Being fully up front, I've never been a big fan of epistolary novels. There are plenty of exceptions, but it's a big hurdle. Ditto with framed narratives.

The letter sections of 'Frankenstein' do indeed drag, particularly at the beginning, being both epistolary and a framing device. Absolutely not my cup of tea. The narrator's expedition north is so superfluous that I contemplated skipping it altogeher, but with herculean effort, I perservered, and thankfully, Frankenstein's narration was much less tedious. Unless one is doing an incredibly close reading for a course or out of personal interest and has it in them to build up the analogy (something something the struggle of man against nature is analogous to Frankenstein's stuggle with his monster) you can skim until you get to Chapter 1.

Suffice it to say that some irrelevant dude finds Frankenstein clinging to life in the Arctic and is then the vessel for Frankenstein's story.

You're welcome.

The actual meat of the tale is what's interesting to read and certainly to discuss.

In this early iteration of 'who is the real monster?' we have Dr. Frankenstein and his creation. There is a 'don't judge a book by its cover' element to 'Frankenstein', but it isn't as simple as 'Dr. Frankenstein bad, monster good, actually' either.

Shelley capably argues that wickedness is, in large part, a product of 'nurture' rather than 'nature.' She describes a being (the creature) who is born innocent, absorbs the goodness of the family he spends so long observing, and only learns of cruelty when they reject him due to his outward ugliness.

Certainly, much blame lies with Dr. Frankenstein for creating a life and then abandoning it, just as much of the blame for ill-tempered children can be attributed to bad parenting.

In the infinite wisdom of our modern age we have come to agree that while personality has some ineffible innateness, a hell of a lot can be demonstrably linked to upbringing, to environment, to the acceptance or rejection of a being by society at large.

It's one of the pet explorations of sociologists: what makes a person a criminal?

Way too complicated and nuanced to get into in a Goodreads review, so go forth: read all about it!

Shelley claims in 'Frankenstein' that a person's behavior is the mean sum of that ineffible innateness and nurture. She allows us to pity the creature while still holding him accountable for his actions.

It is well that you come here to whine over the desolation that you have made. You throw a torch into a pile of buildings, and when they are consumed, you sit among the ruins and lament the fall. [...] It is not pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your malignity is withdrawn from your power. (p.203)

Quite the scathing rebuke by our (otherwise unimoportant) narrator.

My one issue with the argument Shelley builds is how she handles the concept of justice. Justice in 'Frankenstein' is presented as necessarily punitive. There are glimmers of examination of this, but at its core this is a 'sins of the father' narrative (with significant, dark strokes from the creation myth). Frankenstein must suffer because he failed in his duty to take responsibility for his creation. His friends and family are picked off one by one by the creature seeking vengeance, and in the end the creature must die because he has become a murderer.

This comes down rather to one's personal moral sensibilities, but as a proponant of restorative justice, I can't help but to cringe at the implication that some kind of tragic justice prevailed in this story.

Sure, it's good and all that Shelley landed on 'revenge is bad', but, and perhaps I just wasn't paying close enough attention, it seems like she also lands on 'wickedness must be punished.' And at the end of the day, aren't those kind of the same things? It's just that one framework we feel good about and the other we don't.

Indeed, the entire story otherwise seems to suggest that wickedness is learned (in the creature's case) or chosen (in Frankenstein's case). Can't it therefore be unlearned and not chosen? This is where punitive justice gets a little bit squidgy.

Were the creature's killings bad because killing is bad or because he killed innocent people? Would it have been justified for him to kill Frankenstein outright since Frankenstein wronged him by carelessly bringing him into existance and then abandoning him? Would he even have been considering suicide if he had only killed his maker rather than his maker's family?

One can go round and round on this.

Personally, I'm in the camp of 'revenge is bad, and sanctioned retribution is also bad.' Just kind of inherently.

Not to oversimplify or trivialize, but I think Frankenstein and his creature would have benefited greatly from talk therapy.

Finally (or first and foremost, depending), this is a tale of society being really shitty to a person who fell outside the beauty standard and was therefore branded as inherently 'deviant' and therefore undesirable (Shelley seems to synthesize these concepts as 'wretched').

So much to unpack there, much of which circles back to the other question of 'what makes a criminal?'

What indeed.

And none of this even touches on the 'playing god' or 'can knowledge go too far?' discussions.

Overall, not my absolute favorite exploration of this concept, largely due to 'Frankenstein' being rather overwritten in places (despite being a slim 206 pages). This is likely due to Shelley's being such a young writer at its time of publication. But it's certainly a seminal text in the horror genre, and the monster is such an icon (especially after his depiction in the 1931 film starring Boris Karloff) that even without ever having read the original novel the average person could give a fairly accurate, barebones summary of at least the basic plot.

There are so many more shades within the novel that it's almost a shame it's become so iconic that many people likely feel there's no reason to read it. For instance, the image of Frankenstein using lightning to bring the creature to life never happens in the novel. In fact, Shelley doesn't give any indication as to how Frankenstein brought his creature to life, leaving it totally up to the imagination.

Give it a read, choose a thread and tug on it.