Describe the importance of the family in Volume I (including Walton's letters) of Frankenstein. What is Mary Shelly telling us in stressing this theme?

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Describe the importance of the family in Volume I (including Walton’s letters) of Frankenstein. What is Mary Shelly telling us in stressing this theme?

 

This chapter is primarily concerned with the theme of family and kinship. The absolute necessity of human contact and emotional ties is stressed here: the elder Frankenstein goes through great trouble to visit his impoverished friend, and Caroline, too, is selflessly concerned with the needs of others (her father, her family, and the poor). It is important to note that Beaufort's ruin is itself connected to his decision to cut himself off from his former friends and live in absolute isolation; it is his isolation, more than his poverty, which leads to his death.

Because Victor speaks in first person, the other characters are presented as they relate to him ("my father, my mother, my sister"). At the beginning of his narrative, Victor is deeply embedded within a traditional family structure, and we develop our first impressions of his character in relation to it. His childhood is almost implausibly ideal; the reader therefore expects Victor to reflect the love and beauty with which he was surrounded as a boy.

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A number of the relationships described in this chapter are structured as a relation between a caretaker and a cared-for: that between Caroline's father and Caroline; Victor's father and Caroline; the Frankensteins and Elizabeth; and between Victor and Elizabeth, to name a few. In this way, Shelley suggests that human connection  and, to state the case rather more plainly, love itself  is dependent upon one's willingness to care for another person  particularly if that other person is defenseless, or innocent, and thus unable to care for themselves. The elder Frankenstein takes Caroline in after she is left penniless and an ...

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