Author studies stages of life

"THE THINGS THAT MATTER: WHAT SEVEN CLASSIC NOVELS HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THE STAGES OF LIFE," by Edward Mendelson, Pantheon, 260 pages, $23

Employing a fresh perspective on the values of literature in life, Edward Mendelson, a Columbia University English professor, has focused his book "The Things That Matter" on what seven classic novels teach about the various stages of life.

All of the novels were written by women, three of them by Virginia Woolf.

But Mendelson denies that it is because he considers women inherently better than men. Rather, he says it is because 19th century women were mostly "treated impersonally . . . rather than recognized as unique human beings."

And Woolf gets more space because the author considers her to be a thinker of greater depth than the rest of the English novelists.

Mendelson uses "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley, the first novel to be considered in his book, as an example of childbirth.

In the book, Victor Frankenstein creates a human being to his own specifications in his laboratory, but the result disappoints him, "and the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart."

But the only thing the person he creates does to deserve disgust is to reach out for affection. So the relationship between Victor and his "creature" never develops into something meaningful, as it might between a parent and a child.

The author believes that Mary Shelley learned from her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote the first feminist manifesto, "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," in 1792. Wollstonecraft wrote, "A great proportion of the misery that wanders, in hideous forms, around the world, is allowed to rise from the negligence of parents."

Mendelson sees Frankenstein as a negligent parent whose face does not reveal to others the horrible things he does to a child. In other words, "the book invites its readers to recognize themselves in its hero."

Mary Shelley's own life predicted her book: her mother died shortly after giving birth to her, and after Shelley finished writing "Frankenstein" in 1817, she abandoned her father to elope with a lover, and then gave birth to a daughter, and later, a son, both of whom died.

Shelley believed that her father "exerted a subtle control over others" without realizing it, and that is the quality Mendelson emphasizes about "Frankenstein," a person whose cruelty has made his creature so miserable that he cannot possibly atone for the sin.