By Jeremy Anderberg
Victor
Frankenstein does not get much attention in popular culture. It is
Frankenstein’s creation – a nameless monster (often mistakenly called
Frankenstein) – in all his green, bumbling glory that attracts the attention
and the horrified screams of people worldwide.
To the contrary
of how film directors and producers have portrayed Frankenstein’s monster, Mary
Shelley wrote the character as an intelligent and physically astute being. He
wasn’t a stiff, monosyllabic beast with a flat head and a bolt in his neck. And
while Victor Frankenstein himself is often mostly ignored in media portrayals,
he retains the image of mad scientist. That’s about as far as we ever get in
analyzing Frankenstein.
This is
unfortunate, as some of the mistakes Frankenstein made along the way, mistakes
which ultimately led to him losing everything he cared about – his brother, his
best friend, and ultimately his wife – are incredibly instructive to any man
who wishes to improve himself. After reading Shelley’s masterpiece, both
previously and for this month’s AoM Book Club selection, my gut feeling was
actually of sympathy towards the monster rather than Frankenstein.
While
highlighting a character’s positive traits can be inspirational, it can also
sometimes be quite educational to examine the ways in which he stumbles. So
today we’ll take a look at Victor Frankenstein as a profile in un-manliness
and explore what his flaws can teach us about what it means to be human, the
importance of owning up to our responsibilities, and the danger in blaming
anything other than ourselves for our mistakes.
Lesson
#1: Unchecked Passion Can Be Dangerous
The creation of
the monster was a long process. It didn’t happen overnight. It was months and
months of studying and experimental tinkering before the creation rose to life.
Frankenstein notes while narrating his story, “I seemed to have lost all
soul or sensation but for this one pursuit.” His studies and his obsession “swallowed
up every habit of [his] nature.”
While
Frankenstein was away at college, he became utterly obsessed with finding out
what the spawn of life really was. In spite of the insistence of his family and
professors to give up this all-consuming pursuit he continued on. He did
nothing with his time but study this science of human animation and tinker in
his lab. He lost sight of any other thing in life that brought him joy…so he
really did become the mad scientist that we all know from pop culture.
What’s telling
is that when Frankenstein took breaks to go home, his passion would be
tempered, he would realize what truly brought him joy in life, and he would be
happy once again. But then he’d return to college, and continue in his madness.
It was almost an addiction.
While passion
today is touted as a necessary and driving force in our career path, if
unchecked it can lead to losing the things we truly care about in life. The
late Steve Jobs is often looked up to (heck, even worshiped) for his brilliant
business acumen and product innovation. But his passion and obsession for his
company led to him being an angry and temperamental boss, and a mostly absent
husband and father. What is more important in life? I can’t offer a
one-size-fits-all answer, but Frankenstein himself gives us a great bit of
wisdom while reflecting on this passion of his:
“A human being
in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to
allow passion or a transitory desire disturb his tranquility. 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 not man allowed any pursuit
whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections, Greece
had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would have
been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been
destroyed.”
Lesson
#2: Giving Up the Ship Won’t Solve Your Problems
One of my
constant annoyances while reading the book was that Frankenstein incessantly
blamed the ethereal forces of the universes for his problems. At one point, he
comes close to giving up his pursuit of animating a lifeless object, only to be
pulled back into his obsessions once again. Frankenstein notes, “It was a
strong effort of the spirit of good; but it was ineffectual. Destiny was too
potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction.”
Later he blames “chance – or rather the evil influence, the Angel of
Destruction, which asserted omnipotent sway over me…”
Frankenstein
felt he was at the mercy of the fates and had no trust in his own willpower to
overcome his dangerous passions. He had what’s called an external locus
of control – a belief that you’re not responsible for your
behavior, that life happens to you, rather than you making it happen.
A resilient
man, on the other hand, seeks to have an internal locus of control – the
confidence that one is captain of his destiny and can pilot his ship wherever
he wants it to go. He takes responsibility when things go awry and actively
seeks to get back on course.
Everyone falls
somewhere on a spectrum between the two perspectives, even changing depending
on the situation. When we don’t believe we can solve a problem, we tend to
assume the victim mentality and look externally to assign blame.
The reality,
however, is that we have way more control over our lives and actions than we
tend to think; when practiced, our focus and our willpower are incredibly potent tools for
shaping our lives. Sure, circumstances will always have something to say, but
if your life hasn’t gone the direction you thought it would, take action and
don’t let it stay that way. One of our mantras here at AoM is that if you want
to feel like a man, you have to act like one. And a man doesn’t
blame his life on destiny or fate, he takes responsibility and assumes command
of his actions. Which leads to our next lesson…
Lesson
#3: When You Don’t Accept Responsibility, Your Mistakes Can Take On a Life of
Their Own (Literally)
After the
monster rose to life, Frankenstein was horrified at his creation, and ditched.
