The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life

An exploration of how seven of the greatest English novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries portray the essential experiences of life. For Mendelson--a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University--these classic novels tell life stories that are valuable to readers who are thinking about the course of their own lives. Looking beyond theories to the individual intentions of the authors and taking into consideration their lives and times, Mendelson examines the sometimes contradictory ways in which the novels portray such major passages of life as love, marriage, and parenthood.--From publisher description.A literary scholar takes a close up look at seven classic English novels by women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to explore how the authors portray the major passages and experiences of life.

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birth: Frankenstein

Frankenstein is the story of childbirth as it would be if it had been invented by someone who wanted power more than love.

The book’s subtitle identifies Victor Frankenstein as “The Modern Prometheus.” The ancient Prometheus stole fire from the gods so that he could give human beings its warmth and comfort. The modern Prometheus steals from nature “the cause of generation and life”—the secret of biological reproduction by which a new life is brought into being—and uses that secret to create a new species. In human beings the power of “generation and life” works through the partly instinctual, partly voluntary union of a man and woman who have little control over the outcome, and who typically feel—as Victor remembers his parents feeling about him—a “deep consciousness of what they owed towards the being to which they had given life.” Victor, in contrast, feels no obligation to the being to which he has given life through “the horrors of my secret toil,” and he sustains himself through his gruesome, pleasureless work with the thought that his creature will owe him more gratitude than any human child ever owed to its father. Frankenstein performs the act of creation alone, by conscious choice rather than through instinct, so that he alone can have total control over its outcome.

Victor creates new life by applying an electric spark to a dead body, not by embracing a living one. In this act and in every other he rejects his own bodily life, the bodily lives of those who love him, and the whole realm of the flesh. While building his creature, he “tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay.” Later, while building a mate for the creature, Victor is so horrified by the prospect of their having children of their own that, “trembling with passion,” he “tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged.” Victor thinks of his own impending marriage with “horror and dismay,” and some of his feelings are justified by his creature’s threat to be “with you on your wedding-night.” But the deeper cause of his dismay is something that the book never names explicitly, but which it insistently points to—Victor’s deep, unacknowledged horror of the human body and its relations with another human body. One effect of what he calls his “murderous machinations” is the murder of his own bride on their wedding night.