Episode #238 ... Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

Today we talk about the book Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. We talk about the mix of Romantic and Enlightenment attitudes and how it leads to problems without the proper oversight. We talk about technology and the responsibility that comes with creation. We talk about how ostracized people often learn to resent the world they live in. Hope you love it and have a great week! :) Sponsors: Better Help: https://www. BetterHelp.com/PHILTHIS Nord VPN: https://nordvpn.com/philothis Thank you so much for listening! Could never do this without your help. Website: https://www.philosophizethis.org/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/philosophizethis Social: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/philosophizethispodcast X: https://twitter.com/iamstephenwest Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/philosophizethisshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West, this is Philosophize This, patreon.com/philosophizethis, philosophical writing on Substack at philosophizethis on there. I hope you love the show today. So this episode's about the philosophical themes of the book Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. And I think out of respect to your time, it's worth it to clear up a few misconceptions real briefly right here at the start that'll help frame this whole thing. First of all, for anyone just getting started with this book, Victor Frankenstein's the name of the scientist that makes the monster in this book. The monster is not named Frankenstein. In fact, the monster in the book doesn't really have a name, which as we'll see is part of the point that Mary Shelley was going for. Secondly, I think most people, when they think of Frankenstein's monster, they think

• 0:42Speaker 00

  of this, you know, giant green dude, bolts coming out of his neck, he's got a bowl cut, and he just sort of lumbers around all stiff, moaning at people, like, "Ahhh," you know, like he's a zombie or something. Just know, this is a Hollywood thing that came from when they made the Frankenstein movie in the 1930s. This is nothing like the creature Mary Shelley describes in the book. In the book, this creature is articulate, he's fast, murdering people, planting evidence, framing people for murder. I mean, the thing climbs up into the Alps at one point and surprises Victor Frankenstein just sitting on a glacier because he wants to have a private conversation with him. Just know that as we talk about this book, this is the actual kind of monster depicted in the story, Hollywood images aside. The last thing I wanted to clear up here is, if you wanted to feel horrible about how

• 1:26Speaker 00

  little you've done with your life, fun fact, Mary Shelley wrote this book when she was 18, 19 years old. It was published anonymously at first in the year 1818, when she was just 20. A book, by the way, where parts of it were 100 years ahead of its time in terms of the philosophy and it being popular to be discussed, a situation that's pretty unbelievable on its own. And it only becomes slightly more believable when you consider the fact that she was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, legendary philosopher, we've done an episode on her, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, among other things. But the reason I bring it up is because Mary Wollstonecraft dies just 11 days after Mary Shelley is born. So this is someone that grows up without a mom, but spends her entire youth admiring the work that her mother did.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  Her father, turns out, was a famous writer as well, and William Godwin. And again, as an 18-year-old person on this planet, Mount Tambora erupts in Indonesia when she's 18. And while people are staying indoors a lot because of the after-effects of that eruption, to get rid of some of the boredom, she has a competition with some friends about who can write the scariest story. And what she writes, as her entry into this, is the first draft of Frankenstein, considered by many to not only be the first sci-fi novel that was ever written, but also, without question, one of the classic works of philosophical literature that everybody needs to read if they're into that kind of thing. Now, I said this book was published in the year 1818. But an important thing to note is that Mary Shelley made some revisions to the book when she was 34 in the year 1831. And we'll talk towards the end of the episode about those changes and what she was going for.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  But for right now, we're just going to focus on the story and philosophy of the original version of the book, which has become the more popular version recently among fans and scholars of Mary Shelley. The story of the book begins, of all places, in the Arctic, close to the North Pole. An explorer named Robert Walton is trying to get to the North Pole when his ship, along with him and the rest of his entire crew, get trapped in a block of ice in the water, and they need to wait for it to melt for the ship to be able to move. Now, while they're trapped here, in the distance, Walton sees something huge riding a dog sled across the snow. He has no idea what this thing is. And shortly after, he comes across Victor Frankenstein, laying on a flow of ice. He's very close to death. So he pulls him aboard the ship, puts a blanket around him, and says, "Uh, how'd you get out here, man? Like, what happened to you? What's your story?"

