Frankenstein
Examining the novel's spooky glaciers
This is the ninth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the classic novel that more or less invented science fiction—and the book’s curious, often-forgotten obsession with glaciers and polar exploration.
This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.
Somewhat surprisingly, Frankenstein features an oft-forgotten polar exploration frame story: Polar explorer Captain Robert Walton writes some letters back to his sister explaining his encounters with both Dr. Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster, forming the “source” of the book’s more famous narrative. But in addition to the theme of Walton’s explorations, I also want to unpack another arresting “polar” element of this novel: the pivotal scene at the Alpine glacier, where Victor Frankenstein encounters his creation. The glacier as a metaphorical element is used here to great effect—as well as how to chart a character’s several emotional changes—in this text, in reaction to a glacier.
The letters of the explorer Walton served as Shelley’s mouthpiece for broadcasting the Romantic tone that her novel will eventually undercut with its Gothic plotline, setting up the way Frankenstein’s Romantic illusions are ruptured by the consequences of his experimenting on the boundary of natural experience. Describing the root of his passion for exploration, Walton writes to his sister Margaret:
I have often attributed my attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of ocean, to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets. There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand. I am practically industrious—painstaking;—a workman to execute with perseverance and labour;—but besides this, there is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore. (Shelley 18)
Here, Walton describes an attraction to the “dangerous mysteries of the ocean” which spurs his efforts to go into the unknown and to take the path less traveled. As an archetypal Romantic explorer, he is entranced by the sublime of undiscovered lands despite the danger such journeys might entail. In a bit of foreshadowing, Walton expresses his admiration of a (then-) “modern poet” whom he previously identified in the passage as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, regarding “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” This strikes me as a strange poem to adore if you are an explorer, considering the Ancient Mariner’s fate as leading a cursed expedition and his doom in being forced to tell his tale forevermore. But it does make sense as a foreshadowing of Walton’s fate, being the one who ends up being burdened with telling Frankenstein’s story (and that of his monster).
This initial Arctic prelude (and later, the epilogue), which features Walton encountering Frankenstein in the Arctic and Frankenstein relating his tale, serves as a thematic frame to give Frankenstein the quality of a ghost story told secondhand, mediated through several levels of storytelling. In a modern novel, we’d probably cut this whole frame, as it is not particularly essential to telling the story that Frankenstein most wants to tell. But in developing a Romantic figure such as Walton, it does set up how Shelley juxtaposes the invigorating nature of the sublime with the horrifying consequences of Frankenstein’s decisions.
Every time I read Frankenstein, which may be one of the few books I’ve returned to several times, I look forward to the sequence where Dr. Frankenstein goes hiking in the Alps and encounters the monster—and the monster speaks and tells his story of “growing up” in the wilderness without any guidance at all. Perhaps this section is more arresting because the cinematic cliché of Frankenstein’s monster—the green Boris Karloff numbskull who groans and lumbers around—is so unlike the novel’s erudite monster who calmly learns French as a stowaway in the French peasants’ home.
Even so, Shelley displays great control for how she mediates her descriptions of the Alpine landscape with Victor Frankenstein’s wildly-varying emotionality. The dynamism of Frankenstein’s reactions to the landscape both invoke the “sublime” nature of Romanticism and the eerie danger that comes with it, a play on the theme of the referenced Coleridge poem. As Frankenstein wanders the Alpine landscape, grieving the death of his brother William (murdered by the monster), he expresses his solace in observing the glacier:
For some time I sat upon the rock that overlooks the sea of ice. A mist covered both that and the surrounding mountains. Presently a breeze dissipated the cloud, and I descended upon the glacier. The surface is very uneven rising like the waves of a troubled sea, descending low, and interspersed by rifts that sink deep. The field of ice is almost a league in width, but I spent nearly two hours in crossing it. The opposite mountain is a bare perpendicular rock. From the side where I now stood Montanvert was exactly opposite, at the distance of a league; and above it rose Mont Blanc, in awful majesty. I remained in a recess of the rock, gazing on this wonderful and stupendous scene. The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits hung over its recesses. Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds. My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy; I exclaimed—“Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion away from the joys of life.” (Shelley 87-88)
Frankenstein is awestruck by the Alpine landscape and even says he would be content if he died then and there. Yet even within the beautiful landscape lies paradoxes. Mont Blanc is “awful” in its majesty. It seems significant that the glacier is described at first as “the sea of ice” and then “uneven like the waves of a troubled sea,” drawing a lineage to our polar explorer Walton, and making Frankenstein something of an ocean explorer himself. (Though it is worth noting that the glacier Frankenstein is referring to, in France, is in fact known as “Mer de Glace,” so her metaphors are grounded in extant geographical toponyms). However, the jagged nature of the glacier also makes it perilous and “deep.”
