Role Of Arrogance In Frankenstein

Frankenstein, a novel first published in the year 1818, stands as the most talked about work of Mary Shelley’s literary career. She was just nineteen years old when she penned this novel, and throughout her lifetime she could not produce any other work that surpasses this novel in terms of creativity and vision. In this novel, Shelley found an outlet for her own intense sense of victimization, and her desperate struggle for love. Traumatized by her failed childbirth incidents, troubled childhood, and scandalous courtship, many of Shelley’s life experiences can be seen reflected in the novel. When discussing the character and development of the monster, Shelley launches an extensive discussion on the

Near the start of the book, the reader can see that Victor is very fond of his adopted cousin. The reader can see this through his continued communication with her and by the description that Shelley uses that tells the reader of the countless hours they spend together. This lasts until Victor leaves to go off to school. When he is away from home Victor receives countless letters from his “beloved” Elizabeth and fails to read or respond to any of the letters (Shelley, 66). This implies that Victor feels that he no longer needs a female companion and thus is why he no longer interacts with Elizabeth.

The novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelly was published in 1818. Her parent had undoubtedly influenced her ways of writing. Her father, William Godwin is famous with his piece “An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice while her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” is two prominent radical writers who call for reform during French Revolution. Bringing both feminism and radical views from her parents, Shelley critiques women’s weak, docile and uneducated character. She also shows how women are often degraded and treated unjustly. The reason she brought the issues forward is to make women realize that they should improve their position and women should not conform to the dogma that they are always weak.

    In the statement made by Frankenstein’s Creature to Walter, Mary Shelley utilizes emotionally charged diction and biblical allusions in order to demonstrate the motif of abortion. The strong language, that the Creature uses regarding itself, defines the feelings of great loss and depression, such emotions that it’s creator, Victor Frankenstein, felt throughout the novel. The quotation shows that the creator hates the Creature’s construction and wishes it was destroyed. The conversation with Walter allows the Creature to lament his given life and neglection thereby providing a statement of humanness, what the qualifications are to be human, and how one deserves the things a human does. There is inherently self-hatred and loneliness that the Creature feels, being the only one of it’s kind and abandoned to its own devices. The following underlines the plot with Shelley’s own experiences with miscarriage, a form of abortion. As these ideologies combine to form the role of a creator and creation, Shelley’s characterization of the Creature, being rejected and abused, portrays the internal and external influences the Creature experiences with it’s being.

Frankenstein describes the “birth” of his “child” not with the typical affection of a new mother, but with complete repulse:  “I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open: it breathed hard and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs (Shelley, p.58).”  The first words his creation heard were the harsh words of his creator shouting: “abhorred monster! Fiend that thou art.”  He does not rejoice or receive his “child” with kindness, as a loving mother would; he instead rushes out of the room appalled at the disgusting and abnormal physical appearance of his creation.

Men lead intellectually satisfying lives with little emotion while women lived the opposite. They had emotionally exciting lives with little intellectual fulfillment. Victor excelled in the public sphere but could not perform in the private sphere because according to Mellor the “sexual division of labor” does not allow women or men to have both. Mellor then points out the absence of a strong willed female character. The De Lacey family was seen as an alternative to the Frankenstein family, but even they, a family based on “justice, gender equality, and mutual affection” lack a mother figure. The monster goes to Victor longing for this strong female companion but it does not exist. Mellor also explores the idea that Victor’s most passionate relationships are with men. He saw Clerval as “his former self” and Mellor describes Walton’s responses to Victor as “homoerotic.” Finally Mellor claims that Victor “rapes” nature in the destruction of an equal companion for Frankenstein and is punished “with the very electricity he has stolen.” Also with the death of Elizabeth taking away Victors ability to reproduce Mellor claims that Marry Shelley’s novel portrays the “penalty of raping

Dr. Frankenstein’s Id overtakes him throughout the novel to get revenge on his creation after murdering his newly wife, Elizabeth. Victor becomes furious with the monster after all the pain and suffering he has caused and explains, “I was hurried away by fury; revenge alone endowed me with strength and composure”(171). This is an indication that even though Victor’s dream was to create this monster, that he was convinced he was going to care for, he realizes that because the creature murdered his “sweet and beloved Elizabeth” (160) he was now convinced that revenge and anger overtook him. An example of Victor’s feelings and sense of revenge is when he says, “Surely in that moment I should have been possessed by frenzy, and have destroyed my miserable existence, but that my vow was heard and that I was reserved for vengeance” (172). In that case, Frankenstein’s drive for revenge was at its most, and in reality, at this point nothing could stop Victor from feeling this way towards his creation. Frankenstein does not realize that he alone can not take on the eight foot beast and does not think about the outcome of getting revenge as to whether or not he will survive or end in death; all Victor cares about is destroying his creation. His thirst for revenge seeks the pleasure of killing the monster as he believes in ‘an eye for an

