Yeakle Frankenpost #2

Frankenstein earns its status as a literary classic by Mary Shelley's genius as a cultured writer and ability to interweave universal stories and metaphors into her work. The novel is known for its biblical motifs; the story of Adam's creation, the idea of Eve, Paradise Lost and the story of Satan, and the relationship between the creator and the created.  Shelley also drew on Greek mythology and the story of Prometheus, the titan who created a man out of clay (in the novel Victor Frankenstein explicitly refers to his monster as a creation out of clay) and stole fire to give it to men. However, one of the more subtle stories that Shelley tells through Frankenstein is the evolution of humans.

In the mid section of the book, Victor Frankenstein has reunited with the monster, who articulately recounts his life in the past years that they have been separated. His evolution from an unintelligent, primal being to a literate, profound person is symbolic of the development of the human race. The monster describes discovering fire; "When night came again I found, with pleasure, that the fire gave light as well as heat; and that the discovery of this element was useful to me in my food, for I found some of the offals that the travellers [sic] had left had been roasted, and tasted much more savoury than the berries I gathered from the trees." (p. 72) The monster, with his incoherent grunts and animalistic appearance, greatly resembles a caveman discovering the use of fire for the first time. Just as humans began developing speech, the monster is fascinated by spoken language and spends months learning how to pronounce and understand it. "I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds. I perceived that the words they spoke sometimes produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearers. This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it." (p. 78) Not long after discovering speech, the monster witnesses the cottager Felix reading, and is determined to understand written language as well. Like the ancient cultures that created symbols for language, he describes his observations of writing: "This reading had puzzled me extremely at first...I conjectured, therefore, that he found on the paper signs for speech which he understood, and I ardently longed to comprehend these also..." (p. 79)

After months of observing the cottage family, the monster reaches a level of intelligence at which he faces questions that the earliest philosophers grappled with when pondering the existence of humanity: "What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them" (p. 92) At this point he has acquired deep thought, completing the symbolic progress of humans, from the earliest cave dwellers to civilizations, that is one of Mary Shelley's many metaphors in Frankenstein.