The Role Of Isolation In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley relates her own struggles onto the characters, giving them the grief and loneliness she feels during her own life. The deaths of the characters closest to Frankenstein reflects in the deaths of her children. She creates an isolating world for many of her characters through loss of loved ones. Shelley portrays both the monster and Frankenstein as lonely creatures but with opposing reasons for their isolation, proving that isolation is universal and unavoidable.

Frankenstein becomes lonesome as his work immerses him increasingly. His interest in the sciences causes him to read with the "greatest avidity" (25; ch. 2). He is oblivious to the outside world while he focuses solely on one topic. Even in finding

His looks are "horrid" (42; ch. 5), and Frankenstein is repulsed by his creation. After spending almost two years creating the creature, he immediately retreats from it once seeing its "miserable" (43; ch. 5) appearance. Frankenstein may have been afraid of what he was creating at first, but now that he has caught a glimpse, he is hateful, as he knows anyone else would be. Its immediate abandonment by its own creator is only the start of the rejection he will feel as time goes on. Unlike Frankenstein's childhood, the monster is alone in the beginning. While Frankenstein remembers his parents feeling great "affection" (19; ch. 1) towards him as a young child, his creation is turned away in an instant of fear. The monster goes on to master the language of his creator, through the cottage people. Still, he is not given a chance to explain his true kind-hearted nature before the Cottagers beat him "violently with a stick" (115; ch. 15). Although he is completely capable of holding a civil conversation, he is given no such chance to do so. The isolation he feels is caused by a hasty evaluation of his stature, without considering what he has to offer. Saving a child's life does not redeem him, and he is "fired" (121; ch. 16) at by a gun, and shot. The man is not grateful for the good deed the monster has done, and instead acts out of fear of what the creature looks like it would do, basing his opinion on

They will be each other only companions from here on out. He is the true cause for his own and others lack of interaction with others. Frankenstein suffers great loss, and the beginning of this is the "death of [his] mother" (161; ch. 21). The hardships Frankenstein faces starts early, foreshadowing what is to come. He is the only one who knows of the monster because he created it. This brings him an unending isolation which he cannot share because his claims would be seen as "the ravings of a madman" (64; ch. 8). There is no one Frankenstein could tell who would believe his story, and not be disgusted by what he has done. To increase the loss of dreams, the monster is repulsive, and Frankenstein believes that nothing else "could be so hideous as that wretch" (43; ch. 5). After pouring his heart and soul into the creature for almost two years, his work is ruined simply by the look of what he has made because it is immeasurably frightening. Frankenstein unintentionally doomed his monster to a life of isolation by creating a face that filled others with fear. Once Frankenstein knows the monster's one true longing, he refuses to help the monster out of fear of what level of power this could give the monster to destroy the world. He refuses to create the creature "a companion in vice" (146; ch. 20), one who would share the same goals of wickedness and hate. He is afraid what the monster may do, so he refuses to