Irony Examples In Frankenstein

In Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, Shelley uses irony through a character, Victor Frankenstein, to show the flaws of humanity. Victor tries to act as God and creates life using dead bodies from a graveyard to form a new one, in doing so, Victor becomes horrified of the monster and his looks and abandons the creature, leaving it to fend for itself. By doing so, Shelley showed Victor’s true humanity, a man who wanted to play God, yet he disregarded his role as a creator to care and teach his creature the way of life. Similarly, Shelley also uses the monster to show the importance in nature versus nurture, the consequences of the monster seeking revenge, and man’s importance of appearance. Shelley shows an immense amount of irony within the

Shelley’s character Safie, who essentially represented a very attractive version of Frankenstein’s monster, through Safie, Shelley showed the different outcomes of nurture versus nature. Safie’s character represented nurture, a beautiful girl who was illiterate and did not know English, was taken in by the De Lacy family, there Felix cared for Safie. Safie eventually learned to read and to speak English, and the De Lacy family welcomed her with open arms and planned to marry her to Felix. Even though the monster did learn to read and learned many things from the De Lacy family through the crack in the wall, Frankstein’s monster wasn’t nurtured and wasn’t accepted because of his looks. While the blind father could accept the creature, since he could not see him, Felix was afraid of the creature horrid looks, his instinct was to harm the creature instead of accepting him, as he did with Safie. Even though Safie and the creature were ultimately the same, Shelley shows the flaws of humanity and society’s focus on appearances. Because of the creature’s bleak circumstances, he turned into a hateful monster who wanted to seek revenge on his irresponsible creator, Victor, who abandoned the creature and caused him to endure such

Throughout the novel, Frankenstein’s monster is constantly seeking revenge toward Victor. When the creature was abandoned, he was left with nothing. He did not know his existence or how to survive, "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." This is where the creature’s anger stems from and can even be justified with. However, after his experience in the cottage, the monster was well aware of good and evil and right from wrong, yet he still chose the path of revenge. This in a way was selfish of him, to cause pain and suffering to innocent when he himself had experienced similar kinds of pains. Here I wonder if Shelley is starting to show the monster’s humanity, that of which is similar to Victor, a selfish demeanor, or the monster’s lack of humanity. The creature experiences the worse kind of consequence, he is never fully satisfied, when seeking revenge and committing all of the hateful and vengeful murders, he never finds what he is looking for, someone’s acceptance of the monster. In the end, his acts backfire on him, only making himself less appealing than he already was. I question that even if Victor had