Frankenstein

Chapter 13

Mary Shelley · Mountaineers 10th–12th

Teaching Companion Print Adapt for your student

Copywork

Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike.

I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?

Read both passages aloud. The first passage starts with a question, and the second ends with one. Both questions begin with “Was”. What has changed between them?

For the educator Two passages, six sentences. The first is his verdict on Volney’s history, and it is built on antithesis: “so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent” against “so vicious and base”, with “yet” as the pivot. The next sentence makes the same swing with “at one time … at another”. The second passage comes from the talk of property, a few sentences after “The words induced me to turn towards myself.” It stacks clauses on semicolons: two clauses that count against him, then three of strength that carry four advantages. A short plain sentence (“none like me”) falls before the closing question. The first passage opens on a question that begins with “Was”, about man; the second closes on one, about himself. The first question is answered in the next sentence, which holds both sides. The second gets no answer; the paragraph after it speaks only of the “agony” such thoughts bring. Both vocabulary words from the copywork, “scion” and “endued”, come from these sentences. For the talk prompt, listen for a student who hears the subject shrink from mankind to one creature, and for one who hears the first question as wonder and the second as a verdict already reached and only asked aloud. Both can be argued from the page.

Discussion

Narration Tell the chapter back, from Felix’s sad face on a spring day to the last line, where he calls the cottagers his protectors.

Safie arrives with only one word the family knows: Felix’s name. Within hours the whole cottage is glad. What wins her that welcome? Inference
He boasts that he “improved more rapidly than the Arabian.” Safie does not know she is in a race with him. What does he get from coming first? Character
He asks, “And what was I?” He lists what he lacks, and then what he has: he is quicker, hardier and taller than people. What turns those strengths against him? Inference
He says no father watched over him as a baby, and no mother blessed him with smiles. Then he adds, “or if they had.” Why does he leave that door open? Character

Make a Connection Think of a story, or a time you know of, when someone learned a skill in secret by watching others being taught. What did they learn that the lessons never meant to teach?

Vocabulary

scion: He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike. A descendant or offspring; first, a young shoot cut from one plant to be grafted onto another. Here man looks like an offspring of evil itself. It is a word of family lines, and it comes just before the chapter’s talk of “descent” and “noble blood”, the lines he finds he does not have.
hapless: I heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere and wept with Safie over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants. Unlucky; struck by misfortune one did nothing to earn (from “hap”, an old word for chance, as in “happen” and “perhaps”). It names the first suffering he weeps over in the chapter, and it belongs to strangers.
endued: I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. Supplied with; given a quality as if it were put on like a garment. It is close in sense to “endowed”, and it is usually said of gifts, such as grace or talent. He uses it of a body he calls “hideously deformed”, so the grammar of a gift carries what he feels as a curse.
declamatory: He had chosen this work, he said, because the declamatory style was framed in imitation of the Eastern authors. Written as if to be spoken aloud to a crowd: grand, rhetorical, full of feeling. It names a style, not a content. Felix picks Volney for how it will sound to Safie, and the hidden listener takes in his first history of the world in that raised voice.

Critical thinking

Volney’s history gives him a way to rank people. At the top is “a great and virtuous man.” At the bottom is the vicious man, lower than “the blind mole or harmless worm.” Where does he belong on that scale?
The chapter ends with him calling the cottagers his “protectors.” They have never seen him, and he admits the name is “self-deceit.” What does Shelley gain by ending the chapter on that admission?
The creature says that “sorrow only increased with knowledge.” Yet he goes on listening to every lesson Felix gives. Why does he keep learning what hurts him?