Fixing Frankenstein

Note December 2021: Some time ago we interceded at several points in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. To bend the characters away from folly, towards the gentle and the good. We similarly repaired Shakespeare’s King Lear, Goethe’s Werther, a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne called “Beatrice”, and Lewis Carrol’s “Jabberwocky”.

Now we will post these interventions here. Then we’ll also bind them up as a book.

For Frankenstein, we’ll have to also post the work itself, since our spiritual rescues wind in and out of the original. For the other works, it is probably sufficient to link to the Project Gutenberg pages housing their originals.

As far as completed works go, we’ve heard that our Superhero Novella is pretty good on the whole though maybe still a little boggy in spots; and though there’s been very few samplers of A Readable Reader, we believe this work is not too bad, and includes at least some interesting and worthwhile pieces.

Both those works are available on Buy our Books, as are First Loves and First Essays, neither of which we particularly suggest.

[Start with A Readable Reader if you want to read stories about manufacturing Pure Love and essays about Something Deeperism — but our guess is that you should start with Superhero Novella. Or you can just read this Fixing Frankenstein and/or the other freely available work-in-progress Diary of An Adamant Seducer.]

Fixing Frankenstein

Plan December 2021:
I think we’ll first post all of our interventions. Then we’ll post all of Mary Shelley’s original, with links from the spots where we intervened to our interventions. You don’t necessarily have to go from the original to the interventions: Each intervention includes some of the original surrounding text (italicized).

Directly below the interventions are listed in chronological order. But the book is not told in chronological order, so if you go from the the book to the interventions (farther below), you will read them in a different order.

  1. Introduction
  2. Ambitions Redirected [Intervenes in Chapters 3 & 4 of the original.]
  3. Don’t Abandon Me [Intervenes early in Chapter 5 of the original.]
  4. Protectors [Intervenes right after the end of Chapter 15 of the original.]
  5. Sparing William [Intervenes near the end of Chapter 16 of the original.]
  6. Justine Found Innocent [Intervenes in the middle of Chapter 8 of the original.]
  7. To Build a Better Monster #1 [Intervenes in the latter part of Chapter 17 of the original.]
  8. To Build a Better Monster #2 [An alternative to #1]
  9. Elizabeth Lives [Intervenes in the beginning of Chapter 23 of the original]
  10. Assembled Love [Possible continuation of “Sparing William” intervention]
  11. The Picnic [Possible continuation of “Don’t Abandon Me” intervention]
  12. Die Offenbarung des Jungen Werthers [Continuation of “The Picnic”][English translation below]
  13. The Revelation of the Young Werther [German original above]

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with our interventions

It is a little dizzying to weave in and out of the original and the interventions.
We think it is a good exercise.

Below are the chapters where we intervene — with links to and from the interventions.
The other chapters you can read online at Project Gutenberg’s “Frankenstein”

This is our Introduction
Note that our interventions ignore Letters 1-4 at the beginning of the book.

  1. Chapter 3 [Related Intervention: “Ambitions Redirected”]
  2. Chapter 4 [Related Intervention: “Ambitions Redirected”]
  3. Chapter 5 [Related Intervention: “Don’t Abandon Me”]
  4. Chapter 8 [Related Intervention: “Justine Found Innocent”]
  5. Chapter 15 [Related Intervention: “Protectors”]
  6. Chapter 16 [Related Intervention: “Sparing William”]
  7. Chapter 17 [Related Interventions: “To Build a Better Monster #1 & #2]
  8. Chapter 23 [Related Intervention: “Elizabeth Lives”]