Darkly dramatic ‘Gothic’ moments stand out throughout the novel: one event in particular is the creation of the monster in Chapter 5. Dark description used in this chapter sets the mood. The technique of pathetic fallacy is clearly evident from the start. The ‘dreary night of November’ reflects Victor’s anxious agonising wait to witness the awakening of his ‘accomplishments of his toils’. The rain is pattering ‘dismally’, the candle only just glimmering, and the ‘lifeless thing’ at his feet, sets a foreboding tone. He can’t even call his creation “human”.
Victor’s own agonising wait for the monster’s birth matches the reader’s. It is an appropriately bleak and depressing scene for the opening of the ‘dull yellow eye’ of the creature Victor so repeatedly refers to as ‘miserable wretch’ – ironically it is the creature who is later the cause of Victor’s misery. The way in which the monster’s awakening is described, clearly shows Shelley’s use of measured and evocative writing
‘I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open: it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion, agitated its limbs’.
The revelation of the monster is slow, dramatic and paused. The key facets of the monster begin to work and the reader is made aware that this is not the birth of innocence but the creation of a monster and so, their interest is aroused. Victor’s reaction is to flee. His instincts warn him that he has created a ‘catastrophe’: the reader is hooked. In an attempt to ‘seek a few moments of forgetfulness’ his dreams are invaded by truly Gothic images: the dead corpse of his mother, ‘grave-worms crawling’ ‘livid with the hue of death’. His tumultuous thoughts reflect the horror of what he has created, and the reader lives that horror through Victor’s reaction.
To the reader, the description of the grotesque monster on this particular occasion seems full of pathos. The creature tries to communicate, muttering ‘inarticulate’ sounds as he grins at his creator through his ‘straight black lips’ causing horror and revulsion in the reader. The use of vivid, visual, emotive language, a technique used repeatedly by Shelley, enables the reader to picture clearly the abhorrent monster. He stretches one arm out towards Victor – this could be a parody of Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation of Man’ in the Sistine Chapel, suggesting an analogy between Victor and God and the monster and Adam, and anticipating the many allusions to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ which subsequently plays an important role in the shaping and development of the characters.
The narrative of ‘Frankenstein ’is not linear, the points of view shift between Victor, the monster and Walton through the journalistic device. This offers the reader a different perspective, allowing them to transfer their sympathies from one character to another and this serves to sustain the reader’s interest.
The story line of ‘Frankenstein’ embarks upon the dark journey of exploration of man’s dark nature the desire to see what the monster is capable of and what happens to the characters serves as a page-turner to the Victorian reader. Today’s 21st century reader is far more discerning and media savvy and may be less horrified by ‘Frankenstein’. However, the universal thin line that exists between attraction and revulsion still applies. The reader is drawn to the depraved, foul and murderous behaviour of the monster.
‘I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept’.
He admits to killing those ‘who never injured me, or any other living thing’. The emphasis on the vulnerability of his victims makes him all the more evil and yet the reader cannot totally condemn him. This reflects the evil men are capable of and the reader can empathise with this. Yet likewise, the reader is attracted and repelled by Victor. He unleashed the monster yet he, too, becomes its victim. Victor is a complex misguided character and his own vulnerability and isolation draws the reader to him.
While the term “monster” is often used to describe anything terrifyingly unnatural, it initially had far more precise connotations, and these are of some significance for the ways in which the monstrous comes to function within the gothic. Shelley suggests that what Victor does and what he creates is unnatural’ he goes too far and breaks the laws of nature and what he unleashes into society is disruption and destruction in the form of the monster ‘its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes’.
This attraction to the monster is part of Shelley’s psychological exploration, which engages the reader, where she probes the very ideas of monstrosity and humanity. If the creature’s appearance is a visible warning, it is a warning to the readers of Victor’s own mistakes, not the monster’s. Although the creature’s exterior may be horrific, he is, at least initially, not ‘frighteningly unnatural’, rather he is far more natural and humane than the “father” who rejects him, the villagers who stone him and the ungrateful father who shoots him in chapter 15. It is only when he is exposed to, and suffers from, the viciousness of human society that he himself begins to demonstrate violent behaviour. Herein, lies the tragedy of human nature.
William’s strangulation is a tragic example of this. When William loaded the monster with insults which
‘...‘carried to despair to my heart, I grasped his throat to silence him and in a moment he lay dead at my feet’.
The suspense and horror of this act, is not in the vivid description, but the stark actions ‘to silence him’ and the finality of ‘he lay dead at my feet’. Some of the reader’s sympathies have been transferred to the monster, as they begin to understand what drives him to kill.
The psychological relationship that exists between Victoria and his creation is very Freudian and sinister. Victor creates a ‘hideous wretch’ who he rejects thereby releasing the monster’s revenge. Similarly, William’s murder is satisfying as he feels ‘I, too, can create desolation’ and he succumbs to mans’ lowest common denominator – a ruthless serial murderer. The reader sympathies are engaged on a rollercoaster of ambivalence – who is the monster, Victor or the creature?
Shelley uses clever the technique of role reversal to keep the reader intrigued: as Victor becomes more repentant and humble, he becomes inarticulate, whereas the monster, as he becomes crueller, becomes increasingly articulate.
Shelley uses the technique of emotive language to evoke the reader’s sympathy of the monster’s situation. The exchange between Victor and the creature in Chapter 10 is particularly interesting for the reader due to the various shifts in roles that takes place. The creature’s language is generally calm and dignified, biblically solemn and reasoned
‘I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king’.
