“I see a world in the future in which we understand that all life is related to us and we treat that life with great humility and respect.” – David Suzuki
Family and creating connections are common aspects of life that many individuals strive to achieve. The quote by David Suzuki suggests that connections stretch far beyond the particular limitations of blood relations, which is reflected in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Family and connections are considered to be the driving force of the novel when the interactions between the Creature (also known as Frankenstein’s monster, although it is never stated as such in the 1818 version of the novel) as an outsider and the miniature versions of society that he is surrounded with are observed. He is often marginalized as a result of societal norms of acceptability. He is compelled to conform to what is expected of him as a means of fitting in. In the journal article by Colene Bentley “Family, Humanity, Polity: Theorizing the Basis and Boundaries of Political Community in Frankenstein”, the author analyzes the creature’s interactions with individuals such as Frankenstein, and social groups such as the De Lacys’; she explores the challenges regarding societal norms of nurturing connections within a political groups such as families. This essay will discuss the importance of nurture in the upbringing of the creature and how the commonly held beliefs regarding family and connections are challenged throughout the novel.
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The idea of family has an essential role in the nurturing and social growth of individuals who have no previous recollection of society and its conceptions. The novel explores familial relations throughout the three different perspectives, beginning with Walton’s letters to his sister, moving on to Frankenstein’s memories with his family both before and after creating the creature, and finally with the creature’s observations and interactions with the De Lacy family. However, Walton’s letters only serve to introduce this idea of family as the letters mainly pertain to introducing the characters and setting of the novel. This is further cemented through the use of a first-person narrative when each speaker recounted their lives, which allows the audience to understand each character’s position and beliefs in the novel.
Walton addresses his letters to his sister, which already begins to establish family relations in the novel. In the novel, the audience is only able to see Walton’s letters to his sister and not the ones she writes back, which simplifies the issue of introducing too many characters in the beginning. In Frankenstein’s perspective, at the beginning of his narrative, he first goes to describe his origins and states his connections to his country and his family ties before going on to describe himself as an individual. Shelley has Frankenstein detail his nurture, which later contrasts the nurture of the creature as he began to develop his mental capabilities. In this introduction to his early childhood, he also depicts how he came to his ideas about life and the subsequent experiments to make the creation when he explains,
“our family was not scientifical, and I had not attended any of the lectures given at the schools of Geneva. My dreams were therefore undisturbed by reality, and I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life”(Shelley and Hunter, 23)
This directly speaks to how he grew up in a carefree manner that allowed him to retain his eccentricities while adhering to society.
When Frankenstein and the creature return to the “present” after the creature narrates his adventures during the time Frankenstein was gone, the creature asks for him to “create a female for me [the creature], with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being,”(Shelley and Hunter, 101) and asks that the female be made of the same species as him and be “ one as deformed and horrible as myself,”( Shelley and Hunter, 101), which further suggests that he craves a connection that he believes is only possible if the other individual undergoes the same troubles and pains. This speaks to how the creature aligns himself with the common conceptions of the society at the time, where similar instances of nurture allow individuals to create connections and not become excluded from society. However, the way the creature suggests that the female be brought up, it hinders her ability to forge connections with others in society.
In the journal article previously mentioned, the author, Colene Bentley also argues that Shelly uses the Creature’s ability to forge unique connections that do not include familial ties to introduce the idea that society should reject the simple ideals of blood relations when making connections and instead accept less concrete ideals of connections. Bentley uses this to further “demonstrate that Shelley explicitly develops a theory of political community in her novel”(326). The political community in the context of the article is a type of social union that describes the conceptions of life and connections within a particular community, where different ideals of a topic can emerge.
The author explains that within the novel, the families that influence the creature aid in establishing the “political community” of the time and allows the creature to learn in a less ideal environment the mannerisms that are accepted in society. Bentley states that
“While observing the family’s activities through a chink in the hovel wall, the creature’s critical faculties become refined. As he watches the blind De Lacey and Agatha, for example, the creature experiences new sensations that are a “mixture of pleasure and pain” (136) and are different in quality and kind from his responses to hunger and cold,” (Bentley, 328),
This refers to the nurture of the creature through observation rather than first-hand experience. To further establish the idea that the families influence the creature when he interacts with the blind old man of the De Lacy family, he is not immediately judged as an outsider, which begins to advance the overarching idea that connections can be made without requiring the ties of intimacy which Bentley discusses later on. The interaction between those characters allows the audience to believe that had the creature been taken care of as an individual new to society and not immediately tossed aside, he would not have resorted to aggressive tendencies like killing William.
Bentley claims that Shelly attempts to challenge the heredity status that encompasses familial relationships through the interactions between the Creature and the families such as the De Lacys’ and Frankenstein’s family itself. Bentley believes that the Creature’s primary purpose throughout the novel should be to integrate into a community that does not “rely on ties of intimacy, ancestry, or common memory as grounds for inclusion”. However, the Creature desires to be a part of a familial unit, which is a more concrete form of community. This is exemplified by his longing for Frankenstein in the previously mentioned quote about requiring a female companion, which contradicts what Bentley believes and argues for.
When concluding, Bentley returns to the idea of exclusion and inclusion when they states:
“that communities are bounded entities and as such must make decisions about whom to admit or exclude; and on the other hand, she understands that volitional forms of sociability in which impartiality prevails as a moral authority and lends the community its internal coherence and identity seem better equipped to respond to the challenges of modernity than those sharing intimacy and heritage,”(Bentley, 347)
And finishes with the idea that looking through a lens outside of the influence of the society one is within can allow political communities to change its conceptions. This is seen in Frankenstein where the audience views society from the lens of the creature and it is depicted as rather closed off from individuals that differ from them.
The creature’s final actions remain ambiguous within the novel, and the audience is left wondering whether he chose to wander the Arctic or had died, and with it, whether he may have found the connection he craved so much or if he remained lonely and excluded from society. This novel discusses many different ideas of family and connections within society. A new discussion that can be brought up through this novel is whether the role of an outsider is essential within a society, and where the outsider becomes a part of that society due to its collective exclusion by the members within. This could further bring up the question as to how the creature had made connections to individuals and groups within the novel as an outsider and if it counts as being part of the fabric he so desired to be a part of.
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