• 3:37Speaker 00

  And Victor, starting to warm up a bit, decides he's going to tell him his story, because he says maybe it'll save Walton from making the same mistakes that he made. Victor Frankenstein starts by telling him about his childhood. He was raised by a loving, pretty normal family in Geneva, Switzerland. And from a very early age, he grew up living in his house alongside a girl named Elizabeth. Now, this is one of those differences between the 1818 version of the book and the 1831. In the original version, Elizabeth is his cousin, who his parents took in and raised as though she was their own daughter. The reason this matters is because Victor eventually falls in love with Elizabeth years later. And being his cousin, you know, the average crowd reading this book in 1818 didn't like that part of the story very much. There was some backlash from people. So Mary Shelley decides to change Elizabeth to just an adopted daughter in the later version. And this seems to go over a bit better.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  Anyway, Victor continues with this story. And he says, as he started to get older, he started to become fascinated with natural philosophy and the occult. He reads everything he can get his hands on about it. And this interest grows in him until just before his 17th birthday, when his mom catches scarlet fever and tragically dies right at this major formative moment in his life. Victor is heartbroken by this. At first, he doesn't really know what to do with himself. But after thinking about it, and with all this going on, Victor decides he's gonna go to university in Bavaria and finally get started on his formal education in the sciences. Now, once he gets there, this passion he has for the mystery of the natural world combines with a teacher he gets assigned to that really inspires him. And all this leads him more down the road of studying chemistry,

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  and more specifically to him trying to find the secrets to what life is. After studying for years, he thinks he's finally done it. He finally discovers what he calls in the book, quote, "the principle of life," end quote. See, in his mind, he may have just discovered what it takes to create that spark of life and then put it inside of what would otherwise be just dead inert matter. Only thing left to do for him, it seems, is to try it out and see if he's right. I mean, from his perspective, if he is right here, he could be the one to give birth to an entirely new species. This discovery would change the entire world. So he starts collecting body parts from dead bodies at charnel houses. He collects organs from animals at slaughterhouses. In total secrecy, all while he's studying at this university, he pieces this creature together from all these different sources. Finally, the big day arrives,

• 5:49Speaker 00

  where he's gonna breathe life into this thing and see if his research has been correct. And the description in the book of exactly how he brings this creature to life is pretty vague, and this is on purpose for Shelley. For anyone out there curious as to how electricity became the common way this is depicted, in the 1831 version of the book, she talks in the introduction briefly about galvanization, or electricity, as being a method that people might use. But in the actual book, it's funny, there's very little reference to how this creature's actually brought to life. And it's partially because the real significant thing that's going on in this moment for Shelley is that once Frankenstein brings this creature to life, he doesn't have the feeling that he expected to have in this moment. He doesn't feel triumph, like, "It's alive, yay! I've done it after all these years of research." No, his first feeling upon looking at this thing

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  is that he's horrified, disgusted by it even. So he runs out of his laboratory. The lab is in his apartment in the book. He runs into the room where he typically sleeps. He paces around for a bit, and then he collapses on the bed, fully clothed, and just falls asleep completely exhausted. While he's asleep there, he has a nightmare. Where in this nightmare, that woman that he's in love with, Elizabeth, transforms into the corpse of his dead mother. He gets jolted awake by this dream. And what does he see but this creature from the laboratory? Is now at the foot of his bed staring at him, reaching out to him. He sprints out of the building and spends the rest of the night pacing back and forth in the courtyard in front of his apartment. The next morning, his friend arrives. He goes back into the apartment and the creature's gone.

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  And it's at this point that Frankenstein begins the process of trying to forget that any of this stuff he's just done has ever happened. So this puts us at a very good spot in the book to talk about what Mary Shelley has been going for so far in it. One of the most foundational things to understand about the philosophy she's referencing that'll set you up to understand the rest of the point she's gonna make is the presence of two different dominant attitudes of two different eras that when they coexist together in the situation of Victor Frankenstein, potentially become very dangerous. Mary Shelley's living at the beginning of the 1800s. And if you're talking to people during this time, depending on who you're speaking with, you'll see both the attitudes of early Romanticism and the attitudes that emerged out of the Enlightenment and all the scientific progress going on. For example, Romantics will often have a sense of wonder about the natural world.

