cold and in view of a prolonged life at sea. Instead, Russia and the Pole are described in a rather abstract way, less as places in their own rights than as food for

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feelings and imagination. Thus, the “cold northern breeze” merely fills W with “delight” and “dreams” about the NP which set his “imagination” working; he then specifies his vision of the Pole, which revolves mostly around abstract nouns (“beauty, splendour, light, wonders”) and adjectives (“eternal, perpetual”). W presents himself as a man of imagination, as confirmed in the last paragraph by the mention of his having tried his luck at poetry when forbidden to become an explorer, which seems to present scientific exploration and poetry as two sides of the same coin, two possible realisations of the same character. 2 important romantic ideas at work here: * the importance of imagination, whose superiority over reason was vehemently proclaimed by Romantic thinkers and poets who opposed the Enlightenment cult of reason and method. See Blake’s poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, contrast btw positive energy of the imagination (Los) and the reductive power of reason (Urizen). + Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria: through imagination that we perceive things. * the alignment of science and poetry, seen as two twin operations of the imaginative faculty: the man of science, as the man of letters, was the one who created, invented new theories out of the material of the known world. Romantic poets were conscious of this parallelism and often either friends with scientists or well-acquainted with their work. Percy B Shelley, for example, was familiar with the latest scientific discoveries, and his Prometheus Unbound (1819) borrows from Newton and Linnaeus, but also Erasmus Darwin. Frankenstein itself is the testimony of Mary Shelley’s interest in, and familiarity with, among others, Galvani and Aldini’s experiments with electricity. This affinity between science and literary creation embodied by Frankenstein is also thematised in the novel, as early as Walton’s expository letter, in the latter’s two vocations, as well as his imaginative account of the Pole he means to explore. The choice of the Pole as the aim of Walton’s expedition and a setting for the frame-narrative of the novel is not fortuitous either // the French Alps or of Northern Scotland → a type of wild nature which had become very fashionable by the end of the 18th century, both as a travel destination and as a literary motif, the subject of travelogues (Shelleys’ History of a Six Weeks’ Tour) and poems (Wordsworth and Shelley describe the Mont Blanc). + vogue of Walter Scott’s poetry and Waverley novels, set for the most part in Scotland and providing the English reader with descriptions of the mysterious Highlands. This taste for wild nature was both stimulated by, and stimulate in its turn, the development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic category. SUBLIME was applied at first, in a treatise by Longinus (an ancient Greek philosopher) translated into French at the end of the 17th century, to a certain elevated rhetorical style that could transform the mind of the listener and transport him, so to speak, beyond his individual self. In the course of the 18th c., the initial scope of the sublime broadened, as the term was applied more and more to nature → BURKE’s 1757 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. For Burke, a “sublime” spectacle fills one with terror and with the sense of the proximity of some superior power (God or Nature). It is an experience that takes the beholder beyond himself and makes him feel the frailness of his small human self, but also gives him an exhilarating sense of power and might, imparted by the contact of greatness. Such exhilaration can well be seen in Walton’s anticipation of the Pole, which fills him with a “glow” of “enthusiasm which elevates [him] to heaven”. Vs. earlier 18th c aesthetic values, which equated beauty with order, life and harmony, rather than with excess. III.

An ambiguous scientific project

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Mary Shelley’s embrace of some of the most recurring themes of Romantic poetry in her novel is evident in the novel’s epistolary exposition, where the author sets a certain tone and imagery which will be pervasive in the novel – especially at the beginning of volume II when F and the creature meet among the glaciers of the Alps. But W’s letter lets transpire some of the key issues which are raised by Frankenstein, particularly that of the ambiguous nature of scientific exploration, which hovers between philanthropy and egotism, humility and hubris, methodical exploration and the frenzy of passion. W’s enumeration of his motives for desiring to explore the pole is indeed ambiguous. Part of it, is according to him, a means to benefit mankind, by facilitating transportation and explaining as yet unexplained physical phenomena. But alongside the philanthropic motive, another motive surfaces as well: for his insistence on the uniqueness of his endeavour (that what he attempts has “never” been achieved is repeated twice, that his intended expedition is the sole means of furthering scientific research on magnetism is emphasised by the use of the adjective “only”) betrays his eagerness to distinguish himself, an eagerness which must be all the more potent that, as we learn, he has failed to distinguish himself as a poet. It is the love of fame, as much as general care for mankind, which prompts him to launch on his polar expedition: he does not merely want to benefit mankind and to further science, but to be celebrated as a benefactor of mankind and pioneering scientist and explorer. Selfish motive behind the philanthropic impulse also explored in Godwin’s novel St Leon (1799). W’s desire to do what has never been done is also a wish to push back the limits of man’s knowledge and mastery of nature, to extend the realm and power of man within the natural world. To this extent, it is a transgression of the boundaries set by nature or God, similar to that perpetrated by Frankenstein in his attempt at making the dead come to life again. Both men thus recall, as I suggested earlier, Milton’s Satan, a figure much liked by Romantic poets both for his energetic rebellion against the law of God and for his melancholy yearning after the paradise he had lost. They often reread Milton’s epic in a way which was probably much more sympathetic towards Satan than Milton had originally intended, and Blake, especially, famously said that “Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it”. Satan is explicitly alluded to in F by the creature, who reads Paradise Lost and compares himself with Satan because of the envy he is filled with when he beholds the bliss of others which he cannot share. But Shelley also hints at a parallel between Satan and F himself, when at the end of the novel, she makes him deplore the “state of degradation” in which he no longer “recognises” his former self, and exclaim “but how am I sunk!... I fell, never, never to rise again”. In W’s first letter to Margaret, the parallel is also suggested when he claims to have lived for a year in a “paradise of his own creation”. Like F, then, he dreams to achieve a power greater than that to which men are entitled, to usurp the power of the superior forces, whichever they are, that rule over the world. F’ story how show this hubristic trespass is eventually punished, since the creature turns against its creator. Walton, on the other hand, is saved from making the same mistake by the example of F, which persuades him to give up his exploration. But it is indeed the same transgressive desire, the same hubristic ambition, which we see in its budding, infant state, in W’s letter, that lies at the heart of both men’s enterprises. Finally, the very words through which Walton describes his project betray its being rooted in passion rather than reason or even the serene play of the imagination at work. Indeed, he points at his “agitation” and “enthusiasm”, underlined by the use of words suggestive of fire and heat such as “ardent” and “glow”. But he also repeatedly likens himself to a child, by comparing his joy to that of a child “who embarks on a little boat” and by relating his present endeavour to his childhood “passion” for travel-books. Thus, even as Walton’s intended exploration is presented to us, and before we know anything of Frankenstein’s failure, we are made to see the shaky ground on which the discovering impulse rests on.

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To conclude, we could say that this first letter of the novel functions very well as an exposition: First, because it introduces the characters and plot in a way that make us and to read on, while it firmly grounds the novel in the romantic movement. But it also initiates the reader, I would argue, to a certain way of reading: even as we are made to sympathise and identify with Walton through the use of the first person, we are invited not to take him at his word and to see through his speech: we should be able to see what his romantic presentation of himself as a pot-scientist conceals of his childish impatience, eagerness to distinguish himself and hubristic defiance of nature’s laws, all of which characteristics he shares with Frankenstein, whose story W thus anticipates and foreshadows.

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