Frankenstein Revenge Analysis

In the fiction novel Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, the Creature that Victor Frankenstein created was originally good at heart. When he was first brought to life he had good intentions and just wanted to be loved. Although, the Creation sought acceptance from humans, he soon realized he looked monstrous and no one would ever care for him. Many humans look at him disapprovingly, and, they judged him without knowing his kind heart. The judgmental humans are what lead to the Creature 's downfall.

Mary Shelley shows the endless amount of revenge and that it is driven by pure hatred and rage. The monster was not created to be vengeful, he was kind hearted but when he was poorly treated by Victor and then by the Delacey family, he turned cold. In her novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley displays the immorality and destructive effects that revenge can have through Frankenstein and his pursuit of the creature.

Fighting a Mirror In Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, self deception eclipses Victor Frankenstein and clouds his judgment. Victor’s passion in breaking the bounds of nature guides him in making the creation, but when Victor regrets giving life to the hideous creature, he deserts it. The abandonment is just the first step Victor takes to introduce the creation to malevolence followed with Victor’s assumptions of evil and lost responsibility in the results of his own zeal. Victor Frankenstein’s self deception not only forges evil into the creation, but also incriminates him for the consequences of Victor’s ambitions.

Frankenstein essay Joel Edgerton said “Where does guilt and punishment lie, and we are not more expressive over remorse or guilt when other people see the badness in us?” In Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” guilt and remorse play a crucial role. On an occasion it can even affect fate. Victor’s fate to be precise. Guilt and remorse add a base plot line of the story, along with thrusting the plot forward.

An eye for an eye or the law of retaliation is the principle most people live their lives by. For the characters in Frankenstein, this concept is apparent as the main character, Victor, creates a monster and instantly abandons him which sets off the chain of events revolving around revenge. However, as Gandhi once stated, “an eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind” (Gandhi). Throughout the novel, the creature and Victor engage in a recurring cycle of vengeance, but these acts of revenge are bittersweet as in the end it destroys both of them. In the novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley reveals how revenge consumes and destroys those who surrender to it.

”(Millhauser). This violent rejection is a repetition of Victor’s lack of acceptance for the monster and attention to his family. Victor knows that the monster will never be able to live within society and that his ability to create life is the only hope the monster has of achieving companionship. Victor's own aversion to companionship surfaces as he, “ fails to give him the human companionship, the Eve, the female creature, that he needs to achieve some sort of a normal life.” (Mellor).

In the beginning, Victor reveals his timidity towards occurring disasters. When the creature comes to life, Victor realizes that it is grotesque and describes, “I rushed out of the room and continued a long time traversing my bedchamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep” (42). Upon realizing the unfortunate turnout of the creation, Victor avoids confronting his fault by hurrying off and hiding in his bedroom. Accordingly, Victor is unable to control his creation. When the creature leaves after threatening Victor about a tragedy on his wedding night, Victor asks himself, “Why had I not followed him and closed with him in mortal strife?”

Victor selfishly creates the Creature to gain prestige, pretentiously claiming himself as a human god when he succeeds and saying it was for the sake of humanity. In reality, he creates a grotesque being and abandons it the moment his illusions shatter, making the creature a victim because he denies the responsibility of raising it causing hardships for it. Victor also believes the creature is a reprobative individual since it kills his brother and foists Justine’s execution, thus he acts inimical towards it throughout the whole novel as he invectively exclaims, “Abhorred monster! Fiend that thou art! The tortures of hell are too mild a vengeance for thy crimes” (93).

The novel Frankenstein brings to light many problems and situations that shed light on the faults of mankind. Cruelty was a huge factor in the novel; throughout Frankenstein is cruel to his body and to his creation. When he first makes the creature he runs from it, leaving the creature to fend for himself; even when reuniting with the creature he continues displays cruelty. The creature, in turn exhibits Victor cruelty right back. Within Frankenstein cruelty can be attributed, often affecting both Victor and the creature; serving as a crucial motivator and revealing their anger, pain, frustration till eventually both die.

Over the past century, Frankenstein has been analyzed and interpreted in seemingly infinite different forms of literature, film, and television shows. Once solely recognized as the story about a brilliant scientist who creates a creature in whom he regrets making after the creature turns out ugly, Frankenstein now represents an internationally recognized and commercialized pop culture symbol for Halloween decorations and costumes. When analyzing and appreciating the true literary essence behind Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein, one of the most important comparisons to consider remains the underlying influences behind the Creature’s immoral actions and whether or not the blame for these actions belong to Victor or the Creature.

To make Victor experience the feeling isolation, the creature sets out to destroy what he hold most dear, Elizabeth. Victor describes his spouse as the “body of Elizabeth, my love, my wife, so lately living, so dear, so worthy.” Nowhere else in the novel does Victor come even close to describing another human in this manner. Once the monster escaped, Victor realized how important it was to be near people he loved, he had learned the terrors of isolation. The creature then uses this against him by killing the person who brought Victor out of isolation, pushing him back into an even deeper sense of isolation from which Victor

The deferment of death and the promotion of self-supremacy within Victor has backfired. The creature not only craved attention from Victor but also craved a female counterpart. After a further argument between Victor and the creature, Victor agrees to create a female creature. Stunned, and lost in his own doings, Victor asks himself if what he is doing is truly for the betterment of mankind. “Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.”

However, the monster yet asserts that his capacity for “revenge remains” and tells Victor that he shall again with him “on his wedding night” (140). Frankenstein, due to his emotional disconnect with his family, perceives the target of this threat to be himself, but instead on the fated night finds Elizabeth, his own companion, “lifeless and inanimate… [with the] mark of the fiend’s grasp on her neck” (165-166). Elizabeth’s murder causes Frankenstein “the agony of despair,” to the extent that he is made to feel “the heat of fever” in recollection of the event (166). In killing Elizabeth, the monster effectively mirrors onto Victor the pain felt at a lack of companionship, thus ensuring that Victor’s emotional isolation from his family becomes absolute—just as the monster is absolutely alone with the abortion of his own companion.

After Frankenstein experiences the death of Elizabeth, he understands that he is the cause of all the deaths in his family and promises to seek revenge on his creation. All the guilt he has turns into anger and fuels his impulse for revenge on the monster. He very passionately and assuredly describes his anger when he says, “My revenge is of no moment to you... I confess that it is the devouring and only passion of my soul,” (217) and promises to seek justice for what he believes is rightfully his. Frankenstein travels to the ends of the world to enact the revenge he thinks he deserves.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) born as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the daughter of philosopher William Godwin (1756-1836) and well known feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759- 1797), is credited as a great revolutionary in the field of literature. With influences of family guests such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1843) and William Wordsworth (1770- 1850), and access to an extensive family library, Mary Shelley is believed to have developed great imaginative skills and fondness for literature at a very young age. She went on to marry the famous English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816 after his first wife committed suicide. During her lifespan she went through the tragic death of her infant son, suicide of her half-sister and the drowning