In Mary Shelley's Novel, Frankenstein, Who Is More Monstrous, Frankenstein or His Creation?

Franklin Barr Page 10/05/2007

In Mary Shelley’s Novel, Frankenstein, Who Is More Monstrous, Frankenstein or His Creation?

Introduction

Mary Shelly was born in 1797 and died in 1851; she was the second wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the famous English poet. Her novel “Frankenstein” was written when she was only 19 years of age and she wrote it as a response to a challenge that Lord Byron set her. Frankenstein is considered by some to be a modern Prometheus, an ancient Greek myth about the creation of man.

Section 1

Frankenstein wanted to be able to create life and defeat death:

Frankenstein -“I might in the process of time…renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.”

Frankenstein dreams of a world where death is not an object and he hopes that one day death would only mean having to be brought back to life. At this point Frankenstein does not seem at all monstrous. Although in the beginning Frankenstein’s intentions are good but, the way he goes about realising his dream is not:

Frankenstein - “I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave.”

Mary Shelly uses the word “dabbled” to describe the way Frankenstein looks for body parts in graves. These could have been from people who had families or other loved ones, but Frankenstein treats them as pieces of meat, materials for his experiment, and this makes the reader disgusted at Frankenstein. This is the first sign that Frankenstein is immoral. Despite this, might be forgiven as his judgement is affected by his desire to create rather than destroy life. Although this could shock a modern reader, it does not compare to the reaction of a Victorian audience. A modern society would already have been exposed to terrible things like this and be accustomed to them through the frequent appearance of similar events in books, television and film. A Victorian audience would not have experienced this so it makes the impact of the events even more nauseating.

Section 2

In chapter 5, Frankenstein confesses that he tried to make his creation beautiful but succeeded only in making it look even more hideous. This is one of the creation’s so-called beautiful features:

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Frankenstein - “his teeth of a pearly whiteness.”

Here I think Frankenstein is trying to convince himself that his creation is not as hideous as he really knows it is, although he eventually comes to realise this:

Frankenstein - “Beautiful! Great god! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of his muscles and arteries beneath.”

This is the point at which Frankenstein starts to realise that he despises the being he spent years constructing. I think the fact that Frankenstein first finds the monster beautiful and then repulsive represents the way Frankenstein loses his innocence and begins to understand his ...

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Frankenstein - “his teeth of a pearly whiteness.”

Here I think Frankenstein is trying to convince himself that his creation is not as hideous as he really knows it is, although he eventually comes to realise this:

Frankenstein - “Beautiful! Great god! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of his muscles and arteries beneath.”

Section 3

In chapter 11 when the monster is living in the woods after Frankenstein has just abandoned him, the monster describes his first normal human sensations:

Monster - “I knew I could distinguish nothing.”

Here the monster is confused about what he is feeling and knows he must find out what it is. He is also unsure about what he hearing and smelling:

Monster - “innumerable sounds rang in my ears, and on all sides various scents saluted me.”

The monster appears to be scared of what normal educated humans would not pay a second thought to; this makes the audience sympathetic towards the monster and they will also think at this point he is not monstrous. The monster thinks that he should be able to make the sounds that they can:

Monster -“sometimes I tried to imitate the songs of the birds but was unable…the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again.”

Here the monster realises that he cannot make the sounds of birds and thinks there is something wrong with him. The monster does not even know the simplest things like something can be too hot:

Monster - “I thrust my hand into the live embers, but quickly drew it out again with a cry of pain.”

The monster does not comprehend that pain can come from the same source as pleasure. Up to this point the monster has been the victim in all of this the audience would be feeling great sympathy towards the monster.

These quotes reveal the monster’s inadequacies and demonstrate Frankenstein’s cruelty in letting the monster loose in the world.

In chapter 13 the monster learns about the society that he lives in:

Monster - “I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property!”

Now the monster knows that he has no social status and is on his own in the world. At this point Frankenstein defiantly seems the more monstrous; he has taken the body parts of people from the graves, made a creation with them and then left the monster without hope in the world.

Section 4

In chapter 15, the monster decides to talk to the blind man from the De Lacy family:

Old man De Lacy -“the hearts of men, when unprejudiced…are full of brotherly love.”

