Chapter 4 · Frankenstein

Copywork

A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Cæsar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.

Read your copy aloud. These are the older Victor's words. What might the young man in the workshop have said back to him?

Discussion

Narration Retell the chapter in order, from Victor's eager first years at Ingolstadt to the slow fever of the last months. Then choose the sentence you think matters most, and say what it shows about Shelley's purpose.

Victor finds the secret of life after “days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses.” The light breaks in on him “from the midst of this darkness”. Why might Shelley have the discovery of life come out of a place of death? Author's choice
Before his discovery, Victor blamed “cowardice or carelessness” for holding people back from what they could find out. When he decides to make the being a giant to save time, is he being brave, or careless? Character
Victor dreams of pouring “a torrent of light into our dark world.” Yet in his “workshop of filthy creation” he admits that “often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation”. What keeps him at work after his own nature turns against it? Inference
Victor remembers his father's words: “I know that while you are pleased with yourself you will think of us with affection, and we shall hear regularly from you.” What does Victor's long silence suggest about how he felt about himself? Inference
Right after his examples of Greece, Caesar, and Mexico and Peru, Victor breaks off. “But I forget that I am moralizing in the most interesting part of my tale,” he says, “and your looks remind me to proceed.” Why would the man giving this warning still call this stretch of his story “the most interesting part”? Tone
In the last months, Victor recalls, “the fall of a leaf startled me, and I shunned my fellow creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime.” What crime, if any, has Victor committed by this point? Moral reasoning

Make a Connection Victor will not tell his eager listener how he did it. Think of a real discovery, or one in another book, that some people believe should have stayed secret. How is that case like Victor's, and how is it different?

Vocabulary

ineffectual: I was like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead and found a passage to life, aided only by one glimmering and seemingly ineffectual light. Too weak to do what is needed. Here the light only seems so: faint as it is, it shows the Arabian a way out from among the dead.
unremitting: These thoughts supported my spirits, while I pursued my undertaking with unremitting ardour. Never easing off, not even for a moment (to remit is to slacken). It names how hard Victor drives himself.
stimulus: It was indeed but a passing trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits. Something that rouses a body or mind to act. Here the “unnatural stimulus” is the frantic drive itself; once it stops acting on him, the old feelings return, sharper than before.
ascribed: I then thought that my father would be unjust if he ascribed my neglect to vice or faultiness on my part, but I am now convinced that he was justified in conceiving that I should not be altogether free from blame. Put something down to a cause; credited or blamed it. Kin to scribe and describe. Here: putting Victor's neglect down to a fault in his character.
transitory: A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. Lasting only a short time; passing. In Victor's rule, even a passing desire must not be let in to unsettle a calm mind.
alloy: If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. A cheaper metal mixed into a precious one. Here, anything base that, mixed into a pleasure, would spoil it; the simple pleasures admit none.

Critical thinking

Victor's rule says that a study which “has a tendency to weaken your affections” is “certainly unlawful”. By that rule, when did his own study first become wrong?
Victor tells his listener to learn from his example “how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge”. Is the danger Victor warns of in the knowledge itself, or in the way he chased it?