Frankenstein' Literary Criticism Essay

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a gothic epistolary novel, is a narrative of a scientist who in his quest to create life and therefore achieve personal greatness, assumes the role of God. He creates life in a laboratory, thus eliminating not only the female’s cultural power but also her biological role, and as a result, suffers the horrible consequences of it. The scientist, Victor Frankenstein, longing for an enhancement of the intellect, longing both for achieving the sublime, but also for experiencing fulfillment, an individualized personal greatness (Weisman), lets loose his monstrous knowledge on his creation. In doing so, Frankenstein eliminates the female’s primary biological function and disrupts the natural order. In Frankenstein taking up a figurative maternal role, the novel points to how the women in the novel, from Caroline Beaufort, Elizabeth Lavenza, and Justine Moritz to the female creature, are devalued and eventually destroyed. However, Mother Nature fights back, the death of Frankenstein and the transformation of his creation into a monster is suggestive of Nature – conceived as Mother Nature retaliating. The novel exhibits the perversion of the natural order functions as a warning and that human beings must co-operate with each other, rather than dominate the natural order of reproduction. Through his creation of the monster, Frankenstein both creates life without the maternal, but also revives the maternal by becoming it, which ultimately becomes his biggest nightmare.

In his quest to become a superior figure, to create a whole new species, Frankenstein creates a monster that eventually destroys everyone he loves and exhausts him so that he dies at an early age. What starts with Frankenstein wanting to do nothing less than understand the principle of life and create, instead takes a chilling turn. One of the phenomena that attracts Frankenstein is “the structure of the human frame and any animal endued of life” (Shelley 78). He is interested in life, but not interested in life in terms of the flesh and blood engagement (Weisman). He wants to know where the principle of life proceeds and he recognizes that it has never been considered a mystery and what he wants is nothing less than to create not only a single creature, a single example of life, but he fantasizes about creating a whole new species that will hail him as his creator (Weisman). The desire to create a being puts Frankenstein in the woman’s role, however, he never takes up the responsibility of that role but rather considers himself greater than a paternal figure, “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe they're being to me.” (Shelley 80). He calls himself a “creator” and claims the “[new species] would owe their being to me,” obsessed with the notion of being hailed, something that is not natural.

In the novel, Mary Shelley demonstrates how Frankenstein’s yearning to create a life on his own underpins the patriarchal denial of the value of women and their sexuality. Shelley depicts a clear division of the roles of the sexes in Frankenstein’s eighteenth-century Genevan society. The men left homes to seek knowledge and work: Frankenstein (scientist and student), Henry Clerval and his father (merchants), Felix De Lacey (does all the labor for the family), and Robert Walton (Arctic explorer). Knowledge was the preserve of men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Weisman). While women stayed home as either child caretakers, housewives, nurses, servants, (Caroline Beaufort, Elizabeth Lavenza, Margaret Saville, and Justine Moritz), and even referred to as a pet, “[Victor] I loved to tend on her, as I should on a favorite animal;” (Shelley 66). As a result of this drastic division of male (intellect) and female (emotion), Frankenstein cannot work and love at the same time, he does not have the emotional capability to love his creation – something so unnatural. “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. […] I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created…” (Shelley 83-84). When his work ended, his emotional ambivalence for the being ended as well, and he was just filled with dread and hatred. The hatred that fills Frankenstein’s heart as the creature comes to life is also the result of him challenging Mother Nature, his literal man-made creature looks like a monster rather than a human, and Nature does not allow him success.

