Jo Devanny Frankenstein
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Explore the ways Mary Shelley uses Paradise Lost in her novel; ‘Frankenstein.’
Shelley’s story of a creature created by Victor Frankenstein has striking similarities to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ from the outset, as the second letter in the novel that documents Frankenstein’s misfortune, is sent from ‘Archangel’. Satan was an archangel before he was banished from heaven for challenging God, and we know that he was supposedly perfect. Frankenstein sought to make ‘a human being in perfection’, although both the creature and Satan fell from grace at the hand of their creators. The opening line of Paradise Lost underpins the correlation between the tales; ‘Paradise Lost’ opens with the lines, ‘Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit, Of that forbidden tree,’ this is referring to Adam who took forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge and was therefore exiled by God. This story of Eden and mans downfall has obviously influenced Shelley as Frankenstein’s pursuit of ‘nature to her hiding places’ is what led to the demise of himself and his family. Milton’s Satan challenges God; Adam and Eve are tempted by Satan to eat the forbidden fruit and this echoes in Shelley’s novel and Milton’s poem, as he tells us that ‘heaven hides nothing from thy view.’ Yet both Satan and Frankenstein want more than nature has to offer, and the irony in the events leading up to the monsters creation are highlighted, by Shelley’s use of dark and gothic descriptions of foraging in ‘vaults and charnel-houses,’ and how ‘the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain..’ This dark depiction echoes the fate of Frankenstein, the monster and Milton’s Satan, as they all endure an experience of Hell; Frankenstein’s personal hell was of ‘of intense tortures such as no language can describe,’ and his endurance of a ‘deep, dark, death like solitude, ironically echoes his creation’s feelings of loneliness and despair. The monster however, ‘considered Satan as the fitter emblem’ of his condition and continued sufferings, but his hell was also a personal one, to be lived out on earth, and unfortunately alone. Satan, at least, had ‘his host of rebel angels’ and had experience of a ‘father’ and being loved, his demise was through choice, as was Frankenstein’s.
