Term Paper on "Frankenstein -- a Loving Creature, a Hated"

Term Paper 5 pages (1715 words) Sources: 1 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Frankenstein -- a loving creature, a hated scientist and the triumph of Romanticism over religion and science in Mary Shelly's classic novel

On the surface, the moral of the novel Frankenstein seems clear. A man attempts to take on the godlike role of the creator and defy the laws of life and death. He dies as a result of his hubris and faith in science rather than in the Bible. This reading is underlined by the fact that Mary Shelly's novel is subtitled "The Modern Prometheus." Prometheus sought to bring fire to humanity and to uplift human lives through technology and was punished by the gods for his defiance. But it is just as easy to read the novel as anti-theological and potentially heretical to accepted religious norms of original sin and the inherently fallen nature of humankind. From the point-of-view of much of Mary Shelley's early 19th century audience, Frankenstein would also functions as an allegory of the cruelty of God in relation to desperate His human creation.

In the novel, viewed from a Romantic vantage point, science becomes a parallel with the religious creation of Adam in the Garden of Eden. Frankenstein's creature is given innate intelligence, as a result of his origins in humankind and his creator's design. Yet the creature is cast adrift, alone and alienated, in a world not of his own making that is cruel and hostile to his individuality. Not because of disobedience, but because of the world's callousness and the lack of interest of the creator in his creation, the created being turns cruel. The creature's sin of killing Victor's fiancee comes not out of temptation, or out of his innate badness, but his innate goodness and desire for emotional connection with others, a drive strikingly lacking in his creator.

The alignment of Romanticism with the creature's emotional orientation can best be seen in a chronicle of his observations of the gentle, loving people of the cottages the creature observes. Unlike his creator, the monster has no fascination with science, no sense of cool ambition to overcome the limits of the human species like Victor. The monster is touched by the pastoral landscape and can emotionally, as a human being with a poetic soul, understand the way these people relate to one another, even before he understands language: "I soon perceived that, although the stranger uttered articulate sounds, and appeared to have a language of her own, she was neither understood by, not herself understood, the cottagers. They made many signs which I did not comprehend; but I saw that her presence diffused gladness through the cottage, dispelling their sorrow as the sun dissipates the morning mists" (Chapter 13). The monster perceives that family and human connections are what heal pain, in contrast to Victor who shies away from his family and friends to engage in the process of rational scientific creation and discovery that defies the laws not only of God, but more damningly to Romantics, the laws of the natural world, like death.

To a 19th century audience the literature the creature reads would clearly mark him as a Romantic and poetic spirit. When the creature finds the books that provide him with his first intellectual views of the world he: "eagerly seized the prize, and returned with it to my hovel. Fortunately the books were written in the language the elements of which I had acquired at the cottage; they consisted of 'Paradise Lost,' a volume of 'Plutarch's Lives,' and the 'Sorrows of Werter.' The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight; I now continually studied and exercised my mind upon these histories, whilst my friends were employed in their ordinary occupations" (Chapter 14).

Paradise Lost," of course, is a religious document, about the morally bankrupt Satan, who tries to rule the heavens but ends up in hell, an obvious parallel of ambition with Victor Frankenstein, while Adam seems to be like the creature, who is eventually corrupted in the world because of his creator's failure to provide for his moral nurturance, despite his desperation for connection with others and guidance. Many Romantic authors, like Byron, identified with Milton's hero Satan, and the interest of the creature in Milton marks the monster as more sensitive and more interested in the moral and immoral nature of the world than Victor, who has little interest in literature and understanding the world through religion or literature, until he becomes plagued with fear and dread after his creature escapes into the world with a life beyond his immediate control. Perhaps, the implication of Shelly is not that the monster is Satan, but that Victor would understand his own Milton-like parallels if only he had been interested in literature as well as science. The monster's identification with the suicidal Werther, a Romantic hero who commits suicide because of unrequited love also shows that emotional rather than scientific understanding drives the creature's innate inclination, and the limits of Victor's worldview.

Victor's passion is not human connection, like the monster, but scientific creation that is detached from human passion. "From this day natural philosophy, and particularly chemistry, in the most comprehensive sense of the term, became nearly my sole occupation. I read with ardor those works, so full of genius and discrimination, which modern inquirers have written on these subjects...As I applied so closely, it may be easily conceived that my progress was rapid. My ardor was indeed the astonishment of the students, and my proficiency that of the masters" (Chapter 4). Victor uses romantic language, like "ardor" in the small 'r' for romantic sense, to describe his passion for science, not for his fiancee, whom the monster eventually kills in revenge for his inability to find an appropriate love object on earth. (Victor seems to regret the pure, conventional woman's death more than he desires to marry her).

Unlike Victor, the monster is punished, and lives in a fallen world, for no crime he has committed, other than being the victim of his creator's ambitions: "They are kind -- they are the most excellent creatures in the world; but, unfortunately, they are prejudiced against me. I have good dispositions; my life has been hitherto harmless, and in some degree beneficial; but a fatal prejudice clouds their eyes, and where they ought to see a feeling and kind friend, they behold only a detestable monster" (Chapter 15).

If Victor is the creator who punished the monster when the monster was free of any sin, by forcing him to live in a world where he is regarded as an alien, this is a potentially blasphemous assertion on the part of the author. The monster suffers, simply because he exists and was created by the design of his creator, not by any fault. He is doomed because of an awareness of his estranged and hated condition, and condemned to see people he believes are happier because of their ability to be engaged in human society. Shelley's novel thus could be read a denial of the doctrine of Original Sin and the fallen nature of humankind and knowledge -- knowledge drives Victor to be tempted to create, like Adam picking the tree from the apple, just as knowledge of his estrangement drives the monster to kill. But the monster also makes an eloquent plea for the innocence of humanity, until it comes in contact with an evil world where there are few traces of God or the divine.

Victor's failure to understand the complex morality of what he is doing cumulates in his rejection of the creature. He does not take responsibility for his creation, once it does not fit his envisioned pattern of how it should look and function. He abandons it to the world, and naturally, it turns against him. Scientific knowledge that is not based in an irrational appreciation of the emotional needs that the creature expresses is fundamentally bankrupt. When he thinks about creating a mate for the creature, the inability to control the monster's mate is what compels him to desist in his task: "He had sworn to quit the neighborhood of man, and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation" (Chapter 20). There is no way for the creator to control the path that the creation will take in life, hence the frustration of creating human beings, viewed only through the scientific paradigm and not the moral paradigm of Romanticism.

In Shelley's work, both scientific rationalism and traditional theology are problematic. Scientific rationalism does not take into consideration the emotional needs of the human species. Religion does not acknowledge the complexities of morality, and offers a false and dogmatic solution to the problems of the world -- that human beings are fallen, and punishments are just. Religion makes the seeking of knowledge evil, but the world is so fallen, even innocents like the monster become corrupt.… READ MORE

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