Plain and simple. He got out of dodge, ran home, and hoped that his perceived
disaster would somehow remedy itself.
This is
understandable. We’ve all run at one time or another from some problem we’ve
created. And hopefully we’ve come to learn that running only escalates those
problems, and they can truly take on a life of their own. Think of the
snowballing lie where you’re spending more time and thought on the lie than the
reality of the situation. And those instances usually come back to bite us in
the rear even worse than had we owned up right away.
What’s most
frustrating about Victor Frankenstein is that he had multiple chances to take
responsibility and own his mistakes and fix them, and each time he shrank like
a coward and came up with excuses.
At one point
early in the novel, the monster kills Frankenstein’s young brother and frames a
woman in the village named Justine. She is caught and sentenced to die. Only
Frankenstein knew the truth of the matter. He says, “A thousand times rather
would I have confessed myself guilty of the crime ascribed to Justine; but I
was absent when it was committed, and such a declaration would have been considered
as the ravings of a madman, and would not have exculpated her who suffered
through me.”
His excuse is
that the people in the village would not have believed his tale. How lame is
that? And Justine is killed without Frankenstein uttering a word of truth.
When we create
something awesome, we practically fall over ourselves to claim credit. But when
we create a problem, our natural tendency is to slowly walk backwards while
casually whistling the tune of abnegation and denial. But being a man means taking responsibility for all of our
creations, both the good and the monstrously bad.
Humans are not
perfect. Not by any means. But it’s within our power to correct the problems we
create. And when we don’t exercise that power, our problems fester and only get
worse. Think about the dentist. If you go every six months for regular
cleanings, brush your teeth twice a day, and floss regularly, you’ll likely be
just fine. But when you put off those appointments, when you slack on flossing,
when you forget to brush every once a while, you end up being poked and prodded
for two hours so they can give you a deep clean and fix the problem you
created. Not fun. (If it seems like this is from personal experience, it is.)
And that’s just with oral hygiene, let alone something far more serious.
Frankenstein at
one point says, in regards to a potential solution to his monster problem, “I
clung to every pretense of delay, and shrank from taking the first step.”
Can’t we all relate? There are a whole host of reasons why ripping the band-aid off is a better solution
than the slow peel. Most importantly, it’s the simple fact that a man takes
responsibility for his life, and therefore the problems he’ll inevitably
sometimes create.
I’ll leave this
lesson with one final bit of advice from the reflective Frankenstein, “Nothing
is more painful to the human mind than the dead calmness of inaction.”
Lesson
#4: Loneliness Leads Us Down Unhealthy Paths
One of the
catalysts of Frankenstein’s unchecked and dangerous passion was simply that he
was by himself at college. His friends and family weren’t around to give him
balance and to temper his flame. It wasn’t until he could hear the voices of
those closest to him that he realized how selfish and frankly, crazy, he was
being.
“Study had
before secluded me from the intercourse of my fellow creatures, and rendered me
unsocial, but Clerval called forth the better feelings of my heart; he again
taught me to love the aspect of nature, and the cheerful faces of children… A
selfish pursuit had cramped and narrowed me.”
Author Mary
Shelley notes that the theme of loneliness and its effect on humans was
important to her in this novel. In Frankenstein’s case, it can be argued that
it’s mostly his loneliness that led to the creation of the monster.
Loneliness also
plays out in the monster’s life. He turns to killing because he’s so lonely –
nobody accepts him, he has no companion, and even his creator has rejected him.
At one point he tells Frankenstein that if he simply had a female mate, he’d
stop killing and run away to never be seen again. Frankenstein, who should
understand the perils of loneliness, rejects this idea, however. So not only
did loneliness lead to the creation of the monster, the monster becomes
murderous and kills everyone close to Frankenstein because of his own
loneliness. One can’t help but think of the mass shootings of the last two
decades, and how most are perpetrated by males whose profiles include words
like “isolated” and “lonely.” Would things have been different, even in just a
couple instances, if loneliness wasn’t as pervasive in their lives?
Humans are not
meant to live solitary lives. Science has shown again and again the importance
of friends – in everything from stress levels, to happiness levels, to life
expectancy. What’s more telling, however, is simple life experience. As an
introvert, I often just want to sit at home and hang out with myself and my
wife, and I quite love working from home, alone in my office. When I spend time
with friends though, there’s just something that happens inside that gives me a
more satisfied feeling with life. There is simply greater joy in my day-to-day
when friends and family are a regular part of it.
While it can be
and is a difficult and messy endeavor, be sure you have friends and family you can
turn to, and perhaps more importantly, who can keep you accountable when you
get off track. Victor Frankenstein isolated himself, and paid dearly for it.
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