Clearly a creature of intelligence, the monster realises that his only chance of friendship is with this poor disabled chap in his lonely house. One day he finds him alone. He enters the hut. He asks for friendship… well, sort of. Everything seems at first to be going bumps-a-daisy. Unfortunately it then shoots downhill like a shoved nun – it went black then white then black then white… White points were that the old chap seemed to like him.
Black points were that the rest of his family came back, took the monster at ‘face’ value (titter, titter) and turned him out into the outer darkness, where there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth. And why? He hadn’t explained his problem fully to the old man. He dillied. He dallied. And in the end he lost out. He gave a great introduction to his speech, but circumstances stopped him from reaching the res. Finding himself once more friendless and in the cold he starts out upon his mad quest for friendship and revenge. If Frankenstein had loved him in the first place, none of this would have happened.
Chapter Five, therefore, is the starting point for many of the novel’s intricacies. However, it is also the start of something which was new at the time, something which made the novel a sure-fire winner: Gothic Horror. Chapter Five is the first – if not only – chapter in Frankenstein which is pure Gothic Horror in the true sense of the phrase. Every line – nay, every word – oozes Gothic and every second word perspires horror. Take the first sentence for instance: “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.” Whoa! Even the first eight words would have done.
“It was…” Instantly we are cast into a state of apprehension. That word “it”: a true stalwart of the English language, used thousands of times per minute across the whole globe and yet sadly neglected in most analysis of texts; oh, unhappy ‘it’! For underneath that shabby exterior lies a wealth of meaning, emotion and indeed power. Specifying the definite, announcing fact, preparing the way for revelations, ‘it’ does it all. And now couple these startling two letters to the three letter word ‘was’…: ‘it was’. Not great to look at admittedly, but it is a sure sign of better things to come. A more dramatic way of introducing a subject has yet to be imagined.
But the beauty of ‘it was’ is in its power. Not only does it display the blatantly obvious influences detailed above, but it also maintains an ominous subtlety – the sinister use of the past tense. It isn’t, it was. As thoroughbred Brits we tend to use the present tense for happiness and the past for despair. This is, no doubt, because the present is unchangeable, exhaustible and should be enjoyed while it lasts whereas the past is full of death, darkness and, as Frankenstein would say, despair. Consequently, when a member of the British public reads those formidable and menacing words ‘it was’ he is much inclined to close the curtains, pull his head under the covers and generally get ready for a terrifying introduction, excursion or climax as the case may be.
I could rhapsody forever about the cunning Mary Shelley showed by employing such a skilfully crafted weapon as ‘it was’ to open her fifth chapter, but time marches on and so must I. ‘A’, when used in the right place and at the right time, can be extremely powerful. It is, after all, the indefinite article and should not be overlooked. But as I am at nearly 2,800 words already I think that maybe I should skip it… just this once, though.
And so we come to the fourth word of our little clause: ‘dreary’. Now we’re getting somewhere! ‘Dreary’ is the quintessential gothic word, the champagne of an authoress’ vocabulary, the Dior of her dictionary and the Wensleydale of her text (for the uneducated amongst you, Wensleydale is a cheese highly admired in the better circles but often underrated by the general public). Just say it slowly to yourself; savour the subtle nuances of dreadfulness, the nutty shadows of despair; roll it around your mouth as if you were a snooker table and it a ball; then elongate that ‘ear’ until the floor starts to shake and the smoke alarms to ring. Now you have experienced dreariness.
The fifth word: ‘night’. Night is the opposite of day and day is light. Therefore night must, by association, be the opposite of light – dark. And dark is scary. So scary that people are afraid of it. So scary that life tends to cease until it is done. So scary that vampires actually like it. But Mary Shelley is not satisfied with mere drear or just night fright – she is after something more emotive to preface her revelation. Effectively she wishes to make a ‘very, very shocking’. The word she uses instead of ‘shocking’ has yet to be revealed, but she has demonstrated unnaturally gifted skills of rhetoric by substituting her ‘dreary night’ for ‘very, very’. Those two atmospherically synonymous words act just to emphasise what is to come – her substitution for ‘shocking’.
‘…in November…’ “Is that it?” I imagine you cry. Yes, it is (for now at least). Isn’t it enough? In an attempt to provide an atmosphere of Gothic Horror, November is always the novelists’ Holy Grail. The small fry set their tales in Summer and Spring; the established in Winter. Only those authors who demonstrate clear skill are allowed to write about November. ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ Keats dubs Autumn in his ode praising it, and in some respects he is right. But anyone must admit that it scales far above Spring’s gambolling rabbits, Summer’s gay flowers and Winter’s crisp snows when it comes to drear. And why November’surely September, with its harvests and haystacks, couldn’t be the setting for a chilling tale of death? And neither could October, burdened as it is with crisp fallen leaves and festivals. No. November is the answer and always will be for as long as conventions stand.
