The glacier scene is the whole point of Frankenstein

The first time I read Frankenstein I was eighteen and I thought it was a science novel. Mad scientist with lightning and a creature stitched together out of corpses. The second time I read it I was forty-something, and I realized the science is over by chapter five. The rest of the book is something else entirely.

Chapter ten is where the disguise drops. Victor has been wrecked by guilt for two hundred pages. His brother William has been strangled. Justine has been hanged for the murder. So Victor climbs into the Alps because that’s what Romantic-era heroes do when they’re falling apart. He goes to the Mer de Glace, the frozen sea below Mont Blanc, expecting the landscape to do its job.

Then the creature shows up.

This is where you realize you’ve been reading the wrong book. Up to here, the creature has been an absence. Victor calls him a “fiend,” a “wretch,” a “miserable monster.” We’ve never actually heard him speak. We’ve taken Victor’s word for what kind of thing he is. Then he opens his mouth on the glacier and starts complaining — articulately, at length, with citations.

“I ought to be thy Adam,” he says, “but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.”

I had to put the book down the first time I noticed that line. He isn’t just literate. He’s read Paradise Lost, identified with the wrong character on purpose, and worked out the difference between Milton’s God and his own creator. Milton’s God at least populated Eden for Adam. Victor gave his creation nothing. No name. No companion. Not an hour of instruction. The creature has done the theological reading and he’s making a case against Victor in the only court available, which is Victor’s own ears, on the ice.

The book then gives him six straight chapters to tell his own story. That’s why chapter ten functions less like a scene and more like a hinge. Everything after it sounds different because we’ve heard the other side. The De Lacey family. The cottage. The blind old man who could listen to him kindly because he couldn’t see his face. By the time the creature is done, you aren’t on Victor’s side anymore. You suspect Shelley was never on his side either.

The other move Shelley makes in this scene is structural. The Mer de Glace is the most Romantic landscape in the whole book — Mont Blanc looming, the frozen sea below, the kind of sublime panorama Caspar David Friedrich would flood with religious feeling. If she wanted to write a straightforward Romantic novel, she’d let the landscape console Victor and the plot would move on. Instead she stages her cruelest confrontation in the exact spot where consolation was supposed to happen. Nature soothes, but it doesn’t protect. That’s the whole Romantic project getting quietly undermined in one chapter.

I’ve been working through the BrainyStudy guide’s themes section on Frankenstein and they put the ice motif more carefully than I just did. The argument there is that ice binds the entire novel: Victor’s ruin starts in Ingolstadt but culminates on the glacier, and the Arctic ending is the same emotional geography taken to its endpoint. The book begins and ends in ice. The middle, the part you actually remember, is also ice. None of that is decoration.

If you only have time to reread one chapter of Frankenstein this year, make it ten. It’s the chapter where the book stops being about a scientist and starts being about a parent who walked away.