I had not sufficient light for my employment, and I remained idle, in a pause of consideration of whether I should leave my labours for the night, or hasten its conclusion by an unremitting attention to it.

See, this is how you know that I’m at the end of my rope with Dude Nonsense. I blame Jason Bateman and Jeffrey Tambor, but a lot of different people are at fault. It’s probably reasonable for Dr. Frankenstein to take a break in this manner at the end of the day, but all I could think about was how this damn mediocre asshole thinks he can just do whatever he wants all the livelong day and never face a DAMN CONSEQUENCE, and then I decided to give myself the evening off from Frankenstein and see if I would bring a more receptive mindset to it in the morning.

Y’all, I know that I have bitched and moaned about toxic masculinity and red pillers and stuff over the course of this readalong, but I have to say that it’s been really fun reading Frankenstein. It’s a weird little book, but good-weird, and I like it when Romantics take a break from swanning about looking at vistas and just write some really weird shit, and that’s what Frankenstein is. At the end, the monster just sort of slips off into the wilds of the Arctic, and for all we know lives forever up there.

There are also a lot of vistas.

Okay, so what happens at the end is that Frankenstein starts thinking about this project of making a lady monster, and he realizes it’s a non-starter. Fair play to him, he considers the possibility that the lady-monster won’t want to bang the existing monster (as that monster is a murdering jerk), but the thing that makes him decide to destroy his work is the fear that the two monsters will procreate. Frankenstein, you are a moron. Just don’t put a uterus in the lady monster and you would be all set. This is why we shouldn’t let men be scientists.

Well, the monster is angry about Frankenstein’s decision and he tells him, ominously, I WILL BE WITH YOU ON YOUR WEDDING NIGHT. Frankenstein, a noted imbecile, decides that he should therefore get married as soon as possible. You know what I would do if an invincible creature told me I WILL BE WITH YOU ON YOUR WEDDING NIGHT? I don’t know exactly, but for damn sure I wouldn’t run right out to get married in the exact location where the creature already knows to look for me.

(Oh, I forgot to say that Clerval dies. The creature kills him, and Victor is tried and acquitted for that murder. The whole experience ruins his health, and he tells the magistrate about the monster, and the magistrate believes him. Nothing about this experience makes him reconsider his behavior w/r/t the conviction and execution of Justine.)

Victor marries Elizabeth and then, although he knows that a confessed murderer is lurking nearby, he lets Elizabeth go back to her room by herself without any protection. My annotations contain lots of ideas from various critics about why Victor acts like such a dodo. The one I enjoy the most is that the creature doesn’t exist and Frankenstein has just been making shit up while doing murders himself all over Europe. I love that idea. It doesn’t really make sense with the text of the book, but I’d enjoy a fic where it was true. I hate Frankenstein. Luckily he hates himself too.

So, yeah, the creature kills Elizabeth, and then Papa Frankenstein is so sad that he dies too, and then Frankenstein himself resolves to chase the creature all over the world until he can get revenge on him. But quelle surprise, he’s too useless even to succeed at revenge, and he dies on Walton’s ship after gently rejecting Walton’s request that they become best friends.

The creature shows up at Frankenstein’s deathbed and talks for a while about how much he regrets his own choices. It’s — actually kind of good to hear this? Cause the creature has been a real asshole, and I’m glad to know that he’s looking back on things and realizing he could have behaved differently. But what really pleases me is that the creature actually plans to do something about it. Granted, his plan is Romantic Poet-brand stupid — he plans to go to the uttermost north of the world and set himself on fire — but at least it’s not like all of Frankenstein’s plans to date, which have been 90% “do nothing and hope the problem goes away” and 10% “do the bare minimum to address the problem while deeply hoping that it goes away on its own.”

And that’s it! That’s the book! We have now read Frankenstein.

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The creature continues telling his tale of woe to Frankenstein, a very unsympathetic audience. It’s all about how he reads Paradise Lost and Plutarch’s Lives and The Sorrows of Young Werther and learns — doesn’t seem like much of anything? I guess his main takeaway is that it’s not good for a man/creature to be alone, but he def did not take in how to do proper morality, else he wouldn’t go on to kill little William, even if little William was being a real jerk at the time.

