Frankenstein (Signet Classics)
by Mary Shelley

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• ISBN13: 9780451527714
• Condition: New
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Book Reviews of Frankenstein (Signet Classics)

Book Review: An Anti-Technological Warning?
Summary: 5 Stars

Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley, author of "Frankenstein," seemingly foresaw what lurks within all these examples. As the wife of Percy Blythe Shelley--famous even today as perhaps the greatest poet of the Romantic Era--Mary Shelley shared with her husband the concerns of many of the most humanized intellectuals on the planet. Technology in 1821 was a relatively new social force. Industrializing rapidly, the England with which Shelley was familiar had already bent beneath the weight of changes wrought by the beginning of the age of machines only decades before. Old ways obliterated themselves. New, and unfamiliar metaphors to the human condition quickly replaced them.

Considered by some as the first science fiction novel ever written, "Frankenstein," as a novel, could be and might best be considered something of oracular proportions. Sweeping in its scope, wise in its prophetic and albeit poetic assessments of what technology really means to the survival of the human spirit, the novel rises up from the predominant notions of both medicine and the ultimate purpose of technology--in that the prolongation of life and the defeat of death are the ultimate endpoints of both. Moreover, the prospects of creating life from death--and we all know the familiar scenes from the movie in which the crazed Dr. Frankenstein robs graves in the pouring rain--provide an ironic counterpoint to the major thrust of the novel's theme.

Even more ironic is that no one will ever know how Shelley might have felt to have learned that her grave warning to the human race would be hacked and cut to pieces to serve as a form of entertainment that was undreamed of in her age. What would she have thought of Boris Karloff's chilling portrayal as a blunt-headed beast of her protagonist's creation? Could she have ever dreamed that the very message beneath her life's work would be mangled and disembowled of any and all meaning? While many today celebrate the fact that Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" is the archetype of the modern horror story--the birth of a monster that takes more contemporary form in movies such as "Alien" and "Jurassic Park"--few consider the powerful metaphors within the novel itself.

Unlike the movie, Mary Shelley's version begin with a harrowing encounter in the Artic--the ice cold and unhospitable axis of the world, the place by which the world turns and turns ruthlessly with no consideration for the fragility of human life--and continues with almost karmic dimensions as Dr. Viktor Frankenstein, fully and suddenly understanding the scientific terror and technological golem he has obsessively unleashed, devotes the grim remainder of his life to the destruction of what he has created. It's an old tale, too, a little like Dante entering a wood and visiting Hell, the tale of Dr. Frankenstein is synonymous with the advent of middle age: We spend our youths dreaming of our creation, and yet we spend our later years often searching for ways to destroy that for which we once dreamed.

"Frankenstein" is one of richest novels ever written. A favorite of generations, it regales in a style that is itself a vivid example of how technology and its unforseen imperitive--that we constantly hurry and curry the lowest common denominator--have turned both the novel and the English language into a strange changeling that is a pallid, shadowy reflection of an age of philosophic and spiritual grandeur that unavoidably midwived the modern age. Regardless of its richness, however, Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" won't alienate a reader who gives herself to the oceanic flow of her voice. Told simply and with a passion unsurprisingly absent from contemporary prose, "Frankenstein" is a novel whose time has yet to come.

Summary of Frankenstein (Signet Classics)

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