Frakenstein

When Mary Shelley set herself to the task of writing Frankenstein she consciously wanted to create a story "which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awake the thrilling horror-one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart." The novel itself is a monstrous patchwork of text opening into more text, allowing a great and terrible license for the reader to denote their own sense of morality using these valence levels of perspective. Like Mary Shelley, James Baldwin in his essay "The Creative Process" recognizes the indispensable need to understand the vast internal topography of the human in order to legitimize the living continuation of human experience. More importantly, he recognizes the need to create a world that is itself more human. Mary Shelley disturbs the ignorant peace of her reader to force them into discovering that the inhuman themes that are so prevalent within the novel exist within themselves. What the novel consummately accomplishes with the organic convergence of the literal and metaphorical is the final actualization of the reader of his or her own ghastly nature. It is a tale of unchecked Prometheanism, only more terrifying because it lacks the complicity to humanity that even Prometheanism would entail.