Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1831) is a text that I have read several times, at different times in my life, and at each reading, I have perceived new features and new meanings. When I thought about works that would represent autodidacticism, or self-learning, this was one that quickly came to mind because of the Creature’s incredible feat of learning.

After the Creature is brought to life through Victor’s efforts (I think everyone is familiar with the overall premise), he runs away on being abandoned by Victor. The Creature sustains himself according to instinct, eventually finding himself outside a cottage of individuals who interest him. He watches their lives and learns the German language through listening through the window to a young man, Felix, teach his Turkish fiancee, Safie, German. He also learns to read in the same way. This sounds rather unbelievable unless I compare it to autobiographical texts of individuals attempting to teach themselves to read. The Narrative of Frederick Douglass (1845), an incredible work I want to talk about in much more detail in later posts, has convinced me more than any other texts that certainly, where there is a will, there is a way, regarding self-learning.

Frederick Douglass’s motivation to learn to read is to acquire knowledge that will allow him to be free from slavery, and he succeeds wonderfully at this, to become a compelling author and orator. A fictional character, the Creature’s reasons for learning are indistinct and are open to interpretation. In fact, Frankenstein is so very much open to interpretation as a text that I feel it could be applied to every contemporary social problem to provide insight.

Why does the Creature learn? The Creature could be interpreted as super-human, as in possessing qualities that supersede that of humans, both physically and mentally. He could also be interpreted as other-than-human, especially in how Victor, his human creator, is repulsed by him at his first sign of life. Another mystery (before I have fully described the first mystery) is why the Creature is transformed from a miraculous creation to an abject being the moment he opens his eyes and looks at the world:

I saw the dull yellow eyes of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

On the one hand, the Creature is constructed from exhumed corpses and, no doubt, possesses a cadaverous appearance, but why is this appearance so beautiful to Victor when he is nonliving, and so repulsive when he is living? To me, this is one of those questions for us to consider inwardly and draw our own conclusions.

As far as the Creature’s learning powers, we can conclude that Victor’s efforts to create this extraordinary human are successful, because his inner drive to learn propels him at dizzying speed from zero to building philosophical frameworks from copies of Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and The Sorrows of Werter he finds in an abandoned satchel in the woods at some point.

Where things really start to go wrong for the Creature: he develops a deep love for the inhabitants of the cottage he watches and cares for day after day, covertly gathering firewood and doing whatever he can for them. He gathers his courage and introduces himself to the blind patriarch of the family one day, when other inhabitants of the cottage are away, who treats him with great warmth and interest. The cottage’s other inhabitants arrive, exclaim in horror at the Creature’s ghastly appearance, and disturb the man with whom the Creature has forged a quick bond.

Rejected with a quick but deep disgust from these humans, the Creature flees the cottage, where things move from bad to worse throughout the story. Nurtured by the literature he finds, his sensibilities are cultivated to a height that makes him long for social connections and idea exchange. After another confrontation with Victor, his creator, in which Victor is very cruel to him, the Creature begins murdering people, many of whom are beloved by Victor, for whom the Creature has acquired a deep hatred and resentment. On the one hand, Victor feels profound shame and guilt, knowing he is in some way the cause of these deaths, but on the other hand, he does not take responsibility or confess the truth to authorities, which I presume to the reader (at least to myself) makes him the actual object of disgust as the narrative advances and the murders accumulate.

The elephant in the room is how Victor repeatedly beats himself up for having brought this “monster” to life but never considers how his initial and subsequent treatments of the Creature on contact are what have rendered this exquisitely sensitive super-human (if I may call the Creature such for this interpretation) so alienated, so despairing, and so blindly violent that with each killing of other humans, he descends into greater misery that necessitates further killing. As with much of Frankenstein, I read these behaviors as more allegorical than textually accurate. I have no idea what motivates real-life killings and would not presume to speculate. I think that elephant in the room is Victor’s lack of real care for others outside his circle of familiars, even allowing an innocent woman to be hanged for the murder of his younger brother when he knows his Creature is responsible.

There is so much in the text that it’s quite beyond my power to explicate: a flawed justice system; violence and prejudice against women; a dearth of emotional intelligence in, well, most of the people in this story, with the exception of the Creature, who feels and understands far too much, and is far too physically powerful for his own good. Like a profound dream, one cannot make the ends all match up. The truths in the novel must be derived intuitively, if imperfectly, and turned over in the mind, over time.

I believe that Victor, the dangerously powerful and intelligent but short-sighted scientist, is in every human, giving us the ability to overstep our emotional capabilities with our ambitions and harm others, even fatally; and the Creature, the individual who is deeply wounded, blindly feeling, and also dangerously powerful, in a physical sense, is in us as well. I know that I go on my shame spirals when I think about my past incidents of cruel and unthinking hurt toward others, that went so diametrically opposite my supposed principles, motivated by thinking of others as less than myself in some way or other; and I know that I also mournfully gather my cat against my heart in the bed and gaze at the morning light outside the window, feeling like a wounded and misunderstood animal, forsaken by every other human in the world.

What can I take from Frankenstein on this reading? The world that whirls by these windows is surely a different world than on my previous readings. It’s a world constantly riven by physical violence on bodies and mental and emotional violence through electronic communications that manipulate our fears and desires, windows into certain presentations of others’ lives and ideas that carve us with loneliness and despair and drive many people into tribes and/or abject solitude. How would Frankenstein be different if the cottagers had not reacted with revulsion at the Creature’s appearance? This is surely a moment at which the reader feels great disappointment after following the incidents of their lives, and beginning to love them through the Creature’s eyes.

But they did. And we do. I think we’re the cottagers, too.