Guilt Theme In Frankenstein

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Considering Mary Shelley has experienced a childhood without much influence from her parents, it is understandable that she does not recognize the proper ways to cope with guilt. As a result, her main character in Frankenstein, Victor, depicts her confusion of encountering guilt. Even if it is not known if Mary Shelley had negative occurrences resulting from unsettled guilt, she depicts the psychological effects of unresolved guilt through Victor in Frankenstein.
Guilt is a self-conscious emotion that a person feels after carrying out a wrong type of behavior. The emotion is felt after executing a wrongdoing, “It provides a painful consequence for actions that would weaken the groups that you belong to” (Markman sec. 1). The normal reaction …show more content…

7). Mary Shelley uses various dictions in order to portray the way Victor felt after he had finished constructing the monster and putting life into it, “The beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (Shelley 51). When he realized he had worked so hard, sacrificing his social, psychological, and physical state (Shelley 51), he possessed guilt that the monster was not worth the efforts that he had spent all these years. There are several ways to cope with guilt, which for one, he could have first started out with obtaining the reason to why he had felt that guilt and after, “Accept the fact that this happened…and then figure out how to avoid committing the same act in the future” (Whitbourne, sec. 8). Yet instead, he ran away, trying to settle in as far away from the monster as possible, which he chose to, “refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which” he inhabited where he remained during the rest of the night (Shelley 52). Mary Shelley’s purpose in this situation was to present Victor’s inability to resolve the guilt that would lead the emotion to, “…turn into shame, a feeling of worthlessness and a negative sense of self" (Smith, sec. 3). Likewise, Victor repeatedly rehashes the process of rejecting the cause and the displaying of his

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