His plan, after finishing his reading material (and boy, the editor of the annotated edition is having none of the bullshit method by which he learned to read — every time he talks about reading, she’s got a footnote to be like “of course he couldn’t have learned to read that way in real life, this is stupid”), is that he’ll go to the De Laceys house when Safie and Agatha and Boy De Lacey (I want to say Frederick???) are out, and he’ll befriend old blind Papa De Lacey, who won’t be prejudiced by his appearance. Then once he and Papa De Lacey are firm friends, he’ll let the old guy convince the Lil De Laceys not to murder him on sight.

The creature plans this for months, even though it’s like, not an incredibly complex plan, like you could actually make that plan one day and put it into action the next day because it’s really quite basic. But anyway, he plans it for months, only for it to be screwed up by the Lil De Laceys coming home early. The girls faint and Boy De Lacey hits the creature with a stick, so he runs away to the mountains in despair of ever making a friend.

Okay, I’ve been a little snarky about the creature thus far, and if you don’t know this next bit, it’s going to seem like I’ve been a dick for no reason. But the thing is that what the creature concludes from all this violence and hatred — which I admit is sad and hard! — is that he needs Frankenstein to make him a lady creature to bang. And I tell you what, not even a whole month after that attack in Toronto,¹ but also, always, I have very little patience for the argument “I wouldn’t do murders if somebody would just bang me.”

Update: I now hate everyone in this book.

Okay, so the creature resolves to go find Frankenstein in Geneva (there’s a reason he knows that’s where Frankenstein’s from but it’s too boring to go into), and he gets to Geneva with only a few more occurrences of people being hateful and violent to him. There he encounters William, who calls him an ogre and says My father, M. Frankenstein, will get you! So, of course, he kills him. To be fair, William seems like he sucked. It remains, however, hella unfair to poor Justine! The creature plants evidence on her for no reason! He’s just doing it to be mean! Ugh.

The creature’s like “In conclusion, my life is terrible, so you have to make me a lady creature to marry.” It’s a lot for Frankenstein to take in.

In part because he feels responsible for the creature (but he says this so grudgingly! Like, I guess I am responsible — no, motherfucker, you are one thousand percent responsible! Why are you being like this!), but mostly because the creature threatens to kill everyone he loves if he doesn’t agree, Frankenstein promises to make a lady creature. Of course he promises this. He is much too useless not to cave to threats and demands.

But guess what else he is too useless to do? Oh, you’re not going to be surprised. He is too useless to MAKE THE SECOND FUCKING CREATURE. Instead of just MAKING THE FUCKING CREATURE, he putters around and whines and moans and gets engaged to Elizabeth (poor Elizabeth) and goes on a road trip with Clerval. This lasts, I’m not shitting you, another entire year. He does a little work, but mostly he swans around Europe being like “I hope the creature doesn’t kill everyone I love, but I really am too stressed to work on doing his demands right now.”

Contrary to how persnickety this post has turned out, I’m genuinely enjoying Frankenstein and I hope you are too. One more week and I will have finished it, and then I will bask in the glow of victory. And hopefully Frankenstein and his jerk incel creature will be gruesomely dead by then.

If you haven’t entered our giveaway for the Annotated Edition of Frankenstein, it’s not too late! You can also link up your #TraLaFrankenstein posts in the Mr. Linky below.

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THE MURDERS HAVE BEGUN in our Frankenstein readalong, and I have to admit that I was not expecting quite such a rapid onset of murder and mayhem. “Rapid” in terms of how much of the book has elapsed so far, not rapid in terms of how much time has elapsed. As I may have mentioned in my last anger-post about horrible Victor Frankenstein and his horrible decision-making process, he legitimately just lets the chips fall where they may w/r/t the ten-foot-tall monster he’s made. Like he makes this monster, the monster gets away, and then two years go by.

Chapter 6, in any case, starts with a bang, or rather with a murder: Frankenstein gets a letter to tell him that his youngest brother, William, has been murdered. Not only that, but when he returns home to comfort his family in their time of grief, he learns that their servant Justine — a close friend of Elizabeth’s! — is believed to be the killer. But Elizabeth doesn’t buy it, and neither does Victor: He’s sure the true killer has to be the creature he abandoned. He feels bad about it, but not bad enough to try to clear Justine’s name or take any action that might prevent the creature from killing again. He just sits around while Justine is hanged for murder. Cool.

