Frankenstein The Monster's Mother Analysis

It is believed by many readers and scholars like Ellen Moers, who wrote Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother that when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly wrote Frankenstein, she wrote the story as a reflection of her own fears and issues with parenting. I also think that Shelley may have felt that her offspring were somehow against the laws of nature and that this is why most of them died at birth or in early infancy. I think that Shelley brought death from what should have been life from the part where Victor only had created life from the confines of death. In Shelley’s real life, her mother died during the labor and I believe this is also reflected in her role as the creature where it destroys the man who created it because she may feel resposible
for her mother’s death. In this paper I will look at how both the desire to act against the confines of nature, and the lack of responsibility and nurturance of one’s creation causes one’s creation to destroy its maker.
Victor Frankenstein takes over nature’s role as creator by bringing a person back to life.
It is his arrogance that brings about the deaths of his friends and family and finally his own downfall at the hands of his creation. Furthermore, Victor continually refuses to ask for help in regards to dealing with the creature, which is a flaw that haunts him throughout the story. This is because he feels as though he can handle the situation on his own. However, Victor’s experiment was not just performed on any dead body, it was performed on a creature that he created out of an accumulation of different people. This shows how arrogant he is as he felt that he could give life to the ideal man. The problem with Victor’s plan is that he did not take into account what gives a person a look of life. Victor may be able to animate the creature but he was not able to bring life to the already decayed flesh. This is why the skin on the creature looked sallow and translucent over the bones and veins of the creatures face. His eyes also had a cloudy look because there was no soul behind them.
That is where Victor made his biggest mistake in his desire to play god. He thought that just giving something life was enough to make it human, but he forgot or did not consider that humans are believed to have souls. These souls are said to be who we truly are as a person and the soul is reflected in or need to breathe. This is why a person is declared dead when they stop to breathe on their own. Victor
was not able to give the creature the ability to breathe therefore making it nothing more than an animated corpse, rather than the pinnacle of man-made life that he wanted.
This inability to see the creature as anything but a godless abomination, rather than a form of life that needed to be nurtured and guided led Victor to reject his creation “He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs. I took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited, where I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life” (Shelley pg. 90).
This leads to what I think is the second most important theme of the story the responsibility and nurturance of one’s creation. His rejection of the creature, followed by the refusal to create a female counterpart to the creature in order that it would not have to be alone caused a dark cycle of events to occur. This according to Ellen Moers was Shelley’s way of looking at postpartum depression. It is Victor’s depression at seeing the results of his endeavor that cause him to retreat from it. While Shelley herself never suffered from postpartum, she did lose her children and her mother died during her birth.
While Victor’s first crime was playing god, his biggest crime was not taking responsibility for what he created.
Instead, the moment he realized that the creature did not turn out to be the beautiful, majestic lifeform that he had envisioned, he chose to walk away from it. This is of course contradictory to the actions of most parents. In his role of both creator and life bringer, Victor is playing dual roles as both mother and father to the creature. However, instead of taking responsibility for his creation he rushes from the laboratory at the mere sight of the creature. He abandons him to his fate without any concern about how this abandonment would affect both the creature and
society.
Being rejected by his parent, the creature is never truly nurtured in a way that would bring about the ability to have empathy or compassion for anyone else. Before the creature taught himself the acquisition of language and the skill of reading, he knew that there was something wrong with him. This is due to both Victor’s reaction as well as the violent reaction people had when they see him. I believe this is part of the reason why he seeks to aprrehand language. He feels if he can communicate with others then they will not fear him. This is also where the knowledge that he has gain should come in. The creature realizes that it is not just speaking that is important but the sharing of knowledge and ideas.
It is not until after the creature has educated himself and meets Victor at the summit of Montanvert that Victor finally realizes his responsibility to the creature. The creature is able to argue using eloquent rhetoric, which compels Victor to listen to him. The creature told Victor the tale of his life and how the lack of guidance and nurturing caused his sufferings. He said, “I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other” (116). He told Victor that the reason why he had lashed out against him was because of loneliness and lack of nurture. However, this does not prevent Victor from denying the creature a mate for him. “Satan has his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred' (116)
In summary, Victor acts against nature in two ways. The first is by playing god and creating life outside the confines of nature and the second is by refusing to take responsibility for his mistake. I am not really sure what Victor thought would happen if he just ignored the creature. I think that he was not ready to deal with the consequences of his actions and chose to ignore them. I also think that if the story was a metaphor of the children that Shelley had lost and postpartum depression, Shelley was saying that her desire to create was averse to nature and this was the reason why nearly all of her children died soon after childbirth.