'Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/ To mould thee man? Did I solicit thee/ From darkness to promote me?' Adam's words appear in 1818 edition of FR. What light do they cast on the Creature? Does Shelley present him as monster or victim?

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‘Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/ To mould thee man? Did I solicit thee/ From darkness to promote me?’ Adam’s words appear in 1818 edition of FR. What light do they cast on the Creature? Does Shelley present him as monster or victim?

By using the above quote from ‘Paradise Lost’ (printed in the epigraph on the title page of ‘Frankenstein’) Shelley has shown that she does see some parallels with God’s creation of man and Frankenstein’s creation. However through the novel Shelley expresses many opinions and criticisms of society which were influenced by her own family circumstances and her vast reading. She makes constant reference to family and the concept of alienation and by examining how the creature is treated we can form a better view on whether he is a monster or a victim.

Shelley quickly gets the reader involved in the story by enabling us to read the letters Walton writes to his sister. This epistolary style gives a sense of realism to the whole story and thus prepares us to hear Frankenstein and the creature’s accounts later on through Walton’s journal, which forms a frame for their versions of the story. Because we are hearing Frankenstein’s version through the eyes of Walton, a romantic character, who ‘bitterly feel(s) the want of a friend’ and quickly identifies Frankenstein as the sort of person who could satisfy this want, we may be hearing a biased version of the events. We also see the Creature’s version told to Frankenstein and then recorded in Walton’s journal. However, the eloquent rhetoric used by the creature give the impression that we are not reading an entirely prejudiced report of the creature’s account who may otherwise have appeared less articulate and more like a babbling monster.  

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However, first of all I will examine Frankenstein’s narrative where we can see that there is regular emphasis put on the benevolence of the characters. His father ‘passed his younger days perpetually occupied by the affairs of his country’ and his parents’ ‘benevolent dispositions often made them enter the cottages of the poor’. His mother is described as having a ‘soft and benevolent mind’ and his own early childhood memories are of his ‘mother’s soft caresses’ and his father’s ‘smile of benevolent pleasure’. This emphasis on the importance of benevolence can be traced to Shelley’s father, William Godwin a ...

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