Frankly, Franky, you Frighten me.

George Levine seems to have hit the nail on the head when he said, “ It is so common place now, that everybody talks about Frankenstein, but no body reads it,” (Levine, 3)
Prior to our in depth study of it in class, I was one of those everybodies. When we first started reading the novel, I was astonished at how radically different it was than all the previous notions of “Frankenstein” I had known. Growing up, I recall watching Boris Karloff, and his rendition of the “wretched daemon,” as an illiterate oaf, fumbling about with cumbersome awkward movements, green skin, and bolts coming out of his neck. As a little girl, I was under the impression that this was where they charged his battery pack, and Franky wasn’t much different than the energizer bunny, except that in contemporary pop culture, he is lumped with the likes of Dracula, and the ghosties and ghoulies of Halloween.
Initially, I was taken aback at how much I disliked the novel. I was on a 13-hour train ride home for Thanksgiving, trapped alone with my thoughts, and Victor Frankenstein’s narrative. He was like one of those passengers that sits next to you, someone you recognize as slightly famous, someone you think you have heard of, can’t believe you are sitting next to. When you say in passing, “Hi, Mr. Frankenstein is it? I think I have heard of you, how are you doing? How is your work?” he proceeds to elaborate and embellish his entire life story of litany and woe to the point you are sorry you asked. “Geeze,” you think to yourself, “I thought he’d be an interesting guy, but damn!” I felt icky, and had to excuse myself from the conversation numerous times to go to the dining car and catch my breath, call my mum, and scream a little. I don’t think he noticed. His entire person rubbed me the wrong way. His story amplified all too many negative human characteristics; he oozed narcissism, self-centeredness, and pride to name a few. I wanted to like him, but just got more and more frustrated with his drama. It seemed that all of his troubles were of his own crafting, literally, and I wanted to sit him down with a Zen Buddhist manual, some Zoloft, and introduce him to pragmatism. “Here, study this!” Still I could not stop thinking about the novel, and talked about it almost persistently. As much as I wanted to forget the sensational over-dramatization of Victor’s retelling, its influence endured, and I realized sometimes you learn more from something, or someone you dislike, than something you fancy.
That this story—not necessarily the novel—has gained such notoriety, and maintained such a legacy in Western culture is a telling sign of its fascination and appeal. When you Google “Frankenstein”, you get sixteen million hits, sixteen MILLION! Five major motion pictures have been made that pertain, in some fashion, to the monster of Frankenstein, and four hundred editions have been printed since the books anonymous inception in 1818.
What puzzled me most with this, and what I was continually asking myself, was “What is this staying power of Frankenstein? What lessons does this little horror story render that speak so poignantly to the subsequent generations that have encountered it, and why did the book, for me, create such a greater and deeper reaction of horror and distaste than all the movies and preconceived notions of Frankenstein I held, combined.”
Watching Boris Karloff , and the idea of a monster coming to life in some wacked out scientific laboratory didn’t scare me much as a little kid; a little spooky, yes, interesting, entertaining, but it was just make believe, and could never really happen. What is the most horrific feature of Mary Shelley’s novel is not the monstrosity of the creature itself; his watery eyes, or yellowish skin, that barely stretched over the muscle—though the thought of seeing that is rather distasteful. No, more terrifying is the subtle psychological implications (and warnings) the book reveals so well. (1) The monster represents the abject, and is a metaphorical archetype of the creation and externalization of our internal fears; a scape-goating of our internal monsters. (2) The grandiose nature of these fears—and their consequences—are augmented when isolated from society, having to face the extremes of your own nature alone, and (3) in returning to Levine’s initial conjecture, these lessons are slightly amiss when we think we understand the admonitions of Shelley’s Frankenstein from the movie renditions, with out ever having read the novel.
According to Elizabeth Young in her book Black Frankenstein, the story has a long history of being used as a political metaphor. “Consider, for example,” she says, “critiques of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. In ‘We Finally Got Our Frankenstein,’ filmmaker Michael Moore compares Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to the Frankenstein monster.” “We had a virtual love fest with this Frankenstein whom we (in part) created,” Moore states in the film. Moore considers Hussein one of the many monsters created by the U.S. government, including Osama bin Laden. “[He is] our other Frankenstein,” he says. “We like playing Dr. Frankenstein. We create a lot of monsters—the Sha of Iran, Somoza of Nicaragua, Pinochet of Chile—and then we express ignorance or shock when they ran amok and massacred people.” (Young,1) Perhaps it is not ignorance, as Moore states, but more the horror of our own evil possibilities, and the fear of confronting them.
In a 2005 U.S. Gallup poll, teens between the ages of thirteen and fifteen were asked what they fear, and one of the most frequently cited fears was terrorism. (Gallup, 350) The terrorists, we are made to believe, represent those external monsters that insight fear and “terror” and must be put down. We are still creating monsters according to Moore and Young, and since fear,in psychology is often linked with behaviors of escape and avoidance, (cite) the United States' war on terror provides a prime example for the cultural archetype of this external scape-goating of responsibility that is present in Frankenstein. Give Saddam “weapons of mass destruction” to fight the Russians and assume no culpability when he decides to alter his course of attack. Victor's obsession of his creation, literally “love fest” with his work, is soon abandoned when he realizes when he has done. He falls ill for months, and abandons his laboratory, perhaps hoping his nightmare was really just a nightmare, nothing more.
