Quotes from Frankenstein

“I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.”

Victor describing his project at university, before the creation. Three verbs in escalating size: pioneer, explore, unfold. Mary Shelley is satirising the Romantic vocabulary of discovery while letting Victor believe in it sincerely. Every reader knows by chapter four that this sentence is going to cost lives; Victor does not. The gap between his rhetoric and the novel's coming horror is where Shelley does her quietest work.

“Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge.”

Victor to Walton, mid-confession. The framing of the novel is Victor cautioning a younger man not to repeat his mistake. The line is doing two things at once. It restates the moral (knowledge corrupts), and it stages Victor as the kind of man who would moralise about knowledge while withholding the specific knowledge of how to destroy the creature he made. Shelley puts the warning in his mouth and then lets him refuse to give the practical help that would matter.

“How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”

The same chapter, two sentences later. The contrast (native town versus the world) is the conservative reading the novel sometimes seems to endorse. But Mary Shelley grew up in a household that included Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin; she did not actually believe the world should belong only to the people who stayed put. The line is a man's regret, not the novel's verdict, and it is a regret that comes too late to save anyone.

“I am malicious because I am miserable.”

The creature to Victor, halfway through the novel. Six words. Mary Shelley refuses to allow the easy reading in which evil is innate. The creature names cause and effect: he was made, then abandoned, then hated by everyone he tried to approach, and only after years of rejection does he begin killing. The novel does not excuse his violence; it insists on its causes.

“I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.”

The creature's self-description at the end of the novel, standing over Victor's body. The Latinate word abortion is Mary Shelley's, and it is doing precise work: not insult, but the medical sense of a creation prevented from becoming what it might have been. The creature is naming what was done to him as a developmental crime. He is not a monster; he is a child whose father refused him.

“Believe me, Frankenstein, I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity: but am I not alone, miserably alone?”

The creature's first speech to Victor on Mont Blanc. The vocabulary is high Romantic (benevolent, glowed, humanity); the syntax is collected. Mary Shelley is making a structural argument by stylistic means: this is an articulate, educated being, who has taught himself to think and speak. The horror Victor feels at his appearance is exposed, in the same instant, as exactly the prejudice the creature is asking him to put aside.

“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.”

The creature's vow after Victor destroys the half-finished female companion. The line is famous and often quoted as villainy; Mary Shelley wrote it as despair. The creature has spent the novel asking for one thing, a being like himself, and Victor has destroyed it. The vow is a substitution, not an ambition. Shelley's argument is that violence is what remains when the request for love has been finally refused.

“I read and re-read Werter; I considered the work of a divine being.”

The creature describing his self-education, having found a satchel of books in the woods. He reads Goethe, Plutarch and Milton. Mary Shelley is making the most subversive argument in the novel: the creature is more literate than the men hunting him, and his literacy is what makes his loneliness unbearable. He understands precisely what he is missing because he has read about it.

“Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect.”

The creature, after reading Paradise Lost. The comparison is exact. Adam was alone but loved by his creator; Eve came; the world was made for him. The creature is alone and hated by his creator; no Eve will come; the world is made against him. Mary Shelley uses Milton not as backdrop but as evidence in the creature's argument that his abandonment is theological as well as personal.

“I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched.”

The creature speaking to Walton over Victor's corpse, planning his own death. Three things the line refuses: melodrama, repentance, blame. He states the future plainly. Mary Shelley wrote at nineteen with the discipline of a much older writer: she will not let the creature die in a way that would let the reader feel resolved. His suicide is administrative, not redemptive.

“Nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose, a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.”

Walton, the polar explorer, in his first letter home. The line opens the novel and is meant to introduce the value the rest of the book will demolish. By the end, Walton has met Victor (a steady purpose that destroyed five people), and turned his ship around. Mary Shelley uses the frame structure to put a Romantic motto in the first chapter and watch the novel show why it is not enough.