Somehow I managed to escape reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in all of my high school and college English classes--I suppose you can only read so many of the Classics. I can see why it is on so many reading lists because it presents numerous themes for discussion, most prominently I got the message over and over again that knowledge is dangerous.Why is knowledge dangerous? Victor Frankenstein holes up for many years trying to surpass all current knowledge on natural sciences and he ends up creating life. His thirst for knowledge, specifically knowledge of the unknown and undiscovered, is what he sees as the reason for his demise. He goes beyond what has been discovered and creates life, his Monster, but once the Monster takes his first breath he is repulsed by its hideousness and runs and hides to let the Monster fend for itself.
I'm glad I finally read Frankenstein because there are so many current adaptations in film and references to the novel (think Halloween). I never even considered feeling bad for the Monster until now. The Monster was basically an unwanted child that Victor left all alone in a world that saw him as nothing but a threat and all he wanted was some love and attention. Yes, he ends up ruining Victor's life and killing everyone close to him, but what did Victor expect? Victor was basically a coward not willing to fess up to his mistake of creating something he wasn't prepared to handle.
When I first started reading the novel I was entirely opposed to the theme of knowledge as dangerous, at the end I changed my opinion and I now say knowledge can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Not exactly a newfangled theory, but it is definitely interesting in our era of knowledge and advancement to see that Mary Shelley saw this back in the early 19th century. I guess times don't really change.
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