The Innately Good In Mary Shelly's Frankenstein

In the award winning article, “Passages in Mary Shelly's Frankenstein: Towards a Feminist Figure of Humanity?” Cynthia Pon addresses masculinity and feminism in terms of conventions, ideals, and practices (Pon, 33). She focused on whether Mary Shelly's work as a writer opened the way to a feminist figure of humanity like Donna Haraway argued. The article has a pre-notion that the audience has read Frankenstein and Haraway's article. Pon has a slight bias, due to her passion as a feminist writer. It may skew her thinking and at times be subjective. The intended audience is someone who is studying literature and interested in how women are portrayed in novels in the 19th century. The organization of the article allows anyone to be capable of reading it.

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. "Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his face, of such loathsome, yet appalling hideousness. I shut my eyes involuntarily" (Shelley 228). Even Walton is repulsed by the creature’s

In life there are many evils that will try to defeat a person but the key to living a happy, fulfilling life is learning to have empathy for others who are facing their own evils. Empathy is hard to have if a person has not endured any real struggles in their life. Being able to know firsthand how it feels to go through difficulties helps create a level of empathy that leads to compassion for one another. Victor Frankenstein is a prime example of someone who has faced evils in their own life but in the end did not find compassion for others, instead he found his own hell. In the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Victor’s lack of empathy opens the door into his world of selfishness, cruelty, and unhappiness.

Parenting is needed in every child’s life. It is one of the most important things that will help a child grow. In the same way though, children need good parenting. Parents need to love their children and show them right from wrong. Without care from a parent, children may feel lost or lonely like the monster did in Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein. Shelley analyzes the psychology of parenting through Victor Frankenstein and his creation, the monster, by comparing their behavioral and psychological development as a result of the parenting they receive in their childhood. Because Victor was loved and had a great childhood, he was able to grow as a person, psychologically and emotionally. As though Victor had a good childhood,

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. But where was mine? He had abandoned me, and in the bitterness of my heart I cursed him” (Shelley 116). This shows how abandoned the monster feels, and how he could leverage that along with other things he learns against Victor and the other humans.

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 realizes that he has lost control of the monster’s actions and regrets not taking the proper precautions in seizing the monster when he has the opportunity. Ultimately, Victor is victimized. After the murder of Elizabeth, Victor reflects on the deaths of his loved ones and says, “The death of William, the execution of Justine, the murder of Clerval, and lastly of my wife; even at that moment I knew not that my only remaining friends were safe from the malignity of the fiend” (174). Victor suffers watching his loved ones die one by one, yet lacking the ability to save them. Overall, Victor’s victimization is due to his timorousness dealing with his initial

A teenage girl Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein in the 18th century. A Gothic novel Frankenstein deals with two genres, Gothicism and science fiction. Victor, one of Mary Shelly’s characters represents man’s pursuit of knowledge which ultimately leads towards the path of destruction while another character Robert Walton implemented his knowledge wisely to get benefits for the society. Mary is indicating to the society that mankind has to pay full attention to science and scientific innovations in order to avoid the catastrophic events due to misuse of knowledge. The search for knowledge is arduous, to utilize knowledge wisely can be blessings, but

We all like to think that evil is not born within us, but rather nurtured into us; while this may be true for some, others have evil born directly into them. When man toys with the powers reserved for only God, God strikes back with a wicked evil to show man the power that they truly lack. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein contains a prime example of a being born of unnatural causes and thus having these evil urges that they cannot control.

Mary Shelly's Frankenstein discusses the nature of human begins, whether it is simply one's natural instinct to act maliciously or if it's one's surroundings and environment that impact their behavior. Victor Frankenstein, the protagonist of this intricate novel, answers this question in two ways, as both the product and the perpetrator of how it is both in the nature of a person, and their nurturing that develops their behaviors, and in the case of this plot, malicious behaviors.

The gothic fiction novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley centralizes on humanity and the qualifications that make someone human. The content of the novel Frankenstein depicts a monster displaying human traits that his creator Victor does not possess: empathy, a need for companionship, and a will to learn and fit in.

“I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.” (Shelley 69) Said by Frankenstein’s monster, this quote truly defines him: initially an affectionate, love-seeking creature, he transformed into an enraged killer, angry at humanity for the undeservedly poor way he was treated. Victor Frankenstein is an unique, complex individual who encounters a similar change of nature for similar reasons. The quote—though spoken by the monster—encapsulates the evolution of Victor Frankenstein’s personality; misery—a product of isolation and loneliness—aroused a deterioration of temperament from an initially benevolent Frankenstein.

Victor creates the Creature with the ideals of making it a paragon as he states, “[...] I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath” (60), however, he was in a state of semblance believing his creation was preeminent. 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). He is fully aware he the root of all problems, yet he believes the Creature to be censurable and denying to give it a chance of salvation when he breaks his promise and destroys the female creature he was working on; his actions result in his father and Elizabeth’s deaths. This also makes the

illumination of Victor and the monster as father and son, shows the importance of a parental

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.

The monster tells Victor of his feelings when he states, “You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains…I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery.” (153) After months and months of the monster trying to connect with the world, he eventually realizes that the efforts are worthless and vows to do to his creator what his creator did to him. To make Victor isolated would give him the same curse the monster has suffered through for its entire new life. Later, the creature asks himself, “Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed?” The creature easily could kill Victor if that was his desire but its real desire was to make Victor suffer as the monster did. 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 can never