The structure of Shelley’s novel further serves to create doubt in the mind of the reader as to the truth of this initial description. The use of the framed narrative structure means that the novel could be considered to contain three first person narrators, allowing different perspectives to be expressed. Jane Bathard-Smith raises the point that Frankenstein’s narrative is ‘deeply biased’, and that the inclusion of the monster’s account gives the reader ‘the chance to respond to him directly, without being influenced by a manipulating intermediary’. Certainly, the character of Frankenstein is shown to have a repulsion to his creation that is not always justified: from the outset he labels him a ‘wretch’, a ‘miserable monster’ and a ‘demoniacal corpse’; Bathard-Smith implies that the clear bias in Frankenstein’s narrative and his consistently unsympathetic view of his creation shows that it is him who is to blame for the later crimes, that the formation of the monster as a villain comes about as a result of the negative labels that Frankenstein ascribes the monster from the beginning. Such an idea could be linked to feminism – this could be Shelley’s comment on a society in which women were subjugated and not allowed to step outside a certain role because of expectations and labels ascribed to them from birth. This concept is compounded by the monster’s later reference to himself as ‘a poor, helpless, miserable wretch’: Shelley reiterates Frankenstein’s label in order to demonstrate the negative effect that the attitude of others can have on self-perception and expectation.
Of course, it cannot be overlooked that Frankenstein not only labels his creation as ‘monstrous’, but also creates him as such. It is Frankenstein who is shown to dabble ‘among the unhallowed damps of the grave’, selects ‘features as beautiful’ and assembles them in his ‘workshop of filthy creation’. This creation could be likened to a birth, and in fact Frankenstein creates the monster as a ‘human being’ – in his own image. The use of doppelgangers is common in the Gothic genre, and it is here deployed in order to show the split nature of the character of Frankenstein. In describing the monster as Frankenstein’s ‘own spirit let loose from the grave’; with its ‘gigantic stature’, Shelley possibly intends to display an exaggerated version of Frankenstein’s immoral self. The fact that the monster is the product of Frankenstein and has been crafted and moulded by him implies that it is Frankenstein who is to blame for the later crimes committed.
The concept of origins and ancestry playing a part in the formation of character is also explored by Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian is shown to ponder on the effect that his own ancestors have had on him, whether ‘some strange poisonous germ crept from body to body until it reached his own’ and if he had been ‘bequeathed… some inheritance of sin and shame’. Like in Frankenstein, the protagonist is to an extent excused his sins because of the influence of his forebears; as put by Robert Mighall, Dorian is ‘haunted by his ancestral legacies rather than being entirely motivated by his own personal vanity’. On the other hand, although this could be argued for Frankenstein’s monster, whose ‘father’ has a direct influence on him, this appears to be rather a weak argument for Dorian, who unlike the monster has not been moulded by his relatives, as his father ‘was killed in a duel…a few months after the marriage’ and his mother ‘died within a year’. If Wilde wishes Dorian’s actions to appear to come about as a result of the influence exerted by an outside party, the more likely scapegoats are those who have the most direct contact with him.
The effect of external influence on characters is particularly evident in Frankenstein with the relationship between the monster and his creator, which could be considered to have direct parallels to Milton’s Paradise Lost. Shelley portrays Frankenstein as abandoning the monster both physically and emotionally, attempting to cleanse himself of any responsibility towards the creature: he refers to him as a ‘hideous guest’ and regards it as ‘good fortune’ that ‘my enemy had indeed fled’. In this way, the monster is deprived of any Paradise at all: he sees Victor as having a loving family and friends, but is denied even ‘a creature of another sex…as hideous as myself’, and laments ‘everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded’. It is arguable that due to Frankenstein’s actions that the monster turns to violence and hatred, claiming ‘I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed’. Like Satan, the monster seeks revenge by destroying what his creator loves most: not only Frankenstein’s paradise of his family and friends, but also his ideals about scientific knowledge. As Milton presents a sympathetic view of Satan in Paradise Lost, so Shelley shifts the blame from the monster to his creator in Frankenstein.
