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Frankenstein - Mary Shelley (1818)

Clearly this is a work of fiction, after all monsters aren’t made in secluded, upstairs rooms at the university of Ingolstadt; more likely they are what men uncover about themselves on their journey of becoming, the journey into their masculinities.

And clearly too Frankenstein is a horror story - it’s where the monster claims and names the man. Not the other way around. Our monsters are meant to be faced, managed and integrated into that version of who we are and can confidently name as our true selves. But who remembers Victor? Mary Shelley, makes sure we never forget the Frankenstein he made not just for himself but of himself.

Victor begins to emerge as the monster when by his own agency he lets the innocent Justine take the blame for William’s murder, giving a model for the deadly deals of compromise we do in our unfinished personal work, leaving ourselves half baked.

And that’s the genius of Mary’s contribution to literature with this classic. Not just by the subtle and tragic biographical threads of her own innocent abandonment in death that can be found in it (her mother’s death in giving birth to her, her husband drowning and the infant mortality that claimed three of her four children), but also by giving us the opportunity to face the ugly in ourselves and experience our running away from creating our own destinies.

In “Requiem for a Nun” William Faulkner said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”.  And someone else “the past is really the present, seen through the lens of the past”: and if you read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein any “dreary night in November” 2024 it’s possible to get what they mean.

Oppenheimer’s unleashing “the Modern Prometheus” was a monster created  in our era when he brought us the first atomic explosion; genetic modification of genes to increase food production has shared in the same risky business of a “interfering with nature”; our current unknowns around the future of artificial intelligence - all are echos of Mary Shelley’s theme of “playing God” with our newly discovered powers, all accompanied by the dangers of their consequences.

But it isn’t only in ourselves or in our technologies that we can uncover and cultivate monsters. Maybe difficult to detect or slow to emerge but they are to be found alive and well within our  society and its institutions.  
The settling of Australia for instance and Mary’s famous story, were both young at the same time. Frankenstein details how denial of acceptance and recognition can grow the social monsters of racism and discrimination.
 Both Mary herself along with her mother Mary Wollstonecraft knew the monsters of patriarchy; it was five years before Mary could stop publishing this work anonymously, as a teenager and name herself as the author: for nearly two hundred years the work of Mary’s mother too was starved of recognition and acceptance for its contribution to Feminist studies.

But there are many different voices clamouring in to be heard in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Not all dark ones. What makes her work truly great and ranks it among the best is how it shows us ourselves and our own times.  
Monsters don’t die and Mary doesn’t kill off this famous one in her Frankenstein story. She leaves him alive and ready to name as his own the times, the people and the technologies of our making when they fail to rise to their challenges. These involve bringing completion to our own creations, ordering them to good purpose and fostering the beauty of who they truly can be in reconciling with their ugliness.  
“The  labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of humanity” (Frankenstein p.34)

Maybe Mary, maybe!

Michael Glover (Perth Chapter)

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