But despite the subliminal “awfulness” of his surroundings, Frankenstein is liberated by the spectacular danger of his hike. He is joyous, perhaps suggesting how this danger-seeking drive by explorers is self-destructive. By framing the beauty with its accompanying danger, Shelley also sets up her turn back toward the darkness:
As I said this, I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the ice, among which I had walked with caution; his stature, also, as he approached, seemed to exceed that of man. I was troubled: a mist came over my eyes, and I felt a faintness seize me; but I was quickly restored by the cold gale of the mountains. I perceived, as the shape came nearer (sight tremendous and abhorred!) that it was the wretch whom I had created. I trembled with rage and horror, resolving to wait his approach, and then close with him in mortal combat. He approached; his countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with disdain and malignity, while its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes. But I scarcely observed this; rage and hatred had at first deprived me of utterance, and I recovered only to overwhelm him with words expressive of furious detestation and contempt. (Shelley 88)
Through the monster’s “superhuman” speed, the arrival of the monster is immediately heralded as unnatural and terrifying. In this moment, only the “cold gale of the mountains” keeps Frankenstein afloat. The first thought Frankenstein has, as he processes the vision of the monster, is that he should fight the monster to the death. The monster is “unearthly” and in Frankenstein’s view, only deserving of contempt. This reaction is important for two reasons. One, it helps set up the monster’s rejection by the French peasants in his “tale,” by proving how ugly he appears to everyone he meets, even the man who built him. Two, it also pulls Frankenstein out of his Romantic frenzy and rapidly causes him to experience fear, thoughts of violence, and eventually, express hatred and cruelty (in that order). The dynamism of this scene is striking, and how quickly Shelley is able to guide us through Frankenstein’s vacillating emotions.
But there are other ways in which glaciers retain metaphorical significance. A glacier is a frozen river that contains ice, which, if properly analyzed by modern scientists, can uncover the secrets of past atmospheric conditions. While Shelley would not have anticipated the possibilities of climate-adjacent ice core research, in 1818 she was probably somewhat aware of the research contemporaneously being done by scientists in the Alps; some of the successors of these scientists, such as Louis Agassiz and Arnold Guyot, who conducted research on Swiss glaciers in the 1830s, helped prove the existence of the Pleistocene ice age, which in turn helped usher in a scientific revolution that proved the earth was much older than previously suspected, eventually paving the way for Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Glaciers are where secrets come out, and this is an element that has survived the two centuries since Frankenstein’s initial publication; Romantic meaning in the 1800s has given way to a repeated scientific significance, one of the many reasons for Frankenstein’s enduring appeal.
Now glaciers are disappearing across the world, which means their secrets are being lost. In the summer of 2018, I had the opportunity to visit Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, and I felt overwhelmed with sadness at the sight, and yet also felt joy in their presence. Most of the “charismatic” glaciers of that bay (the ones that crackle dramatically as they calve) are essentially gone, and it won’t be long before they all melt. Thus I believe Shelley accurately depicts the fluidity of strange emotions possible in the presence of alien landscapes such as glaciers, a vital observation in a time in which such landscapes are disappearing.
Works Cited
“Mer de Glace,” Wikipedia, January 22, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mer_de_Glace
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (Barnes & Noble Classics: New York, 2003).