The Picture of Dorian Gray also reflects Paradise Lost, and like Shelley, Wilde uses this analogy in order to apportion blame. Dorian is cast as the innocent Adam, who is tainted and corrupted by Lord Henry representing Satan and his philosophy of ‘the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it’. Wilde shows Lord Henry to have had great influence over Dorian, and he specifically refers to him as ‘his own creation’, while acknowledging that ‘there is no such thing as a good influence…all influence is immoral’: in this Wilde demonstrates that Dorian cannot be entirely to blame, but that his relationship with his creator and the influence that has been exerted over him carry the fault.
However, it could still be argued that there is more blame placed on the character of Dorian than there is on that of Frankenstein’s monster. The setting of the seduction of Dorian by Lord Henry directly mimics the Garden of Eden, with ‘great cool lilac blossoms’ and ‘green-and-white butterflies’, underlining the beauty of the Paradise that Dorian is leaving behind in succumbing to Lord Henry’s hedonistic beliefs and gratifying his senses. In this Dorian differs from the monster: he chooses to leave his paradise and commit crimes, while the monster is shown as having little choice, creating a level of sympathy for him on the part of the reader. Wilde’s character acts out of curiosity, while the motivation of Shelley’s is anger and desperation at the rejection he has encountered from both his ‘father’ and his adopted family, the de Laceys. In a way, the character of Dorian is not dissimilar to that of Victor Frankenstein, as both turn away from their paradises in order to satisfy a personal urge, and both can therefore be more squarely blamed than a character like the monster.
The most significant crimes committed by the monster are the murders of William, Clerval and Elizabeth: in each of these Shelley shows the monster to demonstrate little remorse: in fact, in the case of William his ‘heart swelled with exultation and hellish triumph’. The use of ‘hellish’ is reminiscent of Milton’s lexical choices describing the devil in Paradise Lost, suggestive of the parallels between Frankenstein and Satan. At this juncture, it seems difficult not to blame the monster for the crimes that he has committed seemingly in cold blood, although it would still be simplistic to suggest that Shelley wishes the reader to believe that these are the most heinous crimes of the novel.
These murders are seen as a direct consequence of a more serious crime of neglect and rejection committed by Frankenstein: Shelley shows the monster as providing the punishment for Frankenstein’s own crimes, with ‘Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict’. Shelley reveals that it is Frankenstein who has led the monster to this point, and it is therefore Frankenstein who could be considered the main perpetrator of crimes in this novel.
It is interesting, therefore, to further examine Frankenstein’s reaction to the monster’s crimes. Shelley shows him as considering himself the ‘murderer or William, of Justine, and of Clerval’ via his ‘murderous machinations’. However, Shelley never depicts him as repentant for his transgressions towards the monster: he claims himself to be ‘more miserable than man ever was before’ and certainly repents the pain that he has caused himself via ‘the miserable daemon whom I had sent abroad into the world for my destruction’ but never appreciates the pain that he has caused his creation. In portraying Victor Frankenstein as selfish and uncaring, Shelley apportions part of the blame for the crimes committed in the novel to him.
Wilde also explores this selfish trait in shaping Dorian’s response to his crimes. Unlike Frankenstein, Dorian is shown to be remarkably nonplussed about the deaths of those he loves – ‘so I have murdered Sybil Vane…Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that’ – but he is displayed as being concerned with the effect of these crimes on himself. Wilde the aesthete focuses on beauty; namely, the beauty and purity of Dorian’s soul. It is the deterioration of Dorian’s self that he is shown to fear: Frankenstein’s lost paradise is his friends and family, while Dorian loses his inner beauty. Following the deaths of Basil and Sybil, Wilde portrays Dorian as preoccupied with ‘the living death of his own soul’, and shows him only choosing to ‘be good’ because he ‘can’t bear the idea of [his] soul being hideous’. Shelley and Wilde both choose to create criminals who repent of their crimes only because of their effect upon themselves, not upon others: a reader is more likely to take a less sympathetic view of such a character and blame them for all crimes, those directly committed by them but also those that they incite.