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  They're awestruck by it. They'll go on a hike, they'll see a beautiful view of a mountain, and they'll be overwhelmed by the power and mystery of the natural world that they recognize they're just a small part of. Now for Shelley, very different from this was the inspired attitude of the Enlightenment, especially in scientists like Victor Frankenstein. This is more of an outlook where nature is something that's within our grasp, if only we get clever enough and do the work. If I just keep running my experiments and stick to the scientific method, then through just my rational faculties alone, I might be able to master nature and harness it to the benefit of people. To Mary Shelley, neither one of these ways of looking at things is bad. It's not even necessarily bad for the two of these to mix in a single person. But in the case of Victor Frankenstein, in the specific situation he puts himself in,

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  the two of these combined do end up producing horrible things for the people around him. He has all the wonder about nature as this amazing thing that's filled with mysteries and treasure to be discovered. And he has all the scientific spirit and ability to master. And bring it under his control. And when this combination goes on in someone like Frankenstein, who sequesters himself off from the public and from his colleagues and creates this creature without the checks and balances of a community. Well, this leads in the book to him creating a monster that ends up going around and murdering innocent people. In other words, she's saying scientific and technological progress always needs to be done alongside an ethics that considers how this creation is going to impact the community it's being released into.

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  Something that isn't standard knowledge about this book is that the full title of the book was actually Frankenstein, semicolon, or the modern Prometheus. That's the full title of the book she wrote. Prometheus being a reference to the story from Greek mythology of the Titan Prometheus, who defies Zeus and steals fire from him and then gives it to the humans to make their life better. Zeus doesn't like that Prometheus does this, and so he punishes him by chaining him to a rock and then having an eagle eat his liver every day, which then regenerates and then the eagle eats it again the next day. Certainly some creative justice going on there, but the point that Shelley's making is that Victor Frankenstein wants to do science and get access to this incredible ability of being able to breathe life into things.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  And that just like Prometheus, he's going to pay a price when he decides to do this in an isolated and reckless way. Keep in mind, galvanism and running electricity through people was cutting edge science and technology during the time that Shelley's writing this book. There are these famous experiments from the time that were run publicly, where people would take the body of a person that was executed, run electricity through it, and it was incredible to them that this dead person would start convulsing, their face would start scrunching up almost like they were alive. It's a horrific thing for us in our time to imagine, but to them, it was almost like what was missing for life to be there is just the right electrical charge applied to just the right area. And while this was state of the art science and tech going on in her time, the point she's making in the book applies to any generation's cutting edge stuff,

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  to things that push the boundaries of what human beings can do and the ethics connected to that. Remember the episode we did on Bruno Latour? And how he critiques this idea that people often just throw around casually? That technology is not something that's good or bad. Technology is neutral. It's just a tool. It's the people that use the technology for bad things. That's where the real problem is we should be focusing on. And remember, Latour says, "This may not be the right way to be looking at it." That when a technology is created, it carries with it a kind of latent morality embedded into the potential of the technology itself. And that more than that, we always need to be examining these inventions ethically if we want to be doing things responsibly. For example, if in my garage, you know, hidden away from everybody, I create something

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  that 3D prints deadly viral pathogens that target the human immune system and all its weaknesses. Is that a morally neutral piece of technology? Is nuclear power or facial recognition technology, are these simply morally neutral? Or do they carry with them consequences on the community they're released into that need to be weighed against in ethics? To Mary Shelley, "We can't just think of science as pure method. And we can't just think of technology framed only in terms of how it's going to make people's lives more convenient." Facial recognition tech, yeah, it may make it take two less seconds for you to be able to get into your phone. But what are the other possible applications of facial recognition? This needs to be something that's always mediated by ethics and a community. And when you consider the similarities of how certain AI companies do business these

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  days to the way that Victor Frankenstein created this creature alone in his apartment. I mean, in the name of securing the rights to the technology and doing good business, the AI company will sequester themselves off, not be transparent, have everybody sign an NDA. And they're creating something potentially that, in the case of an AGI, is aiming to create an entirely new species that potentially carries risk to the 7 billion other people that live in the world that that technology is going to be released into. As many have already said over the years, but illustrated very clearly in this book, we may be creating a monster in the same way Victor Frankenstein did. Again, one that's made possible only by the innovation process being divorced from ethics and community. And this is one of Mary Shelley's big points here.

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  She's not against science, and she's not against romantic wonder. She's against the arrogance of cordoning yourself off, creating problems that wouldn't exist if you hadn't cordoned yourself off, and then when the problems start showing up in people's lives, not taking responsibility for whatever it is that you created. Because there's a whole other layer to the fallout of all this done by Victor Frankenstein. You know, in the book, after this night in the laboratory he has, he just tries to go on with his life, trying to ignore the fact that there may be this creature he created out there lurking around doing god knows what. But this creature is a fully capable being, it turns out, one that just has to go out on its own and try to figure things out the best it can. Remember, the creature follows Victor up into the Alps so we can have a conversation with him, and he tells Victor what his life has been like since the day he abandoned him.

