The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein: A novel by Theodore Roszak

   This can be viewed as a political novel about the most basic of struggles; The need of humans to own, control, make, and know as opposed to a call-of-the-wild acknowledgement of life and feeling being in everything and humans just a part of it all, more integrated. It is also a psychological study of humans and their interface with the rest of nature. It deals with issues personal and global at the same time, through story, metaphor. Or simply a story about the internal struggle between the thinking self and the feeling self in the individual.
It is the Prometheus story retold from another angle.

To me this is one of these holographic things available on view from varying perspectives. 

 It’s about different starting points of view of humans place in the earth. The notion that human lives were lived differently before beginning the naming, separation, discrimination, quantification of things done with the aim of the betterment, advancement, and expansion of human life separate and over all other earth entities. Dominion of humans over the earth God bestowed on them is basically the notion in vogue. Ownership an idea of accumulating what flies by. As if it is beneficial to keep it, as if it is even possible. Constant anxiety about scarcity.

The novel is set at a point when ancient feminist ritualistic nature-based technology meets with the rise of modern science and logic. Science being associated with the male impulse.

There is a possibility of the marriage of the two, the Mother Nature with the male logic/science. The memoir is a last testament of the nature side, about to be lost, maybe forever. Yet another fall from Eden. 

That’s the big picture overriding the whole thing. Moving in closer there is a young couple that cannot really bond. They cannot bond because he will not bond. He can’t believe, he must know. He can’t imagine, he must fabricate. He goes along up to a point, then withholds. Their ritualized sex is interrupted by his desires, his will.
The novel is written from Elizabeth Frankenstein’s point of view. I have not read Mary Shelley’s book in many years. This novel was therefore taken on its own terms rather than having any personal memory reference to the original material, so I wasn’t upset by anything that might have felt inconsistent with Shelley’s work. 

In close-up, the story is a tragedy, a beautiful romance and marriage that could create a beautiful magical powerful world for them. That can never be. A woman, Elizabeth, is longing and ready to learn to really bond, become one, through alchemical magic ritual, but this cannot happen because of something resistant in the man, Victor. In the beginning of the process he really wants to bond, wants to learn the magic pre-science technologies of witchcraft, but even the times are against this. The flow of interest, at the very end of the 16th Century Europe, is moving toward reason, science, rationality, thought, invention, and dominionism, as it continues to be. There are persecutions elsewhere in Europe referred to, burnings of women going on. 

The book presents this moment of the path of unity diverging into separation and commodification. 

Maybe we are at another fork in the road, or at least we see where this one leads and are looking back to see what happened in search of a direction. The big issues dealt with in the book are now even more with us and feel like they are coming to a head and something must be done. There is a growing number of people interested in more of a connection with something, spirit, nature, something other than the empty competitive consumer world we have inherited from the church of science and religion.

This book was written 25 years ago, but speaks to a counter movement that has grown with the hazards of the domiminist world view.
It turns out that the novel deal with topics and feelings related to the new psychedelic movement which is very much about this attempt to connect to the reality we live in, honoring it’s limits while exploring abandoned paths that could lead (back?) to wonder.

It can be a deep journey to read this beautifully crafted novel. It is a very serious piece within a successfully entertaining structure. 

There is a good deal of magic, wiccan, stuff going on early in the novel. There is even a communicative bird entry friend. 

It’s bold for a male writer to take on a young female first person like this. Although I can’t say I was with this all the way. There were few passages where I wondered what a woman would think of the portrayal of Elizabeth’s erotic thoughts. Maybe women don’t need to read this, only I and my kind, needed to.

I was very set up to enjoy this. I even found similar thematic connections to the book I read before this, Kangaroo by D H Lawrence. Lawrence hungered for the very same sort of thing, a reintegration. But these issues have always been in the background in my life.

Overall, considering the theme, this is one of the best novels I have read. Theodore Roszak is a great novelist. I read the outstanding Flicker this year. But this one even tops that. Pontfex, his first novel is very good but a victim of its setting 1970 type revolution scene and that makes it feel dated which doesn’t help in getting the point across. The point that is not far from this novel. Roszak’s academic field was something called Ecopsychology. Perhaps this is what I read in his novels. He may be teaching me that. I’m happy that there are two more novels of his I have yet to read.