Furthermore, the patriarchal division between the male and female, and most importantly Frankenstein taking up a female’s role and eliminating the female’s primary biological function also leads to the devaluation and destruction of the women in the novel. First, Caroline Beaufort dies from catching scarlet fever when she is by herself nursing and tending to a contagious Elizabeth. Then Justine Moritz, the Frankenstein family servant, is wrongly accused of William Frankenstein’s death. Victor Frankenstein does not come forward to exonerate Justine, he says, “…but I was absent when it [the murder] was committed, and such a declaration would have been considered as the ravings of a madman and would not have exculpated her who suffered through me” (Shelley 103). His justification for not coming forth to defend an innocent person is that people would not believe him; therefore Justine is sentenced to death. He does not take responsibility for the monster he creates, leading to the death of a poor, innocent woman. And Elizabeth is killed by the monster on her wedding night. “The murderous mark of the fiend’s grasp was on her neck, and the breath had ceased to issue from her lips” (Shelley 198). Moreover, Frankenstein refuses to make his creature a female mate, in doing so he does multiple things. First, by not creating the creature his mate he goes against Nature again, he does not provide a being his mate, something every being needs and desires. A phenomenon that is so natural and organic that even the monster understands, “‘Shall each man,’ cried he, ‘find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone?” (Shelley 176). Second, he does not make his creature a mate because he worries she would not conform to the societal rules; she would have thoughts and feelings of her own and would not be controlled by her male mate, “who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation” (Shelley 174). He fears she would be much more evil than his creature and would not comply with the promises the creature makes him “[The creature] He had sworn to quit the neighborhood of man and hide himself in deserts, but she had not” (Shelley 174), but rather would do as she pleased, including murder people and even choose to mate with normal human males by force. Fearing the female sexuality and desires, Frankenstein does not even give the female creature a chance and destroys his half-finished creation: “The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being” (Shelley 178).” The thought of a female having power and control over her actions, and not being delicate and submissive to the male, Frankenstein “trembling with passion,” with hatred asserts his male control over the unfinished female body, tearing “to pieces the thing on which I was engaged” (Shelley 175). These females face the consequences of Frankenstein’s decision to take up the maternal role and birth a creature with his knowledge and tools. Not only do these females face the consequences, but the creature does as well. Even the monster’s anger and destruction are Frankenstein’s doing as he is left to his own devices, lonely, terrified, entirely isolated, and finally and ultimately angry that he has been abandoned. He is hated by his creator and he is not able to be a part the society due to the deep-set prejudices he experiences because of how he looks. “I am malicious because I am miserable” (Shelley), he becomes a monster because of Frankenstein. Frankenstein converts his knowledge into a physical form then and deserts it, taking no responsibility for its actions and outcome. As a result of Frankenstein crossing the limits of Nature, Mother Nature fights back; she takes revenge on Frankenstein for eliminating the female from the natural process of giving life to a being, for killing the maternal by becoming it himself. In a scholarly journal titled, “Milton, Mary Shelley, and Patriarchy,” Burton Halten, writes,

In Frankenstein Mary Shelley […] puts the patriarchal creator on trial, and she finds him guilty. That is, she works through the possibility that the creator’s ways toward the creature are not and cannot possibly be just – that whatever justice may exist in the universe is created not by God but by humankind as we assume collective responsibility for our destiny (32).

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Frankenstein thinks he “pursued nature to her hiding places” (Shelley 81), but before Frankenstein begins his creation; Nature resists the perversion of natural order. During his research Nature denies him mental and physical health: “I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. […] Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most painful degree;” (Shelley 81, 83) Right before he is about to give his creature life, he has agonizing anxiety: “With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet” (Shelley 83). Throughout the process he is in pain; anxious, and nervous, and his body is exhausted yet he continues his work – ignoring Nature’s warnings. When his creation is complete, Nature does not allow his unnatural creation to be a success; she prevents him from constructing the magnificent species he dreamed of – a normal human being but better. His unnatural method of reproduction results in an unnatural being, with “a horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips” (Shelley). He does not get the satisfaction of his completion that he desires the most. He is immediately horrified at what he has created: “But now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (Shelley). In the same scholarly journal, by Halten, he states,

For as the Monster himself notes, God’s creative labors issue in a beautiful creature, while Victor botched the job: ‘Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance (P. 125)

When God creates man it occurs through the natural process of reproduction, therefore it is beautiful, but the monster being created by man himself is put together piece by piece from the materials from the slaughterhouse among other places, “The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials” (Shelley 81) results in a hideous form that even his creator “turned from me [the Monster] in disgust” (Shelley 144). Frankenstein is not well during the process of his creation and does not get the “exercise and amusement” (Shelley 83) he promises himself after either, but rather his condition becomes worse: “Sometimes my pulse beat so quickly and hardly that I felt the palpitation of every artery; at others, I nearly sank to the ground through languor and extreme weakness” (Shelley 84). From that point, Nature does not allow Frankenstein peace. His life is spent in fear of the monster and eventually, that fear becomes an obsession to destroy the monster, leading Frankenstein to mental and physical fatigue that he dies ironically of natural causes instead of by the hand of the monster at the young age of twenty-five.

Nature pursues Frankenstein in the same way he gives his creature life, through the “spark of being” - electricity. – thunder, rain. He realizes the harrowing consequences of crossing the limits of nature: “How much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow” (Shelley 80).

Works Cited

1. Hatlen, Burton. 'Milton, Mary Shelley, and Patriarchy.' Bucknell Review: A Scholarly Journal of Letters, Arts and Sciences, vol. 28, no. 2, 1983, pp. 19-47.