The novel follows Victor, an aspiring scientist as he first searches graveyards in search of materials to create a new being. Once animated, he imminently proves irresponsible to the reader and labels it as a monster, where the creation later sets out to seek companionship and affection from his creator. Shelley utilises techniques such as contrast, the theme of alienation shown by Victor and narrative perspective to cause the reader to feel negatively towards Victor as his selfish and isolated nature is revealed throughout the novel.
Shelley conveys the contrast between the personality traits of Victor and the “monster” to shape the reader’s response towards him. Victor is shown throughout the story that he has a lot support and love from
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Victor is shown in the beginning of the novel to be a man of science, where he holds his pursuit of glory above all else, including his family and loved ones. He pursues this glory by attempting to find the ‘elixir of life’; electricity, and spends the majority of his early life creating the monster in the university. By doing so he isolates himself from society, where all of his time and effort is devoted to the desire of knowledge “It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn” (pg 39). His pursuit of isolation is continued when he leaves his family to study in a different town, this drastic distance being created between him and his loved ones does not seem to affect him. Victor shows his selfishness towards Clerval; his one true friend where his friendship is based on Victor’s terms, this can be seen as he does not confide to Clerval about his troubles with the experiment. Victor chooses to base his laboratory “in a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house” (pg 52), this shows his self-imposed alienation which he has chosen due to the fact of his experiments. Victor’s biggest account of selfishness is where he uses the buried corpses from a nearby church graveyard as a resource of materials for his creation “Darkness had no effect upon my fancy; and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm”. This barbaric act shows Victors immorality as he is grave robbing for the sake of his own personal
Shelley characterizes Victor in a way that he acts on his impulses and not with rationality. As a result, Victor does not take the time to teach or talk to his creation. This action leads to his downfall as his loved one’s are killed by the Creature taking revenge on Victor for leaving him to fend for himself. Victor’s actions have consequences, hence why all his loved one’s are murdered because of his instinct to leave out of fear and safety. Shelley proves that our id demands immediate gratification of needs and thus, is in control of our actions.
Victor uses his knowledge and attachment to science and becomes “thus engaged, heart and soul, in one pursuit” (Shelley 68) and that pursuit is to succeed. He puts his whole heart and dedicates his every hour to the creation, which makes him “neglect the scenes around [him] causing [him] also to forget those friends who were so many miles absent, and whom [he] had not seen for so long a time” (Shelley 68). After putting so much time and effort into the creation, Victor expects the product to be perfect, yet it is the complete opposite, unattractive and frightful. Victor barely gives the monster a chance to speak before he runs off, leaving the monster to fend for
Isolation in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, has several themes imbedded in the text. One major theme is of isolation. Many of the characters experience some time of isolation. The decisions and actions of some of these characters are the root cause of their isolation. They make choices that isolate themselves from everyone else.
Although multiple perspectives can sometimes confuse a reader, Mary Shelley creates a deep connection between the visions of two characters. The creator Victor, who sees the creature as horrible and a killer. And to the Creature who sees the niceness in people and learns how to speak, though don’t be deceived since the creature wonders its identity and seeks answers. This connection creates the theme of fate vs. free will. The fate of Victor is predestined to contact his creation again, the creature expresses free will by understanding why someone would create him and finding
Victor had wanted to create life from ‘dead things’ for the majority of his life. This wish further developed to creating a new species, which would result in the scientific community lavishly praising him. However, the results of him playing at God served only to cause the demise of himself and those close to him. This served as the reasoning behind Victor’s betrayal to the monster and expresses the theme that pursuing knowledge exclusively for fame and glory can never end positively.
...s creation as a way of revenge and payback for all the distress he brought to the creature. The creature, beginning as the most innocent, is alienated by his creator and every individual who witnesses his presence. Finally, Victor isolates himself from his beloved ones in order to fulfill his ambitions. All these misfortunes are caused by the lack of moral decision making. Unfortunately, these decisions ruined the life of many people involved in Victor’s life. All these events are the proof of what people’s actions can result into when isolation is a major theme in one’s life.