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  At first, he went out into the woods, hiding, not really knowing what to do. At a certain point, he realizes he's got to eat, but he couldn't imagine taking the life of another creature. That's unthinkable to him. So importantly here for Shelley, the creature begins his life essentially as a vegetarian that's living out in the woods. Over time, he comes across a family called the DeLacy's. They live in a rural situation, kind of like a farm, and the father of the DeLacy family is completely blind, it turns out. The creature sits just outside of view and watches them for months. He listens to them interact with each other. He pays attention and learns, as they're teaching someone from another country how to speak and read and all the rest of it. He collects firewood in his spare time just to help the family out. Eventually, he even starts to read books. He reads Plutarch. He reads Milton's Paradise Lost.

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  He comes to have an appreciation of art and philosophy and all that humanity has to offer. And one day, he gets up his courage, when all the kids are gone, and there's just this old blind man DeLacy sitting alone at the house. He goes up and starts talking to him. Now, obviously, the guy's blind. He can't see that who he's talking to is this sewn-together, monstrous-looking creature. So he ends up liking him a lot. Real social butterfly Frankenstein's monster turns out to be. But then as soon as the kids get home and they see this monster thing talking to and hanging around their dad, they instantly reject him. They yell at him. They start physically attacking this creature. And as he runs away and goes back into the woods, he starts to realize that he is never going to be accepted by humanity. It's never going to happen just

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  because of how he looks. This feeling turns to anger, which then turns into resentment for the creator in Victor Frankenstein that selfishly brought him into this world against his will. He had no choice in the matter. And then he abandoned him on day one, not giving him anything in terms of care, education, identity, recognition. He deprived him of all these things, simply because he didn't expect to feel the way he did when he created this thing. Now, of course, this is a metaphor for the responsibility that scientists and people that produce technology have to not abandon their creations ethically. But this is just as much a criticism by Shelley of the way that people often abandon other people who are their creations. Not the least of which is when it comes to making babies, who equally didn't choose to be born, who are similarly these creatures that someone

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  might abandon because the feeling they had now that they're here is not the one they expected to have. Scholars of Shelley will sometimes say that the whole experiment that Victor Frankenstein runs here is an overly masculine attempt to use domination over nature to remove maternal care and the woman from the whole process of creating a being. And that not only that, that this is what happens when you try to remove that whole side of things. Victor Frankenstein ends up being both a horrible father and a horrible mother to this creature. That there is no lone heroic genius that's going to be able to step in and replace the need for what community does for people. And then your constant care that something needs to survive. The other conversation to have here, interestingly, related to how we can't remove ethics from the process of creating something, is if

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  you bring a child into this world, for example, then abandon it. And then 20 years later, you get mugged at the ATM for 80 bucks and it's your child that just mugged you. Are you morally responsible for the consequences of you abandoning that creation all those years ago? For what happens when your creation doesn't have responsible guidance? How about the creations of people that make technology? Are they responsible if they act recklessly? Mary Shelley is getting us to question the moral dualism that we often operate under here, especially in liberal society that's so focused on individualism. You know, we'd like to say that everyone out there is their own individual person. Should your kid do something? Well, that's just a bad seed. There's nothing you could have done about it as a parent. But as we hear a little more of the story, are the creature's actions really so clearly

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  separate from Victor's actions of creating something so powerful and then neglecting it so severely? See, a few months before the creature meets Frankenstein up in the Alps and tells him about his life, it had been about a year and a half since that night when Victor brought this thing to life, and he'd heard absolutely nothing about it for that whole time. Had to have figured that the creature was dead, captured, I mean, something must have happened to it. But one day out of the blue, he gets a letter from his dad telling him that his brother William had just been murdered. Obviously, this comes as a shock to Victor, and shortly after, he returns back to Geneva to attend the funeral and see if he can help his family at all. And the night he gets there, it's raining really hard, it's a thunderstorm, it's late at night, dark outside, and as he's looking over at the ridgeline outside near where

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  his brother was murdered, lightning goes off nearby, it lights up the area for a second, and Victor sees the creature he created lurking over on the rocks looking at him. Of course, what he suspects here is the worst, and it also ends up being the truth. The creature has killed his brother William, and he did it out of vengeance for what Frankenstein has done to him. What's worse than that is that nobody's ignoring the fact that a person was just murdered here. And as the police conduct the investigation into the murder, they search the belongings of a woman named Justine who worked in William's house as a servant. And in her clothes, they find the golden locket that William usually wore around his neck. The creature had planted it on Justine just to frame her. Now, her being poor and in possession of the locket doesn't really look too good in the eyes of the court that's holding her trial.

