to say that to be human is to be monstrous is an assertion to which history and life has provided ample evidence; it is an assertion which at this point (perhaps, at all points) appears to border on tautology. if this was the assertion of frankenstein, perhaps we would turn away, bored by the remembrance of our tedious high-school literature classes (no, the monster isn't frankenstein, frankenstein is the monster, etc, etc). but shelley's mirror is no such funhouse, she expands rather than reduces: in frankenstein the worst of human nature is on display--our egotism, our prejudice, our vainglory, our bloodlust and impulse for conquest and hierarchy--but so is the best. our love, our capacity for self-sacrifice, our curiosity and tenacity and grief, our ability to not only appreciate but create beauty, how bravely we cling to life in the face of incalculable loss. the depth and the chiaroscuro of shelley's portrait makes it impossible not end up asking of oneself the greatest, most perpetual questions of human history: why is it that our fear is as great as our courage? that our hatred is as blind as our love? why is our generosity--which can so clearly be seen to exist, in mundane and magnificent forms all across the earth--so selective, so narrow, so paradoxically miserly? why this smallness amidst this vastness? why are we what we are, and must we always be this way?

there are many answers we could come up with--theories that depend on historical materialism or evolutionary biology or Christian cosmogony, but ultimately that is all we are left with--theories.  the essence of who we are as a species, of why we came to be and what we might become--is ever unfolding and thus ever unknown, and it is from this void, this blank slate, this eternal crossroads, that shelley illuminates and disturbs, that she draws her monster.

another thing so striking to me about frankenstein is its refusal to be any one novel at once; it is like an alexandrite stone, it diffuses different colors held up in different lights. there is a reading of frankenstein that is feminist, that is marxist, that is anti-imperialist, that is christian and that is pagan; literarily, it is categorized as gothic--but at times takes on shades of transcendentalism and the romanticism of her husband, it is epistle and soliloquy, (the earliest?) science fiction and philosophy. there are a thousand allegories to be divined out of this text, signs and symbols which come loose from the silt like panned gold. this, of course, seems to be what has allowed it to endure: that every successive generation of readers can discover it again.

unlike some writers a la dostoevsky who try to contend with the great human questions and end up devolving into naked treatise, with characters as servile mouthpieces, shelley is a much more crafty--and therefore entertaining--writer. (and concise!) frankenstein as a work of fiction surpassed my expectations in just how utterly engrossing it was--that its great questions and artistic ambitions are allowed to surface naturally as we run headlong through french palace intrigues and childhood loves, mad sled-dog chases and knotty bavarian professors. i was unable to stop reading once i had started.

considering this is a staple of the english curriculum here, i find it a mild kind of miracle that i went a quarter century without reading so much of a word of this book. i am incredibly grateful that i came to it in my own time; in a classroom, i fear this book would have been laboriously dissected to death (& never galvanized back to life)! being allowed to read shelley's masterpiece unreservedly, to walk into the proverbial two hundred year old theater blind, was a privilege and an immense delight. i was spellbound.