Formal Essay: Frankenstein

UnJi Nam
Mrs. Elliott
AP English Literature
1 Jan 2009

Frankenstein: The makings of a monster

In the novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley delves deeply into her characters and settings in order ask the following questions: What is a monster, and how does one create one? What makes a human, with his or her own inalienable rights to basic necessities, knowledge, and fellow sympathy? To answer the question, the novel introduces the two main characters of the text: Viktor Frankenstein, scientist and creator of the nameless human-like creation who haunts him. At first glance, one would be tempted to immediately assign Frankenstein humanity, and the creation bestiality. After all, Frankenstein seems to the reader at first “a noble creature, destroyed by misery…so gentle, yet so wise…and his words flow with rapidity and unparalleled eloquence.”, a person blessed with the best of humanity’s virtues—intelligence, a happy childhood, a loving family, friendship, and love. The monster, when created, leaves a swath of death and sorrow, and eventually leads to the death of its own creator. However, Shelley makes it clear that Frankenstein, first impressions by reader and the character Robert Walton nonetheless, is not an innocent character who had suffered unfortunate circumstances. It is by his unswerving pursuit of knowledge, even against moral and spiritual concerns, as well as his fundamental selfishness and irresponsibility that leads to his calamitous end. The “monster” that Frankenstein creates acts violently, but it does so out of loneliness, despair, and rage stemming from his situation, all very human emotions and motives. Throughout the novel, as Shelley details their interactions and decisions, she makes many criticisms on the culture of her day—the question of moral evil, the exclusion of moral guidelines in scientific pursuit, and man’s ultimately degenerate nature as opposed to Romanticist’s optimistic view of self-improvement.
Frankenstein as a character is ultimately a frustrating one for readers to swallow. He may have seemed to be like the Romanticist’s ideal at first: intelligent; avidly pursuing knowledge; appreciative of nature and its almost divine “power of elevating soul from earth.”; and almost passionately individual and separated from an ordinary society. But as the novel progresses, the reader slowly loses any respect and awe Frankenstein may have garnered at first. One sees that the character, despite the perfection of his upbringing and childhood in terms of family, love, and friendship, the man is ultimately selfish, easily leaving behind his family to pursue his education abroad, and once there almost completely ignoring them in the pursuit of knowledge. In a way, Frankenstein’s later fall from grace can be foreshadowed in the way he rejects the pure and good represented in his family, particularly his mother and his love Elizabeth. Perhaps Shelley meant to make a point that Frankenstein the monster was birthed by Frankenstein’s lack of balance—his overwhelming pursuit of his studies even when it led him to unsavory deeds such as grave-robbing, his over-emphasis of masculine traits such as rationality and swallowing of emotions and morals. Because whatever Frankenstein’s good intentions were before the creation of his experiment, they dissipate into horror and rejection at the sight of the creature. Though Frankenstein himself in the progression of the novel learns to some degree how responsible he is for the evil that stalks him and his loved ones, he never really loses his basic evil traits—his rejection of responsibility to the “monster”; his selfishness that causes him to send Justine to her death and ignore the monster’s own right to happiness. Though society and the world may commend him, the monster he created is living reminder of his sins. If he had taken responsibility for it, cared for it and educated it as to right and wrong, the monster could have avoided a future of loneliness, violence and vengeance. Instead, as with many of the evil things man has made, such as a polluted environment, man has simply left it behind him and left it alone, forgetting such ugly things created in pursuit of his own selfish desires. By Frankenstein’s rejection of the experiment and its ultimate vengeance, Shelley shows her point that man cannot trust his own judgments in all situations, that he by nature is an unfit judge for himself. The idea of her day, that an individual rather than society was more fit to deem morals for oneself, is dismissed here—Frankenstein, as a human, cannot judge for himself the right path, and hence brings himself, experiment and family into destruction. This is a clear rejection of Romantic ideals of man being basically good, and capable of refining his nature. Society is pictured not as the immoral and soulless system some intellectuals of the day painted it as, but a system to control and lessen the effects of the perversity in an individual’s heart. Shelley does not clear society at large of all responsibility for the evils of humanity—it is interesting to note that while Frankenstein in his ambiguous deeds and misguided actions is widely respected by his peers who are sympathetic to him, society reviles his creation, which is more innocent than his creator.
The monster himself, never named throughout the book, works mostly as a moral counterpart to Frankenstein, posing to his creator the uncomfortable questions of how justified his creator was in making him, and rejecting him. Just by what superiority did Frankenstein believe in that gave him the right to create intelligent life? His supposedly better morals? And by what authority does Frankenstein have in trying to destroy the creature? That he is violent? That he cannot control himself? The creature has no traits that a human does not, and whatever evils he does commit come from the evils that he learned at the hands of humanity. If anything the creature, despite the lack of anything perfect in terms of human interactions and basic necessities, has a better nature than Frankenstein. He is shown to be caring, kind, hungry for affection and curious, though not to the same obsessive degree as Frankenstein. If anything, the tragedy in the novel consists not of Frankenstein’s decline and death, which actually works to underline Frankenstein’s degeneracy and just reward. The tragic feature is the moral decline of the monster himself, who turns to wrath and violence upon humanity for his loneliness imposed upon him, and the fact humanity reviles him the more for his justifiable actions. This is the alienation man faces as he marks his irresponsibility and selfishness on the globe—a sickening environment, radical and aggressive post-colonial nations, social unrest as income gaps widen.
In the end, Frankenstein the technically human is not so much an admirable character as so much a portrait of human evil condensed into a person. The monster, in his innocence, wrath, and eventual grief and penitence, is far more human, far more admirable than his creator himself, lost forever due to humanity’s evils that could swallow any sins of its own but not of others. It is his loss that makes culpable both the irresponsible individual and society as the true monsters.