Compare the ways in which William Golding and Mary Shelley explore the corruption of innocence in their novels.

Authors Avatar

Comparative essay for pre and post 1914 writing

Essay question:         Compare the ways in which William Golding and Mary Shelley explore the corruption of innocence in their novels.

In this essay, I will study how the distortion of virtuousness is portrayed in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ and William Golding's ‘Lord of the flies’.  I am going to be concentrating on the characters of Jack and the ‘creation’ in the particular novels.  My focus will follow their deterioration from innocuous characters with no past of violence to their fall into treachery and deceit.

When we are first introduced to the characters they are innocent.  Jack is the leader of the choir at a public school and we associate this with being of high moral character.  We can also see that he has a child like naivety because he believes that he should be ‘chief’ because he ‘…can sing C sharp’, which shows us he has an unbroken voice and us immature.

The creation of Frankenstein is pure with no knowledge of good or evil and starts with a child-like innocence, which is similar to Jack.  The monster is a creation that the creator ‘…had worked hard [on] for nearly two years for the sole purpose of infusing like into an inanimate body’ and has no previous misdemeanour.  This is similar to the character of Jack because he is only a young boy and was brought up with a wealthy background, shielded from the evils in the world.  Both Golding and Shelley created these characters like this so that the reader has an impartial view of their characters.  

As the novels proceed, the reader can see why the characters start their downfall into corruption.  The first time we see the evil in Jack emerge is at the beginning of the novel when he is asked what he wants the choir to be.  He proposes the choir should be ‘hunters’, this shows us the other side of Jack, and we can see that he has a bloodthirsty and evil streak inside him that wants to kill.  In ‘Frankenstein’, the first time we get a glimpse of the immorality of the creation is when his own creator is ‘unable to endure the being [he] had created’ and this shows us that the creation must be evil if his own creator has ‘disgust fill his heart’ after he realises what he has created.

The reader soon becomes conscious of the characters’ increasing ferociousness as the novel’s authors expose the plot.  In ‘Lord of the flies’, Jack starts to become increasingly savage and he decides he needs a ‘barb on [his] spear’ to aid him in his hunting.  This shows us his growing malevolence because it implies that he intends to kill again, though only a pig at this stage in the novel.  In ‘Frankenstein’ we become aware of the creations quest for vengeance on his creator and he tells the reader that his ‘feelings were those of rage and revenge’, this gives the reader an insight to the plot of the novel and it shows his growing aggression towards his creator.

Join now!

Humiliation and rejection play a key role in the causes of the characters aggressive behaviour.  In ‘Lord of the flies’, Jack is humiliated when he isn’t appointed ‘Chief’ and his hunters fail to back him up.  We see a new venerable and sensitive side to Jack that we have not seen before at this point, when he has ‘Humiliating tears… running from the corner of each eye because his ‘hunters’ have rejected him.  This kind of rejection occurs in ‘Frankenstein’ too.  Frankenstein’s creation is discarded by his own creator but also by mankind in general because ‘All men hate ...

This is a preview of the whole essay