The feminist view is also relevant, stating that the dream represents his crime against both the feminine principal of the mother and birth-giver, and against nature, which is often portrayed as feminine. This also signifies that Frankenstein’s response is one of guilt.
Frankenstein wakes, escaping the nightmare of his dreams but entering the nightmare of reality. The creature is almost childlike in its behaviour, but from the moment he wakes Frankenstein negatively interprets the actions of the creature. “He muttered some inarticulate sounds”, “one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me.” His inarticulate sounds are reminiscent of a baby before it begins to form words properly; Frankenstein does not even hear the sounds, as he is too horrified to sense anything. The hand seemingly stretched out to detain Frankenstein would be interpreted in children as a desire to have contact with its creator and life-giver, bonding with them. Frankenstein is apparently shunning responsibility for his creation, as he is not able to see these gestures of bonding towards him; his actions also make us assume that he is horrified by what he has given life to and consequently interprets the creature actions negatively.
Once Clerval arrives in Ingolstadt and the monster is no longer in his room, Frankenstein perceives that he can forget all about the monster and renounce all responsibility for the creature. For the most part he manages this, despite his nervous breakdown. However when Clerval says to him “I may speak to you on one subject, may I not?” Frankenstein immediately thinks that Clerval has found out about the creature and wants to question him, when in fact it was an innocent subject concerning writing a letter home. This proves that the creature will always be on his conscience and he will never be able to forget it.
Mary Shelley uses a variety of techniques in Frankenstein to present the monstrous nature of the creature created by Victor. Once life is instilled in the creature, Frankenstein tries to describe what it looks like to Robert Walton, who he is telling the story to at this point. Mary Shelley uses two opposing semantic fields to outline the creature’s appearance; a group of positive characteristics and a group of negative characteristics. These descriptions allow a detailed image to be built up in the mind of the reader. The positive characteristics include words such as “beautiful”, “limbs in proportion”, “lustrous black” and “pearly whiteness”.
These words are contrasted with the negative characteristics, for example “horrid”, “yellow skin”, “watery eyes”, “dun-white sockets” and “straight, black lips”. The contrast makes the negative characteristics even more vivid and gruesome, presenting the monstrous nature of the creature.
Another semantic field used by Mary Shelley to portray the nature of the creature contains words such as “horror”, “wretch”, “hideous” and “daemonical”. These words conjure up pictures of a truly hideous monster. Although we are aware that Frankenstein is horrified at the creature he has created, some of the words used to describe the nature of the creature may have been added to Frankenstein’s opinions with the benefit of hindsight, especially words like daemonical, as Frankenstein knew what the monster had done when he told this story to Robert Walton.
In Frankenstein’s opinion, the creature became “…a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.” This reference is important; here Mary Shelley is referring to “The Divine Comedy” a book written by Dante in which the first section describes the seven circles of Hell. This indicates what Frankenstein really thinks of the creature; he believes it is so monstrous that it would look out of place in Hell.
I think that Mary Shelley is using her story as an example of what could happen to all the scientists of her day. Her main viewpoint is that many scientists have excellent ideas that would benefit the whole of mankind; she herself could have benefited from people being brought back to life, for example her mother. These ideas are good in theory and ma y seem to work during experimentation and research, but once they are actually employed there maybe serious consequences. In Frankenstein, Victor’s idea was set to benefit a lot of people, but once the process had been performed, he could see that the idea did not work. This also leads onto a view that all things natural, as created by nature, are beautiful whereas artificially made products manufactured by those attempting to play God will never be anywhere near as exquisite as the natural equivalent. This view would probably be shared by Mary Shelley as she belonged to the Romantic movement which believed in and was fascinated by nature in the role of the healer etc..
We know that Mary Shelley was an atheist, but she probably did think that interfering with the secrets supposedly only known to God was wrong.