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  She gets pressured into confessing to the murder, even though she didn't do it, and so they sentence Justine to the death penalty as Victor Frankenstein watches from the sidelines sick to his stomach. I mean, not only does he now have his brother's death that he feels responsible for, but now an innocent woman's gotten caught up in the mix as well. Now, this turn to violence by the creature in the book is something that's been studied a lot by scholars of Mary Shelley's work. Again, the creature begins its life not wanting to hurt anything. I mean, it's a vegetarian that collects firewood to help people. This thing's a total nerd. Just kidding. Anyway, it's not until, the point is, it starts trying to talk to people, who then ostracize the thing and consider it to be a monster. It's only then that the creature turns angry, resentful, and then resorts to violence as a way to get social recognition from his creator.

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  None of this is an accident of the story that Mary Shelley's writing here. When the creature describes its experience to Victor, and it resembles exactly the kind of experience you'd expect a normal human to have, readers of this book are instantly forced to consider at a deeper level what constitutes personhood. Mary Shelley has gotten people thinking, even back in the 1800s, about how even if someone appears in a certain way, their appearance, their immutable characteristics that they were born with, is this enough for us to assume that this person is a monster? The trial of Justine in the book is often seen as an extension of this exact metaphor. Because think of what's going on in the courtroom. In a supposedly neutral setting, where we're going to leave no stone unturned until we find out exactly what has happened in the eyes of the law, the mere appearance of Justine

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  as a poor woman who had the locket in her possession, just this was enough for the courts to abandon what they claim is their highest ideal in delivering unbiased justice. And to Mary Shelley, this can happen in science, if the community assumes every experiment is a neutral, unbiased method. This can happen in technology, when people mistake the inventions as being neutral tools. The point is, think of what happens when a group based on immutable characteristics are ostracized by the public and labeled as subhuman in some way. And by the way, the point she's making here doesn't have to go on simply at a group level. Remember, the creature from the book is an individual. Imagine a single kid being raised in a home that ostracizes them constantly, denies them care, education, recognition, the same way that the creature was.

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  Would you be surprised if that kid grew up to resent the world they live in? You might say that the parents owed this kid more than that sort of treatment, right? And maybe you'd even say that you see your point about moral dualism there, that yeah, parents are morally responsible in some way if their negligence creates a monster. Don't have kids if you don't want to raise those kids, you may say. But does this same responsibility extend to society? This is a real question she's exploring here in the book. Imagine a group that's committing violence at disproportionate rates. Now, consider, is this also a group that's being treated by the society they live in like they're subhuman in some way, like they owe people something, like they don't deserve recognition at the same level other groups do in that same society?

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  A popular reading among scholars of this book is that, make no mistake, Mary Shelley is certainly including all this in the book to reference the treatment of women in the 1800s when she was writing. But they'd also say, make no mistake, her point here is about a phenomenon that's much larger than just women in the 1800s. It's one that repeats itself throughout history with different groups other than just women. Whenever society ostracizes a group, usually feeling morally superior to this group the whole time that they're doing it, don't be surprised if some members of that group respond with anger and then resentment and then eventually violence like Frankenstein's creature does. Shelley's point here forces us to ask certain questions. Is it wise for society to provide people guidance and a place in their society regardless of what they look like?

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  Does a society have an ethical obligation to give its members social recognition like that because the consequences of not doing it are so dire? Because to get back to the events of the story, after murdering his brother, the creature talks to Frankenstein and tells him, "Look, I realize I'm never going to be accepted by people. I'm never going to have my own place in this world, but you, as my creator, kind of do owe me something here." He says, "Since he gave birth to me as the first member of a new species, you got to go back to the lab and make me a female version of whatever this is that I am. And look, if you do that for me, I promise you, hand to Richard Dawkins, I will disappear with her, we'll go to South America, live in the woods or something, and we will never bother another human being ever again." To which Frankenstein, of course, says, "Yes, I'll do it."

