Three Books in a Leather Bag: What Frankenstein's Creature Reads

This article discusses the middle chapters of the novel in detail, though not its ending. Chapter numbers follow the one-volume 1831 text.

One night, while gathering food and firewood in the forest near the cottage where he hides, Frankenstein's Creature finds something on the ground: "a leathern portmanteau containing several articles of dress and some books." He carries it back to his hovel. The books, he tells us, are "Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch's Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter."¹

Nobody in the novel ever explains whose bag it was. Mary Shelley does not seem to care, and the Creature does not ask. What matters is that a being with no parents, no schooling, and no name is suddenly in possession of an epic poem, a set of ancient biographies, and a sentimental novel, and that he has just learned enough language to read them.

Popular memory of Frankenstein is of a mute, lurching figure. The Creature of the book is its most eloquent speaker, and chapter 15 is where Shelley shows how he got that way. It is, in effect, a reading list with commentary, delivered by the reader himself. The question worth following is what he makes of each book, and what the sequence adds up to.

How He Came to Read at All

The Creature learns language by eavesdropping. From a lean-to against a cottage wall, he watches a family through a chink: a blind father, De Lacey, "descended from a good family in France," living in exile in Germany with his son Felix and daughter Agatha.² When a young Turkish woman, Safie, arrives without knowing their language, Felix begins teaching her, and the Creature takes the same lessons through the wall.

Felix's textbook is a real one: "Volney's Ruins of Empires," chosen, Felix says, "because the declamatory style was framed in imitation of the Eastern authors."³ From it the Creature obtains "a cursory knowledge of history" and "an insight into the manners, governments, and religions of the different nations of the earth." He hears of the European arrival in the Americas "and wept with Safie over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants."³

Volney also teaches him something less welcome. He learns that human societies run on descent and property, and he turns the lesson on himself: "And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property." Then: "Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?"³

So the pattern is set before the portmanteau turns up. This reader does not study a book and put it down. He asks what it says about him.

The Bag

"Fortunately," he reports, "the books were written in the language, the elements of which I had acquired at the cottage."¹ Since the De Laceys are French, the natural inference is that he reads all three in French: an English poem, a Greek biographer, and a German novel, each at one remove. Shelley does not dwell on this, and the inference is ours, but it suits a character who receives everything secondhand.

He describes their effect in one sentence: "They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection."¹ And he names his method: "As I read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition."¹

Goethe: The Private Heart

He starts with The Sorrows of Werter, Goethe's 1774 novel in letters about a young man undone by hopeless love. The Creature values it for "its simple and affecting story" and because "so many opinions are canvassed and so many lights thrown upon what had hitherto been to me obscure subjects."¹ He has been watching domestic affection through a hole in a wall; here at last is someone describing it from inside. "I thought Werter himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined."¹

What the book gives him, by his own later account, is a mood: "I learned from Werter's imaginations despondency and gloom."¹

Plutarch: The Public World

Plutarch's Lives, paired biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen and soldiers, pull the other way. "Plutarch taught me high thoughts; he elevated me above the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to admire and love the heroes of past ages."¹

His preferences are revealing. "I was of course led to admire peaceable lawgivers, Numa, Solon, and Lycurgus, in preference to Romulus and Theseus."¹ Offered founders who kill and founders who legislate, he chooses the legislators.

Then he says something unusually self-aware for any reader. His tastes, he recognizes, were formed by the household he had been watching: "perhaps, if my first introduction to humanity had been made by a young soldier, burning for glory and slaughter, I should have been imbued with different sensations."¹ A being a few months old has noticed that what we take from books depends on who we were when we opened them. It is also Shelley's quiet argument about him. He is not born violent. He arrives at Plutarch admiring Solon.

Milton: The Book He Takes for Fact

Paradise Lost lands hardest, for a reason he states plainly: "I read it, as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true history."¹ He has no concept of fiction. Nothing in his education has told him that a book might describe events that never occurred. Milton's account of God, Adam, and Satan reaches him as a report.

And it is a report about a created being, which is what he is. He tries the role of Adam first and finds the fit poor: "Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect." Adam came from his maker "a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator," while "I was wretched, helpless, and alone."¹

So he tries the other part. "Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition."¹ Even that comparison fails him: "Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred."¹

This is the vocabulary in which he has already confronted Victor on the glacier, in a scene the novel places earlier though it happens later: "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed."⁴ Chapter 15 shows where he found those words. Shelley had pointed to the same source before the story begins: the first edition of 1818 carried on its title page three lines of Adam's complaint from Book 10 of Milton's poem, beginning "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould Me man?"⁵

The Fourth Text

The bag is not the end of the list. "Soon after my arrival in the hovel I discovered some papers in the pocket of the dress which I had taken from your laboratory." Once he can read, he deciphers them. "It was your journal of the four months that preceded my creation."¹

Every earlier book required him to ask whether it applied to him. This one needs no such effort. It is Victor's working record of how he was assembled, including Victor's disgust at the result. Beside Milton it reads as a second creation story, and he compares the two directly: "God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance."¹ His response is the chapter's most famous line: "Hateful day when I received life!"¹

He had been asking, "Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?"¹ Three borrowed books gave him feeling, ideals, and a cosmology to ask with. The fourth gave him the answer, and his summary of the whole course is bleak: "Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was."¹

What the Library Shows

The list is not an idle one. According to the chronology of Mary Shelley's reading compiled from her journals for the University of Pennsylvania's electronic edition of the novel, she read both The Sorrows of Werter and Paradise Lost in 1815, the year before she began Frankenstein.⁶ She equipped her Creature from her own recent shelf.

It would be too simple to say the books make him a monster, or that they make him human. On his own telling, they give him standards — of love, of public virtue, of what a creator owes a creature — and each standard then measures his exclusion. Whether that makes his later violence explicable, excusable, or neither is the argument the novel stages between him and Victor, and it does not settle it for us.

Go back, then, to the leather bag in the woods. It looked like a stroke of luck, and he calls it one. By the end of the chapter it reads more like the start of his case against his maker: a creature who has read Milton knows what he was not given, and one who has read Plutarch knows he would have preferred to be Solon.

A reader who wants to test this should begin with chapters 11 through 16, the Creature's own narrative, and read them before any film version has a chance to get in the way.