Like Caroline and Safie, Elizabeth Lavenza’s father causes her unhappiness. However this is drastically confounded by the egotism of Victor Frankenstein who seeks to take on the vitally female role of the creator. Elizabeth is constructed by Shelley as an extremely positive character, whose ‘saintly soul’ shines ‘like a shrine dedicated lamp’ in the Frankenstein’s ‘happy home’. She, like her foster mother Caroline, keeps the family together ‘veiling her grief’ for the benefit of the children. However, when victor attempts to take on the role of a woman and ‘create life’ Shelley shows us that it is an unfortunate masculine characteristic to doom idealism with egotism and the pursuit of glory. Despite his noble goals of ‘unfolding the mysteries of creation’, to confer ‘inesteemable benefit’ on all mankind, Victor’s masculine egotism endures

    The creature's ambiguous humanity has long puzzled readers of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In this essay I will focus on how Frankenstein can be used to explore two philosophical topics, social contract theory, and gender roles, in light of ideas from Shelley's two philosophical parents, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Over the years, the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has become universally portrayed in one way: a tall, green-skinned, dumb brute with no language or reasoning abilities. Society has turned the story of Frankenstein into a mere horror story, dehumanizing the monster more than was intended in Shelley’s novel. However, the message of Frankenstein is a far cry from the freak show displayed by the media. While many people may only see Frankenstein as a grotesque story meant to thrill its audience, its purpose goes much deeper as it advocates for the equal rights of women in society.

In the novel Frankenstein, the author Mary Shelley reinforced the role of female nature in a book that is predominantly male-oriented. The female character is an underlying feature throughout the whole novel. For example, when Victor Frankenstein created his Monster from dead body parts, he disregarded the laws of female reproduction. Both Anne K. Mellor and Jonathon Bate argue that Victor defiled the feminine nature when he created his Monster from unnatural means. Mellor argued in her essay, “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein,” that Victor eliminated the necessity to have females at all (355). There will not be a need for females if new beings are created in a laboratory. The disruption of mother nature is one of the novel’s original sins (479). In Bate’s essay, “Frankenstein and the State of Nature,” he argued that Victor Frankenstein broke the balance between female principles of maternity and mother nature (477). Frankenstein broke nature and undermined the role of females. The argument of Mellor was more persuasive than the discussion of Bate because she was able to provide more evidence that Victor Frankenstein dishonored the role of female nature.

Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, is a novel based on secrecy, on neglect, and on revenge. In Shelley’s work, a monster relentlessly seeks revenge on his ‘parent,’ Dr. Frankenstein, as a result of being abandoned and rejected by the one who created him. Throughout the novel Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, there are two main themes which are projected into the storyline; two themes in which Edward Mendelson explains in his critical essay on Frankenstein from his work, The Things That Matter: What Seven Classics Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life. These two themes are power verses love and child neglect and abandonment. In his critical essay, Mendelson thoroughly explains the themes that are both prominent and a representation of childbirth in Shelley’s novel.

This section of “Frankenstein” shows us how Dr Frankenstein usurps the role of women by creating life or giving life to an inanimate object. It shows this with an abundance of natal diction and birthing imagery. “how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form” Here, Frankenstein is saying that, after all the time he has spent planning and creating the creature, he finds it ugly and pitiful. This links in to the myth that when all mothers give birth, they are at first disappointed with their baby, because it is so ugly and wrinkled, which is not what they expect.

Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus is a gothic horror novel that it has been written by Mary Shelley and was published in 1818. “Is one of the most influential literary text in English. It is a novel which is embedded in the cultural and political period we call Romantic” (Allen, 1). It also encompasses the nature, monstrosity, secrecy and demonstrates what the consequences are if someone uses dangerously his knowledges and attempts to exceed his limits. In this essay some parts of the novel will be critically analyzed and also the novel will be seen through a feminist perspective.