Beyond the fear of terrorism, and even more acute in humans is the fear of pain Is it is easier to create a monster external to us on which to place blame and conquer, than the fear of the pain we will endure of confronting the monsters with in the self, or owning up to the responsibility of them. Though Victor Frankenstein was in part schizophrenic in dealing with responsibility of the creature, he at one point stated “I am blameless,” (cite) for the destruction wielded by his creation, thus he tried to hide. When our monsters, as horrifying as they may be, lay outside of us, it becomes easier to disown them as part of ourselves, and blame them for all our tribulations than to accept our own culpability. At certain points through out the novel Frankenstein seems to accept his responsibility for his creation. Specifically with the murder of his younger brother William, and later the innocent death of Justine, Victor expresses the deepest grief and remorse. The night before her execution, Elizabeth and Victor visit Justine in prison. As Elizabeth speaks to Justine, trying to console her, Victor is despondent, and stuck grappling with his own self-designed horrors, to which he says he finds no avail:
During this conversation I had retired to a corner of the prison-room,
where I could conceal the horrid anguish that possessed me.
Despair! Who dared talk of that? The poor victim, who on the morrow
was to pass the dreary boundary between life and death, felt not as I did,
such deep and bitter agony. (114)
Fears, and perhaps our innate“evil” tendencies (to try and live beyond our human limitations), as illustrated by Victor Frankenstein are augmented by isolation from society and community. Not only does Victor create in secret, with no witness but his the pages of his journal, he also never admits to his folly to any of his closest friends or family members. He avoids admitting his guilt because he fears the pain it would create. Still in not admitting his guilt, he is eaten alive by the monster of lonely anguish it create inside of him. After destroying the pieces of his second creation he says, “I left the room, and locking the door, made a solemn vow in my own heart to never resume my labours; and then with trembling steps I sought my own apartment. I was alone; none were near me to dissipate the gloom, and relieve me from the sickening oppression of the most terrible reveries” (191) It is when he is left alone to to his own devices that he is able to create such horror, with no external voice of reason saying “Victor, should you really be doing this? Are you prepared for the consequences of your actions?” With out the presence of community he is able to equivocate his responsibility, letting it fester internally. Victor was more able to hide his hideous monstrosity because in the novel, no one was there to witness it,thus never had to fully take responsibility for it. It is when he is alone that he fashioned these creatures, and alone he had to deal with the internal turmoil they presented to him.
(3)The American Library Association and the National Library of Medicine have designed a new traveling exhibition that explores the literary, scientific, and cultural legacy of Shelley's novel. The exhibition examines Shelley's world and the evolution of the monsters as a cultural myth. “One of our goals,” says ALA project coordinator Susan Brandehoff, “is to encourage people familiar with the popular image of Frankenstein to read Shelley's novel. We'd like people to understand the original book as totally different from what's been done with the plays and films.” What is non-existent in the 1931 film by James Whale, the film that propelled Frankenstein into a cultural icon, is the juxtaposition of the isolation versus the community that is so overt in the novel. The film opens with “Henry” Frakenstein and his hunchback assistant “Igor” collecting “materials from a graveyard. Elizabeth, a university professor, and “Victor”—representing Henry, are all present when the monster comes alive. Frakenstein actually states, “One creator, three very sane spectators.” The monster is in the film also lacks the intelligence, moral character, and emotional complexity of the almost human monster in Shelley’s horror story. The near humanness of the monster makes him that much more horrifying because he acts as the doppleganger to Victor himself, and not merely some implausible science fiction character . In the novel we can observe this contrast between Victor, and the isolation he creates around himself, and even with in his community. The film is an inversion of Shelley's novel; almost an entirely different story with a different premise. The lessons of responsibility and isolation are not present in the film the way they are in the book.
What we learn from the novel is much more terrifying. Levine states that, “while Frankenstein is a phenomenon of popular culture, it is so because it has tapped into the center of western feeling and imagination...Frankenstein has become a metaphor for our own cultural crisis... it has become a vital metaphor, particularly appropriate to a culture...neurotically obsessed with 'getting in touch' with its authentic self and frightened at what its discovering ” (Levine, 3) Perhaps we are frightened at the recognition that we can not help ourselves to continually create monsters, and that we fear the culpability of our actions. But that this novel is, has tapped so deeply in western feeling, and such an exquisite metaphor for our own cultural crisis, a crisis that may never have a resolution, is what has kept this novel at the epicenter of western imaginations.

I resolved with more respect for Mary Shelley's monstrosity that when I initially ventured into the story.

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Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 2nd ed. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2001. Print.

Levine, George. The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1979. Print.

Young, Elizabeth. Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2008. Print.

Gallup, Alec. The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 2005 . Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2006. Print.