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Charlotte Gordon on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Episode 10

The Man Who Wouldn't Marry

Featuring Charlotte Gordon

Audio episode · 15 min

Charlotte Gordon on Frankenstein

Take the monster out of these chapters of Frankenstein and what is left is a man avoiding his own wedding. His father asks a direct question; Victor answers with a two year tour of England. Charlotte Gordon reads the delay as the character: procrastination as a way of life, with Elizabeth left holding the bill. Along the way she finds a family album hidden in the prose, with Percy Shelley posed as Henry Clerval, and traces Romanticism itself to a travel book by Mary Wollstonecraft. Even the famous ambling of chapter twenty two turns out to be evidence.

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Frankenstein is about what a creator owes his creation, Gordon argues — Victor's crime is not making the creature but abandoning it.

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