Victor is most productive when he is alone, in solitude he wanted to “explore unknown powers” when he created the creature as mentioned in the previous paragraph, it is also when he is in solitude that he troubles his family. Victor’s creation strangles and kills his little brother William then leaves the locket that he had in Justine’s pocket leading to her being suspected by the police and ultimately executed in the end. Victor is then faced with immense guilt as he points out “I was seized by remorse and the sense of guilt, which hurried me away to a hell of intense tortures, such as no language can describe. This state of mind preyed upon my health, which perhaps never entirely recovered from the first shock it had sustained” (Shelley, 61). He ends it with “solitude was my only consolation-deep dark, deathlike solitude” (Shelley, 61). The crucial point here is that as solitude destroys you it becomes your only solace at one point. Victor’s words highlight the fact that solitude has mentally changed, here we see how solitude creates guilt and mental distress. This guilt and distress gradually liquidate his sanity as the story progresses. After Victor worked in Ingolstadt and decided to not accede to any of the monsters desires Elizabeth sends him a letter asking “do you not love another?” and confesses to him that she loves him, As Victor comes back he and Elizabeth
Shelley takes a subtle approach when introducing her opinion of a monstrous man when writing Frankenstein because “Shelley’s was an age in which heart triumphed over head” (Griffith 194). The Romantic Era, a time period which focuses on the individual and his emotions, is Shelley’s base period for Frankenstein. She emphasizes idea that the creation is the victim of his creator who is considerably the monster because he thinks only of his individual needs and does not take responsibility for his creation. While some believe that Victor is the father of the Creation, he does not deserve nor acknowledge the title as he should. Victor does not guide the Creation as a father should his child and he victimizes himself knowing he is responsible for the Creation and his actions. George V. Griffith mentions in his criticism that [Victor’s] ‘sin’ is not solely in creating the monster but in abandoning him to orphanhood at his birth. . . .Childlike in his innocence, the monster wants only to be loved, but he gets love from neither his ‘father’ nor from any other in the human community” (194-195). By abandoning his creation, victor created a monster of circumstance. The creation recognizes that he is different
One of the most clear and compelling character parallels that Victor and the creature share is their loneliness and their isolation. When the creature observed De Lacey and his family in in a remote German village, he shadowed their behaviors and he began to master the basic ways of life; he learned of their emotions, their culture, and their history. Like a growing child, his mind was constantly saturated with new ideas, his thoughts twirling around the ways of human nature. Although heavily intrigued by their family and values, the creature ponders and says, “Increase knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was” (Shelley, page 133). Progressively, the creature transforms into a slave to everything he learns. Like a child metamorphosing into adolescence, he begins to stray from his innocence and purity, discarding his once-naive ways of thought. This torture he feels, helps him alert Victor, sending him subtle warnings of what his life might become if he follows a certain path. Alone, he says, “I was dependent on none and related to none. The path of my departure was free, and there was none to lament my annihilation. My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them” (15.5). Without
In her novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley introduces the idea that willingly isolating oneself in order to achieve a desired goal leads to unintended situations or consequences that can be detrimental to not only oneself but society through Victor Frankenstein.
In Mary Shelly’s gothic novel Frankenstein, protagonist Victor and the Monster illustrate a conflict between humanity and monstrosity. The portrayal of this character reveals his transformation from man to monster. This exposes the ironic twist in this tale that the sinister being created by Frankenstein is himself. Victor Frankenstein evolves into the true monster in this novel by alienating himself, creating the monster, and showing irrational behavior.
Victor’s thirst for knowledge was nowhere near the end. He deprived himself of everything normal in life because he was locked in a room creating something he did not even know was going to be the most undesirable creature. As the monster’s limbs and fingers started to have a wretched twitch, Victor reacts by saying, “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form?...I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. (Shelley 35). Victor becomes so overtaken by his creation and all his power he has obtained. He is so disturbed and shocked by the fact that he has created something from the dead. Victor is frightened by the ugliness and unknown actions the monster will make, so he selfishly runs and leaves the monster to fend for
This shows that Victor chooses to be isolated. No one forces him to isolate himself for the world. When he is in Ingolstadt he builds a laboratory of his own “in a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase” (Shelley 45). He builds this lab in order to do scientific experiments on human life. In this lab he starts building his creature out of dead body parts from the cemetery. He says that the reason he chose isolation is because of the creature. This tells the reader that he will do anything to achieve his, even isolate himself from rest of the world. Only creating the creature does not isolate him, but trying to keep his creation and later trying to destroy it also isolates him again. After the creature comes to life Victor sees his own creation as an ugly monster. Victor abandons the creature right after it comes to life. He says, while describing the monster, “I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then, but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived” (Shelley
Victor’s curiosity for science causes him to disregard other aspects of his life in order to focus on his personal motives and desires. Not only is Victor fascinated with science, but he is also interested in working with the dead. Without even realizing the effects of his actions, Victor’s interest in science and his longing to create the monster ultimately ruins his life. Next, after observing the interactions between the cottagers, the monster began to develop his own feelings, especially towards Victor. Mary Shelley uses the themes of discovery and exploration throughout the novel to allow both Victor Frankenstein and the monster to fulfill their individual
Victor Frankenstein changes over the course of the novel from an innocent youth fascinated by science into a guilt-ridden man determined to destroy his creation. Whether it is his desire to have the godlike power to create new life or his avoiding the types of sciences done in public, Victor’s lack of humanness is his downfall. He isolates himself from the world and eventually he dedicates himself with a nonhuman obsession will getting revenge on his creation. At the end of the novel, Victor tells his story to Robert Walton and then dies. With multiple narrators and multiple perspectives, the novel gives the reader contrasting versions of Victor: the classic mad scientist, who destroys all boundaries without concern, and the brave adventurer of unknown sciences, who should not to be held responsible for the consequences of his explorations.