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In Conversation

The Abdicating Creator: What You Make and What You Refuse to Claim

By Andrew Wessels

Featuring commentary from Charlotte Gordon and Megan Marshall

A man brings a life into the world and then refuses to answer for it. That single act, the creation disowned, sits at the center of both Frankenstein and The Scarlet Letter, and it is where the two novels speak to each other most directly. Charlotte Gordon, reading Mary Shelley's novel for Rebind Classics, makes Victor Frankenstein's abandonment of his creature the book's founding crime. Megan Marshall, reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's, finds a minister who will not claim his own child and a husband who poisons what he touches. The question both books press is the same: what does a maker owe the thing it makes?

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