Book beginning: page 15

Overall questions

• Who could potentially have been right: the monster for thinking his happiness lied in a female counterpart or Victor for thinking that together they would pose too much of a threat to the human race?
• Which of the two suffered more, Victor or the monster?

The monster

• Would anything have differed in the story if the monster had not killed people before making his request for a female counterpart?
• Is the monster’s bad fortune an excuse for him to behave so irrationally?
• The monster said he was born ‘good’ and made to turn bad, but if he were to find happiness, he would become virtuous again (p100). Would it be possible for him to become what he once was?
• The monster slept in a kennel, like an animal (p106). Is this where he belongs because his appearance puts him there? After all, he did have fully developed emotional and mental faculties.
• How personally should the monster have taken people’s screams? In all fairness it does not matter if it is a little insect in the summer or a bear in the woods, our tendency is to run away screaming. Depending on the circumstances, sometimes humans make one another scream if they are startled enough.
• Had the monster been a hansom specimen, would there have been a more positive, even heroic outcome of his life, where he would not have even been labelled a monster?

Society’s reaction to the monster

• Did Walton make it back to England alive? If so, was his story maybe worth more to him than what he had originally set out to do? If he revealed his story to anyone else other than his sister, did any scientists seek him out to question him or anyone go looking for the monster or his remains?
• Did people hear the story and just think it was a traveller’s tale? Maybe putting it down to delirium and ramblings from when he was stuck in the ice?
• What would have happened had Victor told Elizabeth about the monster, especially if he had done so before the murders? Would her motherly instincts have prevailed and insisted that Victor bring him home to care for him, or would she have shrunk away in fear from both Victor and his monster?

The science

• Is the monster the next step in evolution or a previous one? (p120).
• The monster was described as having “powers of eloquence and persuasion” (p200) but no indication was given as to where they came from. Did he therefore acquire them from life experience or was it the piecing together of these body parts that formulated this particular creature?
• Was the sacrifice worth it, in general or specifically looking at Victor, to make the scientific discovery of how to create life?

Bias

• Is the fact that he has widely become known as “the monster”, already giving us a preconception of his character before we read the novel nowadays?
• Does Victor being the narrator, thus obliging the reader to follow his version of events, make us too bias against the monster? If it were told from the monster’s point of view, or even by an omniscient writer’s, would we perhaps feel differently?

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Oxford World Classics, 1998.