Lawrence Lipking's Essay 'Frankenstein, The True Story'

When an author creates a story that lasts through centuries and has been recreated in all types of entertainment, one has to ask why? Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is possibly most perfect example of this. In Lawrence Lipking’s essay “Frankenstein, the True Story; or, Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques” he argues that Frankenstein is so popular, even today, because almost all the major ideas of the book are open to interpretation. This lets the reader take away from the book whatever he or she feels important because every major idea in the novel has no one answer to it.

Lipking proves the point that there is no one moral to Frankenstein, and no one way to interpret it, by taking some of the most widely argued about ideas in the book, and providing strong arguments to support both sides. After doing this it, it becomes pretty clear that for every argument that supports a specific idea, there is an equally relevant contradicting argument. This creates a balance in every important idea in the novel, a balance that can only be tilted by the reader’s own values and morals. Since ones interpretation of the novel is supposed to reflect their own values and morals, the only way you can read Frankenstein
Rousseau believes that people are born as good people, and it is man that corrupts everything. In Rousseau’s words, “everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things, everything degenerates in the hands of man.” When I first started reading Frankenstein, all I could think about is how Shelley created the perfect example to support this idea. Rousseau’s idea had almost no supporting facts because you cannot ask a newborn how he or she is feeling, and they are obviously too young to perform tasks. Shelley created a situation in which a creature has the mind of newborn but has incredible strength and the ability to get