On Dread

It's been almost two days since the Presidential Election of 2016 and I still feel a bit numb.

The word that stuck in my mind today was "dread." I honestly don't remember when I felt anything as serious as "dread" before. I've endured a lot of moments of pain in my adult life: when I learned in March that my liver was ailing on account of my allergy medication; when my father collapsed last fall from a weakened heart; when I sat motionless before my parents and came out as bisexual a couple months after Obama's election; when I feared whether I would pass my general exams in grad school earlier that year; when George W. Bush won reelection in 2004; when two planes crashed into the World Trade Center on live CNN.

But in retrospect none of these moments carried with them anything close to "dread." Some even seem silly as I write them out. After all, a lot of folks suffer great fear way more than I ever have, for reasons that no one can explain.

Walton; or, The Early Modern Humanist

A Review of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

"You throw a torch into a pile of buildings; and when they are consumed you sit among the ruins and lament the fall. Hypocritical fiend!" - Captain Robert Walton, to Frankenstein's Monster, Volume III, Chapter VII

The conflict within young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's mind is readily apparent throughout her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Here at once was a highly educated and privileged eighteen-year-old woman; a passionate Romantic; a British conservative; a liberal feminist; a lover of Percy Bysshe Shelley; a daughter of two famous (or infamous, to many) public intellectuals; and a mother who suffered the death of a child. All of these identities intertwined to produce a very human writer and her equally human novel, about the very human Victor Frankenstein and his equally human Monster, in what most observers rightfully identify as a classic Gothic novel and founding text of modern imaginative fiction. It's odd to feel this way, but I really don't think Mary intended a clear, cogent message with her "ghost story." If there is an ultimate theme, it's the assertion of humanity amid the ambiguity of modern (here, early industrial) life. But I see this message in pretty much everything, so like all good art, maybe Frankenstein simply reflects back a thoughtfully distorted image of our own current selves. At any rate, it deserves a place among the best of fiction--literary, genre, or otherwise.