After Justine is gone, Victor continues to make things all about him, such that both his father — who lost a son — and Elizabeth — who lost a brother — have to try to comfort him. Victor is a garbage person who deserves to be torn to pieces by the monster, but based on his heavy foreshadowing and the annotations about Jung, I suspect this won’t be what happens.

Um, I wrote that, and then I remembered that can’t be what happens because Victor is telling this story to us now and thus has to have survived it. Well! I hope that after this story is over, we hear back from our good old totally straight pal Robert Walton that the creature catches up to them and shanks Frankenstein.

On a mopey lonesome trip up a mountain, Frankenstein meets his creature face to face. He tries to fight it for killing little William, but the creature is vastly his physical superior, so that doesn’t work out. The narration doesn’t specifically say that the creature put its palm flat on Frankenstein’s forehead and held him at arm’s length while Frankenstein windmilled his arms, but I have to assume that’s what went down.

The creature’s like “Yes, I know I killed your brother, but I still need a favor from you. Hear me out.” Two months after killing someone’s brother is not a great time to ask someone for a favor, but I get that the creature’s new to this world and doesn’t know how things work yet. Frankenstein agrees to hear him out, and the creature begins telling a story of how he learned what humans were and how fire works. By happy coincidence, he ended up in a hut that abutted another hut (or something — I wasn’t super interested in the geography of this arrangement so I didn’t pay attention to it) in which lived a super nice family. The son has an Arab girlfriend who comes to stay, and as they’re teaching her to speak French, the creature learns to speak French too.

The section ends here. I am getting a terrible premonition that the creature is going to fall in love with Agatha — the beautiful and virtuous daughter in the family the creature lives next door to — and that we’re going to discover he’s turned to Murder as a result of her spurning him. That better not be what the plot turns out to be. I am in NO MOOD.

Are you reading along too? Enter our readalong as many times as you want to tweet or post about the book, and link any thoughts you have about Frankenstein in the link-up at the bottom of the post.

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Now let’s dive in. This metaphor works brilliantly because the first part of the book is all about a sea voyage to explore the Arctic wilds. I am a metaphor genius. Y’all are surely thrilled to have me hosting this readalong.

Having read the foreword by editor Leslie Klinger, I have determined that all the Romantics were — as I suspected — dickholes. Mary Shelley seems better than some of them but not like, better better. She’s pretty mean to Claire/Clara/Clara Mary Jane, her stepsister, even if okay, I can see how it would be annoying to have a younger stepsister you and your husband had to support while she ran around getting pregnant by Lord Byron, as you yourself were having miscarriages and writing Frankenstein and stuff. However, she was nowhere near as terrible as terrible Percy Shelley, who married this poor girl called Harriet, probably knocked her up, criticized her for not feeling sorry enough for him, cheated on her with Mary Shelley, accused her of cheating on him, suggested that she and Mary Shelley both bang him, and eventually ditched her in favor of Mary. What a cad. I’m glad he drowned.

Anyway, so this edition of Frankenstein uses (gasp!) the 1818 text, which was the original. In 1831, Mary Shelley heavily revised it, partly because her ideas about the world had changed, and partly to make it more, like, family friendly. So far the biggest thing I have noticed about the changes to the 1831 edition (The New Annotated Frankenstein tells you everything that changed for that edition) is that it’s way gayer. Here’s a sentence that got added to the later edition:

Sometimes I [the narrator, Robert Walton] have endeavored to discover what quality it is which [Frankenstein] possesses that elevate him so immeasurably above any other person I ever knew. I believe it to be an intuitive discernment, a quick but never-failing power of judgment, a penetration into the causes of things, unequalled for clearness and precision; add to this a facility of expression and a voice whose varied intonations are soul-subduing music.

Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure.

Anyway, so the deal is that Robert Walton is going on a polar exploration expedition, which took me by complete surprise. Hands up everyone here who knew that the framing device for Frankenstein was about polar exploring? Oh, everyone but me already knew that? Cool. Cool.

Walton catches a glimpse of a giant on a dogsled, and shortly after that, he picks up Victor Frankenstein, who is frozen nearly to death and keeps talking about a final mission. Once he completes this mission, he says, his life will be over. Seeing that Walton is attempting a dangerous scientific feat (exploring the North Pole) in pursuit of glory, Frankenstein decides to relate his own, similar story of hubris.

