Three Key Ideas from "The Reading Monster" by Patrick Brantlinger

1.  Frankenstein is filled with political meanings.  This piece of criticism looks at a context set in the French Revolution or the Enlightenment, and Victor as being aristocratic oppression, reationality, or radicalism.  Therefore, the Monster represents the working-class.  This view gives a whole new personality to Victor, as being the over powerful aristocracy over the poor, soulless, education-less, working class Monster.

2.  Frankenstein is a novel about two educations, or "miseducations," and discusses literacy, and science.  Victor's story is filled with the pursuit of knowledge and science.  In this essay, Brantlinger describes that Mary Shelley expresses a continuity of alchemy into modern chemistry.  Also, it is "undecidable whether the Monster's creation is the result of modern science or of black magic."  So the question of science appears in many instances.  Beyond science, the Monster learning to speak, and read comes up in the education topic.  "The family circle the Monster longs to join represents everything that Victor, in his obsessive pursuit of the secrets of life and death, has rejected."  The Monster self-educates himself and gains the capabilities of challenging his creator.  Again, Brantlinger suggests that the most difficult ideas for readers to accept is the Monster's literacy.

3.  Why has the Monster, already stripped of soul and education, taken on his creator's name, Frankenstein?  This is one of the shorter ideas finishing off the essay, but is an interesting topic for Brantlinger to bring up.  After reading Frankenstein, it is obvious that the Monster has no name, and Frankenstein is the name of the creator.  Several possible answers are given: "because the Monster is nameless, it makes sense to give him his father-maker's name," the Monster is a symbol of Victor's identification, or the Monster is Victor's alter ego.  This topic does not necessarily change interpretation of the novel itself, but asks an interesting question regarding the confusion over the name of Frankenstein and the Monster.