Both authors create protagonists who are unwilling to take responsibility for their crimes, and instead try to pass them off as the handiwork of another. For Frankenstein it is ‘the filthy daemon to whom I had given life’, while for Dorian ‘it was the portrait that had done everything’. According to Freudian theory, both of these entities could be considered the physical manifestations of the id, or base, primal desires, of their more respectable counterparts. The concept of the doppelganger is one that is used often in gothic novels, but it is here used slightly differently in order to portray the darker sides of a character’s nature. Significantly, the later descriptions of Dorian’s portrait as ‘loathsome’ allow more direct comparisons to be drawn between the portrait and the character of the monster, implying that they are in fact intended to represent the same thing. This leaves Dorian and Frankenstein as representative of the outwardly respectable face of society, while the monster and the portrait signify the repressed desires contained within.
It is this idea of the characters being representative of society that provides the crux of both novels. The society depicted in Wilde’s novel is typically divided, with certain social expectations of gentlemen that are not always compatible with inner desires – ‘each of us has Heaven and Hell in him’. Wilde implies that the façade that must be maintained in order to meet expectation is damaging, that it is like acting, like an art. In trying to circumvent this, Dorian turns to crime, because, as stated by Lord Henry ‘crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders…I should fancy that what crime is to them art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations’. Particularly when viewed in the context of Wilde’s life, during which he was forced to suppress his homosexuality and other desires in order to retain respectability, The Picture of Dorian Gray could almost certainly be viewed as a novel depicting how a need to repress beliefs and feelings will lead to wrongdoing. In this, it is important that the blame for the crimes is placed on the character of Dorian, as it is only through this that it can be understood that his behaviour is caused by the unrealistic contemporary societal expectations.
Shelley’s novel is also a comment on society that could be interpreted in two different ways. Most obviously, it forms part of the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment: although the novel has a clear scientific base, Shelley uses this as a tool to warn against the dangers of too great a scientific development and dependency. Here, Frankenstein and Walton are representative of the over-reaching scientists of the time, who wish to probe into ‘the dangerous mysteries of the ocean’ and the ‘dangerous…acquirement of knowledge’: the repetition of the ‘dangerous’ even here creates a sense of foreboding and implies Shelley’s warning even early in the novel. The monster is symbolic of the outcome of such an endeavour – Shelley crafts him to physically embody the spiritual ugliness that this task portrays: ‘frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world’. In placing the blame on Frankenstein in the novel, Shelley demonstrates the destruction that could be caused by the quests for scientific advancement that characterised the Enlightenment.
Like in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Shelley also manipulates her characters to present a view of the divisions of society. Unlike Wilde, however, she focuses on a more Marxist element: the monster could be considered representative of the proletariat, which the capitalist elements of society both despise and rely on. The monster is shown to be ‘more powerful’ than Frankenstein, his creator, and capable of making him ‘so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you’. In this way, Shelley demonstrates the power of the working classes, and the peril caused by the aristocratic rejection of them. This was particularly pertinent at the time of the first publication, during which England, influenced by the recent French Revolution, was in upheaval and close to a working class revolution. Again, the apportioning of blame to Frankenstein is symbolic of the need for a change in attitude among the upper classes, and a necessity to care for and appreciate the proletariat.
Throughout both Frankenstein and The Picture of Dorian Gray, the respective authors direct the reader to apportion blame to certain characters in order to lead them to the desired conclusions. Both novels are a commentary on society, both consider the crimes in the novel not as the product of one character, but of society as a whole. Shelley and Wilde indicate that society needs to change, in one way or another, in order to escape the death and destruction that feature so prominently in their novels.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 19
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 143
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 143
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 59
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 59
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 59
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 60
Jane Bathard-Smith, What to call the monster?, emagazine, Feb 2004
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 59
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 60
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 105
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 55
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 54
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 78
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 77
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 137
Robert Mighall, Introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg xix
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 35
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 62
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 148
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 103
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 21
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 57
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 20
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 23
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 26
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 144
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 173
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 181
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 181
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 202
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 96
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 210
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 94
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 78
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 210
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 211
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 150
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pg 203
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 22
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 53
Mary Shelley, Author’s Introduction to Frankenstein, pg 9
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 102
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pg 172