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I read another book, no 6 for the year! It was Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, which somehow I'd never read.

The biggest thought I had running through my head was that lot of internet discourse has a whole thing on "oh Frankenstein is the real monster of the story" or "intelligence is knowing that Frankenstein is the human, not the monster: wisdom is knowing that Frankenstein is still the monster" and I do question how many of those people have actually read the book. Not that Frankenstein is entirely un-monstrous: he's an obsessive, hubristic, idiot who acts on whims and fails utterly in his duties of care to his own creation and in basically everything else he does.

But the monster is a monster. He's smart enough to know that what he's doing is wrong, as expressed clearly and repeatedly in his own dialogue. There's never truly a suggestion that the reason for his attacks is because he doesn't appreciate that he's killing innocents or that that's bad. Indeed the monster isn't in any sense intellectually incapable: he's shown to be a quicker learner than humans, and claims to have read and understood quite a wide variety of texts, as well as having indirectly learned through observation a lot about human society. He nonetheless fundamentally fails at the concept, core to morality, that virtue is not virtue when it goes away and turns into murder-rage when your feelings get hurt.

Whilst Frankenstein's lack of moral education and care to the monster is bad, it would make it thereby seem possible, even grimly just given the monster's sufferings, if the monster had taken his revenge out on Victor directly. The four entirely innocent people who die instead are on the other hand, well, entirely innocent: not only did they not author the monster's woes, none of them fail in the repeatedly failed moral test of humanity, that of judging the monster with immediate brutality, because none of them are given a chance to before being murdered.

Frankenstein is, by analogy, an uncaring societal elite. He does not mean direct malice so much as blithely benefiting from a system built to cater to him and still wanting more. But the monster? My take that both the conservative "the monster is an inhuman monster" and modern "Frankenstein is the only real monster" readers will probably hate is that the monster is a monster, and specifically he's an incel. He claims that personal societal rejection, as defined by him, makes his violence towards people who did nothing whatsoever to harm him inevitable. He literally tries to get his problems solved by getting someone to make him a woman. Whilst Victor is an idiot to go back on his word, some of his objections to this plan - unlike the monster he correctly reasons that another reasoning being might not just agree to be the first being's paramour - actually make a lot of sense.

So that's my hot take on this one anyway.

My other notes:

The ship's captain who provides the framing narrative is an interesting character who I think I'd like to think on more.
A lot of people are given as M. this that or the other - not sure if this is Mister, Magister, Monsieur, or what? It's not something I recall from other texts of this period but I guess it's a long time since I read anything early C19th.
People hearing bad news and getting immediate fevers or mental breaks feels like a topos of older literature but I wonder what its basis is or how common such states of being bedridden with mental illness actually were at the time of writing.
The fact that Frankenstein doesn't request to do an autopsy on William or challenge the direct findings in the murder trial seems weird to modern eyes though I guess such methods weren't really used in law at the time the book was written. But it seems strange that the greatest living expert on anatomy never thinks to ask or point out that the giant hands of an eight foot tall monster would have left a decidedly different impression after strangulation than those of a five foot tall serving girl.

#58

Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

Last post by Son of the King - July 28, 2025, 11:16:50 PM

Purchase

#59

Narnia Total War / Re: Narnia - Fall of Telmar Su...

Last post by Littlefinger - July 28, 2025, 11:02:29 PM

I still have the standard mod installed, do I need to remove it?

#60

Narnia Total War / Re: Narnia - Fall of Telmar Su...

Last post by Littlefinger - July 28, 2025, 11:00:57 PM

I added a screenshot of the inside of the fall of telmar file.

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