'Now it is ended. There is my last victim!'
[Intro music]
Frankenstein ends where it began:
On the boat with young Walton, the wannabe explorer
But now Frankenstein is dying and Walton laments
his hopes frustrated by concessions to reason and moderation
the very two things that Victor refused to give an inch to
ultimately leading to his destruction
Walton writes to his sister:
'The die is cast!'
I have consented to return if we are not destroyed
Thus are my hopes blasted by cowardice and indecision
I come back ignorant and disappointed
It requires more philosophy than I possess to bear this injustice with patience"
So Walton will turn back before he ventures too far to ever do so
But before they even begin their return voyage,
Victor dies
Walton grieves
but even as he does so,
one last strange event occurs.
The monster appears, for a final time.
Upon returning to the room where Victor's body lies,
Walton sees some dread form bent over it
It's the monster!
The monster speaks to Walton of how he has been wronged
and asks for forgiveness for his crimes.
He alternates between raging and weeping
and, in doing so, he offers the most telling lines in the book.
He says:
"No sympathy may I ever find."
"When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue,
the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed,
"that I wished to be participated."
"But now that virtue has become to me a shadow,
and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair,
in what should I seek for sympathy?
"I am content to suffer alone while my sufferings shall endure;
when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory."
Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment.
Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form,
would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding."
Here, the monster serves as a stand-in for the poor, the criminal and the downtrodden,
all of those that Victorian society rejected,
offering a warning that that very rejection might actually lead to greater crimes
The monster then continues:
"I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion.
But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal.
No guilt, no mischief, no malignity and no misery, can be found comparable to mine.
When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature
whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness.
But it is even so;
The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.
yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation;
I am alone."
Once again, the monster recalls Milton to express his position
with regards to his creator and to mankind.
And then he says:
"Am I to be thought the only criminal when all humankind sinned against me?"
And, with that, we have brought together the two warring sides of the monster that we've seen throughout the novel,
the two sides illuminated by all the literature the book references:
the way the world see the monster
and the way the monster see himself
In these paragraphs, the monster summarizes all of those themes that we've seen within the book:
Egoism,
An Imperfect creator
The self harm of vengeance
parental duty
and personal responsibilty
and, of course, acceptance.
But after saying all of this, the monster leaps out the window and disappears out onto the ice
leaving Robert Walton all alone
and forcing us to make one last juxtaposition between Walton and ourselves.
We are Robert Walton
We have found Frankenstein and we too are ending our journey with him
Now we must put down the book and withdraw from the cold Arctic reaches
to return to society and the living.
Walton says that he returns ignorant
But what about us?
What lesson have we learned from this strange journey?
Why do we still remember and read this book?
What hold does it have on us in the modern age?
There are many answers to that question and you've probably got your own, but
I would say that, it's because, more than all the other themes,
Frankenstein is a book about alienation
Radical Alienation
This theme is universal and it's timeless,
but it's also a theme that has become all the more prevalent in our modern age
When you think about it, it makes sense that this book arrived at the end of the Napoleonic era,
when modernity was just beginning to take shape.
It makes sense that this book uses science to drive the plot
at a time when science was just beginning to redefine the world
But most of all,
it makes sense that this book began what we now know as 'science fiction'
because so much of science fiction
is about the alienation of our vast and technological modern world
The alienation that can be self-imposed
in a world large and complex enough to disappear in
and the alienation imposed on us by a society
that thinks differently than we
and demands that we conform to it
Both the monster and Frankenstein are alienated characters
The monster's case is clear. He even states that
all of the horror, all of the destruction of the book,
comes from him being cast out, rejected by society.
But then we have Victor also whose alienation is much more self-imposed.
We know that Frankenstein has a large family and friends who love him
and yet his obsession causes him to abandon them.
As he creates the monster that will bring about his own ruin,
Frankenstein alienates himself from these connections
ignoring their letters and their attempts at communication
isolating himself more and more to focus on his own work.
And once that work is done, his shame isolates him
It keeps him from getting help or talking to someone about what he's done
And in the end,
this alienation leads to his destruction.
We see these themes in science fiction all the time.
We see the idea of obsessive self-isolation,
pushing everyone else aside,
withdrawing from society because they can't understand you or your work
We see isolation by shame, even though that shame may be unwarranted
And we have frequently seen the monster's style of isolation too,
where some disfigurement or impediment,
or even just some way of being or acting that is non-standard to a given society,
causes that society to reject a good and deserving person.
We have seen that stuff in science fiction from The Invisible Man,
to Philip K. Dick,
to Ender's Game,
and we see it play out in our own community as well.
In this culture that has sprung up around science fiction.
Frankenstein is about alienation and the desire to belong
and it brought into science fiction, ideas of all the things that keep us unmoored
From each other, from our world,
from our society.
Science fiction would become an art of outsiders
It attracts outsider writers and outsider readers
It attracts those who see the cracks
who see the alienation and the isolation around them
It attracts those that have been alienated and rejected by the rest of society
and those looking for a place where they might belong.
But, our time with Frankenstein is done.
Join us next time as we take a dive into the work
at one of the great writers of outsider science fiction stories:
William Gibson
[Outro]