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  You know, making almost the exact same mistake he did before, bringing yet another creature into existence without their consent. And, by the way, this time, essentially sentencing this one to be the romantic partner of this other thing he created. But anyway, he agrees to do it, gets back to work in a new lab this time, starts putting together this other creature, and not long after, he starts to have doubts about whether what he's doing here is really the right decision. After all, he thinks, "What if he just creates another one of these things, and now there's two of them out there murdering people? What if the two of these things breed with each other, and all of a sudden we got a whole village of these things wreaking havoc on people?" Also, we can't ignore the fact, he thinks, that this creature says he's going to move out into the woods in South America and not bother anyone. But how is any of that really enforceable by Frankenstein?

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  I mean, the fact is, he has zero recourse, should this creature not keep his word there. What if he's just gonna keep getting blackmailed by this thing? He starts to realize, oh, wait, wait, I am just doing the same thing as before. And maybe the best decision I can make at this point is to just end this whole process right here. He's conflicted about it. He thinks about the situation for a while. Until on one of the nights, he's working in the lab, he looks out his window. And who does he see there but the creature, standing there, peering through the window? And it feels like he's supervising him, doing his work, trying to make sure he does a good job. This becomes the last straw to Victor Frankenstein. He starts to feel used. He feels like this thing is holding him hostage, and that now the whole power dynamic has flipped. To where at first, he created something he was in total control of.

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  And now he spends his days just obeying whatever his creation tells him to do. Which, for whatever it's worth, welcome to having kids, Victor Frankenstein, welcome aboard. Anyway, he gets mad in front of the creature, he tears apart this female creature he was working on. And he screams at him through the window that he refuses to work on it anymore. To which the creature replies to him, "I'll be with you on your wedding night." Then he disappears. Shortly after this whole event, one of Victor's closest friends gets murdered. He knows it's the creature that did it. Shortly after that, he asks Elizabeth to marry him. And on his wedding night, he remembers what the creature told him that day. So he arms himself, expecting the creature to come and try to kill him. But instead, the creature kills Elizabeth.

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  Leaving Victor in absolute misery as he sees all the people closest to him, destroyed by his past mistakes. At this point, he vows to kill the creature. I mean, what else is left for this guy to do with his life? He tracks the creature north into the mountains, and eventually all the way to the Arctic, where he finally gives up and lays down on an ice floe to hopefully be able to die in peace. And that's when Robert Walton, the explorer from the beginning of the book, finds him and asks him to tell his story. Victor dies shortly after he tells Robert all this stuff. And then Robert finds the creature, grieving over Victor's dead body. It swears to Walton that it's gonna end its life, that its purpose here is complete. And then the creature takes off into the distance, and that's the last we hear of it in the book. Couple things to note here towards the end of this that are worth mentioning.

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  If you notice that there are a lot of women in this book that get killed, or convicted, or even ripped apart while they're being constructed. There's a lot of feminist readings of this book that'll say this was deliberate by Mary Shelley. That science is coded as masculine, nature is coded as feminine, and that when masculine projects are carried out in the world without the moral accountability discussed so far, it's not just potentially damaging to the community it's in, but specifically women become disposable and killable in the name of that project at a disproportionate level. Another thing to mention is that if you've read this book before, and you read it because it was assigned to you in school or something, it's likely you read the 1831 version of the book that Mary Shelley made those revisions to that we talked about before. In terms of why she made these revisions then, well, most people think the answer to that

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  question can be found by looking at the specific things that she changed in those revisions. Most notably, she changes the whole tone surrounding the things that Victor Frankenstein does in the book. And after the revisions, she frames them more in terms of this all being his fate, deterministic and out of his control, instead of this being a matter of his own free will. People think she made this change because of all the tragedies that happened in her own life during that time span. I mean, between 1818 and 1831, in this period, she loses two of her children, her husband dies, she suffers from depression, gets really bad recurring headaches all the time. She's a single mom that's trying to deal with all this, on top of also trying to be a world-class writer. The common theory is that by the time she got to this point where she's making revisions,

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  she just felt much more strongly that the events that are thrown your way in a lifetime define a lot of what you do, and that she wanted this to be more emphasized when it comes to the events of Victor's life in the book. Anyway, I hope this guide helps you if you decide to read the book. It's not that long of a read, by the way. Highly recommend it myself. Really looking forward to having the discussion with all you fine folks on Patreon, and learning some more from all the good people that listen to this show. Thanks to everyone that supports the podcast in any way that you do. I could never do this without you. But most of all, thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.