Until this month, I had never read Frankenstein. I always thought that I had, but, nope. Dracula is another matter – I bought my first copy from the Scholastic Book Club in sixth grade, and my life revolved around it for years. Frankenstein, though, surprised me.

Frankenstein is, of course, famous as the first book in a brand-new genre, science fiction, written by a brilliant teenage girl, Mary Godwin Shelley. The story of its origin is famous. One stormy night, at a villa in Switzerland, four friends decided on a competition to see who among them could write the best horror story. The competitors were young Mary Godwin, her lover and future husband the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his notorious friend Lord Byron, and Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori. I don’t know if the other two completed their entries, but Polidori did come up with a story called The Vampyre, based on some notes that Byron had collected on his journeys in the Balkans.

Although The Vampyre went on to inspire Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Frankenstein won the competition, and Shelley published her book in 1818. Then in 1831, she revised it heavily, having been told it was “too radical,” and this later version has been the most widely published since then.

And thanks to the online book club sponsored by retro game streamer Karkalla, whom my partner follows on Twitch TV, it was now my turn to finally read Frankenstein. We’re reading the 1818 edition. It’s considered more true to Shelley’s own beliefs, which were heavily influenced by the writings of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist who had died when her daughter was a baby.

The thing that floored me from the very earliest chapters was the realization that Frankenstein is a total take-down of Romanticism, an artistic and cultural movement that was central to the identities of her future husband and his friends. Romanticism, which flourished in the first half of the 1800s, encouraged emotional self-expression, without holding back – acting on impulse as the most authentic way to be. We can think of it as a reaction against the values of the Enlightenment (rationality and order).

For the Romantics, discipline and routines were drudgery. They admired everyday nature and the pastoral (pretty little farms, etc.) as landscapes (seeing them as places to admire and travel through, not to live and work), but this was partly because their pleasant domesticity contrasted so sharply with the dramatic places that heroes might take action – in the mountains, on the wild ocean.

And indeed, much of Romantic literature focuses on stories about one man against the cosmos, trying to realize his destiny and achieve eternal glory. Here’s a speech by Victor Frankenstein near the end of the book that captures this major theme from Romanticism. (You’re welcome to skim it – it’s easy to get the gist.) The context is that they’re on a ship north of the Arctic Circle, surrounded by icebergs, and the crew tells their captain they want to turn back. A dying Frankenstein rouses himself to scold them:

“What do you mean? What do you demand of your captain? Are you then so easily turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition? and wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror; because, at every new incident, your fortitude was to be called forth, and your courage exhibited; because danger and death surrounded, and these dangers you were to brave and overcome. For this was it a glorious, for this was it an honourable undertaking. You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species; your name adored, as belonging to brave men who encountered death for honour and the benefit of mankind. And now, behold, with the first imagination of danger, or, if you will, the first mighty and terrific trial of your courage, you shrink away, and are content to be handed down as men who had not strength enough to endure cold and peril; and so, poor souls, they were chilly, and returned to their warm fire-sides. Why, that requires not this preparation; ye need not have come thus far, and dragged your captain to the shame of a defeat, merely to prove yourselves cowards. Oh! be men, or be more than men. Be steady to your purposes, and firm as a rock. This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts might be; it is mutable, cannot withstand you, if you say that it shall not. Do not return to your families with the stigma of disgrace marked on your brows. Return as heroes who have fought and conquered, and who know not what it is to turn their backs on the foe.”

In recreational contexts, Romanticism can be great fun. The classical music composers of the Romantic era are still popular today – Mendelssohn, Schubert, the later works of Beethoven, and so on. The plotlines of many fantasy novels and videogames fit the Romantic storyline very well, although sometimes (as in The Lord of the Rings), the message is that the temptation to wield extraordinary power is something one should resist.

Romanticism is also an animating force of the nationalist movements that came to power in the 19th century. If we see our entire country as if it were a beleaguered person, striving to restore its former glory against the odds, that’s very much in line with Romanticism, and in the 20th century, it clearly inspired the Nazis and numerous revolutions. But, although political psychology of that type is one of the usual themes of this blog, that’s not where I’m going today.

