Surprisingly this is my first encounter with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This being said, I was very interested to read the Critical History that accompanied the novel. Since I was going into this text cold, I decided to put my main focus on the character development and symbolism within the first segment of the book. I, unfortunately, did not have the time I would have liked to do a bit of background research on the novel and its author, so I decided to make my primary focus the physical text that I had in front of me. And I’m sure that anyone who has read Frankenstein before will agree with me when I say that this story is filled with motifs, symbols, and interesting characters!

            First I would like to share my views of the characters in the story. Victor Frankenstein is a character the I find to be very curious. Seeing how this first second of the book it narrated primarily my Victor it is both difficult and easy to read his character. I found that it was very interesting to have a window opened into his thoughts and his motives, but it also made it tough to see how others may have perceived him. One thing I found very interesting was the fact the throughout the entirety of the first 16 chapters Victor tells his readers over and over that he is not a mad man. To me this seemed like an odd thing to continue to mention, and suggested to me that Victor clearly was undergoing a serious internal struggle. It is very apparent to the reader that he is filled with overwhelming amounts of emotion throughout the reading, which shows us he struggles to self-regulate himself. Victor feels very intense emotion which is beautifully described to the reader and helps the reader sympathize with him. However, there are glimmers of the different perspectives of Victor’s behavior. When Clerval visits Victor after he has created his monster he cries “…what, for God’s sake, is the matter? Do not laugh in that manner. How ill you are! What is the cause of all this?” (63). This gives us readers a window of a new perspective. It would seem, contrary to what he tells the reader, that Victor may be indeed a bit of a mad man.

            When it comes to the monster himself, I was very intrigued. To me the monster that Frankenstein created is more than a character, and more of a representation of the human nature. The monster shows through his story that he is torn between an terrible vengeful nature and soft tender tendency toward compassion and kindness. As I was reading I was almost tempted to view the monster as a manifestation of Victor Frankenstein himself. After scarlet fever killed his mother, Victor seemed to enter a bit of a downward spiral of grief in which he seemed to harness to create his monster. Through a metaphorical lens I could see that the monster seems to embody Victor’s humanistic internal struggles. He shows a side of great compassion and yet turns to a crazed furry as well.

            With a different approach I saw that the monster showed us readers how an education can mold and sculpt a human being. The monster learns from the French family and witnesses their struggles and kindness. He takes what he sees and internalizes it and begins to commit kind acts for the family such bringing in wood. However, the monster did revert back to aggression and anger after the family turns on him. I feel as though the cause of this was due to his abandonment by his creator. To me the mirrors the dangers of abandoning a child at birth. The child is dependent on their mother (or their creator) to show them how to create meaningful human connections, and if they miss out on this it will follow affect them for the rest of their lives. The monster in this case shows just this, he is able to attempt to learn compassion and kindness in later life but is greatly affected by the scares left from the absence of Victor when he was first created.

            I was very interest to read the critical history of the text, because I found that in some ways my views of the novel fell in line with some of the reviews and I also had my eyes opened to new perspectives on of the text. I was very interested in the viewpoints Johanna Smith and the other scholars who studied the text through a feminist lens. I thought Laura Kranzler’s made a very interesting point by conjecting that “Victor’s creation of life and modern science’s sperm banks and artificial wombs show a similar ‘masculine desire to claim female (re)productivity for themselves’” (279). This had not occurred to me when reading the text, but it got me thinking and finding myself in a bit of an alignment with these views.

            One other view point that I would also like to explore is the thoughts of Grant F. Scott’s queer reading. While reading the text initially I did notice subtle tones of homosexulaism within the story. I would be interested to broaden this theory a bit and examine it more closely since the view points on such a topic has changes so dramatically in the last 250 years. When I finished reading this critical history I felt as though I found myself thinks similar thoughts about each of the different perspectives. I wish that this critical history was able to focus in on some of the bigger time periods and perspectives rather than trying to give us readers as many as possible. As I read I found things that greatly interested me, however there wasn’t the elaboration on the topic that I would have hoped for. However, over all I was very interested and pleased with both the original text and the critical history.