Themes in Frankenstein

Themes in Frankenstein

1. CREATION AND DIVINE ASPIRATIONS

   • Victor usurps the role of God by giving life to his creature, it is suggested that his 'frightful' presumption in aspiring to act like God is his main crime. However there is no vengeful God to punish Victor, only a vengeful monster. The crime that Shelley also highlights is not so much what Victor does, but what he fails to do: nurture his creation, and Victor's description of his 'secret toil' does suggest he is engaged in something unlawful and shameful.
     • 'A new species would bless me as it's creator...No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as i should deserve theirs'
       • 'The moon gazed on my midnight labours...my workshop of filthy creation'
     • ISOLATION
       • A key theme from the opening with Walton's complaints to his sister about his lack of companionship. The sufferings of both Victor and the monster are primarily caused by their alienation from others. The monsters isolation is caused by peoples fear of him and his creator who abandons him, he longs for companionship and affection and turns to Victor for this, Victor destroys his dream of ever finding love and happiness. Victor insists that his loneliness is due to the monsters crimes,nevertheless he choses to isolate himself from family and friends to carry out scientific experiments.
         • 'I bitterly feel the want of a friend' -Walton
           • 'I am malicious because i am miserable' - The Monster
           • THE DOUBLE
             • A common trope in nineteenth century gothic. It is often used to demonstrate tension between the laws of society and the desires of the individual, and to give voice to that which has been silenced by rational discourse. The popular tendency to refer to the monster as Frankenstein is appropriate considering Shelley's use of the motif of the double. When he refers to the monster as 'my own spirit' he provides clarity that they are doubles.
               • 'My own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me' -Victor on the monster.
     • THE FAMILY
       • Percy Shelley's preface of 1818 claims that the chief concern of the novel is the 'exhibition of domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue'. It is domestic affections which the monster longs for and that Victor repeatedly holds up as the ideal as to which he should have aspired. The Home is represented as a paradise and the woman as the presiding angel.
         • Kate Ellis however has convincingly argued that it is possible to read the novel as questioning the value of the domestic affections and as an attack on, rather than a celebration of the institute of family strictly enforced by artificial role distinctions. The treatment of the creature by the De Lacy family points to another defect in the domestic world: its insularity. Ideal though this family may seem, it functions only by excluding anything that appears as a threat to its security. The monster devotes himself to the destruction of ideal domesticity once he recognises he is doomed to be excluded from it, and in this he may be acting as Victor's double.
           • 'If no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country' -Victor.
             • 'No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles or caresses' -The monster.

2. CRITIQUE OF SOCIETY

   • Whilst the family is the institution most throughly examined and analysed, throughout Frankenstein there is a more general challenge to and criticism of the established social order and its institutions. Shelley frequently uses the monster as her mouthpiece in he critique of oppression and inequality in society.
     • 'Men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each others blood' - Elizabeth after the execution of Justine.
       • 'Am I to be thought only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me?' The monster to Walton.