The monster knows that Old Man De Lacy cannot be prejudiced because of the way the monster looks, but when the rest of the De Lacys come back, they see the monster and when Felix sees the monster clutching Old Man De Lacy, he attacks and beats the monster with a stick:

Monster-“he dashed me to the ground and struck me violently with a stick.”

So far in the book, the monster has expressed only kind-hearted human qualities and is the victim of prejudice and attack. Therefore,, the audience will be feeling great sympathy for him up.

Chapter 16 is when the monster is again a victim of discrimination, but this time he was doing mankind a favour:

Monster-“she continued her course along the precipitous sides of the river, when suddenly her foot slipped, and she fell into the rapid stream…I was suddenly interrupted by the approach of a rustic…he aimed gun, which he carried, at my body and fired”

This is the point at which the monster decides he has had enough and vows revenge on mankind and when he starts to become “evil”. He commits his first two acts of revenge in chapter 16; the first is the murder of Frankenstein’s brother William:

Monster-“I grasped his throat to silence him, and in a moment he laid dead at my feet…my heart swelled with exultation and hellish triumph.”

The monster kills William partly by accident but the fact that he feels delight and triumph shows that the monster is starting to turn on mankind. This is not the end of the monster’s wrong doing in this chapter. He also frames another of Frankenstein’s loved ones, Justine, for the murder:

Monster - “I had learned now to work mischief, I bend over and placed the portrait securely in one of the folds of her dress.”

The monster is now “evil” although the audience will feel that Frankenstein is also partly responsible for the monster’s conversion but the various characters that showed prejudice towards the monster are not without blame.

Section 5

The monster gives Frankenstein a chance to redeem his maltreatment of the monster in chapter 20 by bargaining with him, to make a female companion:

Monster-“I have endured incalculable fatigue, and cold, and hunger; do you dare destroy my hopes?”

Frankenstein agrees to make the female monster; I think that this is the right decision, as it will make the monster, which he created, happy and will save the lives of his loved ones. But Frankenstein does not keep this promise and never creates the female monster. This frustrates the monster:

Monster-“remember, I shall be with you on your wedding-night”

Frankenstein’s decision not to create a second monster could be seen as wrong because this is his second opportunity to give the monster a chance of a better life. The audience would be split at the moment: some would think that he should have made the monster to save bloodshed but some would think that Frankenstein had made the right decision not to unleash another monster on the world. Still the monster grows more and more monstrous.

Chapters 22 and 23 are when Frankenstein agrees to marry Elizabeth, but at their wedding the monster kills Elizabeth, just as he vowed:

Frankenstein - “with his fiendish finger he pointed towards the corpse of my wife.”

I think at this point the audience thinks that the monster is getting his revenge but still feels hatred towards him for the way he has obtained it. Obviously the monster is at the peak of his dreadfulness. I think that the monster was turned evil by the prejudice he experienced. Had mankind not been so narrow-minded all this carnage could have been avoided. I think that Frankenstein deserved some compensation; some may say he destroyed the monster’s life why should his not be destroyed in return.

Conclusion

Frankenstein is more monstrous than the monster and should carry the ultimate blame for the deaths as he had the vanity to believe he could play god and the arrogance to embark on this reckless experiment and did so with the body parts of dead people, which he from graves. Then when he had created life he could not face up to his responsibilities as the creator and abandoned his creation because of its hideous looks. Even then he was given a chance to make amends and create another monster as the original monster’s companion in return for the monster’s promise to leave mankind alone but chose not to and not only did he choose not to but he also lied and said that he would. The monster however, started his life with good intentions but was driven to evil by the prejudice he faced from humans. Despite this, the monster is not blame-free and is still monstrous because he takes his revenge by killing innocent people.

I think that Mary Shelly was trying to get across two points when she wrote the novel. The first and more obvious is that when she was writing Frankenstein, there were radical scientific developments going on at the time. Scientists were starting to think that they could bring dead organisms back to life. Mary Shelly thought this was wrong as more people were starting to believe in science rather than go. I think Mary Shelly’s tale of woe is a warning to people. This is what can happen when you rebel against god. The second point is that like her mother, Mary is a feminist. When the novel was written, men would have made all the vital decisions at the time; Mary didn’t agree with this. In Frankenstein it is men (Frankenstein and the monster) who make all the vital decisions and consequently it is, bar Frankenstein’s friend Clerval, all women and children who die.