As the long quote above shows, Victor Frankenstein aligned himself with Romantic values. He threw himself wholeheartedly into his scientific project, with “unremitting ardour.” He ignored letters from his family. He pursued “the beauty of the dream” and eventually triumphed over the mystery of life itself. Then he was filled with horror because his creation was not physically attractive and abandoned it.

For me, the obvious moral of the story is that if a person acts consistently with Romanticism – impulsively, seeking glory and ultimate triumph over the way the universe works, judging the worth of things on the basis of their beauty or lack of it, dismissing the foundations of stability, caring, and interconnectedness – they are doing something very wrong.

For Victor, the real achievement could have come from treating his creation as a member of his family, educating him, introducing him to the world, and embedding him in a social network. Instead, the creation must educate himself, which he does while secretly observing a different, functioning family. When he tries to join that social network, he fails. His only hope, he thinks, is to have someone else like him to be his partner. So he makes that demand of Victor, who eventually comes to his senses and realizes that the female-creation would also have free will – she might not want to be with the original “monster.” Of course, he yet again fails in his responsibility to his creation by not bothering to explain his reasoning; he simply destroys the female-creation in progress. And yet more destruction, by the despairing monster, follows.

Then, near the end of his life, Frankenstein reflects: “During these last days I have been occupied in examining my past conduct; nor do I find it blameable. In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature, and was bound towards him, to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being.” Then he says that it would have been wrong to create the companion, so he didn’t. But he utterly ignores that he did absolutely nothing towards his creation’s “happiness and well-being” from the moment of his creation until he had that conversation with him, years later – as if that possible creation of a companion was the only way he had ever had to improve its life. Frankenstein can only act in bursts of enthusiasm.

The author’s message is very clear: Self-absorbed glory-seeking is wrong. Leaping into action on the basis of passion, without reference to one’s deeper values, is wrong. Judging on the basis of physical appearance, although natural, is wrong. Ignoring our responsibilities is wrong.

Of course, there were many facets to Romanticism – it’s not like it had a party line that its followers had to agree upon. However, it sure looks like Mary Shelley was not on board with the way we generally understand it today.

When I learned there were two editions of Frankenstein, I figured that Shelley had decided to scale back the Romantic aspect of the story, but no, the later version leans even further into it. In the 1831 edition, as we can see from a website that lists the differences, Victor Frankenstein is much more self-absorbed and even less sensitive to the feelings of the people he cares about.

The bottom line is that this Romantic storyline is a way for an entitled person to find meaning in life by establishing themselves as extraordinary. Further, they aren’t special for what they do, day in and day out, over a lifetime, but for some achievement or series of achievements of supposed glory. It’s closely related to the “fixed” and “growth” mindsets that Carol Dweck has researched, which I wrote about in my article on Clara and Robert Schumann – which is not a coincidence as Schumann was a Romantic composer.

Disclaimer: There are surely numerous talented scholars who have devoted their professional lives to the study of Mary Shelley, and it’s possible that my observations have been made many times before. Please don’t take this post as the last word on the topic. I’m just speaking from my own perspective, based on reading this one novel, and all I can say is – I was shocked.

One of the reasons that Romanticism has been on my mind is that I spent the last year writing a book about the ways that we can use language to capture attention and get emotional reactions. In the Romantic movement, authors and artists used those techniques to pump up our reactions even more strongly – with dramatic contrasts, descriptions of extremes, evoking order versus disorder, and so forth. And Mary Shelley was a master of that style of writing.

True story: My grandparents owned a small “resort” on the Oregon coast, five miles north of my hometown. They had a row of rental cabins, a small grocery store, a Mobil gasoline pump, and a giant box of worms for use as fishing bait, with a couple of monkey puzzle trees out front and a sand dune in the back.

Once, when my dad was a teenager, he got to be the fishing guide for one of their guests, a Mr. William Henry Pratt. Here’s a photo of Mr. Pratt at work:

We know him better as Boris Karloff.