1 birth: Frankenstein Frankenstein is the story of childbirth as it would be if it had been invented by someone who wanted power more than love. The book's subtitle identifies Victor Frankenstein as "The Modern Prometheus." The ancient Prometheus stole fire from the gods so that he could give human beings its warmth and comfort. The modern Prometheus steals from nature "the cause of generation and life"--the secret of biological reproduction by which a new life is brought into being--and uses that secret to create a new species. In human beings the power of "generation and life" works through the partly instinctual, partly voluntary union of a man and woman who have little control over the outcome, and who typically feel--as Victor remembers his parents feeling about him--a "deep consciousness of what they owed towards the being to which they had given life." Victor, in contrast, feels no obligation to the being to which he has given life through "the horrors of my secret toil," and he sustains himself through his gruesome, pleasureless work with the thought that his creature will owe him more gratitude than any human child ever owed to its father. Frankenstein performs the act of creation alone, by conscious choice rather than through instinct, so that he alone can have total control over its outcome. Victor creates new life by applying an electric spark to a dead body, not by embracing a living one. In this act and in every other he rejects his own bodily life, the bodily lives of those who love him, and the whole realm of the flesh. While building his creature, he "tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay." Later, while building a mate for the creature, Victor is so horrified by the prospect of their having children of their own that, "trembling with passion," he "tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged." Victor thinks of his own impending marriage with "horror and dismay," and some of his feelings are justified by his creature's threat to be "with you on your wedding-night." But the deeper cause of his dismay is something that the book never names explicitly, but which it insistently points to--Victor's deep, unacknowledged horror of the human body and its relations with another human body. One effect of what he calls his "murderous machinations" is the murder of his own bride on their wedding night. Choosing Beauty The body is the part of yourself which is most obviously created and shaped by nature. No one can ever fully control its appetites, instincts, and desires, especially the impulses that erupt without warning at the end of childhood, when the body becomes sexually mature. Everyone wants to achieve at least some control over them, but Victor Frankenstein wants the total control over the flesh that he can attain by making a body to his own specification. His ambition is not merely to gain control over his own body--although he drives it to exhaustion and withholds satisfactions from it--but to conquer nature itself, to seize for his own use that mysterious instinctive power that gave his body life. "I pursued nature to her hiding-places," he says of his researches, as if he were a hunter and nature his prey. When a child is born, nature determines whether or not it will have physical beauty, but Victor chooses for himself the appearance that he gives his creature: "His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful." (The modern couple who advertises for a blond, blue-eyed egg donor is driven by a similar wish to control a new life.) He gives the creature the spark of life; he refuses it the warmth of his feelings. When Victor's work is done and the creature opens its eyes, reaches out its hand, and tries to s Excerpted from The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say about the Stages of Life by Edward Mendelson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
