Explore How and Why Mary Shelley Creates Sympathy for The Monster

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Alexandra Bowe

How and Why Does Mary Shelley Create Sympathy for the Monster?

Mary Shelley’s gothic horror novel ‘Frankenstein’, tells the story of an ambitious university student named Victor Frankenstein, who discovers the secret of giving life to inanimate objects, and subsequently creates a monster by using parts of various dead bodies.  Throughout the course of the novel, Frankenstein’s monster commits a number of criminal acts, supposedly making it difficult for readers to sympathise with him.  However, some of the monster’s actions, the language that he uses, and the way in which the novel is structured, actually encourage the reader to sympathise with him.  My intention is to explore how and why Mary Shelley creates sympathy for Frankenstein’s monster.

The first obvious instance of Shelley attempting to create sympathy for the monster comes at the moment of his “animation” or “birth”.  Appalled and unnerved by the living appearance of the monster, Frankenstein instantly rejects him:  ‘Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room’.  This instant repudiation by Victor of his own ‘being’, could evoke pity from the readers as they know that the fact the monster has a repulsive appearance is no fault of his own.  Following the initial shock of seeing the monster in an animated state, Victor retires to bed, but is woken by the monster holding up the curtain of his bed and supposedly reaching out to ‘detain’ him.  However, due to the fact that this event is recounted during Victor’s narrative, one gets the impression that Shelley has purposefully made it appear that Victor is recounting this event slightly differently, and in fact the monster’s gesture was not a menacing one, but instead somewhat similar to that of a child reaching out for its parent.  Again, this helps readers to feel sympathy for the monster and also creates a more negative opinion of Frankenstein.

The second instance of Mary Shelley creating sympathy for the monster occurs during Victor’s second encounter with him.  This meeting comes at a much later point in the novel.  After months of suffering from a fever, Victor learns of his brother William’s murder; and the execution of a young girl named Justine Moritz who had been adopted by the Frankenstein household.  Whilst passing through the woods in which his brother was murdered, Frankenstein catches sight of what he becomes convinced is the monster, and instantly concludes that the murder of his brother was the monster’s doing.  To ease the grief brought on by the murder of William, Victor embarks on a holiday to the mountains, and it is whilst he is crossing a glacier that he next comes face-to-face with his monster.  The setting in which this meeting takes place show Shelley juxtaposing the beauty of “God’s creation” – ‘wonderful and stupendous scene’ – with the hideousness of Frankenstein’s monster – almost too horrible for human eyes’.  Rather than evoke pity, this is perhaps evidence of Shelley’s own thoughts and feelings, with the creation of God being beautiful and awe-inspiring, and Frankenstein’s creation being hideous and wretched.

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The meeting on the glacier is the first point in the novel where the monster actually speaks.  It is here that readers expecting the monster’s dialect to be similar to that of a crude Neanderthal, are shocked by the fact that the monster’s speech is incredibly delicate and eloquent: ‘I expected this reception…all men hate the wretched…thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of once of us.’  The fact that Shelley gives the monster such calm, articulate speech, presents Victor to be more of a monster, as he expresses his feelings with ...

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