Mary Shelley’s personal life could have been the reason behind the death and new life issues in the story. Her Mother died when she was very young girl and then when Mary Shelley had a child of her own; it died when it was 11 days old. Also when she had a child out of wedlock, her Father rejected her for 2 years, which could reflect the rejection the monster receives from Frankenstein. In the beginning of the story Shelley makes Frankenstein’s attitudes to science and being able to play God exciting and good news, but in the end of the story the attitudes change and there seems to be a warning to not play God because it’s dangerous and has bad after affects.
At the beginning of chapter 5, pathetic fallacy is used to create the feeling of dullness and boredom, which is very unlike traditional gothic horror. At the end of this paragraph, the dullness changes to excitement and anticipation as the monster comes to life.
Frankenstein had obviously wanted his creation to be perfect, as he said about how it’s “limbs were in proportion” and “his hair was of a lustrous black” and “his teeth of a pearly whiteness”. Yet despite these wonderful things, he was disappointed in the way the creature looked. He was disgusted, “No mortal could support the horror of that countenance.” He refers to his creation as a hideous wretch and say’s it to be a thing that Dante, who was an Italian poet concerned with representing Hell, could not have conceived. He was possibly scared of its appearance and he prejudged it. Frankenstein being prejudice towards the creature lead to his rejection towards it and all the others that see it later on in the story feel the same as well, apart from a blind man. The monster was rejected as soon as it was infused with life, as soon as it “born”, when it was a young baby and most needed it’s “Mother”, as a factor of this the monster grew up to be cold hearted and to have a dislike to humans, and a hatred to his creator.
An important part of this chapter, is a dream that Frankenstein has shortly after he creates the monster. In this dream he sees his wife Elizabeth, whom he is “delighted and surprised” to see, but as he kisses her, her lips become “livid with the hue of death” her features change and Frankenstein ends up holding the corpse of his dead Mother in his arms. This could symbolise many meanings such as maybe he had sexual feeling towards his dead Mother, as there is already some sort of incestuous relationship between him and Elizabeth, or that he missed his Mother, or even that he was scared of sex and sexual relationships, this could be said to be romanticism. Another may be that it could be annotating there not being a need for women to create life anymore or that he has a fear of Elizabeth dying. The dream could also be a warning to the deaths that happen later on in the novel.
Michelangelo’s image of ‘The Creation if Man’ in which God and Adam (the first man) are in could show Frankenstein and the monster, as Frankenstein has played God at creating new life. In the original God, the creator, seems to be reaching out to touch Adam and shows love towards his creation, whereas if It was of Frankenstein and the monster, it would be the monster reaching out to Frankenstein.
In the chapter there is a poem called Coleridege’s Ancient Mariner -
“I like one who, on a lonely road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And, having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.”
This gives the idea that the monster is always close behind Frankenstein at the end.
Frankenstein uses scientific language to show the awareness he has of the affects the creature has on him “my pulse beat so quickly and hardly that I felt the palpitation of every artery.”
I think that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein to express her feelings about her life and her past and to discuss the matters and developments that were happening in science and modern life at that time. She may have also written it to say that people make us who we are and how we act and feel. The most obvious meaning to the story though, is that religion was better than science and that science had a far way to go, and that people shouldn’t experiment with it unless they were able to cope with the consequences.
