Reanimation

Well, our very chill book club on Discord decided on reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to start it up again after a long hiatus. I read it slower than I expected, but finished it last night. I hadn’t read it since undergrad, so it was definitely a different experience 20+ years later. IIRC, I read it when I was barely learning anything about Classics, so I didn’t pick up on a lot of things (the references to Paracelsus, for example, but I guess he’s more of an alchemist or occultist than anything). The book has some really stunningly beautiful imagery; Shelley does a wonderful job with describing travel and landscapes. I also had no idea that a stretch of the Thames is called the Isis, apparently out of a mistaken etymology; Shelley references that and it did not make sense at all to me until I looked it up. Also, you’ll find some more archaic definitions used, such as “to devote” meaning “to curse” (< Lat. devovere, “to curse, execrate” vs. the more common meaning “to vow, devote; promise solemnly, vow”), so that was interesting. Context helped with that.

What really struck me, though, is how much the whole story, at least in its second half (you’ll know what I mean if you’ve read it), read like a Greek tragedy. Instead of Furies chasing Orestes to the ends of the earth as in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Frankenstein has his own pursuer, menacing him from the shadows, for much of the second half of the book. Yet Frankenstein also calls on the Furies of lost loved ones to help him in vengeance. Interesting stuff. Even the first half of the novel is dripping with dread, catastrophic thoughts, direness, fright, and terror, but it really ramps up in the second half. Again, I felt like I was reading Aeschylus, whose plays are full of gloom, dread, and religious awe. For Shelley, bad things happen in loci amoeni (“pleasant places”) and desolate, dreary ones alike. I found it interesting also how frequently “blasted” was used to describe Frankenstein’s plight, and of course kept thinking of Hollow Knight: Silksong’s “Blasted Steps” area (likewise full of dread, desolation, and religious awe). I would be surprised if Shelley weren’t well-trained in the classics, so I think it’s all very intentional. The whole story is steeped in dread, which becomes more apparent as it all goes on. Also, the story begins mediis in rebus (“in the middle of things”), so that’s interesting and definitely a throwback to classical literature, where that’s very common. Most of the bulk of the story is told in narrative flashback.

Anyways, it was a dreadfully lovely read and nice to revisit it. Very happy it’s available in the public domain for anyone to read and enjoy! If you haven’t checked it out, I’d definitely recommend it. It’s telling that her work entirely survived, and I don’t think we know anything about Percy Shelley’s contribution to the famous storytelling session, and (I had to look this up) Lord Byron’s contribution was made into a story, “The Vampyre,” by John Polidori. Still, what an interesting little conference of minds that would have been! I always thought of Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted as a modern equivalent; I don’t really read anything of his anymore, but that is one I’ve held onto, because of the weirdness of it all. Anyways, glad I read Frankenstein again!!