Be advised this episode discusses and depicts the topic of suicide.
Wanted to give you a heads up just in case.
"I found on the ground a leathern portmanteau containing several articles of dress and some books.
"I eagerly seized the prize and returned with it to my hovel.
"The books consisted of Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch's lives
"And the sorrows of young Werther. The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight.
"I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books.
"They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings that
"sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection.
"I thought Werther himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined,
"his character contained no pretension, but it sank deep.
"The disquisitions upon death and suicide were calculated to fill me with wonder.
"I did not pretend to enter into the merits of the case, yet
"I inclined toward the opinions of the hero, whose extinction I wept without precisely understanding it."
Of all the books that the monster in Frankenstein reads,
"Sorrows of Young Werther" is perhaps the one he most associates with, the one that to him most mirrors his own life.
So let's take a quick look at this other book to see why it influenced Mary Shelley,
and what it tells us about Frankenstein's monster.
"Sorrows" is a novel about impossible, unrequited love.
It begins with a young artist moving to a small village.
There, he falls in love with a woman who is already betrothed to an older and more established
but less worthy man, at least from the perspective of the novel.
Unwilling to abandon her, Werther tries to befriend them both,
but this simply causes him more suffering so instead he decides to leave,
but he suffers just as greatly without her as he did in her presence,
so he returns one last time to the small town where she lives,
only to find that now she is married.
The pain of this discovery leads him in his grief to suicide.
This novel was a smash hit.
If there had been charts back then, this would have torn them up all across Europe.
Even the fashions described in its pages became a sensation,
with people wanting to dress like and be more like the characters they felt so much kinship with.
An entire industry sprang up to basically
provide Werther cosplay,
but there was a darker side to this popularity too.
The book was blamed for what has become known as the
Werther effect, a rash of suicides by young men
hopeless in love who ended their own lives in emulation of Werther.
The novel was banned in several countries
and created a moral panic across Europe,
but that only made it more popular among the Romantics.
In fact, some have argued that this one book
actually paved the way for the Romantic movement with its
unrestrained embracing of passion, and the way it valued human emotion above even life itself.
All of the romantics would have read this novel, including Mary Shelley,
and this story clearly resonated with Mary.
She was dealing with a relationship that often felt to her unequal in love, although
philosophically she believed in free and unrestrained love.
She found herself in love with only her future husband Percy Shelley
but Percy still had a wife at the time who he had left pregnant when they began their affair,
and as they traveled, Percy probably hooked up with Mary's half-sister Claire
who would eventually have a child by Lord Byron.
That's just a bonus fact for fun. Enjoy that.
So as Mary returned to her own novel, she drew from Werther so many things:
Frankenstein's epistolary format, the way the story's told as though through a series of letters,
seems borrowed right from Werther.
So do some of the novel's themes, such as all the musings on the value of life, and of course,
there's Victor's contemplation of suicide after cowardly refraining from speaking in the defense of a dear friend at trial who was later executed.
The monster too exalts the release of suicide as the book comes to a close. Very Werther.
But perhaps most striking is how Shelley delves into the question of love,
because her whole book deals with unrequited love, love which seems so
tantalizingly near, only to be ripped away at the last moment.
Victor's bride is killed on his wedding night.
The monster genuinely loves humanity,
and the readers led to believe time and again that this fondness will finally be returned,
only to then witness the monster being rejected by humanity whenever he so much as reveals his visage.
But Shelley doesn't just rip Werther's ideas about love wholesale.
She's got her own unique take on it,
her own angle that she wants to explore because the central pivot point in her story is
arguably the monster's request that Frankenstein make him a mate.
In keeping with this repeated motif of
unrequited love and dashed hopes, Viktor initially acquiesced to the request,
but later when the project is nearly done,
he changes his mind and tears the half-formed creature apart before the monster's eyes.
This decision ultimately
leads to the destruction of nearly every character in the book
but it's that plea from the
monster that Shelley really wants to talk about,
this request to be built a mate to mirror you, one which shares all of your flaws
and failings, and yet somehow manages to lift you up.
This is a critique of the failures of
Enlightenment thinking, one which we are gonna see come up again and again in sci-fi, by the way.
Here, Shelley is arguing that you can't always
engineer your way out of a problem,
that sometimes problems cannot be solved with mechanics and logic, that building a human being is a
fundamentally flawed idea because we are more than simply a group of mechanisms,
more than a bunch of cogs and wheels.
Even if you can engineer a sentient being, every moment it's alive,
it will continue to create itself and in doing so
break the bounds of the purpose you built it for.
This moment is also a feminist critique.
Mary's mother was actually one of the most well known early feminists.
Here, we are shown two men talking about building a woman to meet one of their desires.
There is no discussion of what she might want or what she might need. In fact, the
possibility that she might reject the monster isn't even considered until her creations nearly complete,
but most of all this moment is a critique of those who would demand that love solve all of your problems.
Now, Shelley was a Romantic.
There is no doubt that she saw love as the most powerful and ennobling of human emotions,
and she would agree that love can soothe the soul and help us through the toughest times.
We see her express exactly that with the side characters of Felix and Safie,
a pair of poor young lovers whom the monster observes.
But Mary has a subtler point to make; the soothing support and strength of love has to happen organically.
You can't demand that of love. You can't say, "I'll find love and then I'll be okay"
because that breaks the idea of what love is; the mutual,
equal, and reciprocal nature of love falls apart if one partner needs love to fix them. For Shelley,
love is an end in itself, not a device by which you achieve other things, so in the end,
Frankenstein is perhaps as much a critique of Werther as an embracing of it.
Werther's limitless passion and zealous portrayal of love are
absolutely baked into the tragedy of Frankenstein.
But the argument that we can't demand that love save us is in there, too,
that love doesn't exist to fix us or to solve our problems, that people can't put that burden on love
because love is in and of itself complete.