Comparing Heroes And Villains In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

While attempting to uncover the meaning of life and death, and though he believed his experiments would further the paths of science, Victor fails to see the potential consequences of “bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” (Shelley 37). This, in turn, creates a monster. After his “great” experiment, Victor spends his life in grief. Despite this, he manages to belittle his creation, and act superior to him, claiming that “I [Victor] will not hear you. There can be no community between you [the creature] and me; we are enemies” (Shelley 84). Even later on, when assured by the creature himself that Victor would be left alone if he creates a female counterpart, Victor cannot see past the shreds of pride he has left and refuses, causing the death of his family and loved ones. It’s Victor’s pride and his fear of the creature that clouds his judgement and in the end leads to his

Victor obsession with his creation represents the dark side of ambition. By creating the monster, “darkness” follow him wherever he goes through the representation of deaths and daunting weather like lightning. After his release from prison, he saw around him “nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me” (Shelley 160). By trying to turn himself into a god through the creation of the monster, that is, the unnatural, Victor is deprived of joy and is tormented by fevers, anxiety, and stress because he had thrown nature into the state of imbalance. Rather than feeling a sense of accomplishment through his scientific achievement, he lives in fear and guilt knowing that he is the cause for the destruction of his

The creature's physical grotesqueness makes the creature unable to attain affection from the human societies. The creature is initially rejected by his creator, who is the closest resemblance to a mother or father figure. Despite this relationship, Victor finds the creature to be a "miserable monster" (39). Consequently, as soon as life is present within the creature, Victor abandons his child. Victor claims that he "escaped, and rushed down the stairs" (40) away from the

Well in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein I will tell you how victor and the monster are very similar in a lot of ways first off Victor created the monster not intended to be like Himself but out of nowhere he does not look like him physically but mentally and personality wise they are the same. So in a crazy way, These two characters have been isolated, have been neglected by society and abandoned.

In Frankenstein, the reader is presented with two main characters of which are both monsters. Nevertheless one must be crowned as the true monster. The Creature is a monster who posses the free will and consciousness of a human. Victor is a human being trying to play God. They both have felt pain and anger; they were driven to do unspeakable things. However one is worse than the other.

In the novel by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, the creature and its creator, Victor Frankenstein, share a lot of similarities throughout the story. The relationship shared between the two resembles that of a father and his son. Since Victor created it , the creature inherits certain traits of Victor’s without realizing it. Victor and the creature both have an overpowering thirst for knowledge, a love for the beauty of nature and a tendency to use it as a scapegoat, a depressing feeling of isolation from people, a desire for revenge, and the ability to play God. The relationship between Victor and the creature does not develop like a normal father-son relationship, nor does it develop as a good versus evil relationship. Both characters show hero and villain qualities throughout the novel as their relationship develops.

Frankenstein is a tale of an individual with many mixed identities. Often hearing the name of Frankenstein comes along with a monstrous spirit. Although in Mary Shelley’s novel, The monster is the horrible creation from the scientist, he just wanted a friend that was the same level of intelligence with him and one that he could be able to speak with and be friends with. Victor robbed body parts from graves and he was ready to for this construction. One stormy October night, he brought it to life. When Victor saw this creature reaching out to him, attempting for a smile, Victor began scared and ran from the

As his creator, Victor Frankenstein holds a significant amount of responsibility for the condition of the relationship between himself and the Creature. The Creature realizes that the people of the world owe him nothing, but Frankenstein, however, owes him a chance for a better life (87). When Victor first completes the being, it is evident that he despises his previously treasured creation. He is “unable to endure the aspect of the being [he] had created,” and unable to take responsibility for his actions, leading him to settle on hating the product of these actions instead (43). Although in his infancy, the Creature better comprehends the responsibilities that Victor should hold than Victor does himself, which is portrayed when the Creature says, “ ‘Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us’ ” (86). The Creature recognizes that a creator is not meant to hate their creation, but rather to love them (86). The Creature’s experiences in his short life have greatly increased his ability to understand complex ideas, however, he fails to make reason as to why Frankenstein would create “ ‘ ‘a monster that even [he] turned from [the Creature] in disgust’ ’ ” (118). The emphasis on Victor hating the Creature demonstrates the hurt he has caused

