Frankenstein

Chapter 17

Mary Shelley · Mountaineers 10th–12th

Teaching Companion Print Adapt for your student

Copywork

I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me?

The stars shone at intervals as the clouds passed from over them; the dark pines rose before me, and every here and there a broken tree lay on the ground; it was a scene of wonderful solemnity and stirred strange thoughts within me. I wept bitterly, and clasping my hands in agony, I exclaimed, “Oh! stars and clouds and winds, ye are all about to mock me; if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart, depart, and leave me in darkness.”

Read both passages aloud. Both speakers talk about pity. What does each one want pity to do?

For the educator Two passages, five sentences: the creature’s answer to Victor’s refusal, and Victor’s cry at the fountain on the way down the mountain. The first opens on a short claim of cause, “I am malicious because I am miserable”: two adjectives that share their first sound, joined by “because”. A rhetorical question follows, “Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?”, which allows only one answer. The third sentence sets two clauses on either side of a semicolon and ends on a question built on a reversal, why he should “pity man more than he pities me”. The same verb runs both ways, and the sentence asks for a fair trade. The second passage sets the scene in one long sentence in three parts joined by semicolons, and the third part steps back to judge it: “a scene of wonderful solemnity”. Then comes the cry. Victor speaks to the stars, clouds and winds as if they could hear him, a figure called apostrophe. The cry offers them two choices: “if ye really pity me”, crush his feeling and memory; “but if not”, the doubled “depart, depart”. The words shunned and nought are in the vocabulary. For the talk prompt, listen for a student who hears the creature’s pity as something owed in return and Victor’s as a wish to stop feeling, and for one who notices that both men ask for pity within a few hours of each other.

Discussion

Narration Tell the chapter back in your own words, from the creature’s demand for a companion to Victor’s return home to Geneva.

Victor’s first answer is no. He would rather be “the most miserable of men” than “base in my own eyes.” Whose good is he protecting? Character
In the middle of his argument, the creature admits that “the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union.” Why admit that when he wants Victor to say yes? Inference
The creature calls his picture of their life in South America “peaceful and human”. What in that picture is human? Character
Victor finds that he cannot sympathise with the creature. Because of that, he decides he has “no right to withhold” what the creature asks. How can failing to feel for him take away Victor’s right to say no? Moral reasoning
Back home, Victor feels “placed under a ban”, as if he had no right to his family’s sympathy. Why would saying yes on the mountain cost him that? Theme

Make a Connection Think of a story, a piece of history, or a moment from your own life when only one person could give someone what they asked for. How did that person decide?

Vocabulary

shunned: Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? Kept away from on purpose; avoided by people who will have nothing to do with you. To shun is stronger than to ignore: it is a choice to turn away. The creature pairs it with hated, and the pair carries his question’s point: shunning is what hatred does. Back home in Geneva, Victor feels “placed under a ban” among his own family.
nought: I wept bitterly, and clasping my hands in agony, I exclaimed, “Oh! stars and clouds and winds, ye are all about to mock me; if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart, depart, and leave me in darkness.” Nothing; zero (an older spelling of naught, as in to come to naught). To “become as nought” is to be as if one had never been. At the fountain Victor asks the stars to crush his feeling and memory and let him be nothing, hours after the creature hoped to become a thing no one knew existed.
inextinguishable: I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Impossible to put out, like a fire that will not die (in-, not, and extinguish, to put out). He swears a hatred that cannot be put out. Minutes later, calm again, he says that for one kind being’s sake he “would make peace with the whole kind”. The word is the strongest he has, and the chapter tests whether he means it.
abhorred: Yet even thus I loved them to adoration; and to save them, I resolved to dedicate myself to my most abhorred task. Hated with disgust; shrunk from as loathsome (from Latin, to shudder away from). Both men use the word in this chapter. The creature calls his solitude a thing “that I abhor”, and Victor calls the work that would end that solitude “my most abhorred task”.

Critical thinking

The creature says he will reason with Victor “instead of threatening”. In the same speech he swears “inextinguishable hatred” against him. What part does that threat play in his argument?
The creature promises that his companion “will be content with the same fare.” He is speaking for someone who has not been made. What is that promise worth?
The creature demands a companion “as a right which you must not refuse to concede”. Does Victor, as his maker, owe him one?