"Frankenstein, the True Story”

Introduction

This paper we will be analyzing the literature of an article entitled "Frankenstein, The True Story" by Lawrence Lipking. We will be providing argument for Lipking. When an author creates a story that lasts through centuries and has been recreated in all types of entertainment, one has to ask why? Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is possibly most perfect example of this. In Lawrence Lipking's essay “Frankenstein, the True Story; or, Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques” he argues that Frankenstein is so popular, even today, because almost all the major ideas of the book are open to interpretation. This lets the reader take away from the book whatever he or she feels important because every major idea in the novel has no one answer to it.

Analysis

While going through the article it is analyzed that the interpretation of the novel is a balanced one. A major idea that Lipking discusses in his essay is the relationship between Frankenstein and the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Kiely, 96). Rousseau believes that people are born as good people, and it is man that corrupts everything. In Rousseau's words, “everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” When I first started reading Frankenstein, all I could think about is how Shelley created the perfect example to support this idea. Rousseau's idea had almost no supporting facts because you cannot ask a newborn how he or she is feeling, and they are obviously too young to perform tasks. Shelley created a situation in which a creature has the mind of newborn but has incredible strength and the ability to get around. Lipking proves the point that there is no one moral to Frankenstein, and no one way to interpret it, by taking some of the most widely argued about ideas in the book, and providing strong arguments to support both sides. After doing this it, it becomes pretty clear that for every argument that supports a specific idea, there is an equally relevant contradicting argument. This creates a balance in every important idea in the novel, a balance that can only be tilted by the reader's own values and morals.

Since ones interpretation of the novel is supposed to reflect their own values and morals, the only way you can read Frankenstein the “wrong” way is if you are influenced by someone else's interpretation of the novel. For example, if you are reading Frankenstein for the first time and you read somewhere that the creature is innocent and he is an example of how society corrupts people, you will read the whole novel with sympathy for the creature. You will get mad at Frankenstein when he does not create a mate for the creature, and you will feel that the murder of Elizabeth is almost justified (Bloom, 17). This exactly how I felt when I read Frankenstein for the first time after briefly looking through an article I found online to try to get a good ...