He is an eloquent rhetorician. He draws with skill upon such devices as oxymoron and antitheses: ‘I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel’ which sums up his feelings of rejection. His threats are measured and elegant, with a sophisticated yet powerful, underlying horrific overtones:
‘If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends’.
This threat is spine – chilling and the monster’s intelligence is clearly demonstrated here, as instead of threatening Victor himself, the monster uses psychological trickery. This is the first time the readers hear the monster speak, and they find that despite his hideous appearance, he is the most eloquent character in the novel; there is a striking contradiction here between the verbal and visual.
In comparison, Victor seems to do little more than splutter insults and threats. His language clearly reveals that he is in the grip of a terrible savage passion. His speeches are almost absurdly melodramatic, full of exclamations and theatrical expressions such as ‘Begone, vile insect!’ He addresses the creature like a vengeful God:
‘…do not you fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head?’
Victor repeatedly refers to the violence of is feelings; his rage is ‘without bounds’, he ‘trembled with rage and horror’. ‘Rage and hatred’ first deprive him of speech, but then he overwhelms the monster with words ‘expressive of furious detestation and contempt’. In this passage, the boundaries between the human and monstrous seem to dissolve as Victor’s savage passion suggests that he, not the creature, is the true monster. Shelley, here, forces the readers to ask what a monster actually is, how do we define the monstrous and the human and is it even possible to make a clear distinction between the two?
Sex and seduction are further gothic traits which secure the reader’s interest. At the very moment the monster appears most horrific, he sees the miniature of Caroline. Women in this novel are most noticed for their effects on others; Elizabeth, Victor’s fiancée, for example, has previously been called ‘the living spirit of love to soften and attract’. Caroline has a similar influence, even through the medium of her portrait. The readers know, although the monster does not, that this is Victor’s mother. Mothers in ‘Frankenstein’ are notable for their absence – they suggest something which is desired, but prohibited. This is particularly true in the case of the monster, whose erotic gaze is focused on the maternal figure that he, due to the circumstances of his birth, has been denied. This mixture of lack and desire may be of particular significance if we consider the monster as Victor’s double – his “doppelganger”. Victor too has been denied his mother through death, and his fear of sexuality which he sees as horrific is at least partly a fear of his incestuous desires. Both Victor and the monster obsess for a mother. The intricate sexual complexities are reflected in both characters and this would satisfy a Victorian reader.
Soon after, the monster encounters Justine. The desire he has felt in gazing at the portrait is transferred to the woman he finds sleeping at his feet. This scene could be described as a perverse fantasy of rape, there is far more tenderness than violence in the monster’s language. Echoing Satan whispering seductively into the ear of the sleeping Eve in Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, he whispers seductively to Justine, ‘awake, fairest, thy lover is near’. His attempt at seduction is halted, however, by the recollection that if Justine should awake she could reveal him as a murderer. All his satanic impulses now come to the surface; the ‘fiend’ stirs within him. The hostility he feels at being denied possession of the mother is transferred to this mother substitute,
‘…not indeed as beautiful as her whose portrait I held; but of an agreeable aspect’.
He decided to implicate Justine in the murder, condemning her because he cannot possess her. Here, we can see the monster as Victor’s double, acting out Victor’s aggression towards women, and, in particular, see the monster as an embodiment of Victor’s horrific sexuality, where the mother is desired, but prohibited, and where the erotic is fused with the murderous. These two dark sides of the human nature, being explored and compared side by side, result in a compelling gothic read.
At the end of the tale, in true Gothic fashion, there is narrative resolution, albeit implicit. Victor’s own death is reminiscent of the monster’s birth ‘his eyes half closed, and his limbs hanging listlessly’ as he acknowledges,
‘In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature’ who ironically ‘showed unparalleled malignity and selfishness in evil’.
Like a tragic Shakespearian hero, Victor redeems himself on his death bed, urging Walton to destroy the monster. Likewise, the monster acknowledges ‘your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself.’ The monster hates himself as much as the reader does and the connotations of ‘torturing flames’ and ‘conflagration’ in the monster’s last words satisfy the reader’s need for him to suffer and pay for his crimes. He is destroyed.
In its exploration of man’s psyche, its focus on the dark side of humanity, ‘Frankenstein’ sets a trend for later Victorian Gothic novels such as Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. The novel ‘Frankenstein’ refuses to distance the reader from the horrors described but insists instead on exploring the complex human issues raised; they draw on science, not superstition, on what is frighteningly possible and familiar rather than entirely absurd and alien. This technique of tangibility is more frightening than the abstract world of vampires and werewolves. While ‘Frankenstein’ is generally identified as a Gothic novel, Mary Shelley, whilst using the more traditional elements of this genre also encompasses new elements which engage the readers interest, including reference to the scientific debates and discoveries of her time based on secular and materialistic elements of nature. Shelley manages to combine traditional Gothic features with elements such as birth and creation, alienation, psychology and sociology, science and social critique, all of which add dimension to the tale. It also has a moralistic air: the idea that society itself is monstrous – how do we define the monstrous and how the human? Can we distinguish between the two?
‘Frankenstein’ very much began the genre of the psychological thriller, where man can see himself reflected in the characters he reads about, exploring the old adage that man is fascinated by the evil men do.