Shelley explains how Victor has a great mental turmoil after he indirectly caused the death of people who were close to him by the actions he took to create the monster. Shelley’s description of Victor’s feelings show the deprivation of hope and fear in his soul and the emphasises the pain in which he was indirectly the cause of. Victor not only caused his own mental illness, but he also caused his own physical illness. Victor makes himself physically sick by his actions during the creation of his monster. Victor’s work unintentionally causes himself to decline in health and become vulnerable to illnesses. “When Victor is working on his experiment, he cannot love: he ignores his family, even his fiance Elizabeth, and takes no pleasure in the beauties of nature. Moreover, he becomes physically… ill, subject to nervous fevers”(Weiner 83). Victor is shown to focus directly on his work, causing him to forget most of the outside world and not be influenced by forces that usually comfort and heal him. His work makes Victor subject to nervous fevers, causing himself to become sick more often and need help from family and friends more often. Although the process of creating the monster was physically taxing on Victor, the end product caused him even more pain. The creation of the creature impaired

In Frankenstein – A Critical Study from a Freudian Perspective, it compares the monster and Victor and concludes that the monster and Victor is the “mirror-inversion”, it states that they “both are intelligent and well educated, and both start out with the impulse to be good” (Johnson 3), for example: Victor is a “dutiful son and the monster in his efforts to help the de Lacey family”, and “Yet both end up as murderers, haunted and hunted by each other” (Johnson 3). I agree with this, Victor and the monster are like contradictory parts of a same person; the monster is active and energetic but also violent and cruel, it is like the evil side of Victor. And this is the reason that Victor constantly tries to get rid of the monster but fail to do so: the monster represents Victor’s dark side, and Victor can’t escape from his own negative thoughts. Moreover, every time when Victor makes the decision which relates to the monster, the monster is like a mirror that reflects Victor’s irresponsible, timid and selfish characters, and it’s the growing of these negative characters which lead Victor to frequently make the false decision. Overall, the monster makes Victor comes to a deep understanding of his characters: if Victor does not create the monster, he would never know how destructive his mind is; also,

Recognising the true feeling of his creator towards him the monster beings to inflict pain on to Victor by hurting his loved ones. Revengeful, Victor wants to“trample [his creation, the creature,] to dust” (Shelley 97) for the murders the wretched monster has done and fully intends to commit, similar to how a God in many religions may deliver divine retribution onto its creation. Victor’s supposition of authority over whether his creation will live or die is another attempt to play God. Victor plans to kill his own creation to protect the lives of his family and friends, however, as Victor pursuits after his creation, other humans are endangered and Frankenstein’s attempt to prevent the monster from harming any more of Victor’s loved ones is

It was made out of many dead bodies which made it look ugly. When Victor saw the creature alive in front of him, he was scared by the thought of what he ended up with. Frankenstein’s monster is like a new-born baby. It did not know how to speak or cope up with the world. When Victor turned his back on the monster, it felt betrayed. It did not get the love and support it should’ve been given. Also, when the world was reluctant to accept the creature even after it helped them, it started harming the people who hurt him. It felt lonely as it was not taken care of by the only father figure he had, Victor himself. The monster told Victor, “You had made me, but why had you not looked after me, and saved me from this pain and unhappiness?” (Page 30) This showed how much deprived of happiness the monster was, which made him take revenge from Frankenstein.

Victor feels that his relentless search for more knowledge is the cause for all of his suffering. It is true that his knowledge is what created the creature, but what made things worse is that he never gave the creature what he needed, so the neglected creature set out to find it himself. Victor’s tragic fate was not the result of his knowledge but because he did not take care of his creature. 6. Foreshadowing is seen multiple times such as the night when Victor sees lightning strike down a tree and Victor is fascinated with how much power the lighting has. The monster also foreshadows his own death when saying, “But soon I shall die.. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames..” 7. By not giving his creation a name, Victor didn’t give his creature an identity or a place in society. In society, a person’s name is who they are, people make their own judgment of people right away. The creature didn’t have a name and people judged him right away and identified him as monster and only that, rather than an actual being. 8. During the period in which Frankenstein was written, science was growing and it was seen as anything could be possible with the new research and

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein portrays one of the darkest, most hopeless situations that could possibly occur due to the monstrous deeds performed by the main characters in the novel. When one thinks of Frankenstein, they generally think of Victor’s creation as being a monster, and the cause of the unfortunate events that occur in the novel. While Victor’s creation is indeed a monster, Victor is equally as monstrous in his actions. While both characters are initially innocent, they are being constantly corrupted throughout the story. Both Victor and his creation become monsters through their actions.