And so there we go. There are approximately 2,500 words in Chapter Five, each one worth individual and contextual analysis. There are candles and Coleridge, fiends and friends, beds and bodies. But a good start is essential to all things, chapters included. Truly, in eight supposedly simple words Mary Shelley has given her Chapter the greatest beginning it could conceivably have had. And it didn’t stop there. Next morning, Frankenstein runs madly out of his house and goes on to reach safety in his life-long friend Henry Clerval who, by a huge coincidence, happens to be passing. This creates a dramatic plunge from dread to ecstatic tranquillity.
“Nothing could equal my delight on seeing Clerval; his presence brought back to me thoughts of my father, Elizabeth, and all those scenes of home so dear to my recollection. I grasped his hand, and in a moment forgot my horror and misfortune; I felt suddenly, and for the first time during many months, calm and serene joy” says Frankenstein. To be honest, I think that this is the turning point in the chapter as far as horrific flair is concerned.
Mary Shelley realises that horror by itself will soon become commonplace, and so she throws in a comparison, at the same time giving the impression that the fear is contained within the attic where the monster was created. This is later dispelled, but at the time is a very good way of showing that the panic as for Frankenstein alone and as of yet has not spread to the world in general. It also gives a quick balance to the text, as now we can hear, through Clerval’s words, what Frankenstein looks like to an outsider: using first person narration Mary Shelley has ensured that we only get Frankenstein’s version of events. It is nice to be thus subtly given a control narration just to offset Victor’s natural bias.
When Mrs. Shelley wrote Chapter Five she did not just start her story on the track to success. She created a cult. From the candlelit setting to the way she switches from dark to light (the monster to Clerval) she was copied. But she was not the first. In 1764 Horace Walpole had created the genre Gothic Horror with his The Castle of Otranto. However, although the public bought these new horror novels as though their lives depended on them, ‘serious’ authors despised the style. Until Mary Shelley came along, that is. She showed that Gothic Horror could be taken seriously and could be used as a tool for getting into the public’s imagination. Even though I said earlier that I don’t think that her aim in writing Frankenstein was to condemn the public for the way they were exploiting science, I do believe that she wrote certain social comments into the text as an afterthought. For instance, women’s role in society.
Many people miss the fact that Frankenstein fails at acting both Mother and Father to his creation. Who can say what would have happened if he had just played Father? If someone else had done the maternal stuff leaving Victor to enforce discipline and generally be nice and paternal? Was she saying that, although successful at ‘giving birth’ to the creature he didn’t do any of the other things that a mother would have done? Was that why his ‘baby’ turned evil? “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.
Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous” says the monster later on in the novel. Maybe Mary Shelley, a woman herself, was warning mothers to stay at home and nurse their children otherwise they would turn into little horrors? If she was it shows great foresight, as it wasn’t until the Second World War (over 100 years later) that mothers started to work. However, I do believe that if that was what she was saying then she hit the nail on the head: I think that the broken relationships, depressed children and general social chaos around today is mostly down to working mothers.
Somehow I don’t think that Mrs. Shelley was quite saying all that. After all, she didn’t have much experience at that sort of thing, her only child dying shortly after birth. It’s much more likely that she was pointing her finger at science. Chapter Five is very much a chapter of science. It states things. It has a hypothesis, a fleeting glimpse (‘I gathered my instruments about me’) of a method and what is, when you think about it, a pretty obvious result. It is from Chapter Five that disaster springs. Is it from science that all catastrophes leap? Was Mary Shelley writing a strong retort to the scientific obsessions of the time?
Her father – William Godwin – was a successful author and radical thinker who knew Humphrey Davy, a chemist who believed that chemistry was the underlying principle of all life. She regularly attended scientific lectures with her husband Percy and consequently was well briefed with the ‘facts’ that modern science had ‘discovered’. Could she have been such a great supporter of scientific advances and yet be aware of and warn against the dangers of incautious fascination? Yes – quite easily.
However, she could also quite easily have purely used pertinent facts to give her fantasy a flavour of reality. Was she a socially aware and clear-thinking moraliser or just an authoress with a flair for combining imagination with realism? That is for each and every one to decide individually, there being no clear argument either way. I personally favour the latter alternative as it sounds more like human nature.
If, however, she did write Frankenstein as a social statement then what was the point? Was it worthwhile? Has she been heeded? We have now developed methods of cloning animals. One day these practices may be applied to humanity… Will Mary Shelley’s ‘advice’ be listened to and noted or will science take control? Will life become secondary to technology? Will contemporary scientists act like modern-day Frankensteins? Chapter Five is the diving board from which a tragic tale falls. Will we, as a planet, one day be in our very own Chapter Five?
