Joel Coen once stated, “We create monsters and then we can’t control them.” The same can be told about Frankenstein by Mary W. Shelley. The book shows us how the creature is made and eventually abandoned by Victor. Throughout the following chapters, there is a noticeable shift in the creature’s personality as he discovers more about his upbringing. The creature is truly kind by nature, but the circumstances of his life lead him to hate humanity and take his rage out on them. Chapter 12 shows how kind he can be when he feels a connection with someone. As the creature watches the De Lacey family, he builds a relationship with them in his mind. The creature cares for them so much, he even helps with chores. In his mind, the emotional connection was so strong that the creature says “...When they were unhappy, I felt depressed; when they rejoiced, I sympathized in their joys.” (Shelley 95). The bond between the creature and the …show more content…
This was after the discovery of the journal which detailed how Victor abandoned him a year prior. This final blow by humanity causes him to hate. The creature burns the cottage and destroys everything that was related to the family. The creature says he feels, “feelings of revenge and hatred… But again, when I reflected that they had spurned and deserted me, anger returned, a rage of anger; and unable to injure anything human, I turned my fury towards inanimate objects.” (Shelley 119) After telling Victor his entire story, the creature asks for a female companion to lead him to happiness. The creature tells Victor, “I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?” (Shelley 125). He goes on to blame Victor and humankind for his murder. He knows in his heart that if not for his treatment by humanity, he would be kind. The creature believes that if he had someone that looked like him, he would be happy. And ultimately Victor agrees to create the creature a
He had made Victor a “slave”(122) and made himself Victor’s “master”(122). This was done by demanding Victor to build a female companion. The creature was motivated to make sure that this happened. He had stalked Victor, very rarely allowing him out of his sight. The creature made Victor’s life miserable in many ways, such as framing Justine for the murder of William, and following through with his threat to be with Victor on his “wedding night”(123), and killing Elizabeth.
This emotional reaction stresses one of Mary Shelley’s key themes, family and how necessary these connections truly are. The creature began his argument by trying to create pity and compassion for himself, believing Victor would commiserate his loneliness. He tells of traveling for days and nights before stumbling across a cottage where a family resided. He decided to lodge nearby and observe them from a distance.
“I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the whole human race” (186). Victor sacrificed the peace he wanted for himself and accepted the lifelong torment of the creature, a consequence of his broken promise. Victor did this for the greater good of humanity, recognizing the power of his choice to create or not to create, as well as the power of the creature. Victor had to discover the hard way, how powerful the creature became when reading letters like this one from his father, “About five in the morning, I discovered my lovely boy, whom the night before I had seen blooming and in active health, stretched on the grass livid and motionless; the print of the murder’s finger was on his neck” (72). What Victor thought he was doing to save his family and friends, ended up being the thing that killed them.
After the Creature escapes and is forced to grow up on its own, it learns basic needs and emotions, and how society treats people like him. The Creature being shunned away by everyone, including his creator, takes a toll on his mental health and self-esteem, and he expresses his depression when he tells Victor, “You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me” (Shelley 147). The Creature feels no remorse for his actions, as he deals with the immense emotions he feels about being abandoned. Victor's tragic flaw is that he never accepts he made a mistake until it was too late. He turns his back on the creature which ultimately causes his
The creature observes the feelings shown by humans while he is in the village and desires to acquire these same feelings. Victor filled with fear, pities the creature, so he followed the order and created a companion for the creature. Victor struggles to secure his power over his emotions. Half way through the making of the female monster, Victor feels guilt and rage from allowing the monster to have control over him and his emotions, which caused him to react in a violent manner to regain his power. He destroyed the new creature.
After Victor brings the creature to life, he is immediately repulsed by his creation and abandons him. Victor's cruelty towards the creature has far-reaching consequences, setting off a chain of events that ultimately leads to tragedy. This act of cruelty is a powerful motivator for the creature, who seeks revenge against his creator for abandoning him. As the creature explains, "I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on" (Shelley 117). Victor's cruelty towards the creature ultimately leads to the deaths of several innocent people, highlighting the dangers of unchecked ambition and the human desire for power.
Many more deaths happened due to the creature's actions. Killing innocent people who had nothing to do with his creation is not a humanly act, the creature was truly crazy. The only reason Victor hated the creature was because the creature was a murderer, and Victor would’ve most likely reasoned with the creature if he hadn’t killed a relative. Eventually, the creature “snatched…every hope of future happiness,” (page 187), from Victor. These actions didn't help the creature in any way, all it did was make Victor's life miserable.
He does not want Victor to merely die, he wants Victor to experience such pain and agony, to share what he had to go through. He is acting illogically and wants Victor to go through pain and agony; he asks for Victor’s sympathy. Therefore, the creature is human because he falls towards the chaos of emotions rather than the stable coherence of
The creature seeks acceptance from the De Lacey family but is violently rejected, fueling its hatred for mankind (Shelley, Chapter 16). The creature's genuine longing for connection and acceptance highlights its humanity, but Victor's failure to guide and protect his creation condemns it to a life of isolation and despair. The rejection it faces from society, symbolized by the De Lacey family's violent response, fuels the creature's feelings of bitterness and fuels its transformation into a monster. Victor's rejection further emphasizes the theme of alienation and its impact on the creature's psyche. The absence of nurturing relationships pushes the creature to seek companionship in desperate and often harmful ways, reinforcing the tragedy of its existence.
The Creature commences as “benevolent and good” (pg. 69) as he firstly observes the positive aspects of mankind. The positive nature of mankind is emphasized by the deeds of the two younger cottagers who “several times placed food before the old man when they reserved none for themselves.” (pg. 77) The deeds taken by the two cottagers deeply affected the Creature as it demonstrates the human ability of unselfishness and the effect of human kindness. The creature states that “this trait of kindness moved me sensibly”
(Shelly 69) What Victor endured in the past still fuelled his hate and anger towards the creature. This hate consumed his whole being leading him to parade such savagery to the creature. Through the cruelty he shows buth his own body and the creature we can see Victor's selfishness.
Victor's fear of being known as the creator of the creature, and the creature killing his family made him more and more isolated from the world just like the creature was. Victor even said “Revenge kept me alive" (pg149) similar to the creature's “insatiable thirst for vengeance”(pg 164) which kept him alive. Victor and the monster both had a similar desire for a loving family, and neither one could have it. Victor was given a woman to marry, his mother said “I have a pretty present for my Victor - tomorrow he shall have it” (pg 18) talking about Elizabeth. The creature wanted to be given a woman to be with just as Victor had.
The benevolence of the creature is further on nurtured by his perceptions of the De Lacey family. He reflects upon the behaviour of his cottagers by saying that, "this trait of kindness moved [him] sensibly" (109) which depicts how he relates to and keeps on being moved by such "gentle manners and beauty of the cottagers" (110). The idea of the creature and his "admiration of their virtues" (131) shows the positive side of his character, which reflects upon the idea of the family bringing out his tactful side. Aside from simply admiring the qualities of his cottagers, the creature shows kindness by stopping himself from stealing their food. He “collected [his] own food and fuel for the cottage” (113) in order to help the family.
The creature wants to take revenge on Victor for abandoning him and causes Victor grief by killing the people he cares about. When the creature kills, Victor feels responsible and guilty of the murders. He continually breaks down with each death by “his” hands, which makes him go mad. The task of creating a monster turned Victor into a monster
The fact that Victor sees the creature as such a vile thing shows us that Victor doesn’t have any respect whatsoever for it. The creature states that he was ‘dependent on none and related to none’ which also