The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [256]
The monster is heartbroken, and by the Rule of Three this third rejection, Frankenstein's final dark act, seals the hero's fate. First the monster murders Clerval, the light Alter-Ego. Then, when Frankenstein has married his beautiful, calm, loving Elizabeth, the monster murders her too, on their wedding night. Finally Frankenstein's father dies of grief. The hero has now been responsible, through his shadow, for the deaths of the Child, the Innocent Young Girl, the Alter-Ego, the Good Old Man/Father and, above all, his own `other half', his anima. All the light aspects of himself have been killed off. All along, Frankenstein had been the only truly dark figure in the story: although, like Dorian Gray's portrait, the monster has become more and more evil as a reflection of the ever greater darkness engulfing the hero. Like Gray, Frankenstein at last in desperation determines to free himself from his hated shadow forever. In a nightmare chase, he pursues the monster half across the world, up into the frozen Arctic wastes - but there it is the monster which turns on him and destroys him, before vanishing forever across the ice.
The most obvious thing which may strike us about this nightmarish tale is how it takes the familiar, age-old pattern of the Overcoming the Monster plot and turns it in every conceivable way upside down. It begins with a hero who is dark and a monster who is light; and ends with the hero being overcome by the monster, rather than the other way around. The question which then arises is: how did such an extraordinarily dark, inverted story come into the mind of a young girl who had never written anything before in her life? A good deal of the answer, as various commentators have observed, lies in the personality of the man who was by far the most dominating presence in Mary Godwin's life, Shelley himself.
Not only did a great many of the scenes and details in Frankenstein spring directly from Mary's life with Shelley since they had first eloped together two years earlier. He himself took a profound interest in the story, making clear, when he reviewed it anonymously after its publication in 1817, how much he identified with the monster, as a hapless victim of circumstances whose wish only to live benevolently and at one with mankind had so continually been thwarted by persecution and rejection. `Too often in society', as Shelley put it, such a cruel fate is meted out to `those who are best qualified to be its benefactors and its ornaments'.
Certainly by this time in his life Shelley had found himself violently at odds with society in every possible way. On the masculine side of his personality, there had been the terrible battles with his father, the stiff, conventional baronet, and with authority-figures of every kind, from those running his university to government agents. With his dreams of revolution, overthrowing the established order, and his horror at the notion of a cruel, patriarchal God, Shelley seemed at war with the world of `Father' in all its aspects. But in terms of his relations with the feminine, his chaotic love-life showed him equally at sea. Having eloped with his first wife Harriet, and then found it necessary to be involved emotionally with two women at the same time, he cast them both off and repeated the pattern, by eloping with Mary herself and her half-sister Claire (although by the time the story was written Claire was also flinging herself at Byron, by whom she immediately became pregnant).
Shelley may have consciously identified himself with the poor, rejected, wouldbe benevolent monster in Frankenstein: but from the outside it seems that he was much more like Frankenstein himself, possessed by a demonic, blind egotism which, as the years went by, plunged his own life and that of those around him ever further into chaos and nightmare. Only a few months after the episode in Switzerland, the deaths began: with the suicides, first of Mary's sister Fanny, with whom Shelley had had a brief affair, then of his abandoned and distracted wife Harriet. Two years later his little