Literature

Young Victor Frankensten comes from a caring family. His adopted sister, Elizabeth, loves him and he has a good friend called Henry. He is intelligent and deeply interested in science. At university he learn how to create life from human body parts but, at the moment of his triumph, he realises he has created a monster. The monster wants to be loved but Victor rejects him and the monster escapes from Victor’s laboratory. In his anger and frustration, the monster first kills Victor’s brother, William, but then comes to believe that he will be happy if he has a mate, He asks Victor to make him a female companion, promising to leave the country and commit no more evil in return. Victor agrees but later has doubts and destroys the female. The monster wants revenge and goes on to kill Henry and finally Eblizabeth on the night she marries Victor. Victor pursues the monster across the North Pole and eventually dies. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is considered a gothic novel because of its dark and eerie themes and its emphasis on horror and terror.

The novel draws heavily on the gothic tradition, and Shelley was undoubtedly influenced by the works of gothic writers such as Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe. Importantly, the novel is steeped in the ideas and values of romanticism and its critical reaction to the Age of Enlightenment.

This is evident in the way that the novel takes issue with the Enlightenment notion of humanity using reason and science to impose its will on nature and to reshape it in its own image. The main themes explored in Frankenstein are ambition, the pursuit of knowledge, nature vs. nurture, isolation, revenge, and the responsibility of creation.

Frankenstein asserts in its introduction that it is a book that presents a positive picture of “domestic affection.” That seems like an odd assertion in a murder mystery, sorrow, and hopelessness. However, the true source of all that misery, murder, and hopelessness is a lack of ties to society and/or family. Stated differently, solitude rather than Victor or the monster is the real evil in Frankenstein. Victor withdraws from human society when he becomes lost in his studies, which causes him to lose awareness of his obligations and the results of his actions. The monster becomes vindictive not because it is malevolent but rather because of the intense hatred and rage that solitude causes in it.