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. Victor emphasizes the creation’s malevolence, but he fails to notice how his actions create the pejorative characteristic. From …show more content…
He initiates the hostile relationship, threatening the creation, “We are enemies. Begone, or let us try our strength in a fight in which one must fall” (103). Just as Victor abandons the creation from the day he creates him, Victor demands for the creation to leave him. Victor’s first instinct is to escape, avoiding his creature, and the responsibility he has to him as the creator. He rejects love in the relationship, while the creation seeks it from his estranged author. Victor manifests hatred onto the embryonic creation, assuming the creature is programmed with evil nature. Instead, the creature, who desires affection, consumes his aversion and mirrors it. As Victor’s resentment becomes clear for the creation, he too forms animosity, forcing Victor to promise him happiness in the form of a female counterpart. Victor undertakes the promise, but reneges on it. He “destroy[s] the creature on whose future existence [the creation] depend[s] for happiness” and watches the creation, “with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdr[a]w.” (171). Victor describes the creation as “devilish”, but the “devilish” nature is a direct result of Victor’s actions. He agrees to deliver happiness, but accomplishes the opposite. Victor knows
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Show MoreFrankenstein, by Mary Shelley, displays various emotions and reactions to death and loss- one of the many being guilt. After Victor broke his promise of creating life to the monster, the monster went and killed his Victor’s friend, Henry Clerval. Later, the monster kills Elizabeth on her and Victor’s wedding night. After hearing of this, Victor’s father becomes sick and soon dies. Frankenstein constantly shifts the blame of the murders from the monster to himself, causing him to become depressed and more and more desperate for revenge from the monster.
In this, Victor brought up things that no mortal should know about, such as: cloning, stem cell research, and IVFs. Examples of these were shown when the author states, “It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn… my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical… the physical secrets of the world” (43). Victor is knowingly tampering with knowledge that is essentially too great for man. He is also essentially trying to be like God, which is the original sin, and as a result, he is put in eternal despair.
In reality, he is disgusted by the sight of his creation so he abandons it leaving it all alone in the world without any guidance and runs away to the next room. Victor himself suffered from being a social outcast and now he bestowed the same feeling onto the creature by abandoning him. By treating the creature as an outcast, “he will become wicked … divide him, a social being, from society, and you impose upon him the irresistible obligations—malevolence and selfishness” (Caldwell). Not only is Victor selfish for abandoning his creature but he is shallow as well. Instead of realizing that he achieved his goal of bringing life to an inanimate body he runs way because of how hideous it is.
(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.
He grows angry at Victor for creating him, leaving him, and refusing to make him a female companion. Victor’s creation murders his friend Henry Clerval, his brother William, and even his wife Elizabeth. Once Victor’s creation comes to life, his life is ruined. If he would have accepted him from the beginning and taken on the rule of a father, his life may not have been so miserable. Victor and his creation ultimately needed each other’s love, because their separation ultimately destroyed them
The novel Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley depicts certain ideas that can not be described or written within novels. For example, the telling of the story between three different narrators can teach the reader about putting together “pieces of a puzzle” in order to understand the plot of the story. The three narrators in Frankenstein are Victor, Walton, and the Creature, all with very distinct personalities and character traits. Of these storytellers, Victor could possibly be debated as the most extraordinary. The qualities that make Victor pictured as this unique character, that the fact that he is a dynamic character, and that he is an unreliable narrator.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley tells the story of passionate scientist Victor Frankenstein, whose devotion to science leads him to become obsessed with creating life, but his good intentions lead to a lifelong conflict with his problematic creation. This creature causes pain and suffering for Victor by killing his friends and family, which causes him to feel responsible for their deaths. Ambition’s dark and addictive side got the best of Victor, who became blinded by dreams of glory. Similarly, Don Quixote fails to identify the risks of ambition while exploring Spain. He wants to be a famous knight so badly that he begins to hallucinate obstacles that he must conquer.
Victor is stirred by his work, but not in a positive manner. He goes on to explain his feelings towards the creature by saying, “… my heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred” (136). Victor is so bewildered and repulsed by the creature that he misses key signs of violence, from the creature, that may have saved Victor’s family had he not been so
He fulfills this and creates the creature. Victor is horrified by the monster's appearance however. He later abandons the creature despite being his own successful creation. What does this say about the creature? If its own creator was horrified, then the rest of society would be horrified as well, but the creature does not know this.
”(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).
From the moment he is created, the creature knows he is not wanted by Victor. Shelly writes, “Unable to endure the aspect of the being
From the moment Victor decided to create the Creature, he begins his assertion of dominance over the Creature. By creating a “monster” solely for his own
He uses the little that he knows to fuel his hatred towards humans and his creator. This shows the exponential growth of the problems that Victor has created as a result of his desire for knowledge. Not only did he create the destructive monster, but now the monster is using a hunger for knowledge, the very thing that created it, to do even more damage. This root cause is linked to everything that is causing Victor’s suffering. The monster also compares his relationship to Victor to that of God and Adam, wishing that he had the same supplication to his creator that Adam did, “I remembered Adam’s supplication to his creator.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein examines how the presence of a mother, negatively or positively, affects the development of a child. Victor’s mother, Caroline Frankenstein, dies while Victor is still a young man (he is about 17 years old), breaking their relationship between mother and son. Because Victor loses his bond with his mother, he is unable to act as a mother would when he creates his creature. Caroline Frankenstein’s absence in Victor’s life creates a disunion between the mother and child bond, which is evident in Victor’s creation and his fragmented relationship with the creature. Caroline Frankenstein, Victor’s mother, portrayed a traditional mother in the Frankenstein household, until her death.
Examples such as prejudice and guilt are very conspicuous between Victor and Creature; their actions cause them to view each other as a target of hostility and anathema as Victor says, “ For this purpose I will preserve my life: to execute this dear revenge will I again behold the sun and tread the green herbage of earth, which otherwise should vanish from my eyes forever” (173). Both despise each other for their actions, Victor desires the Creature’s death since it brutally murders his friends and families leaving him tormented, while the Creature wants Victor to experience its pain from loneliness and retaliation destroying the female creature who would be his salvation. In the end, guilt from their actions plagues both of them resulting to their ends. Christian bible references consisting mainly of God, Satan, and Adam and Eve apparent throughout the Creature as it compares itself , “[...] no Eve soothed my sorrows nor shared my thoughts; I was alone. I remembered Adam’s supplication to his Creator [...]