The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [255]
`disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingoldstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave worms crawling in the folds of the flannel.'
He wakes from this nightmare to see `the miserable monster whom I had created' standing by the bed, grinning, trying to utter inarticulate sounds and stretching out a hand in friendship. Frankenstein is horrified, rushes out into the street and, when he returns next morning, the monster is gone.
Here is an opening unlike any before it in the history of storytelling. We see the hero first in a happy, innocent `upper world', surrounded by his light family; then isolating himself as he plunges down into the dark `inferior realm' where he himself brings to birth a monster. At the moment where the monster is about to come to life, his nightmare betrays the true nature of what is happening, as he sees his anima Elizabeth, his hope of future wholeness and life, dissolving into the horror of the `Dark Mother', with whom he is locked in a deathly embrace. But then something even more revealing happens. When he first sees the monster, it smiles and puts out a friendly hand to him. Here is a complete inversion of the usual relationship between hero and monster: here it is the hero who has become dark and isolated, in his dream of winning power and occult knowledge; while the monster, wishing only for friendship and fellow-feeling, represents, in his hideous, inferior form, the Self. Frankenstein rejects the monster, which disappears. The next day there unexpectedly appears in Ingoldstadt his cheerful boyhood friend Clerval, full of news of Frankenstein's home and family, a picture of kindly normality: he now represents the hero's innocent `light Alter-Ego, the Self the hero might have been had he not been tempted into his dark and secret course.
Outwardly Frankenstein's life, under the ministrations of Clerval, returns to normal. All seems well. But beneath the surface, he has made his fatal surrender to the powers of darkness. From that first crucial act of rejection of the monster's friendly overture, everything else in his life is to follow. Unknown to Frankenstein, the monster has retired secretly into the mountains, where by eavesdropping on peasants he first learns how to speak, then manages to read the great books of mankind. He is determined to become a full, proper human being, imbued with the most noble and benevolent feelings towards all mankind. But when he finally dares to confront some human beings, they recoil from him in revulsion. Crushed by this second act of rejection, the monster is now fired with terrible feelings of vengeance against his creator. He comes down from the mountains, tracks down Frankenstein's little brother, William, and kills him. Frankenstein, fully aware of who must have committed the murder, heartlessly watches while the boy's loving nursemaid is tried and executed for the crime. The Child and the Innocent Young Girl have become the first victims.
Frankenstein then has a long interview with the monster, who explains that his only desire is to live virtuously without harming anyone. He asks his creator to fashion a female `monster' as a companion for him, with whom he can disappear to some remote region of the world and never trouble Frankenstein again. The hero agrees, and retires to a cottage in the Orkneys where he sets to work. He has almost completed the monster's `other half' when he sees the monster peering in at him through a window. At the thought of his two creations getting together to reproduce, and to people the world with monsters, he panics and destroys his handiwork.