Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: The Original Thesis

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After completing the task of reviving this inanimate being into a living entity, Victor admits that he is haunted by what he has done and that his heart is filled with "breathless horror and disgust" (Shelley, 52). Obviously, Victor has now entered the realm of true madness, due to realizing that his experiment with the dead has placed him in a very dangerous position. While trying to sleep on the night of his success, Victor sees the "miserable monster" staring at him through a shuttered window -- "His jaw opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks," and then, Victor calls the monster a "demoniacal corpse to which I

had so miserably given life" (Shelley, 53). Certainly, only a man whose mind and abilities would allow him to create such a hideous "monster" must surely be truly mad, considering that Victor goes so far as to contrast the "monster" with something that "even Dante could not have conceived" (Shelley, 53), a reference to Dante the poet, best-known for "Paradise Lost" and the "Divine Comedy" in which the narrator descends into Hell to sup with the Devil himself.

Although Victor's success in bringing the "monster" to life through alchemical means causes him to become ill in body, he also becomes ill in his mind, especially when he dreams of seeing his fiancee Elizabeth holding the dead body of his mother in her arms, enveloped by a white shroud in which grave worms are crawling "in the folds of the flannel" material (Shelley, 53). He also walks about the streets of the city with his heart "palpitating in the sickness of fear" while thinking about a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge ("Rime of the Ancient Mariner") in which an unknown entity follows the narrator -- "Because he knows a frightful fiend/Doth close behind him tread" (Shelley, 54), a possible reference to the "monster.

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" Overall, Victor has been driven mad by his creation and knows that he is doomed to Hell for transgressing against God and nature.

In conclusion, although Mary Shelley was only eighteen years old when she wrote Frankenstein, she most certainly knew as a very talented writer how to elicit fear and horror and how to create such a character as Victor Frankenstein, one of the most memorable and "mad" literary characters of all time, due to his curiosity and desire to create something out of the range of normalcy which goes against all of the rules of ordinary society and against the very precepts of science itself.

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Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; Or, the….....

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