In the first two chapters, we just learn a little bit about Victor Frankenstein’s family: He has an adoptive sister/cousin called Elizabeth, who gives to their mother the scarlet fever that kills her. He has a friend called Clerval who has a poetical soul. He studies alchemy texts independently and is crushed to learn that modern science has what he considers to be less exciting ambitions. Mary Shelley wrote of these chapters:

If there were ever to be another edition of this book, I should rewrite these first two chapters. The incidents are tame and ill-arranged — the language sometimes childish– They are unworthy of the rest of the narration.

They’re fine! Give yourself a break, Mary!

Okay, so then chemistry is a lot of fun and Frankenstein is all in on science, and pretty soon he learns the secret of Life. He starts building an eight-foot-tall creepy person out of corpse parts that he gets from graveyards and slaughterhouses.

Disappointingly, we don’t get to hear the secret of Life. Frankenstein keeps it to himself, the greedy fucker. This is apparently because when he uses it on his creation, he immediately stops loving it. He runs away from it and bashes into his good pal Henry Clerval at the ?train station or something? IDK I wasn’t paying that much attention. And when he takes Clerval back to his house, the creature isn’t there, and he’s like “Oh good phew, it’s gone” and NEVER WORRIES ABOUT IT AGAIN FOR LIKE A YEAR AND A HALF.

I’m sure this will turn out fine. I’m sure he will not have cause to regret his scientific hubris and subsequent abandonment of the monster he created that will have no place in this cold cruel world.

How’s #TraLaFrankenstein going for y’all? Hit me up on Twitter, and/or drop a link to your first post below.

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Even more excitinger, there exists a new annotated edition of Frankenstein, published by the good folks at Liveright, and I am here to report that it is amahzing. The annotations (from what I can tell skimming through it and noisily showing it off to my family members) are A+ and include asides by the editor, Leslie Klinger, to be like “but is Frankenstein straight-up lying to us in this part? Maybe!”¹ There are also numerous color illustrations which yr correspondent got very excited about.

The aforementioned folks at Liveright have offered us a copy of The New Annotated Frankenstein to give away to readalong participants, and there are many ways to enter to win it. Sign up for this readalong below; natter about it on social media using the hashtag #TraLaFrankenstein; comment on other people’s blogs on all the ways the 1831 edition is better (or whatever, I am currently in a state of great confusion about the different editions). This giveaway is for US readers only, and I am very sorry about that. Non-US readers are amazing too, and only the US Postal Service keeps us apart by getting rid of international surface mail.

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FAQ

What chapters should I read by what days?

Honestly, live your truth, nobody but Ravenclaws ever sticks to reading schedules YEAH SLYTHERINS YOU HEARD ME. (I actually consider Slytherins the second likeliest to stick to a readalong schedule, so I don’t know why I’m having a go at them.) But we’re breaking the book down into four parts based on an extremely cursory glance at some TOCs and a blithe hope that we wouldn’t end reading sections in any weird places.

May 7 – Read through Volume 1, Chapter 5
May 14 – Read through Volume 2, Chapter 5
May 21 – Read through Volume 3, Chapter 2
May 28 – Finish the book! Yay!

My copy of Frankenstein does not seem to adhere to the same organizing principle as this schedule.

Yeah, there are two editions, and the New Annotated Frankenstein uses the 1818 text. If you are reading the 1831 text, which is slightly different, that’s totally fine, because the annotated edition talks about the textual changes, so we can all talk about it and fight over which one’s better. Here’s the schedule if you have the 1831 edition:

May 7 – Read through Chapter 7
May 14 – Read through Chapter 13
May 21 – Read through Chapter 19
May 28 – Finish the book! Yay!

Can I use gifs to express my feelings about the book as we are reading along?

God yes. In fact, if you use a gif you are particularly happy with, please caption it to let us know you’re psyched about it, and we will praise you extravagantly. We are very high on using gifs to express feelings about books from the olden days.

Wouldn’t this readalong be better suited for a spooky month like October?

Where can I sign up to participate?

Right down here! You can also talk about it any time on Twitter or Instagram, with the hashtag #TraLaFrankenstein.

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