Frakenstein's Interpretation Of Frankenstein '

Frakenstein Interpretation Essay

Synopsis

Frankenstein is the frightening, imaginative, and classic mixture of the Romantic and Gothic era of writing. It's author, Mary Shelly, successfully mixes these (on face value) opposing themes. One of the most prominent motifs in the Gothic "half" of this book is the eerie psychic connection between the Monster and Victor Frankenstein, or as a wise English teacher put in one sheet, the parent-child connection. My brief essay will explore the two major connections the Monster and Victor share; Victors motherhood, and they're search for love.

Women, Victor and the Monster

There is also the matter of the Monsters lust for a female companion. Why does the monster crave a female companion? Surely, their kind could not "reproduce"- They were made in laboratory, with parts from the deceased and rotten. It is my opinion that the monster, with his great brainpower, could have fashioned himself a companion, stealing Victors notes and equipment and notes. This also may have been simpler and less stressing to the monster. So it leads me to ask, why did the Monster depend upon Victor for his new companion? Was it so the Monster could be
sure of an equal, that he would not alter his creation? Would it be to avoid the implication that his companion would be his daughter? Surely, that could not be it.
Victor never considered the Monster a son; why would the Monster, in all the drastic similarities to Victor, differ from him so greatly on that? It could be, perhaps, the monsters understanding of the natural pairing between man and woman. For the Monsters species to complete, he realizes the need for a second sex. But since the species could not be able to reproduce, why would Victor worry so? The excuse of Also, the monster is looked upon with only hate, disgust, and horror. Women have never bestowed these upon Victor (to the reader's knowledge), and the psychic connection between the Monster and Victor (a Gothic theme) could be telling the monster this. It is also worthy to note that no woman ever did direct harm to him, and he even saved one from
drowning. Now, for a novel written by the daughter of an important feminist, Frankenstein is strikingly devoid of strong female characters. The novel is littered with passive women who suffer calmly and then expire: Victor's mother dies slowly and quietly, Justine is executed for murder, despite her innocence, the creation of the female monster is aborted by Victor because he fears being unable to control her actions once she is animated; Elizabeth waits, impatient but helpless, for Victor to return to her, and she is eventually murdered by the monster. One can argue that Shelley renders her female characters so passive and subjects them to such ill treatment in order to call attention to the obsessive and destructive behavior that Victor and the monster exhibit.

The Monsters Birth or Abortion

Birth (or for this illustration, reproduction) is always regarded as a beautiful act of nature, the sole reason for the survival of the human race, and the most basic instinct of all animals. Victor worked in a figurative pregnancy for great time, and in the moment of birth, the moment he gave life to a being that had never experienced it before, he immediately wished he had not. Shortly after seeing his child, Victor says: "When I thought of him, I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed, and I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I had so thoughtlessly made." The monster feels a similar disgust for himself: "I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on." Both lament the monster's existence and wish that Victor had never engaged in his act of creation. The motif appears also in regard to Victor's other pursuits. When Victor destroys his work on a female monster, he literally aborts his act of creation, preventing the female monster from coming alive(and in doing so, aborting his one chance of living the rest of his life in peace). Figurative abortion briefly appears in Victor's description of natural philosophy: "I at once gave up my former occupations; set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation; and entertained the greatest disdain for a would-be science, which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge." As with the monster, Victor becomes dissatisfied with natural philosophy and shuns it not only as unhelpful but also as intellectually grotesque.

In Conclusion

Victor spends great lengths in a figurative pregnancy, preparing to give birth to an abomination he could not foresee. On the moment of life, the smile from the monsters lips, Victor suddenly abhors his child, wishing he had never conceived it. Like a horrible parent, one that loathes his child, he leaves the Monster alone until it dissipates. But like a horrible child, the Monster returns for revenge upon his creator. Through the unexplainable connection of parent-child, the Monster knows where Victor will be, what he will do when hes there, and when he'll be back. The Monster then goes on to take all the life that Victor holds dear.