In "Frankenstein" the fiend's life allows Marry Shelley to dramatize her ideas about evil; this is because the creature began his life as a charitable and affectionate character. However Victor Frankenstein didn't want anything to do with him and left. Also
Mary Shelley deceives us into thinking that the fiend Victor Frankenstein has created is evil when he in fact tried to be friendly but "turned bad" due to ill treatment. She makes the creature seem evil outside Geneva and the way she does this is by associating the fiend with harsh conditions. For example he meets him on a stormy night when it is raining hard and very cold; Mary Shelley uses "dismally" to describe the weather to emphasize the dullness. Also the background to this scene is the mountains which connects the creature with hostile conditions. Mary Shelley uses a lot of strong emotive language that doesn’t provide us with a visual image but tells us that he is too hideous to look at. Some examples of this are "ugly", "horrid", and "hideous". Also "Depraved wretch", which suggests that he lacks any decency and completely immoral is used. "Filthy daemon", is used to provide a strong connection with hell and evil.
During the book we find out that Mary Shelley has deceived us, by the revelation that the fiend in fact was a kind person but turned evil due to certain incidences, he experienced, where he was mistreated. This is a big surprise because up to that point in the book Victor Frankenstein leads us to believe that the fiend was morally wrong, for example he says "demoniacal corpse" and "monster" which make us think that he is evil. Also we found out, after that he murdered Victor's sister which makes us think he is even more evil. However we are told that he in fact started out life as a kind and caring person but because of Victor and other peoples' actions turned against humanity. Mary Shelley did this to make us think that all beings start out good but may become bad if ill-treated and not to look at things at face value.
In "The Destructors" the main character "T" who instigates the demolition of "Old Misery's" house has no principal motives. However we are given hints of certain motives to why he longs to do this. These are that on Page 168, it says, "His father, a former architect and present clerk, had "come down in the world"". This suggests that he is gaining revenge on the occupation of Architecture because his father was sacked from it; he wants to destruct the house because it is a quite expensive, luxurious and a "credit" to architecture. He may also be unhappy and down beat with the current situation of the world and is bored so he needs to do something. He may simply just be jealous of "Old Misery" because he doesn't have as much wealth. We are also given some hints that "T" has as an appetite for destruction and has a talent for it, when on Page 177 it says "Destruction is after all a form of creation". There is also a possiblilty that "T" is crazy and is infatuated with destruction because on Page 173, he says, "We'd be like worms, don't you see, in an apple". Graham Greene gives us quite few motives but no outstanding reason to make evil mysterious and that we can't understand it.
The other characters in "The Destructors", are important to Graham Greene's ideas because they are used as a contrast to "T". This is because they have all been through the hard times during the war, with food shortages and realization of the mass killing but only the main character, "T" is really evil. The others are tying to get fame and acknowledgment but "T" for some reason is just trying to be evil. What Graham Greene is saying is that evil is not simple but mysterious; because all of them would be evil if it was caused by ill treatment.
The moral of "The Destructors" is that evil is quite mysterious; we don't know why it happens. They're maybe many reasons why people are evil; it is not just how they have been treated which may turn them i.e. we are yet to understand the origin of evil. Mary Shelley however has the idea that that evil is a direct cause of ill treatment and harm done by others, which can turn them against you, and if we treat people well then they will treat you well in return. Frankenstein also has a second moral in that humans should not "mess" with human genetics and nature because as soon as Victor creates the fiend, everything goes wrong.
The story that Mary Shelley has written has a lot to do with the time period she was writing in i.e. her ideas are connected greatly with the theories and opinions that were "in the air" at that time. For example her parents, William Godwin and Mary Walstonecraft were very much knowledgeable of the theories of the day and therefore she would have been brought up on those ideas. John Locke who said, "the mind of a newborn child is completely blank and the personality is "imprinted" by the child's education and experience" was well known. Also Jean-Jaques Rousseau who wrote the novel "Emile" backed up Locke's idea by voicing the opinion that children would grow up good if allowed to develop naturally and freed from poverty and oppression. These two people would have considerably influenced Mary Shelley.
"The Destructors" written in the 1950's would also have been greatly affected by the things that were going on at that time but the ideas would have differed. The main thing that surrounded that period was the end of the Second World War and the aftermath; the war is also mentioned quite a few times during the story for example Page 169-"The site of the last bomb of the first blitz". The teenagers would have been greatly affected then, there would have been ruins of buildings hit by bombs, rationing due to food shortages caused by the sinking of merchant ships. People would have realized the extent of killing and become aware of the death camps. Even though the war would have just finished America and Russia, the superpowers were looking to re-arm and begin another war. To the teenagers they couldn’t see the point; many people had been killed but the superpowers wanted to start another war.
