Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Analysis of the Novel

One may come to assume that Mary Shelley intended u to derive for her novel a lesson that would be important to everyone’s existence. In her tale, Frankenstein, she depicts a monster that is hideous and wretched looking. A monster’s whose appearance prohibits anyone from going beyond his exterior qualities to reach his inner ones. The reader is the only one, besides Frankenstein, that Shelley exposes the monster’s feelings and emotions to. The other characters shield these emotions from being noticed because they presumed that his appearance told everything about him.

Mary Shelley allows the reader to learn that, unlike Victor Frankenstein, the monster that he created possessed emotion and passion. The monster failed to understand each emotion that he experienced, but they all affected him, nonetheless. The monster experienced feelings of happiness, joy and excitement several times. However, for most of the time, he felt lonely, neglected and depressed. Evil, anger and resentment corrupted his heart. The monster let his anger and negativity get the best of him, and he acted impulsively because of it. Like Frankenstein, many other people thought that the monster was incapable of having such feelings or emotions, due to his appearance. Many people’s preconceived notions are that the monster lacked any human qualities; unable to think, feel or speak. That is quite the contrary. The monster did have a wide range of emotions, just like everyone else, and that is what Mary Shelley was trying to tell us.

Mary Shelley used the monster to show that all creatures have emotions, and that they tend to act because of how they feel. Before the Romantic Age, people often did not express how they truly felt. Sharing emotions just did not occur. The Romantic Age brought out feelings and emotions that were always present, but never written or spoken about. Through Shelley’s character of the monster, she allows u to see the human spirit, overflowing with emotion and feelings. The hideous beast/monster that Frankenstein created had emotions. He spoke openly with Frankenstein about how he felt. He also told how his feelings affected his actions. Shelley’s novel wants to teach her readers, through her unrealistic tale of the monster, that everyone has feelings and emotions. Not only does everyone possess emotion and feelings, but also that we should allow others to know how we feel about certain things.