978 shelley, Mary
Victor recounts a more auspiciously begun edu-
cation, one over which his father—at least ini-
tially—has conscientiously presided. Victor’s has
been a well-populated paradise: “No youth could
have passed more happily than mine. My parents
were indulgent, and my companions amiable . . .
so far from study being made odious to us through
punishment, we loved application.” This apparently
corrective educational model is interrupted when
Victor happens upon a book that lies outside his
father’s approved curriculum. This book—“a volume
of works of Cornelius Agrippa,” the famed 16th-
century alchemist—captivates Victor, engendering
an “enthusiasm” for its “wonderful facts” and ideas
resonant with Walton’s passionate, fanciful reading.
Like Walton, Victor comes to regret the educational
path on which his intellectual curiosity has taken
him. However exhilarating, his interests eventually
lead him away from “bright visions of extensive use-
fulness into gloomy and narrow reflections on self,”
increased “solitude,” and “secret toil.”
Like both Walton and Victor, the creature
recounts his Edenic early life with a mix of nostal-
gia and regret. He learns by eavesdropping on and
imitating the De Lacy family, whose sentimental
drama unfolds before him, a spectator “unseen and
unknown.” This “paradise” is exploded once the crea-
ture comes to understand that the De Lacy family is
not his family—that, indeed, he is utterly and irrepa-
rably alone in the world. Like those of Walton and
Victor, his is an illusory prelapserian world, false and
unreal, the product of a mind unregulated by domes-
tic or social ties: “I allowed my thought, unchecked
by reason, to ramble in the fields of Paradise. . . .
But it was all a dream.” The creature’s education is
completed when a sack filled with books falls into
his hands. Not unlike Walton and Victor, whose
realities, future selves, and destinies are shaped by
the books they accidentally discover, the creature
reads as a method of self-examination and defini-
tion, as a way of making sense of himself and his
experience of the world. Mistaking John Milton’s
ParadiSe loSt, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s
The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Plutarch’s Lives
for “true histories,” the creature immediately gives
himself over to the “continual study” of these works,
finding in them contexts in which to understand and
fashion himself. Even as the creature comes to full
self-consciousness by painfully differentiating him-
self from these imaginary characters, they remain
the only models by which he can act in the world.
While he initially identifies with Milton’s Adam, his
painful experiences force him to recognize Satan “as
the fitter emblem of [his] condition.” In imitation of
this character, the creature finds selfhood and pur-
pose in a plan of “eternal hatred and revenge.” “I like
the arch-fiend bore a hell within me,” he explains.
While all three characters are avid readers for
whom reading furnishes ecstatic fantasies of great-
ness and belonging, each is conspicuously deprived
of a reading teacher. In each case, it is the father’s
failure to assume his proper, governing role that
derails his son’s education. Walton’s expeditions are
made in violation of his absent father, “whose dying
injunction had forbidden [him] to embark in a sea-
faring life.” In response to Victor’s eager account
of his new favorite author, Victor’s father mocks
his son’s misguided enthusiasm but fails to correct
it. Indeed, Victor blames the entire ruinous course
of his life on this one moment, bemoaning “the
many opportunities instructors possess of directing
the attention of their pupils to useful knowledge,
which they utterly neglect.” The creature, aban-
doned by Victor, his “father and god” and shunned
by all society, has no choice but to educate him-
self, to read and learn in near total isolation from
the world. Accident, whim, and willful, unbridled
imagination guide Walton’s, Victor’s, and Victor’s
creature’s learning. Each possesses a self-governing,
passionate intellectual curiosity, which, rather than
any formal system of education, is responsible for
the formation of his character. In the absence of a
benevolent guide, each wayward son finds himself
led away from filial duty and domestic responsibil-
ity and toward a dangerous, even murderous hunger
for glory, knowledge, and “boundless grandeur.” If
the novel is haunted, then, it is less so by a monster
than by the specter of a self-guided, pleasure-
seeking, undisciplined education, one in which
poorly chosen books replace responsible guardians
as the central governing agents of childhood, and
one which is more oriented to self-fulfillment than
social utility.
Hilary Englert