Frankenstein

I first read Frankenstein around my junior high years. Primed by Frankenstein movies and current horror tales, I expected something gorier. There are deaths in Frankenstein but little splatter. Mary Shelley created an atmosphere of dread, and asked fresh questions about whether we are responsible for our creations. She also gave the monster a chance to talk. 

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818. The sentence is long, as was common at that time. It also features strong, emotionally laden words, a feature of Romantic style, which was dominant in the early 19th century. These are the words that create the strongest emotional response: rejoice, disaster, evil, forebodings. The last three are all negative, which outweighs the lone positive word in the list: rejoice. 

The sentence implies two people, one who is speaking, and "you," one who hears or reads the words. The narrator is reassuring "you" that their evil forebodings have not come true. We have no place, no concrete details – there is nothing here that can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled. As far as time goes, we only know that an enterprise has commenced. 

"Commenced" means that the enterprise is begun. It does not mean that it has completed. So it is not as reassuring as the narrator hopes to say that "no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise." Will disaster accompany the middle of the enterprise? The completion of it? Also, "disaster" means a huge and enveloping crisis – to say that there has been "no disaster" still leaves open the possibility of many smaller, and still quite serious, problems. 

Both the first and last words of the sentence project the future. The first words, "you will rejoice" are what the narrator expects his later words to accomplish. But as we have seen, the middle words only weakly argue for that outcome. The final words are what "you" projected into the future: "evil forebodings." "You" had a feeling that the enterprise would go badly. "Evil" here can carry two senses. It could intensify the negative strength of the forebodings, or it could mean that the forebodings were themselves a danger. In expressive writing, all the possible meanings can influence how readers feel about the sentence. So both meanings have an effect and both may reflect the author's intentions. 

With only "disaster" avoided, and only at the "commencement," and with "evil forebodings" placed in the strongest position, the sentence creates tension rather than reassurance. The dangerous future still looks more likely than that "you will rejoice."

One other note – this is the kind of sentence that might start a letter. "You will rejoice to hear" fits very well with "when you receive this letter." In fact, the headings in Frankenstein say this is Letter One. When there were fewer novels, to tell a tale in the form of letters may have been a familiar way to approach the writing. The term for book-length fiction written in letters is an "epistolary novel." Dracula also takes this form. 

Graphic design by Ken Silbert